Planet Earth Calling Doctor Who’s New Time Lady: Save Us

The Guardian - Stewart Lee

With just 12 years left to tackle climate change, perhaps it’s time the Doctor made an intervention

 Illustration by David Foldvari 

Last week, there was really only one story. And it wasn’t that a children’s television science-fiction character, who never reproduces or has sexual relations with anyone, is now played by a human of a different gender than at any point previously. Despite this, like all the other crying centrists, I wept hot snowflakes to witness it happen in my lifetime.
And I couldn’t be happier that the Time Lady’s new companions include a black teenager with mild learning difficulties and a female Asian police officer. Predictably, The Chase’s Bradley Walsh let the side down by being a straight white man. Though I understand that in tonight’s episode Bradley Walsh reveals that, as a result of unpredictable side-effects from his character’s chemotherapy treatment, he now has both male and female genitalia, while a cloaca on his left thigh also enables him to reproduce parthenogenetically, although not without some discomfort.
Like the Zuni berdache, Bradley Walsh will become an intergender priest-princess, an ambassador between different dimensional realities, his engagements unencumbered by a traditional sexual identity. Typical BBC! It’s political correctness gone mad!! Nonetheless, the genitalia of fictional time travellers wasn’t the week’s big story.
On Monday, scientists revealed that we have only 12 years to put in place real strategies to combat climate change before the future of all life on Earth is doomed. It has taken our government more than two years to fail to agree that Brexit is more difficult than David Davis’s proposed easiest thing in the world. In the light of the progress of these negotiations, I don’t hold out much hope for the survival of the Melton Mowbray pork pie, let alone the continued existence of all the life on Earth.
But while climate change experts were once derided as cranks, a kind of environmental Flat Earth Society, finally their message is believed. And now the cranks are oil industry cheerleaders such as Nigel Lawson, ranting outside the window like a Hogarth etching of some bawling fictional aristocrat; Lord Entitlement Demands His Buttermilk Ramekin.

The definitive mass extinction bombshell held its position in the news chart for a few days and on Wednesday all four of the Guardian’s page four stories covered the end of all life as we know it and related fossil fuel consumption and rainforest obliteration news, shunting Adrian Searle’s review of the artist Anni Albers’s new abstract textiles exhibition all the way back to a humiliating page nine.
A further story, that the Dutch are developing robot bees to pollinate the crops we need to survive after the now inevitable insect apocalypse, ran on page 14, being five pages less important that the textile display. I immediately began to worry that intelligent robot bees would realise the best way to ensure the survival of the crops they were programmed to nurture was to destroy the human race who were poisoning the Earth. I wondered how me and my family would best survive attack by millions of Dutch nano-bees. I began learning the phrase “Robot bee, I am your friend” in as many Dutch dialects as I could master: West Frisian, Papiamento, Low Saxon and Limburgish.

If the Doctor really cared, wouldn’t she go back in time and save us? Photograph: Sophie Mutevilian/BBC 

In other newspapers, we were back to business as usual. On the front page of Wednesday’s Sun, the end of all life on Earth forgotten, it was revealed that a comedy man had kissed a dancing lady behind an acting lady’s back. Really? As a species, we don’t deserve to live. It’s just a shame we’re going to take all the insects, animals and plants down with us. Unless we are exterminated by robot bees.
The imminent extinction of all life on Earth exposes a logical hole in the Doctor Who mythos. The Doctor loves to help humanity but as a time traveller she must know that within a decade or so our whole race will be doomed. If she really cared, wouldn’t she go back in time and save us all from ourselves? But by doing what exactly? Preventing Trump from weakening the Paris accord last June? Exposing the 1970s oil companies that sat on climate change data they knew would make their brands toxic in the short term? Or going back to the dawn of time and preventing the clever troglodyte, Keith Flintsparker, the first fire-starter, from dipping a dry twig into a puddle of tar and flint-sparking it into fuel.
The 1975 Tom Baker Doctor Who story Genesis of the Hateweed explores this conundrum. In it, the Doctor finds himself in the laboratory where his future nemesis, the Hateweed, is being genetically engineered into existence. He holds the spores over a nearby toilet and eventually decides that flushing them down the bowl and destroying them would constitute too great an intervention in the timeline. Nicholas Parsons, in a rare serious role as the Hateweed’s creator, Anglias the Weedseeder, watches him while eating a blue space pie, in an act of defiant indifference.
In 1992, I worked with Baker on the BBC radio comedy series The Inexplicable Worlds of Patrick Nimmo and I loved pumping Baker for behind-the-scenes Who stash. Baker told me he had been professionally jealous of the popularity of the Hateweed with female Doctor Who fans and had intended to change the scene while filming by “throwing the fucking seeds into the toilet and doing a massive, fast wee on them and shouting, ‘That’s pissed in their chips!’ But Nicholas Parsons said, ‘You, Thomas Stewart Baker, are drunk,’ and he said he would throw the space pie at me if I did a wee. I said, ‘I may be drunk, but you are Nicholas Parsons and in the morning I will be sober.’ We had a jolly good laugh and it was all forgotten over a few jars.”
I share a personal trainer with Bradley Walsh and so I went to meet him in Doctor Who’s Cardiff studios on Thursday and asked him if he thought the new Doctor should intervene in the climate change catastrophe. Bradley Walsh, who was patiently being fitted for multiple prosthetic genitals, both male and female, and those of a bird, said he didn’t know.

Links

• We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
• Robotic bees could pollinate plants in case of insect apocalypse
• Oil industry knew of 'serious' climate concerns more than 45 years ago
• Donald Trump confirms US will quit Paris climate agreement

While My Island Nation Sinks, Australia Is Doing Nothing To Solve Climate Change

The Guardian - Anote Tong*

The inaction and recalcitrance of Australia’s federal politicians is making Kiribati despair

Part of the village of Eita in the nation of Kiribati, which is only two metres above sea level and is already feeling the impact of rising sea levels. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images 

A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a picture of what the world will look like if it gets 1.5°C, and 2°C, hotter than pre-industrial levels.
Half a degree of warming may seem trifling but, for my country, Kiribati, these fractional figures are a matter of life and death.
Our whole nation is only two metres above sea level, and the report shows that the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming is several centimetres of sea level rise. Given that we are already feeling the impacts of rising water, every millimetre counts.
Increasingly frequent king tides and storm surges, floods and longer droughts are new, unwelcome additions to our way of life on Kiribati.
Sea level rise is turning our freshwater resources salty, rendering the land unable to grow staple crops such as coconut and taro, and eating away our shoreline.
We are being told that we may have to abandon our islands, the places where our ancestors have been buried, where our children have a home and an identity.
If this disastrous outcome comes to pass, my people will need a place of safety to move to. Rather than be regarded as “climate refugees” – a term that has no definition or status in the international legal system – I seek migration with dignity for my people.
As we reflect on the frightening future ahead of us, there is no escaping the deep injustice of the fact that, despite our negligible contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, we are on the frontline of climate change consequences.
Making matters worse is the fact that instead of heeding the IPCC’s recommendation for urgent and deep emissions cuts to make sure we don’t exceed 1.5°C of warming, industrialised nations such as Australia are doing virtually nothing to solve the problem.

We are being told that we may have to abandon our islands, the places where our ancestors have been buried, where our children have a home.

It’s bad enough that the United States, one of the world’s largest polluters, has pulled out of the Paris agreement. Now, there are rumblings that Australian politicians want to do the same.
Already, Australia has one of the highest per capita emissions in the world, and its national greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. The country is twiddling its thumbs as the window of opportunity to keep the people of the Pacific – and Australia – safe slams shut.
Historically, many in the Pacific have regarded Australia as a big brother to our region, and looked to the country for leadership.
The inspiring advocacy of ordinary Australians, businesses, unions, city governments, state governments, churches and NGOs gives us hope that Kiribati could have a fighting chance at survival.
But the inaction and recalcitrance of federal politicians makes us despair.
As we witness their indifference to the reality of climate change, this longstanding friendly relationship is giving way to disillusionment and disappointment. We believe Australia is failing in its duty as a regional leader.
The implications of this for Australia’s foreign policy are immense, as the inroads made by Chinese diplomacy have shown.
Australia must play a more constructive role. Ceasing to approve new coalmines would be a good place to start. It must also adopt obvious solutions such as renewable energy, which will help bring its emissions down to zero.
It’s not just us that stands to gain from this. In Australia, supporting these solutions will also create new, green jobs, and unlock billions of dollars in economic opportunities.
And your own country, which has been ravaged by bushfires and droughts over the past few months, will also be safer from climate change impacts.
Ultimately, as I head to Australia later this month for a series of public lectures and meetings, I hope to leave the Australian people and politicians with one simple message. The future of Kiribati, Australia and the region is in your hands. It’s time to act.

*Anote Tong is the former president of Kiribati

Links

• Waiting for the tide to turn: Kiribati's fight for survival
• 'Our country will vanish': Pacific islanders bring desperate message to Australia
• We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
• Australia tried to water down climate change resolution at Pacific Islands Forum: leader
• Pacific nations beg for help for islanders when 'calamity' of climate change hits
• Pacific leaders voice frustration over Australia's position on climate change
• From Tuvalu to Kiribati, the outlook for Pacific island states is perilous
• Australia must not be afraid of its obligations to Pacific climate migrants

Australia's Climate Idiocracy Must End – And There's No Time To Waste

The Guardian - Greg Jericho

The Liberal party’s biggest con was the idea that reducing emissions could be done without pain and at little cost

Michael McCormack, Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, who bragged that ‘emissions on a per capita and GDP basis have come down to their lowest level in 28 years’. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian 

This week came the news from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that we are screwed. I wish I could be more optimistic. I wish I could hold out some hope that things are about to improve. But I look at actions by governments around the world, and the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments, and I find the ability to retain a positive outlook smothered in the face of feckless indifference and wilful ignorance.
The IPCC report is not actually, as some would have you think, a prophecy of doom – it is a call for action. Rather than talking of what will happen if the planet warms by 2C above industrial levels, its focus is on how much lower the risks are if we limit it to 1.5C.
And the good news is this can actually be done.
The bad news is we need to do it by 2030 and it is going to cost, on average, about US$2.4tn every year until 2035 – equivalent to 2.5% of the world GDP.
For Australia, that translates to around $46bn – the same amount the government spends on the aged pension. Even if we argue that as we only contribute about 1% of total global emissions we should only contribute 1% of the US$2.4tn cost, we are chipping in $33bn a year in Australian dollars – or equivalent to the combined amount spent this year on the NDIS, Newstart and the childcare subsidy.

Not cheap.
But keeping temperatures at 1.5C reduces the risk of, for example, all of the Great Barrier Reef dying (we’re still likely to lose 70% to 90%). Our farmers would certainly notice the difference as the reports suggests that biome shifts in Australia (which would see our arid, temperate and tropical regions shift) “would be avoided by constraining warming to 1.5C as compared with 2C”.
In a pure dollars sense, the report notes that “the economic damage in the United States from climate change” is around 1.2% of GDP per 1C increase.
So it is pretty clear that limiting the temperature rise to 1.5C is worth it. The problem is it is harder to achieve. It requires, for example, reducing emissions to zero by 2050 rather than 2075.
And that is tough to do, especially when you have governments like our own that are already fudging their ability to reduce emissions by much lower amounts than what would be required.
As we saw earlier this month, the government tried its best to hide the latest greenhouse gas emissions data and, since then, has done nothing but try to con voters that all is well.
On Monday, the environment minister, Melissa Price, in an excruciating interview on the ABC’s AM program, refused to say she thought the IPCC report was reliable and boasted that “emissions per capita were at their lowest level in 28 years”.
This was repeated by the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, who took it further by bragging that “what we’ve done on climate is seen that emissions on a per capita and GDP basis have come down to their lowest level in 28 years. That’s the record.”

The reality of the IPCC report is that we can limit the damage from climate change but it is going to be hard and it is going to be expensive.

What an idiotic thing to brag about.
Every government every year since 1990 has been able to say that emissions per GDP are at their lowest level – they haven’t gone up once! Bragging about having reduced emissions per GDP is like boasting that today you are the oldest you have ever been.
Reducing emissions per capita (or per GDP) has never been the issue. The only reason people look at that figure (as I did a few years back) is to compare it across nations to contrast greenhouse gas dependency and efficiency.
In 2016, Australia had the fifth-highest total emissions in the OECD – behind the US, Japan, Germany and Canada. But, on a per capita basis, guess what? We’re No 1.
So if Frydenberg, Price and the prime minister want to talk about emissions per capita, talk about that. Or maybe they can brag about the fact that in 2014 our emissions per capita were 5.5% higher than that of the US but in 2016 they were 12.6% higher.
The problem is our government, like the Trump White House and Republican party in the US, consists of two types of people – climate change deniers who are so ignorant they truly do think it is all a UN hoax and those who are willing to enable the deniers for political gain.
A choice between the ignorant and the feckless.
And it really doesn’t matter which category the prime minster, treasurer or environment minister are in, the end result is the same – climate change policy cons that will not deliver what they say they will.
Take the prime minister’s line that we will reach our Paris targets “in a canter”. How, pray tell, will we do this? Well, he told ABC’s Sabra Lane that “this is the advice that we’re working through as a government. But what it’s based on also is we’ve crossed a threshold point, Sabra. No longer in order to see large investment in renewable technologies do you need these heavy subsidies, because it’s now making economic sense all on its own.”
In other words, he would have us believe that nothing more needs to be done, it will all happen because of market forces. Even more laughably, Morrison suggested that we would meet our commitments because “we’ve still got the small-scale RET and the large-scale RET programs, they remain in place”.
Yes they remain in place but, as the minister for energy, Angus Taylor, recently told parliament, “the truth of the matter is that the renewable energy target is going to wind down from 2020. The target reaches a peak in 2020 and we will not be replacing that with anything.”
So Morrison’s two major programs that he believes will help us reach our emissions reduction target by 2030 will end in 2020.
But, you know, trust him! Morrison “believes” that “we’re going to meet those targets comfortably”. Faith can move mountains and now apparently also reduce emissions.
The reality of the IPCC report is that we can limit the damage from climate change but it is going to be hard and it is going to be expensive.
That has always been the biggest con from the Liberal party since Tony Abbott took over – the suggestion that reducing emissions can be done without any pain and little cost.
If that were the case, no one would be worrying about it – it would have already have been done. But the con artist always tries to sell the line that the difficult can be done with ease – just trust him, you can get something for nothing. And all the while something nags you, because you think it sounds too good to be true – and it is.
The IPCC report makes clear that this government’s con job on climate change must stop, and that not only is the time running out to do something about emissions but that the time to put up with climate-change deniers and their enablers in governments around the world is over.

Links

• We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
• Canavan condemns business emissions self-regulation to meet Paris target
• In a canter? Climate experts say Australia will not meet emissions targets
• IPCC issues dire climate warning, says coal must go to save Great Barrier Reef
• Climate data release again delayed by Government, FOI documents show

'Jaw Dropping': New Zealand Offers Lessons In Tackling Climate Change

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Scott Simpson, New Zealand's National Party environment spokesman, stunned a trans-Tasman investment meeting last week by stating that climate action was "too important to be playing politics with".
Or rather, it was the Australian delegates who were shocked, so used are they to the toxic debates in Canberra.
"It made my jaw drop, that's for sure," said Emma Herd, chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change.

Agriculture accounts for half of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions - and will be the central to that country's climate action. Credit: Grant Matthew 

Also well-received was Mr Simpson's comment that it was vital "for all of us and our grandchildren that we have a [climate action] framework that is enduring", coming as it did soon after the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had issued its latest report warning about the perils of even another half degree of warming.
That Mr Simpson hails from the centre-right opposition party roughly equivalent to our Liberal-National coalition only underscored the contrast between the nations.
New Zealand's major parties, busy trying to thrash out a Zero Carbon Bill by year's end, are dismayed by the absence of similar bipartisanship across the Tasman, James Shaw, climate change minister in the Labor-led government told Fairfax Media.
“We do tend to look at what’s going on in Australia politics, in particular in relation to climate policies, and we think, 'We cannot afford to let this happen in New Zealand'," Mr Shaw said. "It seems like a pretty strong lesson in what not to do.”
Despite ditching its main climate and energy policy – the National Energy Guarantee aimed at reducing carbon emissions from the power sector while bolstering the grid and easing prices – the Morrison government insists it can achieve Australia's Paris climate commitments.
"The government will meet its 2030 target through our scalable policies, and will do so without compromising the economy," Melissa Price, the environment minister, said. The goal of reducing 2005-level emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030 "is responsible, achievable and comparable to other developed countries"

'Whole world must act'
Even if total emissions were the issue, Kiwis would have more excuse than Australians for doing nothing. Their share of global greenhouse gases is less than 0.2 per cent, or about a eighth of Australia's.

James Shaw, New Zealand's climate change minister, says even small nations much do their part. Credit: Ross Giblin

Still, on a per-capita basis, both nations have among the highest emissions in the world, Mr Shaw said.
Tally up the 90-odd nations contributing less than 1 per cent of emissions and you reach almost a third of  the global total – larger than China or the US, he says.
“An issue like this is something the whole world has to grapple with," Todd Muller, Mr Shaw's counterpart from the National Party, says.
In government, the National Party signed up to the Paris climate accord and introduced an emissions trading scheme.
To remove the politics from the negotiations, all sides agreed to take advice on New Zealand's targets from an independent climate commission. (Australia has a Climate Change Authority but all the original board members have been replaced since it was set up by the Gillard government and its role as an advocate for action has largely disappeared.)
“If you have essentially your best and your brightest informed by science ... it’s an easier place to have a conversation with your community than just playing partisan politics with them,” Mr Muller said.

Todd Muller, the National Party's climate spokesman says all nations must act to tackle global warming. Credit: Grant Matthew

Mr Shaw said the Opposition could have exploited a potentially divisive policy – agriculture contributes half of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions – but didn't.
"They are playing an absolute straight bat," he said. "There’s a genuine best effort to get a consensus outcome.”
New Zealanders, like Australians, have endured an increasing spate of extreme weather events, which the government attributes in part to climate change. These include a record hot year in 2016, droughts and a major forest fire last year.
"We've definitely had a lot more extreme rainfall events," Nava Fedaeff, a climate scientist with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), said. These include damaging ex-tropical cyclones hitting the nation, with the average jumping from less than one a year to three over the last summer season.
Farmers, who have in the past objected fiercely to taxes on methane, appear more ready to accept the need to act. DairyNZ, for instance, has welcomed the prospect of emissions targets enshrined in legislation to give the sector "much needed certainty".
Trish Rankin, a dairy farmer managing 440 cows for a Maori-owned co-operative near Hawera in the Taranaki region of the North Island, said climate action "needs to be apolitical – it needs to be able to last over time".
Ms Rankin said New Zealand farmers realise their social licence depends on them being good custodians of the land, and the principle extends to curbing emissions. Open consultations with experts have also helped.
"If you know they are listening to you, you're more likely to listen to them," she said.

Whether NZ stands for New Zealand and Net Zero emissions will hinge largely on what happens in its agriculture sector. Credit: AP

Convergence ahead?
Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, notes New Zealand's existing climate policies are insufficient, but the nation appears to be "moving to a much better space".
Steps already taken include the ban on new offshore oil and gas exploration, and in prospect are five-year interim emissions targets and a more ambitious emissions trading scheme.
Mr Hare is optimistic that because Australian levels of public support for climate action including renewable energy are not so dissimilar to New Zealand's, policies will eventually converge.
"Farming wants to see some serious action", he says, while recent reports suggest the power sector isn't going to wait for the government to move on emissions cuts either.
New Zealand's climate minister, Mr Shaw, says farmers – unlike Australian coal companies – have options.
“People are still going to want to eat in 30 years' time, so the question is what do you produce and how do you produce it – not whether or not you’re going to produce food," he said.
"But in 30 years' time, you can pretty much guarantee no one in the world is going to use coal for anything.”

Links

• 'Next decade critical': Perils mount at 1.5 degrees of warming, says IPCC
• 'Terrible': Rising gas output lifts Australia's greenhouse gas emissions
• Malcolm Turnbull blames Morrison, Cormann for $443m Reef Foundation grant
• The economic case for climate action is strong
• States' climate risks are rising, led by health impacts: Moody's
• Approvals would lift NSW coal output by 2 billion tonnes, defy IPCC

Climate Change Will Make The Next Global Crash The Worst

The Guardian - Larry Elliott

The storm clouds are gathering, but the world’s economies now have far fewer shelters from disaster than they did in 1929

 Illustration: Eva Bee

Late last month Indonesia was hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami that left thousands of people dead and missing. This week the International Monetary Fund arrived in the country to hold its annual meeting on the island of Bali.
On the day when the IMF issued a warning about trouble ahead for the global economy, the latest report from the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change said the world had only a dozen years left to take the steps necessary to prevent a global warming catastrophe.
The message is clear for those willing to hear it: get ready for a time when economic failure combines with ecological breakdown to create the perfect storm.
Even without the added complication of climate change, the challenge facing the finance ministers and central bank governors gathered in Bali would be significant enough. The IMF has cut its forecast for global growth, but the chances are that next year will be a lot worse than is currently forecast. The risks, the IMF says, are skewed to the downside. You bet they are.
Here’s a brief checklist. For the past 10 years, the world economy has been surviving on a diet of low interest rates and money creation by central banks, but that stimulus is now being gradually withdrawn. In the United States, growth has been further pumped up by Donald Trump’s tax cuts for individuals and companies, but only temporarily. The impact will start to fade next year as higher interest rates start to bite. Trump is already berating the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, for increasing borrowing costs.
In Europe, a colossal row is brewing between Italy’s populist government and the fiscal conservatives at the European commission because the budget proposed by Rome runs completely counter to the EU’s fiscal rules. Officials in Brussels are more worried about Italy than they are about Brexit, and with good reason. Italy’s banks are awash with bad debts and could not survive the sort of financial crisis that appears to be in prospect. It is a much bigger country than Greece, and far too big for Europe to bail out if the worst happens.
The standoff between Rome and Brussels is happening as Europe’s growth rate has started to slow. One reason is that its export-driven economies are already being hurt by the early skirmishes in Trump’s trade war. As the IMF noted this week, protectionism is a key risk to global growth.

China, the world’s second biggest economy, has always been Trump’s main target, and it has been affected by new US tariffs, as its domestic economy was already slowing. Elsewhere, in the past few months the IMF has been called in to help Argentina, there has been a run on the Turkish lira, and inflation in Venezuela threatens to hit Weimar Germany-style levels.
In better times, oil-rich Venezuela might have been well placed to benefit from the rising price of crude oil, which is heading steadily towards $100 a barrel. Every big recession in the global economy has been prefigured by a jump in the cost of crude, which makes it somewhat curious that share prices on Wall Street are so high. Traditionally, stock markets anticipate trouble, but the mood currently is to dismiss higher interest rates, rising oil prices, Italy and trade wars as somehow unimportant.
Ominously, next year is the 90th anniversary of the Wall Street Crash. The Great Depression that followed that market meltdown led to new economic thinking. It spawned full employment policies, increased spending on welfare, and a new set of multilateral organisations.
Turn the clock forward to 2018 and the parallels are obvious. International cooperation has broken down, economic failure has damaged mainstream political parties, and belief in the invisible hand of the free market has been shattered. But the threat posed by global warming means the current crisis of capitalism is more acute than that of the 1930s, because all that was really required then was a boost to growth, provided by the New Deal, cheap money, tougher controls on finance and rearmament. In today’s context, a plain vanilla go-for-growth strategy would be suicidal.
Even so, there are countries that are prepared to self-immolate their economies in pursuit of growth at all costs. America is one. Australia appears to be another. At the other end of the spectrum are those who say there will be a future for the planet only if the idea of growth is ditched altogether. Politically, this has always been a hard sell, and has become even more difficult now that populations in the west have experienced an entire decade of flatlining living standards.
In the developing world, the problem has been too little growth rather than too much. Tackling global population growth is a no-brainer from a climate-change perspective, and most of the projected increase comes from low-income countries, most notably in Africa. The reason is simple: poor families have more children. Birthrates fall as countries become richer.
Between the two extremes are those who think the circle can be squared by carbon-free growth, made possible by the dramatic fall in the cost of renewable energy. Technology will ride to the rescue, they insist.
This sounds like a cost-free (or at least relatively cheap) option, and that’s why almost all politicians pay lip service to green growth. But then they act in ways that make achieving global warming targets harder – by building new roads and expanding airports. And always for the same reason: because doing so will be good for growth. This is called a balanced approach, but it is nothing of the sort. If the IPCC is even close to being right about its timeline, speeding up the transition from fossil fuels to renewables is vital.
Can that be done? One of the winners of this year’s Nobel prize for economics – William Nordhaus – says it can, if policymakers get serious about a carbon tax set high enough to price oil, coal and gas out of the market.
Here, though, the breakdown in international cooperation and trust becomes really damaging. Ideally, existing global institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the UN and the World Trade Organization – would be supplemented by a new World Environmental Organisation with the power to levy a carbon tax globally. Even in the absence of a new body, they would be working together to face down the inevitable opposition to change from the fossil fuel lobby.
Instead, the response to climate change looks similar to the response to the financial crisis: fail to recognise there is a problem until it is too late; panic; then muddle through. That’s a sobering prospect.

Links

• Trump's trade war with China and Europe will hit global growth – IMF
• We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
• How the 1929 Wall Street Crash unfolded
• Nobel prize in economics won by Nordhaus and Romer for work on climate change and growth - as it happened
• Projections and uncertainties about climate change in an era of minimal climate policies 

States' Climate Risks Are Rising, Led By Health Impacts: Moody's

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Australia's states face increasing threats from climate change but their economic diversity will be key to providing a buffer against the worst of the economic fallout, according to international ratings agency Moody's.
The main risks include rising sea levels, more intense storms and heatwaves that are expected to take their toll on the finances of state treasuries, the agency said in a new report.

Climate change costs are going to mount for Australia's states, Moody's says. Credit: Dean Lewins

The Moody's report, the agency's first to examine the financial health of the states and territories, comes a day after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its special report into the international effects if global warming is allowed to exceed 1.5 degrees.
"From what we can see now, the capital spending required looks manageable across all the states," John Manning, a senior credit officer with Moody's, said. “There’s no immediate impact on states and territory ratings.” The agency has a AAA rating, its highest level, for federal government debt.
The challenges are expected to mount both at the federal level, but particularly at the level of state and local government. "That's where the primary responsibility for preventing, preparing and responding to national disasters actually sit," Mr Manning said.
Increasing temperatures and the related effects on heatwaves and more extreme fire weather are likely to lead the challenges facing states given the possible health risks. Health spending typically amounts to about 30 per cent of state budgets, he said.
The cost of extreme weather could also hinge on the intensity of short-term cycles such as El Ninos, which can exacerbate dry spells over southern and eastern Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology on Tuesday raised its outlook to "alert", rating the chances of an El Nino at 70 per cent, or triple the normal level.
States' infrastructure spending will also likely increase to cope with rising sea levels and more intense storms. Cyclones tracking further south will also challenge regions where building codes have been less stringent, Mr Manning said.
The IPCC reports have shown agriculture-based economies were likely to be the most vulnerable to the more chaotic weather expected as the planet warms.
The atmosphere can hold about 7 per cent more moisture with degree of warming – and that's about the level since the industrial era began – while droughts are made worse by increased evaporation amid the warmer temperatures.
For Australia, the diversity of the economies even with states will shield the economy from some of the worst disruptions, Moody's predicts.
For instance, mining accounts for just 3.2 per cent of NSW's gross value added economy, the agency said, and just 0.9 per cent in Victoria.
Queensland, though, has more of a concentration, with mining accounting for almost 10 per cent of the economy and tourism 7.5 per cent.
Mining accounts for about 30 per cent of Western Australia's economy but is more iron-ore based than mining in the eastern states and so less exposed to the expected trend away from coal envisaged by the IPCC, Mr Manning said.
Still, changing weather, warming oceans and shifting ecosystems may force changes in Tasmania, where just over a 10th of the economy is derived by agriculture, forestry and fishing, easily the most of any state.
Just as the spread of industries gives Moody's comfort in the ratings outlook for the states, it also implies that adjustments – such as reduced coal mining – can be navigated by state governments if they are nimble enough.
“These challenges also open up opportunities for new industries and new growth,” Mr Manning said.

Links

• Climate change risks facing Australian states mitigated by diversified economies, strong institutions
• 'Next decade critical': Perils mount at 1.5 degrees of warming, says IPCC
• El Niño ALERT; positive Indian Ocean Dipole likely underway
• Australia Doesn’t Care To Break Its Coal Habit In The Face Of Climate Change
• Driest Ever September Deepens Australia's Drought
• 'This Drought Is Different': It's Drier And Hotter – And Getting Worse
• Australia's Emissions Data Would Shame The Coalition, If Such A Thing Were Possible
• How Deadly Is 50-Degree Heat? Australia's Cities Face The New Reality Of Climate Change
• In A Country So Dry Even Cows Take Showers, Climate Change Gets Ignored

What The Past Can Tell Us About The Future Of Climate Change

University of Melbourne - Associate Professor Russell Drysdale

For several millennia during the Last Interglacial period, temperatures were higher than pre-industrial levels and that had an impact on our climate system. But with recent dire forecasts of global warming, what can the past tell us about the future of our climate?

Getty Images

Earlier this week, 91 of the best scientific minds from around the globe warned what the world could look like if we fail to keep global warming below 1.5℃ this century.
The report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says heat, droughts and flooding will become more common and extreme. It also warned of the impact on the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the average rise of the rest of the planet.

The Greenland ice sheet covers almost two million square kilometres of the country.
Picture: Wikimedia

And this means the faster melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This ice sheet is important. It’s the second largest body of ice in the world, covering almost two million square kilometres or roughly 80 per cent of the surface of Greenland.
In recent years, the ice sheet has seen record levels of melting - with the ‘melt zone’, where snow and ice turns into slush and meltwater, expanding at an accelerating rate.
In fact, recent climate modelling and observational data suggests that the magnitude of surface ‘freshening’ in the sub-polar region of the North Atlantic could be enough to significantly disrupt ocean circulation. This would have trickle-down effects on the climate that could lead to widespread changes in rainfall as far away as the southern hemisphere tropics.
In other words, to us here in Australia.
But history can also help give us a ‘bigger picture’ look at what might happen in the future for the ice sheet.

Warming Up
We can look back at warmer periods from the past, like the Last Interglacial, which occurred between about 129,000 and 116,000 years ago, in order to understand the relationship between global warming, ice-sheet melting and how our climate system responds.
Parts of the Last Interglacial were actually warmer than the current Holocene Interglacial (the last 11,700 years), particularly in the Arctic region.
As a result, sea levels then were higher than they are now – the latest estimates suggest somewhere between 6 and 9 metres above today’s level. And between 0.6 and 3.5 metres of this sea level was contributed from melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which was smaller than it is today because of strong Arctic warming at the time.

Changes in rainfall is registered in stalagmites’ geochemistry.
Picture: Supplied

It’s worth noting, though, that these warmer Last Interglacial temperatures were naturally occurring – a result of changes in Earth’s orbit at the time. But in these post-Industrial days, it’s human-induced warming that’s heating up our planet.
So, what effect did this meltwater from Greenland have on ocean circulation and regional climate?
Our international team of scientists, led by Professor Chronis Tzedakis from the University College London, set out to answer this question. The team studied ocean sediments from a drill core taken just off the coast of Lisbon in Portugal, as well as stalagmites collected from an Italian cave system.
This information was then compared with other ocean cores and climate-model simulations to explore the links between the ice-sheet melting, change to the North Atlantic Ocean circulation and climate change across southern Europe.
The ocean sediments we collected not only contained essential information about past sea-surface-temperature and ocean-current changes in the North Atlantic during the Last Interglacial, but also preserved plant microfossils (pollen) from rivers draining the Portuguese hinterland.
Because these two sets of information come from exactly the same sedimentary archive, this enabled us to match regional vegetation changes with the shifts in ocean-circulation patterns in the North Atlantic.
At this time, stalagmites were slowly growing almost 2000 kilometres away in Antro del Corchia, a 60 kilometre-long cave system in northern Italy. The drip waters that build-up these formations originate from rain falling above the cave – and this rain mainly comes from air masses crossing the North Atlantic.

Periods of ‘excess warmth’, like the Last Interglacial, can lead to significant melting of ice in Greenland.
Picture: NASA

So any changes in climate and ocean currents in the North Atlantic affect the amount of rainfall reaching Corchia cave and this information is registered in the stalagmites’ geochemistry.
By comparing the information contained in the marine sediments and stalagmites we found a consistent pattern of climate fluctuations throughout the Last Interglacial. The interval of warm, wet climate that occurred at the very start of the interglacial, spanning about 2500 years, came to an abrupt end around 126,500 years ago when the abundance of drought-sensitive trees plummeted.
The same trend was revealed in the stalagmite geochemistry. In fact there was such an obvious reduction in rainfall that one stalagmite actually stopped growing. Several other smaller changes are seen in both the ocean-sediment and stalagmite records as the Last Interglacial progressed.
So what caused these rainfall changes?

Changing Weather
A comparison of our data with previously published ocean-sediment studies shows that most of the aridity events, or the drying out of the climate, across southern Europe can be can correlated to cooling phases in the sub-polar North Atlantic.
These phases are inferred from changes in the abundance and geochemistry of marine microfossils at these more northerly ocean sites.
While cooling may sound counter-intuitive, its effects aren’t. Ocean currents in the North Atlantic bring warm water from the tropics north to higher latitudes, keeping western Europe relatively warm. This current is actually a part of a larger circulation that links to the global ocean system called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or the AMOC.

AMOC is a large system of ocean currents that carry warm water
from the tropics northwards into the Arctic region.
Picture: Wikimedia

 But any disturbance of the AMOC can have an impact. One way that can happen is meltwater from an ice sheet - a tongue of cold, fresh water that is less dense than the salty water coming up from the tropics.
Because of the intertwined relationship between ocean temperature and our atmosphere, this ocean cooling causes a southward shift in the Arctic front, changing moisture transport and air mass trajectories across Europe. In Southern Europe this can mean less rain - less evaporation from cooler ocean surfaces, so less moisture in the atmosphere to bring rain.
The major cooling 126,500 years ago has been attributed largely to the final melting of the remnants of a large ice sheet that covered northern USA and Canada during the preceding glacial period.
The meltwater from this ice sheet travelled through Hudson Bay and out into the North Atlantic via the Labrador Sea, and may also have involved melting ice from Greenland. The meltwaters caused regional cooling and interrupted ocean circulation.
Data from the sub-polar ocean cores also suggest that the subsequent aridity events in southern Europe could also have been triggered by melting ice from Greenland.
To test this scenario, our colleagues Dr Laurie Menviel and Dr Andrea Taschetto from the University of New South Wales, worked on modelling experiments.

Century-Scale Disruptions
These experiments simulated meltwater flowing into the sub-Arctic region using the same volume of water Greenland’s ice released that affected sea levels during the Last Interglacial and at rates comparable to today’s sea level increases (a few millimetres each year).
The results indicate that the volume of meltwater would have weakened ocean circulation in the North Atlantic by 35 per cent for the largest event and 20 per cent for the smaller ones - in both cases leading to rainfall decreases across the Mediterranean that lasted a few centuries.
We can see this reflected in the vegetation and rainfall changes suggested by the ocean-core and stalagmite data.

Could the Greenland ice sheet melt faster than in the past?
Picture: Shutterstock

The results of this work suggest that periods of ‘excess warmth’, like the Last Interglacial, can lead to significant melting of ice in Greenland and century-scale disruptions in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation that have an effect on rainfall much further afield.
Whether or not this occurred during older interglacials, and precisely how these events influenced the climate of regions beyond southern Europe, are the subject of ongoing studies.
But with mean global temperatures creeping higher, and climate projections showing significant Arctic warming by the year 2100 – comparable to Arctic temperature estimates of the Last Interglacial – the possibility of accelerated Greenland melting looms.
A dry southern Europe is already vulnerable when it comes to water security under climate projections, and although the changes we studied occurred over centuries, were they to play out in the future, it would be a major ongoing issue for us all.

Links

• What do Gen X and Gen Y worry about most? Climate change.
• Is Australia set to follow Europe and North America with an extreme summer?
• The great (climate) depression
• Avoiding Day Zero in Australia
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• The great Greenland meltdown
• When did the Last Interglacial end?
• Holocene Epoch
• Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods
• Enhanced climate instability in the North Atlantic and southern Europe during the Last Interglacial