Warming Oceans Are Changing Australia’s Fishing Industry

The Conversation - Alistair Hobday | Beth Fulton

Ocean fish are changing where they live due to climate change. Annie spratt/Unsplash, CC BY-SA

A new United Nations report on fisheries and climate change shows that Australian marine systems are undergoing rapid environmental change, with some of the largest climate-driven changes in the Southern Hemisphere.
Reports from around the world have found that many fish species are changing their distribution. This movement threatens to disrupt fishing as we know it.
While rapid change is predicted to continue, researchers and managers are working with fishers to ensure a sustainable industry.

Lessons from across the world
Large climate-driven changes in species distribution and abundance are evident around the world. While some species will increase, global models project declining seafood stocks in tropical regions, where people can least afford alternative foods.
The global concern for seafood changes led the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to commission a new report on the impacts of climate change on fisheries and aquaculture. More than 90 experts from some 20 countries contributed, including us.
The report describes many examples of climate-related change. For instance, the northern movement of European mackerel into Icelandic waters has led to conflict with more southerly fishing states, and apparently contributed to Iceland’s exit from negotiations over its prospective European Union membership.
Changes in fish abundance and behaviour can lead to conflicts in harvesting, as occurred in the Maine lobster fishery. Indirect effects of climate change, such as disease outbreaks and algal blooms, have already temporarily closed fisheries in several countries, including the United States and Australia.
All these changes in turn impact the people who depend on fish for food and livelihoods.

Climate change and fisheries in Australia
The Australian chapter summarises the rapid ocean change in our region. Waters off southeastern and southwestern Australia are particular warming hotspots. Even our tropical oceans are warming almost twice as fast as the global average.
More than 100 Australian marine species have already begun to shift their distributions southwards. Marine heatwaves and other extreme events have harmed Australia’s seagrass, kelp forests, mangroves and coral reefs. Australia’s marine ecosystems and commercial fisheries are clearly already being affected by climate change.

Summary of recent climate-related marine impacts in Australia. Warming on both coasts is also moving species southwards. Author provided

In the Australian FAO chapter, we present information from climate sensitivity analysis and ecosystem models to help managers and fishers prepare for change.
We need to preparing climate-ready fisheries, to minimise negative impacts and to make the most of new opportunities that arise.
Experts from around Australia have rated the sensitivity of more than 100 fished species to climate change, based on their life-history traits. They found that 70% of assessed species have moderate to high sensitivity. As a group, invertebrates are the most sensitive, and pelagic fishes (that live in the open ocean sea) the least.
A range of ecosystem models have also been used to explore how future climate change will impact Australia’s fisheries over the next 40 years. While results varied around Australia, a common projection was that ecosystem production will become more variable.
As fish abundance and distribution changes, predation and competition within food webs will be affected. New food webs may form, changing ecosystems in unexpected ways. In some regions (such as southeastern Australia) the ecosystem may eventually shift into a new state that is quite different to today.

How can Australian fisheries respond?
Our ecosystem models indicate that sustainable fisheries are possible, if we’re prepared to make some changes. This finding builds on Australia’s strong record in fisheries management, supported by robust science, which positions it well to cope with the impacts of climate change. Fortunately, less than 15% of Australia’s assessed fisheries are overfished, with an improving trend.
We have identified several actions that can help fisheries adapt to climate change:

• Management plans need to prioritise the most sensitive species and fisheries, and take the easiest actions first, such as changing the timing or location of operations to match changing conditions.
• As ecosystem changes span state and national boundaries, greater coordination is needed across all Australian jurisdictions, and between all the users of the marine environment. For example, policy must be developed to deal with fixed fishing zones when species distribution changes.
• Fisheries policy, management and assessment methods need to prepare for both long-term changes and extreme events. Australian fisheries have already shifted to more conservative targets which have provided for increased ecological resilience. Additional quota changes may be needed if stock productivity changes.
• In areas where climate is changing rapidly, agile management responses will be required so that action can be taken quickly and adjusted when new information becomes available.
• Ultimately, we may need to target new species. This means that Australians will have to adapt to buying (and cooking) new types of fish.

Researchers from a range of organisations and agencies around Australia are now tackling these issues, in partnership with the fishing industry, to ensure that coastal towns with vibrant commercial fishing and aquaculture businesses continue to provide sustainable seafood.

Links

• Climate-driven species on the move are changing (almost) everything
• Loss of marine habitats is threatening the global fishing industry – new research
• Ecosystems across Australia are collapsing under climate change
• For indigenous communities, fish mean much more than food
• Is fishing with electricity less destructive than digging up the seabed with beam trawlers?

Lauren Rickards Reviews 'Sunburnt Country: The History And Future Of Climate Change In Australia' By Joëlle Gergis

Australian Book Review - Lauren Rickards

Sunburnt Country: The history and future of climate change in Australia

by Joëlle Gergis

Melbourne University Press

$34.99 pb, 320 pp, 9780522871548

Sunburnt Country is a fascinating, timely, uneven book. Consisting of forty-one short chapters, it is written by climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, who explores the matter of climate change through an unusual mix of genres: colonial history, popular science, scientific autobiography, and advocacy. The first two of these dominate the self-representations of the book.
In particular, it is framed as filling a gap in our (Western) understanding of the Australian continent’s climate history by reconstructing earlier settler colonial climates. Going beyond the official climate records that commenced around 1900, the book reports on innovative Australian research that has combed through settler diaries and other written records for climate-relevant information.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the records found seem to be about extreme events and provided by white male colonists. The result is a romantic colonial-era drama that reiterates the undeniably epic nature of the colonies’ early years. Key to this drama are the weather and climate, which are given a powerful, capricious character that continually trips up courageous colonial settlers as they slowly come to the realisation that the country they invaded has ‘one of the most spectacularly erratic climates in the world’.
Gergis, weaving together the stories with flair, complements many with well-chosen details and illustrations. In the process, these stories of early settlers’ lived experiences are revealed as not just a second cousin to ‘real’ climate data, but a valuable part of our cultural history, as professional historians of Australia have long known. By relaying these stories of climatic catastrophes with evident passion, compassion, and a comfortingly simple focus on climate (one that does not engage with the wider politics of settler colonialism or writing history), Sunburnt Country implicitly offers glimpses into both the physical and social reasons that Australia has been mythologised as a ‘land of drought and flooding rains’.

Lauren Rickards researches and teaches on the social dimensions of climate change and the Anthropocene at RMIT University.

Besides descriptions of colonial climates, the book includes an array of insights and snapshots about the long-term climate of Australia and how scientists are working to decode it. Using easy-to-understand snippets of specific scientific studies, Gergis explains how past climates can be read off the landscape thanks to the ‘tattooing’ of climatic experiences on tree rings, ice cores, coral, and sediments. One chapter also acknowledges indigenous Australians’ intimate understanding of climatic cycles, contingencies, and expressions in the landscape.
The overall result is a succession of interesting snippets of information about past climates interspersed with valuable insights into how different climate systems function and how such information is derived. We learn, for example, that in New Zealand at least, tree-ring data indicates that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate system has been unusually pronounced in the twentieth century, but still does not equate to what was experienced in the medieval period.
This attention to the continuities as well as discontinuities with past climates usefully complicates the oft-repeated binary of old climate versus new climate, or climate variability versus climate change. At the same time, Gergis describes in detail how a ‘human fingerprint’ on the climate is clearly obvious from the mid-twentieth century. The upshot is that ‘modern societies may not have experienced the full range of natural variability that occurred in the past’, but this is just further reason to be prepared ‘for some nasty climate surprises in the future’.
It is on the question of human-induced climate change that Gergis’s stories of climate science in action are most compelling. Representing a new era of concerted transparency in how climate science is done, Sunburnt Country provides not just generic insights about how climate science approaches research problems, but about what it is like for Gergis and colleagues to perform such work in a hyper-politicised social context.
This more autobiographical element of the book usefully reveals the mundane practices involved in professional research, such as writing grant applications, checking data, revising publications, as well as the moments of intellectual excitement that make it all seem worthwhile. Not only does this window into the doing of climate science add an engaging personal note to the story, but it usefully shines a light on what Paul Edwards calls the ‘vast machine’ of climate science: the immense cross-institutional, international network, structures, and procedures that collectively produce, test, and validate scientific information about the climate.
It is this diffuse machine and its convergence in observational, modelling, and theoretical studies that points with uncommon confidence to the fact that the global climate is changing and is doing so due to human interference in the atmosphere.
We come then to a further element of doing climate science that Gergis’s account usefully reveals: the way organised climate change scepticism attempts to derail scientific processes, and the resultant hyper-vigilance that now inflects climate science practices such as peer review of publications. Gergis gestures to the painful embodied costs of doing climate change science under the gaze of malevolent interests and a paranoid discipline, costs that are layered atop the ‘normal’ emotional costs of climate change that all of us face.
Unsurprisingly, Sunburnt Country also contains advice on how society needs to act to ward off the worst of projected climate change outcomes. Following some useful syntheses of the physical impacts of projected climate change in Australia, including sobering assessments of the situation facing different ecosystems, Gergis provides high-level overviews and broad endorsement of the ‘symbolic start’ provided by the Paris Climate Agreement. But rather than discuss adaptation solutions – as may have been expected given the book’s focus on climate (change) impacts and silence about sources of greenhouse gases – it turns to the question of emission mitigation.
Here, despite decent overviews of recent developments in Australia, Gergis stumbles on the over-trodden step from climate science to climate solutions.
As social science and humanities scholars such as myself frequently argue, the latter requires a deep, critical understanding of society; deeper than provided by Gergis’s calls for government action, technological innovation, and individual-level reconnection with nature. While all of these things are undoubtedly required, on their own they obscure the power of more important factors, namely corporate capitalism’s ongoing frontier logic of expansion, extraction, and externalisation, which is – the book might have noted – inseparable from the settler colonialist project that led to temperate climate Britons struggling with the more tempestuous Australian climate in the first place.
This is the silence in Sunburnt Country that I felt most keenly. The very act of colonialism and the related effort to create a new territory, settlement, and node in the imperial economy were climate-changing acts. Sunburnt Country left me hungry for a parallel, intersecting history of Australia’s emissions and climatic interventions; a history not of just a young nation’s struggles with a seemingly capricious, volatile climate, but of the longer, uneven, embedded engagement of Indigenous and settler populations with ‘the environment’ (broadly defined), of which atmosphere and climate are a part.
At a time when prime ministers continue to exploit Dorothea Mackellar’s patriotic poem about Australia’s sunburnt character to explain away ‘natural disasters’ such as the Tathra fires – disasters covered with human fingerprints at multiple levels – we need to reboot Australia’s climate re-education. The first, ongoing lesson is to appreciate that extreme climate variability in Australia is natural, normal, and inevitable; a message Sunburnt Country contributes to. But, as the book also indicates, a second lesson is now also needed: the fact that the climate is not just variable but the whole climate envelope is now shifting. A ‘new normal’ is emerging but the reasons are neither natural nor inevitable.
To understand and address the latter we need to return to Britain and Europe more broadly, not to unpack the climate assumptions the early settlers brought with them, but to understand why they were heading off to settle a new continent in the first place. We need to return to the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the rise of the Anglosphere, and the birth of the corporation. We need to trek back beyond the mid-twentieth-century ‘Great Acceleration’ in consumption rates and carbon dioxide concentrations that Gergis refers to, to the industrial revolution, the sixteenth-century emergence of the Capitalocene, and the idea that to be productive is to extract value from other bodies, things and places.
Understanding these longer histories requires socio-political literacy more than scientific literacy. At multiple levels, Sunburnt Country assists greatly with the latter. More importantly, though, it opens the way for subsequent, more critical analysis of the relationship between the ongoing settler colonial project and climate change.

Links

• The First Fleet And Australia’s Unforgiving Weather
• Lauren Rickards reviews 'Defiant Earth: The fate of the humans in the Anthropocene' by Clive Hamilton
• Kathrin Bartha reviews 'Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime' by Bruno Latour, translated by Catherine Porter
• Peter Christoff reviews 'Burn Out: The endgame for fossil fuels' by Dieter Helm

Prolong The Life Of Coal-Fired Power Stations In The National Electricity Market, Says Australian Energy Market Operator

AFR - Mark Ludlow

Coal-fired power stations should be kept in the NEM for longer, said the Australian Energy Market Operator. Glenn Hunt

Existing coal-fired power stations will need to be used for as long as possible before they can be replaced with renewable energy sources, the national market operator has proposed, saying this was the cheapest option in the long term.
In a move which will embolden Coalition backbenchers about the future of coal in the National Electricity Market, the Australian Energy Market Operator's plan to be released on Tuesday warns against the early retirement of coal-fired power plants, saying they provide essential low-cost energy as well as stability in the power system.
"Maintaining existing coal-fired generation up to the end of its technical life is a key element of a low-cost approach," the report said.
AEMO's  plan, a key recommendation of last year's Finkel Review, also found the total investment required to replace the retiring generation capacity and meet on-going demand would be between $8 billion and $27 billion.

AEMO chief executive Audrey Zibelman said the proposed Integrated System Plan showed the energy sector was in the midst of transformative and unprecedented rate of change. Alex Ellinghausen

It also found spending more money on extra transmission assets – to move electricity between the big states – at a cost of between $450 million and $650 million, would help deliver some cost savings on the final bill.
The AEMO report comes as Energy Minster Josh Frydenberg attempts to land the Turnbull government's National Energy Guarantee at a meeting of the Council of Australian Governments energy council meeting next month. It also follows last week's report by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which recommended the Commonwealth under-writing new generation which could include coal.
AEMO found about 30 per cent of the NEM's existing coal resources, which produce 70,000 gigawatts of energy each year, would be approaching the end of their technical life over the next 20 years which could have a major disruptive effect on the energy system, which is already dealing with the large influx of renewable energy sources.
While the coal-fired power plants will be replaced with renewable energy such as wind, solar and battery storage, it was important to keep the coal assets running for as long as possible.
"To support an orderly transition, ISP analysis demonstrates that, based on projected cost, the least-cost transition plan is to retain existing resources for as long as they can be economically relied on," the report said.
"When these resources retire, the modelling shows that retiring coal plants can be most economically replaced with a portfolio of utility-scale renewable generation, storage, DER [distributed energy resources], flexible thermal capacity and transmission."

Energy reliability will require that the life of coal-fired power stations be extended, according to the report. Photo: Michele Mossop

The report will be seized upon by critics of AGL Energy, which has ignored requests by the Turnbull government to keep the Liddell power station in NSW open longer than its planned close date in 2023. AGL says it would be too expensive to keep Liddell open – saying it needed close to $1 billion for another five years – and it wants to replace it with new gas plants, renewables and storage.
While the AEMO report warned about the early closure of coal-fired power stations, it was in no doubt about what should be its replacement – clean energy. It said a portfolio of resources including solar (28 gigawatts), wind (10.5 gigawatts) and storage (17 gigwatts) – complemented by 500 megawatts of flexible gas and transmission investment – would help fill the gap left by exiting coal assets.
This would become even more certain as the price of renewables continued to fall.
"This portfolio in total can produce 90 terawatts of energy per annum, more than offsetting the energy lost from retiring coal-fired generation," the report said.
AEMO chief executive Audrey Zibelman said the proposed Integrated System Plan showed the energy sector was in the midst of transformative and unprecedented rate of change.
"We are witnessing disruption across almost every element of the value change. Due to the vital importance of affordable, reliable and secure power as the engine of a strong economy, care must be taken now more than ever to manage this transformation in order to minimise costs and risks and maximise value to consumers," she said.
In the short term, transmission capacity between NSW, Queensland and Victoria needed to be increased by between 170 megawatts to 460 megawatts, according to the AEMO plan.
In the medium term, even more transfer capacity would be needed as well as the development of "renewable energy zones" and the integration of big projects such as Snowy 2.0 into the grid.
Longer term, the "sweating" of coal assets to make them last longer would be need as well as extra intra-regional network development to connect new renewable projects to the NEM.


Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull restated his government's commitment to the National Energy Guarantee in spite of rumblings in his own party and his coalition partners, The Nationals.

Links

• AEMO 2018 Integrated System Plan
• Energy plan keeps the coal fires burning as long as possible
• King coal to rule for 20 more years, says independent energy market operator
• AEMO study a "game plan" for transition of the energy sector

Rising Ocean Waters From Global Warming Could Cost Trillions Of Dollars

The Guardian - John Abraham

We’ll need to mitigate and adapt to global warming to avoid massive costs from sea level rise

Waterfront condo buildings are seen June 3, 2014 in Miami, Florida. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images 

Ocean waters are rising because of global warming. They are rising for two reasons. First, and perhaps most obvious, ice is melting. There is a tremendous amount of ice locked away in Greenland, Antarctica, and in glaciers. As the world warms, that ice melts and the liquid water flows to the oceans.
The other reason why water is rising is that warmer water is less dense – it expands. This expansion causes the surface of the water to rise.

Earth’s climate history shows there have been times when ice sheets rapidly changed and created multiple meters of sea level rise in a century. As Earth’s ice sheets continue to change, a key question facing scientists now is: Could human-caused climate change be pushing us toward one of those times? Infographic

Rising oceans are a big deal. About 150 million people live within 1 meter (3 feet) of sea level. About 600 million live within 10 meters (33 feet) of sea level. As waters rise, these people will have to go somewhere. It is inevitable that climate refugees will have to move their homes and workplaces because of rising waters.
In some places, humans will be able to build sea walls to block off the water’s rise. But, in many places, that won’t be possible. For instance, Miami, Florida has a porous base rock that allows sea water to permeate through the soils. You cannot wall that off. In other places, any sea walls would be prohibitively expensive.
It isn’t just the inevitable march of sea level that is an issue. Rising waters make storm surges worse. A great example is Superstorm Sandy, which hit the US East Coast in 2012. It cost approximately $65 bn of damage. The cost was higher because of sea level rise caused by global warming.

Climate scientists do their best to project how much and how fast oceans will rise in the future. These projections help city planners prepare future infrastructure. My estimation is that oceans will be approximately 1 meter higher in the year 2100; that is what our infrastructure should be prepared for. What I don’t know is how much this will cost us as a society.
A very recent paper was published that looked into this issue. The authors analyzed the cost of sea level if we limit the Earth to 1.5°C or 2°C warming. They also considered the future cost using “business as usual” scenarios.
What the authors found was fascinating. If humans take action to limit warming to 1.5°C, they estimate sea level will rise 52 cm by the year 2100. If humans hold global warming to 2°C, sea levels will rise by perhaps 63 cm by 2100.
The difference (11 cm) could cost $1.4 tn per year if no other societal adaptation is made. This is a staggering number and in itself, should motivate us to take action.
But the authors went further, they considered an even higher future temperature scenario (one that is essentially business as usual). With that future, global annual flood costs would increase to a whopping $14 tn per year.
In the study, the authors considered which countries and regions would suffer most. It turns out upper middle income countries will be worse off, particularly China. Higher-income countries have a slightly better prognosis because of their present flood protection standards. But make no mistake about it, we will all suffer and the suffering will be very costly.
There are four important takeaways from this study. First, while the economic costs are large, there is some range of projections. The actual costs may be lower or higher than the median predicted in the study. This is largely due to the fact that we don’t know how fast Greenland and Antarctica will melt. If they melt faster than projected, things will be worse than what I’ve described here.
Second, adaptation will help. By adaptation I mean making our societies less susceptible to sea level rise. For example, building sea walls when possible, building new infrastructure away from coasts, putting in natural breaks to limit storm surge during large storms, and making infrastructure more water-resistant.
Third, what we do now matters. If we can get off the high-emissions business as usual scenarios – if we can increase investment in clean and renewable energy – we can reduce the future costs.
Finally, while scientists often use 2100 as a benchmark year, it isn’t like oceans will stop rising then. In fact, we are committing ourselves to hundreds of years of rising oceans. The ocean has a lot of climate inertia. Once it starts rising, you cannot stop it. So, by focusing only on the year 2100, we are deluding ourselves into underestimating the long term costs.
This research shows it’s important to connect climate science with economic science. Too often, social scientists and economists with very little climate science understanding have tried to tell us that climate change is not a problem. Whenever you hear an economist or a social scientist give you a rosy future prediction, take it with a grain of salt. Their opinion is worthless without being backed by physical understanding. And the loudest economists and social scientists often have very little of this physical understanding.

Links

• As Seas Rise, NASA Zeros In: How Much? How Fast?
• Warming Seas and Melting Ice Sheets
• Glacial Rebound: The Not So Solid Earth
• A Summer of NASA Research on Sea Level Rise in Greenland

Approving The Climate Security Agenda

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Thomas Gaulkin

The United Nations Security Council has officially discussed climate change just three times since 2007. (Photo illustration via bwats2 and AIRS)

The UN Security Council held a meeting this week under the heading, “Understanding and Addressing Climate‑related Security Risks.”
It was just the third time the body has officially debated climate change as a security concern, but with Trump making headlines overseas, few noticed. (Climate change itself saw practically no major network coverage in the United States this month, despite record-breaking heat waves across the country.)
The council’s previous debates on the topic, in 2007 and 2011, were marked by disagreement over whether the Security Council is an appropriate forum for climate questions at all.
There are other bodies at the UN that cover the environment and development, goes one argument against it.
Another suggests that climate might be used as a pretext for politically motivated interventions, or securitization of climate issues might unfairly target poor nations that still depend on a high-emissions economy.
Veto-wielding states like China and Russia have routinely opposed anything that would expand the council’s peace-keeping powers.
Despite those objections, over the past seven years Security Council members have voted for multiple resolutions that acknowledge the links between climate-related displacement and conflict, including in regions like Somalia and around Lake Chad (which is now less than 10 percent of its 1960s size).
Since the issue first came on the council’s agenda 11 years ago, many other states have also begun to experience the direct and indirect effects of climate change.
The devastation in Syria, and its impact on migration (and politics) across Europe and the globe, were partly precipitated by drought. The Arab Spring has been linked to a 2010 drought that destroyed Russia’s wheat harvest and led to sky-rocketing food prices across North Africa.
The July 11 meeting may be a harbinger of more sustained interest in treating climate as an international security concern. Baron Waqa, the president of Nauru and chair of the Pacific Small Island Developing States, called for a new UN special representative on climate and security.
Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström, who presided over the debate, announced the creation of a climate security “knowledge hub” in Stockholm, with a focus on evidence-based analysis.
“It is time for the Security Council to catch up with the changing reality on the ground,” Wallstrom said.
But other states remain unmoved. The Russian deputy UN ambassador described the inclusion of climate on the council’s agenda as “an illusion.”
While supporting the council’s attention to natural disasters, the United States barely acknowledged the main agenda topic, referring to climate change only once, and at arm’s length.
“We have heard from our friends in the Pacific that they consider climate change to be an existential threat to their populations, and we understand the priority they place on the UN system and the international community supporting their unique needs,” said the US deputy representative, Jonathan Cohen.
The bar is still set low.
Wallström acknowledged at a press conference before the meeting that it was “not realistic” to expect any immediate concrete outcomes, and that “it’s a success to be able to place it on the agenda.” With more resource- and climate-related conflict likely on the horizon, it’s difficult to know whether the Security Council taking on climate change is a hopeful sign, or just another indication that the world is marching steadily toward a future in which climate change poses a dangerous and unavoidable security threat.
“Very soon we will see more climate refugees, and it will affect all of us,” Wallström said. “So their destiny is also our destiny.”

Links

• Understanding and addressing climate-related security risks - Security Council, 8307th meeting
• Sweden: Statement by Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström at the UN Security Council Debate on Climate-Related Security Risks
• Did climate change spark the border crisis?
• Major broadcast TV networks mentioned climate change just once during two weeks of heat-wave coverage

An 11-Million-Ton Iceberg Is Threatening A Tiny Village In Greenland

Washington Post - Cleve R. Wootson Jr.

Innaarsuit, on the west coast of Greenland, this week. The iceberg rises about 300 feet above the water level. Credit Scanpix Denmark/Reuters

An 11-million-ton iceberg is parked precariously close to the tiny village of Innaarsuit —  a glacial faceoff that pits 169 residents of Greenland against the biggest iceberg many have ever seen.
Their fate could be entirely dependent on the weather forecast.
If a strong enough wind blows at the right time, the berg could be dislodged from the spot where it has grounded, and float harmlessly into Baffin Bay. Crisis over.
But if Mother Nature brings enough rain, the relatively warm precipitation could further destabilize the iceberg, potentially sending a chunk of it into the ocean and creating a tsunami that could wash away part of the town.
“We are very concerned and are afraid,” Karl Petersen, chair for the local council in Innaarsuit, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
So far, 33 people have been moved to safer places inland. Others have been encouraged to move their boats away from the iceberg.


A huge iceberg grounded just outside the village of Innaarsuit, Greenland, and is threatening the coastal homes of the town's 169 residents. (Reuters)

Innaarsuit is about 600 miles north of Nuuk, the country's capital. The village's residents are mostly hunters and fishermen in an isolated area most easily reached by boat or helicopter.
The iceberg is 650 feet wide — nearly the length of two football fields — and rises 300 feet above sea level, according to the New York Times. In terrifying pictures, it literally casts a shadow on a hilly outcropping of Innaarsuit, dwarfing boats, homes and businesses.
Residents don't need lengthy memories to know the effect even a small tsunami could have on the country that doubles as the world's biggest island.
Last June, according to Quartz, a landslide caused by a 4.1-magnitude earthquake that struck 17 miles north of the village of Nuugaatsiaq partly triggered a tsunami that washed away 11 homes and killed four people.
Video posted online showed villagers sprinting away from approaching waves washing over seaside homes.
Tsunamis caused by landslides in bays can rise to incredible heights, travel at devastating speeds, and cause massive destruction, according to Quartz.
A similar giant wave was thought to have destroyed the city of Geneva in 563 AD, the Economist wrote.
Of course, even if there isn't some giant city-destroying Hollywood-style tsunami, there are other dangers from rising water. Nearby rivers could overflow their banks, for example, threatening homes and other buildings that don't face the sea. And Innaarsuit's power plant is also on the coast, meaning flooding in a very specific place could send Innaarsuit into the Dark Ages.
A Danish Royal Navy ship is standing by, according to the CBC, in case the situation sours.
“We can feel the concern among the residents,” Susanna Eliasson, a member of the village council, told CBC. “We are used to big icebergs, but we haven’t seen such a big one before.”
For now, the residents of Innaarsuit are watching the weather. The area will see relatively sedate winds for the next week. And on Sunday, July 22, it's supposed to rain.

Links

• A Giant Iceberg Parked Offshore. It’s Stunning, but Villagers Hit the Road.
• Greenland villagers evacuated after iceberg comes to town
• Iceberg 4 miles long breaks off from Greenland glacier
• Tsunamis in Lake: Geneva Lake monsters

Climate Change To Worsen Urban Air Quality, Lifting Death Toll

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Days of severe pollution in Australia's biggest cities will worsen in coming decades as a warming climate triggers more intense temperature inversion events, exacerbating health issues, according to new research.
With more than 3000 premature deaths a year in Australia already linked to urban air pollution, worsening low-level air quality could increase the toll, said Jason Evans, a professor at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and a co-author of the report published recently in the Climate Dynamics journal.

Fog and smog across the Sydney Basin on the coldest morning of the year so far. Photo: Dean Sewell

Inversion events reverse normal conditions, with cool air near the surface trapped beneath warmer air. The resulting lack of mixing allows pollutants, dust and pollen to build up, potentially harming health.
The new study examined data for the 1990-2009 period from nine weather sites. They ranged from Brisbane along the eastern seaboard to Adelaide, and took in inland cities such as Canberra.
It then applied regional climate models based on a business-as-usual carbon emissions trajectory to project results for 2020-39 and 2060-2079.
Significant changes in the intensity of inversions - based on the increasing differential between the temperature at the top of the warm layer compared with the air near the land - were detected in the latter period at all of the nine locations.
"Even though the overall number of inversions didn't change, we saw a substantial reduction in weak inversions and a marked increase in stronger inversion layers," Professor Evans said.
For Sydney, the increasing strength of daytime inversions was about 46 per cent for the 2060-79 period, compared with 1990-2009.
For Melbourne, the increase was as about 53 per cent, Brisbane 64 per cent, Adelaide 69 percent and Canberra about 80 per cent, according to the paper.
"With more than 80 per cent of Australia's population living [in the region studied] and large increases in population projected, the impact of more intense air pollution events in the future could be substantial," the paper said.
The models indicated only small changes in the duration of inversions, with those in the south becoming longer and those in the north shorter.

Inversion conditions
Since inversions typically develop during periods of calm winds, clear skies and long nights, the worst events will likely occur during the winter months.
Inversion conditions may occur on Monday in Sydney when overnight temperatures were tipped to drop to as low as 4 degrees at Observatory Hill, potentially the lowest July reading in 11 years.
Winds are expected to be light, with fog also settling in over places such as Richmond, on the city's north-west.
Paramatta North and Richmond were two sites to report poor air quality on Sunday morning, as did Armidale and Gunnedah, according to the Office of Environment and Heritage.
As inversion events usually take place during daylight hours, health effects will be amplified because "that's when people are out and about and most exposed", Professor Evans told Fairfax Media.

Days of poor air quality are projected to worsen with climate change. Photo: Anthony Johnson

One role climate change could play is that with warming conditions, cities in Australia - and elsewhere - are expected to cop more rainfall but during fewer events. That would leave longer periods of relatively clear skies, conducive to inversion events, he said.
Climate models also project a decline of wind strength over land, Professor Evans said.
While the paper did not examine sources of pollution, one of the biggest for cities such as Sydney and Melbourne can be smoke from hazard-reduction burning.
Fire researchers say the window for conducting such burn-offs has been narrowing, particularly in the spring. That makes it more likely authorities will step up prescribed burning during periods of light winds and dry conditions - precisely the conditions favouring inversion events.

Links

• Projected change in characteristics of near surface temperature inversions for southeast Australia
• Australian snowpack in the NARCliM ensemble: evaluation, bias correction and future projections
• Regional climate projections of mean and extreme climate for the southwest of Western Australia (1970–1999 compared to 2030–2059)
• Zonal winds and southeast Australian rainfall in global and regional climate models
• Temperature response to future urbanization and climate change