Business Needs To Get Real On Climate

AFR - Craig Emerson

Craig Emerson is managing director of Craig Emerson Economics, a distinguished fellow at the ANU and an adjunct professor at Victoria University's College of Business.

The looming election will determine the course our nation takes on an issue of vital importance not only for humankind, but for Australian businesses as well. If business organisations such as the Business Council of Australia (BCA) persist with their support for the Morrison government's carbon-emissions target of a 26 per cent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030, they will position their members as being opposed to meaningful action on climate change.
A pattern has already emerged. The BCA backed an emissions-trading scheme – but not the Rudd government's emissions-trading scheme. It continued to mouth support for an emissions-trading scheme after the election of the Gillard government – just not the carbon price, which after three years was legislated to morph into an emissions-trading scheme anyway. Now the BCA is backing the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) that the Morrison government has abandoned but which remains Labor policy – just not one with a 45 per cent emissions-reduction target for electricity generation.
Instead, the BCA describes the 45 per cent target for electricity as "economy wrecking", supporting only a 26 per cent reduction. Modelling by the Energy Security Board forecasts a 24 per cent reduction in emissions from the electricity sector on 2005 levels by 2021-22. This would leave only a 2 per cent reduction to be done from 2022 to 2030 if a 26 per cent target were adopted. During the 2020s, two or more ageing coal-fired power stations will be retired regardless. In other words, the BCA supports the NEG as long as it doesn't do anything.

Earlier droughts underscored the danger of a perfect storm to John Howard.  Glenn Campbell

Existing policy settings
The BCA's support for a do-nothing target for electricity generation fails to recognise that the cost of installing and transmitting large-scale renewable energy has fallen so rapidly that increasing renewable energy in the system now drives electricity prices lower.
Prime Minister Morrison has declared Australia will reach its Paris commitment "in a canter" under existing policy settings. That is untrue. Our Paris commitment is a 26 per cent reduction in emissions for the whole economy, not just for electricity generation. Official government projections released, conveniently, just before Christmas are for Australia's total emissions to rise between 2020 and 2030, for an overall reduction on 2005 levels of just 7 per cent – a long way from a 26 per cent reduction. If the Morrison government is re-elected Australia will miss its Paris target by a country mile.
Fortunately some of the BCA's more-enlightened members are supporting the transition to a low-carbon future, installing renewable and low-emissions energy capacity and refusing to buckle to Coalition pressure to keep open coal-fired generators beyond their economic lives. Householders, too, are installing rooftop solar panels at unprecedented rates.
The Coalition's conservative faction, urged on by its backers on shock-jock radio and Sky After Dark, continues to propagate the conspiracy theory that climate change is an elaborate hoax. They are supremely confident that, given a choice between lower electricity prices and emissions reductions, voters will follow the money every time.
There are two problems with this short-term, cynical analysis.
First, voters don't believe they should be required to make a choice; they support lower electricity prices and action on climate change.

The Andrews government's renewable-energy policy went over a treat in the Victorian state election.  Supplied

Second, this polling is getting old. When John Howard later reflected on his own announcement of an emissions-trading scheme ahead of the 2007 election, he described the political environment at the time as "a perfect storm". Ironically, chief contributor to the "perfect storm" was the prolonged drought. Voters were constantly reminded of global warming by water restrictions in the cities and horrible images of devastation in the bush.

In for a big shock
History is now repeating. Much of Australia is in the grips of another severe drought. Concern about climate change is firmly back in the public's consciousness. As the Morrison government moves towards the election, musing about the underwriting of new coal-fired power stations and boasting about doing nothing on climate change, it is in for a big shock.
The Andrews government's renewable-energy policy went over a treat in the Victorian state election. Just ask voters in blue-ribbon Liberal seats, several of which fell to Labor and which make up the federal electorates of several staunch Liberal conservatives.
If Labor wins the coming federal election it will try to get an NEG with a 45 per cent emissions-reduction target through a Senate in which conservatives are likely to have a majority. If Labor fails in that endeavour, it will move to contracting for generating capacity consistent with the 45 per cent target and an integrated system plan that addresses and manages reliability and grid stability.
As the BCA and others campaign against that target and in favour of a do-nothing target, they will isolate themselves, forfeiting any influence on government policy and will end up, again, on the wrong side of history.

Links

• Business backs NSW plea for action on federal energy policy paralysis
• Australia on track to miss Paris emissions targets by huge margin
• Climate Change: Focusing On How Individuals Can Help Is Very Convenient For Corporations
• Lightbulb Group Shows Way On Climate Change
• Is Corporate Australia Facing A 'Tipping Point' On Climate Change?
• Australian Businesses Must Do More To Disclose Climate Change Risks To Investors, ASIC Says
• Investors With $26 Trillion In Assets Urge G7 Leaders To Act On Climate Change
• Corporations To Lead Charge Into Wind, Solar And Storage
• Powerful Investors Push Big Companies To Plan For Climate Change
• Lloyd's Of London To Divest From Coal Over Climate Change
• Why We Can’t Rely On Corporations To Save Us From Climate Change
• Australian Business Is Waking Up To Climate Risks

An Ocean Of Evidence On Warming Is Our Cue To Take Action - Now

Fairfax - John Church

John Church is a professor at the Climate Change Research Centre, University of NSW, and the first Australian to receive the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in climate change award, for his work on rising sea levels.

Over 90 per cent of the heat trapped in the climate system by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations from our burning of fossil fuels is stored in the oceans. With much less variability than surface temperatures, ocean warming is one of the most important indicators of the ongoing pace of climate change.
Two new studies published last week confirm the world’s oceans are warming. The first,
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows that ocean warming has accelerated since 1870. The second, a perspective published in the prestigious iournal Science, reports studies that indicate the rate of ocean warming over recent decades is 10 per cent or more greater than the studies considered in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment published in 2013, and that the rate has increased since 1991.

Broken sea ice emerges from under the hull of a Finnish icebreaker as it traverses the Arctic's Northwest Passage.

Credit: AP

The updated observations are in agreement with the results of climate model simulations of the impacts of our continuing release of greenhouse gases. These models show the ocean will continue to warm through the 21st century and beyond.
Greenhouse gases have a long life time in the atmosphere. Even if carbon dioxide emissions were to cease completely, atmospheric concentrations would only decrease slowly over thousands of years unless we discover a way to artificially remove them from the atmosphere.As a direct consequence, surface temperatures would remain elevated. As result of the oceans’ ability to store heat, they will continue to warm for centuries.
Decisions we make now about greenhouse gas emissions have long-term consequences for the world and Australia’s climate and sea level, and of course for the natural environment and our modern society.
Continued greenhouse gas emissions at a business-as-usual rate would result in the ocean warming accelerating through the 21st century, and a contribution to sea-level rise of about 30cm from ocean thermal expansion alone by 2100. The warmer ocean would be accompanied by warmer surface temperatures, increased frequency of climate extremes, and increased intensity of extreme rainfall events and hurricanes, with major disruptions to society.
The ice sheets are even more important for long-term sea-level change. Unabated emissions this century would commit the world to metres of sea-level rise over coming centuries. We would likely cross the threshold, well before 2100, leading to an accelerating melting of the Greenland ice sheet and a sea level rise of up to about seven metres. An acceleration of the Greenland contribution to sea level rise has already been observed.
For Antarctica, a warming ocean would lead to the decay of ice shelves and an accelerating flow of ice into the ocean, as revealed by recent observations of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The rate of sea level contribution from Antarctica is more uncertain but could equal or exceed the contribution from thermal expansion by 2100, and could be metres over coming centuries.
Global average temperature is already about 1C above pre-industrial levels and we have already seen an increased frequency of coastal flooding events. Unabated emissions would see permanent inundation and a dramatic increase in the frequency of coastal flooding events, disrupting the lives of tens to hundreds of millions of people.
Urgent, significant and sustained mitigation of our greenhouse gas emissions are required if we are to meet the Paris targets of “limiting global average temperatures to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”, and thus significantly reduce the impacts of climate change. Current mitigation “promises” are not sufficient to meet these goals, and planned mitigation is even further away. Every day we delay action makes the Paris targets more difficult to achieve.
The long time scales of the ocean means we will have to adapt to climate and sea level change resulting from past emissions. However, further sea level rises and other changes in our climate can be greatly reduced, but not eliminated, by reaching the Paris goals.
We should remember that sea levels were six to nine metres above current levels at a global average temperature about 1C above pre-industrial values.
Current Australian government figures do not indicate Australia is on track to meet our committed greenhouse gas emission mitigation target of 26 to 28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 “in a canter”. Meeting this target will require the urgent development of an effective Australian climate policy.
Perhaps more importantly, this target is completely inadequate. To make a proportionate commitment to meeting the Paris targets, Australia needs to ratchet up our targets, as expected by the Paris agreement, and to urgently develop realistic plans to meet these targets.
Actions we take now will affect the lives of our children and grandchildren and that of future generations. We know what is required for significant mitigation and we have the knowledge and technologies to do it. What we require urgently is the will to do it.

Links

• Arctic is in even worse shape than realised
• Across the Arctic, lakes are leaking dangerous greenhouse gases
• Arctic temperatures soar 25 degrees above normal in the dead of winter
• Countries fail Paris promises to cut carbon emissions: report

How The Fossil Fuel Industry Got The Media To Think Climate Change Was Debatable

Washington Post - Amy Westervelt

A brown-coal-fired power plant in Bergheim, Germany. (Sascha Steinbach/EPA-EFE/REX)

Late last year, the Trump administration released the latest national climate assessment on Black Friday in what many assumed was an attempt to bury the document. If that was the plan, it backfired, and the assessment wound up earning more coverage than it probably would have otherwise. But much of that coverage perpetuated a decades-old practice, one that has been weaponized by the fossil fuel industry: false equivalence.
Although various business interests began pushing back against environmental action in general in the early 1970s as part of the conservative “war of ideas” launched in response to the social movements of the 1960s, when global warming first broke into the public sphere, it was a bipartisan issue and remained so for years. On the campaign trail in 1988, George H.W. Bush identified as an environmentalist and called for action on global warming, framing it as a technological challenge that American innovation could address. But fossil fuel interests were shifting as the industry and its allies began to push back against empirical evidence of climate change, taking many conservatives along with them.
Documents uncovered by journalists and activists over the past decade lay out a clear strategy: First, target media outlets to get them to report more on the “uncertainties” in climate science, and position industry-backed contrarian scientists as expert sources for media. Second, target conservatives with the message that climate change is a liberal hoax, and paint anyone who takes the issue seriously as “out of touch with reality.” In the 1990s, oil companies, fossil fuel industry trade groups and their respective PR firms began positioning contrarian scientists such as Willie Soon, William Happer and David Legates as experts whose opinions on climate change should be considered equal and opposite to that of climate scientists. The Heartland Institute, which hosts an annual International Conference on Climate Change known as the leading climate skeptics conference, for example, routinely calls out media outlets (including The Washington Post) for showing “bias” in covering climate change when they either decline to quote a skeptic or question a skeptic’s credibility.
Data on how effective this strategy has been is hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence of its success abounds. In the early 1990s, polls showed that about 80 percent of Americans were aware of climate change and accepted that something must be done about it, an opinion that crossed party lines. By 2008, Gallup found a marked partisan divide on climate change. By 2010, the American public’s belief in climate change hit an all-time low of 48 percent, despite the fact that those 20 years saw increased research, improved climate models and several climate change predictions coming true.
By demanding “balance,” the industry transformed climate change into a partisan issue. We know that was a deliberate strategy because various internal documents from ExxonMobil, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute and a handful of now-defunct fossil fuel industry groups reveal not only the industry’s strategy to target media with this message and these experts, but also its own preemptive debunking of the very theories it went on to support.
It need not have been such a successful strategy: If news purveyors really wanted to be evenhanded on coverage of climate change, they could certainly weave in the insights of more conservative scientists — those whose predictions err on the sunnier side of apocalypse. Instead, many took the industry’s bait, routinely inserting denialist claims into stories about climate science in the interest of providing balance: In an analysis of 636 articles covering climate change that appeared in “prestige U.S. outlets” from 1988 to 2002, researchers from the University of California at Santa Cruz and American University found that 52.65 percent presented climate science and contrarian theories as equal. The practice continued into the mid-2000s. As recently as 2007, PBS NewsHour invited well-known (and widely debunked) former weatherman Anthony Watts on to counterbalance Richard Muller, a former Koch-funded skeptic who had shifted his view.
By about 2008, most mainstream print outlets had moved past the notion that “balance” means including climate contrarians in coverage of climate science. These outlets do still trip up occasionally, though. In 2017, ProPublica published a remarkably uncritical Q&A with Happer, for example, describing him as “brilliant and controversial,” and characterizing his view that global warming is good for the planet as merely “unusual.” That same year, the New York Times was roundly criticized for hiring climate contrarian Bret Stephens as a regular editorial columnist (and his first column didn’t help).
While print outlets aren’t perfect, TV news has lagged further behind on climate, often presenting climate contrarians as an equal and opposite balance to climate scientists. In coverage of the national climate assessment, for example, multiple cable news shows featured both climate scientists and climate deniers, as though the two are simply opposite sides of a debate. “Meet the Press,” “Anderson Cooper 360” and “State of the Union” all brought on climate deniers to provide balance to their shows. Republican politicians made the cable news rounds, too, spouting familiar tall tales about climate change being normal and cyclical or sun spots and volcanoes being the real culprits. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) repeated the “the climate always changes” story on CNN, while Rick Santorum, informal White House adviser Stephen Moore and British politician Nigel Farage pushed the “climate scientists getting rich” narrative.
Though some outlets have moved to extricate deniers from the conversation, too many television news programs continue to bring on “contrarian” experts, giving a platform to tired lies. I say “lies” because fossil fuel industry scientists debunked these theories themselves decades ago, so they are knowingly perpetuating falsehoods. In a “global warming primer” prepared in the 1990s by the Global Climate Coalition, a since-disbanded consortium of fossil fuel producers, utilities, manufacturers, and other U.S. business interests (including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), a Mobil scientist debunked all of the prevailing contrarian theories of the day on climate change. That part of the primer was left unprinted, of course, and oil companies went on to fund scientists promoting those very theories — the same ones that industry spokesmen and conservative politicians spout today.
In addition to propping up experts and leaning on media to use them as sources, oil companies have spent millions on advertising and advertorials over the years. Which seems innocuous — most companies advertise — but oil companies don’t sell a consumer product so much as a commodity. Most people aren’t loyal to a particular brand of gas; they buy whatever is most convenient or cheapest. So, when oil companies take out ads, it’s with the intention of shifting the opinions of the voting public, policymakers, and the media.
In an exhaustive survey of ExxonMobil’s advertorials from 1977 to 2014, science historian Naomi Oreskes and researcher Geoffrey Supran found that these pieces often took the form of “op-ads” that look and read a lot like op-eds but are paid for by an advertiser. Some simply presented positive stories about the company (heavily focused on their investments in algal biofuels, for example), but others argued for more relaxed policies on offshore drilling or a “common sense” approach to climate change regulation. The researchers found that “83 percent of peer-reviewed papers and 80 percent of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81 percent instead expressing doubt.”
A 1981 internal Mobil memo discovered by the Climate Investigations Center is an evaluation of the first decade of Mobil’s advertorial program, and it makes the company’s goals clear: “Not only is the company presenting its opinion to key opinion leaders, but it has been engaging in continuing debate with the New York Times itself. In fact, the paper has even changed to positions similar to Mobil’s on at least seven key energy issues.”
Granted, Mobil communications staff are giving themselves a lot of credit here, but whether they accomplished their goal is almost beside the point. This document shows the intention of these campaigns, and that’s something that should be taken seriously by any media outlet agreeing to run them, especially because many still do today. Campaigns that bring in big money at a time when the business of news is struggling are surely hard to turn down, but media outlets need to seriously consider the impact these campaigns have on their ability to inform the public, and work to mitigate that impact, above and beyond the usual “church and state” division between advertising and editorial. They could stop running these campaigns alongside climate reporting, do a better job of labeling campaigns, or refuse to run them altogether.
It’s well past time the media stopped allowing itself to be a tool in the fossil fuel industry’s information war. Oreskes likens the push for “balance” on climate change to journalists arguing over the final score of a baseball game. “If the Yankees beat the Red Sox 6-2, journalists would report that. They would not feel compelled to find someone to say actually the Red Sox won, or the score was 6-4,” she says.

Links

• Five myths about climate change
• Scientists know climate change is a threat. Politicians need to realize it, too.
• Deniers club: Meet the people clouding the climate change debate
• 1998 American Petroleum Institute Global Climate Science Communications Team Action Plan
• 1991 Information Council on the Environment Climate Denial Ad Campaign
• Media bias evident in climate coverage
• United States news media and climate change in the era of US President Trump.

How 300 Years Of Urbanization And Farming Transformed The Planet

CityLab - David Montgomery

Three centuries ago, humans were intensely using just around 5 percent of the Earth’s land. Now, it’s almost half.

Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)

Humans are transforming the Earth through our carbon emissions. Arctic sea ice is shrinking, seas are rising, and the past four years have been the hottest since record-keeping began. But long before the first cars or coal plants, we were reshaping the planet’s ecosystems through humbler but no less dramatic means: pastures and plows.

Environmental scientist Erle Ellis has studied the impact of humanity on the Earth for decades, with a recent focus on categorizing and mapping how humans use the land—not just now, but in the past. And his team’s results show some startling changes. Three centuries ago, humans were intensely using just around 5 percent of the planet, with nearly half the world’s land effectively wild. Today, more than half of Earth’s land is occupied by agriculture or human settlements.

“Climate change is only recently becoming relevant,” said Ellis, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “If it keeps going how it is, it will become the dominant shaper of ecology in the terrestrial realm, but right now the dominant shaper of ecology is land use.”

In contrast to the typical division of the world into ecological “biomes,” Ellis and his team at the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology map what they call “anthromes,” or “anthropogenic biomes.” These show the intersection of ecology and human land use.

Using a range of sources, Ellis’s team mapped out that land use, dividing the planet into grids and categorizing each cell based on how many people lived there and how they impacted the land. The densest areas were cities and towns, followed by close-packed farming villages. Less populated areas were categorized by their dominant land use—crops, livestock pasture, or inhabited woodlands—while other areas were marked as largely uninhabited. (See image Land use, above.)

Even with only one snapshot per century, the animation makes some of the trends obvious. Large swaths of Russia and the United States become cropland over the 19th century, while livestock occupies increasing amounts of previously semi-wild land in Africa and Asia.

“Asia is pretty much the dominant transformed area, and transformed the earliest,” Ellis said. “Europe is also pretty dense ... The rest of the world has a different trajectory. Much slower, less dense.”

All of this is a mixture of estimates and approximations. One reason Ellis and his team only looked every hundred years and divided the world into cells that stretch for miles was to avoid giving a false impression of precision.

People ask Ellis, “‘What was my backyard like?’” he said. “Well, we don’t have any solid evidence … The further back in time you go, the more you have to consider [this], in a sense, educated guesswork.”

Even more recent data can have issues, based on political decisions that countries make about how to self-classify their land. Saudi Arabia, for example, reports “almost every part of their country as being rangeland” even though much of that arid land is seldom if ever grazed.

Humans shape even “seminatural” biomes

Significant portions of the world, both now and in the past, have been what Ellis’s team terms “seminatural.” These are areas—frequently forests—with low but real human habitation. This could reflect a large cell of the grid that has a farming village or two but mostly natural forests. But frequently, Ellis says, humans have taken a much bigger role in shaping seemingly natural wilderness than people think.

Take the “pristine myth”—the idea that the Americas before European colonization were dominated by pristine wilderness untouched by human hands. In fact, modern researchers believe that indigenous tribes had actively shaped their landscapes through agriculture and regular burning of American forests.

Because of this, the devastating spread of epidemics among indigenous populations after 1492 also had a huge impact on climate—and not just locally. Some scholars believe disease-ravaged peoples significantly cut back on their management of American forests, which meant far less carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere from fires and far more absorbed into newly grown forests. The combination could have played a significant role in the “Little Ice Age” that lowered global temperatures for several centuries between around 1500 and 1850 C.E.

This kind of active land management was done not just by sedentary populations, but by hunter-gatherers, too. This, Ellis says, is a shortcoming in the data.

“There’s no direct mapping of hunter-gatherers’ land use in these datasets. That’s something we’re trying to rectify now,” he said, noting that evidence suggests even non-agricultural people have major effects on the environment.

The data also shows the massive impact made by cities, the most dramatic way humans transform their environment. In 1700, a negligible portion of the Earth’s surface was covered by cities. Over the three centuries that followed, this boomed by around 40 times. Cities are still just half a percent of the planet’s land area, but they have had the most dramatic increase in impact of any of Ellis’s “anthromes.”

Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)

Densely populated farming villages—which often have similar concentrations of people per square mile as American suburbs—are also big, especially in the developing world. (Ellis’s team don’t map any urban areas in the Americas or Australia before 1900, and never apply the “villages” category to those continents, because those areas didn’t have “histories of intensive subsistence agriculture.”)

Huge portions of India and China are occupied by these kind of villages. So, too, were the hinterlands around major European cities before improvements in transportation enabled produce to be brought from farther away. Paris, for example, used to be surrounded by suburban “market gardens” which, historians André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq note, could produce five or six harvests per year and had a “virtual monopoly of the Parisian market” for food until the second half of the 19th century.

How cities drive land-use changes

That kind of intensive agriculture to feed a demanding urban market is part of the huge impact that cities have on the use of land even well outside their boundaries. Those thousands or millions of urban dwellers aren’t producing their own food, and thus need more food produced elsewhere in order to eat.

Ellis describes two different ways that cities impact far-away anthromes through their demands for food—one of them devastating to natural ecosystems, the other surprisingly beneficial.

The first sees new land being put under the plow, as societies try to produce more food for a growing population. This is often low-productivity agriculture, reflecting the marginal quality of the farmland: If it was good for farming, it would have been farmed already. But later, as populations grow, comes an “intensification” process as technology increases the yields on low-productivity farmland.

Agricultural expansion has a massive impact on natural biomes, and has for millennia. But the second process, intensification, has the potential to restore some of the natural biomes that humans previously plowed under.

“Dense cities actually have the potential to help areas recover, because dense populations in cities often are basically pulling people out of the rural areas where they’re farming low-productivity land,” Ellis said. The increased production on good land means the marginal farmland is no longer needed.

Author Charles Mann described this process taking place in New York’s Hudson River Valley in his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet. In the late 19th century, this region was dominated by “hardscrabble farms and pastures ringed by stone walls.” Now many of those “hardscrabble farms” are gone. Six counties in the lower Hudson Valley had around 350,000 people and 573,000 acres of timberland in 1875; today those same counties have more than 1 million people but three times as much forest.

“Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere,” Mann writes. “Nor was this growth restricted to North America: Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.”

But while this intensification of agriculture is allowing the return of nature in parts of developed countries, the first phase—expansion—is still playing out in the developing world. Erle’s maps show the expansion of crops and livestock into areas like Africa’s Sahel and South America’s Amazon rainforest over the past century.

“Land transformation is the big story of biosphere transformation so far,” Ellis said. “If you’re trying to understand how we produced the ecology we have now, it’s the story of land-use transformation.”

Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)

What’s next for Earth

So what will a future mapmaker show for the world’s land use in 2100? Ellis said he expects urbanization to continue, at least doubling the share of the planet’s land devoted to urban areas over the next century.

Similarly, he expects developed countries to see an intensification of agriculture that enables marginal land to be returned to the wild—a process already under way in newly developed countries like China. Poorer countries, on the other hand, may continue to convert marginal wild land into farmland.

“It’s only poor farmers without much investment that can make that work,” Ellis said. “When you’re investing large amounts of money in farm equipment and fertilizers, you don’t invest that in marginal land.”

Much depends, however, on political, economic, and technological changes that will unfold over the next 80 years. For example, Ellis said, the United States has recently seen “a huge shift from beef to chicken” in consumer demand. “That changes the kind of land that’s in demand, from grassland to production of maize and soy.”

Among the factors that could affect the future of Earth’s land use are political decisions in Brazil, where new President Jair Bolsonaro wants to open up more of the Amazon rainforest to agriculture, and technology, where a potential breakthrough in electrical generation such as fusion power could enable transformative changes such as vertical urban farming. Conservation efforts, or lack thereof, could also impact areas of intensive agriculture in developed countries.

“The future of the biosphere… depends partly on economics, partly on politics, but also partly on vision,” Ellis said. “It depends on what people’s values are.”

Links

• Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000 (pdf)
• Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology
• Reforestation helped trigger Little Ice Age, researchers say
• Why Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro has environmentalists worried for the Amazon

Treaty On HFCs Aims To Curb Global Warming From Greenhouse Gases In Air Conditioning, Refrigeration

ABC - Ben Deacon

The Kigali Amendment limits the use of hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs.

(AP: Altaf Qadri)

In many parts of Australia, air conditioners have gone from being a luxury to what many consider a necessity.

It's a trend that's being echoed around the world as billions of people in hot counties lift themselves out of poverty.
But the explosion in demand for the energy-intensive appliance is alarming climate change experts, who say we're heating the world up by cooling it down.

Alice Springs recently recorded more days over 45C in a single week than in the past 76 years.

(ABC News: Neda Vanovac)

Victoria MacLean, who runs the Bureau of Meteorology's weather station in Alice Springs, said the start of 2019 was unbearable, even by local standards.
"We had 11 days in a row recently of 40-degree-plus days. We had a 45.6 day. In fact we had another one like this as well and that did break the record for the Alice Springs airport," said the meteorologist.
During the heatwave, Alice Springs had more days over 45 degrees Celsius in a single week than the town has recorded in the past 76 years.
Like most people in the desert community, Ms MacLean coped by running her air conditioner flat out.
"We closed off the downstairs side of the house and we actually stayed down there, we slept down there a few times, just to stay cool.
"We've got two dogs; we had to keep them inside because they just couldn't handle it."
But she does worry about the environmental impact of air conditioning.
"It's kind of ironic that you'd been using the air conditioning, and we've got climate change going on, so we're trying to conserve energy, but then you have to use more of it."

Air conditioners' environmental impact
Air conditioners are a double whammy in terms of climate change.
They're the most energy-hungry appliance in the average home, which in Australia is mostly powered by fossil fuels, and the refrigerants inside air conditioners are potent greenhouse gases.

IEA chief economist Laszlo Varro speaking at the GHGT-14 conference in Melbourne.

(Supplied: GHGT-14)

Experts say demand for air conditioning is increasing so fast internationally that it will have a real impact on the earth's climate.
Laszlo Varro, chief economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA), told a recent conference of greenhouse gas scientists in Melbourne that Asia was experiencing an energy transformation unlike anything in history.
"The overwhelming majority of electricity-demand growth comes 10 years after you provide electricity to the village," Mr Varro said.
"You provide electricity to the village and then the kids go to school. Then they work in a factory and they buy a refrigerator and a television.

"This is when electricity demand explodes and the most important household appliance in this respect is air conditioning."

The IEA estimates there will be 5.6 billion air conditioners globally by 2050, up from 1.6 billion now.

(Reuters: David Gray)

There are 3 billion people living in regions of the world where air conditioning is needed more than 300 days a year, and as the world's climate warms, that number is getting bigger and bigger.
The IEA estimates there could be an extra 4 billion air conditioners around the world by mid-century, which alone could push up the world's temperature by more than half a degree.
"We expect up to 4,000 terawatt hours, which is 10 times the Australian electricity system, [in] additional electricity demand, [which] can potentially emerge only from air conditioning," Mr Varro said.

"And this is coming in parts of the world where today coal is the dominant source of power generation."

Mr Varro said the investment wave into new coal capacity in Asia was so robust that about one-third of coal-fired power stations around the world were less than 10 years old.

"That's not so bad for an industry that's supposed to be dying."

Global cooperation on air conditioners and climate change
On January 1, while Alice Springs endured its heat wave, an international treaty quietly came into effect to limit the impact of refrigeration and air conditioning on the world's climate.
The Kigali Amendment follows the extraordinary success of the Montreal Protocol in banning ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs.
The new treaty commits signatories to phase down hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, the greenhouse gases found in almost all modern air conditioners.
In 2016, the former US Secretary of State John Kerry said Kigali was "likely the single most important step that we could take at this moment to limit the warming of our planet".

Patrick McInerney from the Environment Department (centre) co-chaired the negotiations for the Kigali Amendment.

(Supplied: IISD)

Peter Brodribb, an internationally recognised expert in the environmental impacts of HFCs, said Australia played a key role in the negotiations.
"In fact the co-chair of the executive committee was an Australian, Patrick McInerney from the Department of the Environment. He was one of the main people that negotiated the agreement," he said.
The Kigali Amendment commits developed countries to reduce production and importation of HFCs by 85 per cent by 2036 and 80 to 85 per cent in developing countries by 2047.
In October 2017, Australia became the 10th of 66 countries to ratify the Kigali Amendment, and began its HFC phase-down on January 1, 2018.
The United States is still to ratify the amendment.
Kigali aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 72 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2019 and 2050: the equivalent of well over one year's total global greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr Brodribb said Kigali meant more than just the banning of a group of potent greenhouse gases.
"By transitioning to new refrigerants, what this means is that companies have to do new designs, and with new designs they create products that are much more efficient," he said.
"They consume less electricity and once again, that will contribute less to global warming."

Links

• The Future of Cooling
• Global deal to limit powerful greenhouse gases, fight climate change
• Hunt confident global climate agreement can be reached

How Is Climate Change Affecting Australia?

Climate Reality

Few countries see almost every side of the climate crisis as clearly – and have as much to lose – as Australia.


Tourists know the country for the koalas and kangaroos that fill nature shows and iconic places like the Sydney Opera House that seem to appear in every Hollywood film shot Down Under. And then there’s the timeless mystery of vegemite.
But talk to many climate scientists and they’ll tell you that Australia is especially vulnerable to the climate crisis, putting all this wonder at risk. Talk to many activists and they’ll tell you it’s no wonder, since Australia exports more coal than any other nation on Earth.
But there’s good news, too. The country is also home to an incredible community of activists, who’ve fought potentially world-changing developments like the Carmichael coal mine tooth and nail.
So what’s at stake in the fight against coal and for climate solutions in Australia? Here are four key ways climate change is impacting the nation and its people – and one big way you can help turn Australia’s climate-fighting potential into a reality.

Heat and Drought
Here’s the climate reality: Since 1910, Australia's climate has warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius (or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). In fact, without action, Australia is expected to warm as much as 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2090.
Simply put, Australia is already a hot and dry country and it’s expected to generally get hotter and drier without action on climate change. And make no mistake: An increase of 5 degrees Celsius (or 9 degrees Fahrenheit) is a huge deal.
Consider this: “Scientific records over the past million years show that as periodic ice ages ended, global average temperatures rose a total of 4-7 degrees Celsius over the course of about 5,000 years.” What happens in Australia when they rise by about that much in the space of less than 200 years? It’s uncharted territory.
We’re already seeing the impact of rising temperatures today. In January 2018, temperatures in Sydney soared to over 47 degrees Celsius (about 117 degrees Fahrenheit). It was the hottest day the city had seen in nearly 80 years. It’s true, heatwaves are not a new phenomenon. But climate change is making heatwaves more common, more severe, and longer lasting. Heatwaves have real impacts on human health and wellbeing – leading to heat exhaustion or even heat stroke.

Image: Centers for Disease Control, Climate Change and Extreme Heat: What You Can Do to Prepare

There’s also a direct link between a hotter world and more drought. Andrew King, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, explained the connection to the Guardian:

“In general climate change is exacerbating drought, mainly because in a warmer world we experience more evaporation from the surface, and we project for that to continue in the future. So when it does rain, more of that water is likely to be lost to the atmosphere through evaporation than before human-caused climate change.”

In 2018, Australia battled “its worst drought in living memory.” And climate models indicate that, as rain patterns continue to change and heat continues to rise, southern Australia in particular will spend more and more time in drought going forward – unless we act.



Bushfires / Wildfires
Here’s the climate reality: Fire season in Australia has become longer and longer since the 1950s. Bushfires (what the Northern Hemisphere calls wildfires) are also becoming more extreme, especially in southern and eastern parts of the country.
We already know that Australia is becoming hotter and drier due to climate change – making the perfect conditions for bushfire. Plants dry up and die, the ideal kindling to fuel a fire.
At our Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training in Los Angeles, Ken Thompson (former deputy fire chief of the state of New South Wales) reported that fire season now runs for nine months out of the year in Australia. He explained, “The climate is changing and we’re seeing the effects of that on the frontline by more and more fires, more frequently, and more severe.”

“Trends from 1978 to 2017 in the annual (July to June) sum of the daily Forest Fire Danger Index—an indicator of the severity of fire weather conditions.” Image: Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology, State of the Climate 2018, cc by 3.0 AU

At the end of 2018, the Guardian characterized fire conditions in the nation as “catastrophic” as residents endured an extreme heatwave. In fact, at some points in mid-November 2018, the eastern state of Queensland battled nearly 200 fires – something Annastacia Palaszczuk, Queensland’s premier, described as “off the charts.” She went on to say, “No one has ever recorded these kinds of conditions ever in the history of Queensland.”

Agriculture and Livestock
Here’s the climate reality: Farmers depend on a steady climate to grow food and raise livestock. The climate crisis makes it increasingly difficult for farmers to grow food for Australia.
As Australia’s climate changes, every type of farmer will be affected – from those who raise dairy cows to fruits and vegetable producers to wine growers and everything in between. According to Melbourne Sustainability Society Institute’s report, Appetite for Change: Global Warming Impacts on Food and Farming Regions in Australia:

• Dairy cows can’t take the heat! “Heat stress on dairy cows typically reduces milk yield by 10-25 percent, and by up to 40 percent in extreme heatwave conditions.”
• The largest fruit industry in Australia? Wine grapes. And “up to 70 percent of Australia’s winegrowing regions will be less suitable for grape growing by 2050.”
• Carrots are “the nation’s most valuable vegetable export… Higher temperatures associated with climate change are likely to make carrot production less viable in warmer areas with shifts to cooler regions such as Tasmania.” (To add insult to injury, warmer temperatures also make carrots less tasty and change their texture.)

One Australian farmer, John Said, explained it well: “There’s no doubt climate change is a reality now. We’re seeing abnormal temperatures. We’re seeing abnormal fluctuations in weather patterns… Climate change will certainly disrupt food security, there’s no doubt about that.”

The Ocean and the Great Barrier Reef
Here’s the climate reality: The Great Barrier Reef is larger than the Great Wall of China and the only living thing on our planet that can be seen from outer space. It might seem too huge to hurt, but our carbon dioxide emissions are killing the reef.
Ever heard of ocean acidification? We explained it in a blog from 2016:

“Our oceans are an incredible carbon sink — they absorb about 25 percent of the carbon dioxide humans produce every year. But this is changing sea surface chemistry dramatically: when carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean, it dissolves to form carbonic acid. The result, not surprisingly, is that the ocean becomes more acidic, upsetting the delicate pH balance that millions and millions of organisms rely on.”

Our oceans are being hit hard by a double whammy: they’re becoming warmer and more acidic – all because of greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1910, Australia’s ocean surface temperatures have warmed by about 1 degree Celsius (or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) .



Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef has been hit exceptionally hard by both factors. Stressed by warmer and more acidic waters, coral expels the colorful algae it depends on to survive. The coral turns white – known as “coral bleaching” – and unless the coral has a chance to recover and the algae can return, it can die, upsetting entire marine ecosystems.
This can happen on a vast scale, in what’s called a “mass bleaching event.” In 2016, the Great Barrier Reef experienced a mass bleaching event that scientists say was made 175 times more likely by climate change.
Coral can recover from bleaching but that doesn’t always happen. In fact, about 30 percent of corals on the reef have died since the 2016 mass bleaching event.
Marine life depends on the Great Barrier Reef – and so do Australians. A Deloitte Access Economics report values the reef at over AUD $57 billion (over $40 billion in US dollars). The reef supports fisheries, helps employ more than 64,000 people, and brings tourists from around the globe to see this World Heritage Site. If we’re going to save the Great Barrier Reef, we must act on climate.
It’s clear that Australia has a lot to lose to climate change if we don’t take action. Unfortunately, much like in the US, Australia’s federal government has not risen to the challenge. Our friends at Australian climate change organization The Climate Council said it well: “Australia lacks credible national climate policy to drive down greenhouse gas pollution. This is why we are not on track to meet even our woefully inadequate 26-28 percent emissions reduction target for 2030.”

What can change this? You.

From June 5–7, 2019 Climate Reality will be training Climate Reality Leader activists in Brisbane, Australia. Climate Reality Leaders are everyday people who decide to help lead the fight for climate solutions in their own nation and around the world.

Come to Brisbane and you’ll spend three days working with former Vice President Al Gore and world-renowned scientists and communicators learning about the climate crisis and how together we can solve it.
Join us and gain the skills, knowledge, and network to shape public opinion, influence policy, and inspire your community to act at this critical time. Learn more now and apply to join us in Brisbane before March 31!

Links

• Climate Change and Health: Food Security
• Global Warming’s Evil Twin: Ocean Acidification
• Australia one of the countries most exposed to climate change, bank warns
• Adani: thousands protest across Australia against Carmichael mine
• What’s the big deal if the planet is a few degrees warmer?
• How Australia's extreme heat might be here to stay
• Climate change and health: heatwaves
• The new normal? How climate change is making droughts worse
• Australia is devastated by drought, yet it won't budge on climate change
• Facing reality: firefighters on the climate frontlines
• Extreme heatwave in Australia: catastrophic fire conditions as temperature records broken
• Appetite for Change: Global Warming Impacts on Food and Farming Regions in Australia (pdf)

The Stunning Chart Revealing Australia's Record-Breaking Run Of Rising Temperatures

Fairfax - Nicole Hasham

If there was any question Australians are enduring a more extreme, topsy-turvy climate, look only to the month just gone.
In early December, Cyclone Owen unloaded 678 millimetres of rain in one day on the tiny North Queensland town of Halifax. It was a new December daily rainfall record.


The Bureau of Meteorology gives a snapshot of the Australian climate including rainfall, temperature and significant weather events. 

By mid-December, a month's worth of rain fell in parts of Victoria in 24 hours. On December 20 it was Sydney’s turn when a monster thunderstorm dropped giant hail stones - some the size of cricket balls. The insurance bill is nearing $675 million.
Then, the sun came out. By month’s end, much of Australia was baking under torrid temperatures. Marble Bar in Western Australia reached 49.3 degrees - the third-highest December temperature recorded anywhere in the country.
The record-breaking events are outlined in the Bureau of Meteorology’s 2018 climate statement released on Thursday, which confirmed the nation experienced its third-warmest year on record in 2018. The bureau attributed the year of meteorological extremes to both climate change and natural variability.
The national mean temperature in 2018 was 1.14 degrees above average. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005.

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Australian mean temperature anomaly

Based on the average for 1961-90. Source: BOM

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The bureau’s senior climatologist Lynette Bettio said every state and territory experienced above-average day and night temperatures last year.
“The average maximum temperature for the country as a whole was particularly warm, sitting 1.55 degrees above the 1961–1990 average, making 2018 Australia's second warmest year on record for daily high temperatures,” Dr Bettio said.
Australia's September rainfall was the lowest on record. Nationally, rainfall in 2018 was the lowest since 2005 and 11 per cent below average, while rainfall in some areas was significantly further below normal.
“Large areas of southeastern Australia experienced rainfall totals in the lowest 10 per cent on record, which exacerbated the severe drought conditions,” Dr Bettio said.

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Australia's rainfall in 2018

Source: Bureau of Meteorology

“NSW had its sixth driest year on record, while the Murray-Darling Basin saw its seventh-driest year on record.
"We did see some respite in the final three months of the year with decent rainfall in the east of the country.”
In other significant weather events last year, Broome broke its annual rainfall record just two months into the year and Tropical Cyclone Marcus was the strongest to affect Darwin since Tracy in 1974.
In August and September, up to 100 bushfires were active across NSW, Queensland and Victoria when warm, dry conditions brought an early start to the bushfire season.

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Maximum temperatures 2018

Source: Bureau of Meteorology

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The bureau said Australia was strongly influenced by both natural variability and climate change in 2018. Natural drivers included sea surface temperatures in the southern Tasman Sea which rose to “exceptionally high levels” in late 2017 and early 2018, contributing to warm overland conditions.
The report said Australia's climate “is increasingly influenced by global warming” and the nation has warmed by just over one degree since 1910. Most warming has occurred since 1950.
“The background warming trend can only be explained by human influence on the global climate,” the bureau said.

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Mean temperatures 2018

Source: Bureau of Meteorology

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The Morrison government has been riven with internal tensions over climate change policy. Under the Paris climate accord, Australia has vowed to reduce greenhouse emissions, based on 2005 levels, by 26 per cent before 2030.
The government says Australia will meet that target "in a canter” however this claim has been contradicted by international bodies and the government’s own data.
Most recently, figures released by the Department of Environment and Energy last month showed that on current trends Australia will reduce emissions by just 7 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030, a massive 19 percentage points or two thirds of the way short of the Paris agreement.
A major report prepared by the United Nations body for climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in October said coal-generated electricity must be phased out globally by 2050 if the world is to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global warming, including the total destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.


Australia could use a little-known loophole to help meet up to half its Paris climate commitments in a move that analysts warn could undermine the global accord. 

It said radical, swift efforts must be taken to curb greenhouse gas pollution and keep the global temperature increase below the critical 1.5 degree threshold.

Links

• Bureau of Meteorology Annual Climate Statement 2018: Warmer than average temperatures and below-average rainfall
• Australia’s 2018 in weather: drought, heat and fire
• NSW experiences warmest year on record in 2018
• Warm, dry, record-breaking: Canberra's weather in 2018