23/10/2019

The Climate Is Apparently Not Getting 'Worse' Because Some Places, Like Canada, Will Benefit

ABC News - Jack Snape


Deputy secretary Evans says whether climate change is bad is "a judgement call". (ABC News)

Key points
  • A Department of Environment official was not prepared to say the climate is getting "worse"
  • She argued that changes will advantage some parts of the world
  • A report from Moody's earlier this year found that Canada may benefit under projected temperature rises
There will be winners and losers from climate change, and that means the climate is not getting "worse".
That's the view inside Australia's Department of Environment, which insists it provides "frank and fearless" advice to Federal Government ministers.
Jo Evans, deputy secretary of the department, told a Senate hearing on Monday that whether you used "worse" or "better" to describe climate trends depends on where you were on the globe.
"Some parts of the world — they will find some of those changes working to their advantage, some of them not so much," she said.
Last year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified the people and places at a higher risk from rising temperatures.
"Populations at disproportionately higher risk of adverse consequences with global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and beyond include disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, some indigenous peoples, and local communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods," the report warned.
"Regions at disproportionately higher risk include Arctic ecosystems, dryland regions, small island developing states, and least-developed countries."
Despite the sober outlook, some have identified other groups and regions that might benefit if global warming trends continue.

Adaptation providers
As the climate warms, extreme weather events are predicted to become more common.
A report from investment bank Morgan Stanley last year identified this as a possible commercial opportunity.
"Developing countries may offer investment opportunities in new construction and infrastructure projects that are built to hold up under extreme weather events," it stated.
"Investments can include companies that help refit existing buildings and reinforce energy infrastructure for more resilience."
Construction of sea walls was among the examples it listed.
The Center for Climate Integrity, based in the US, estimates it will take at least $42 billion to build sea walls to block storm surges for all threatened American coastal cities with more than 25,000 residents by 2040, according to The New York Times. Protecting all coastal communities would cost more than $400 billion.
Shackowners along the coast at Chinaman Wells on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula are building their own sea wall to protect their properties from storm surges. (Supplied: Doug Pritchard)
Arctic entrepreneurs
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressed the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Finland earlier this year, highlighting opportunities in the region.
"The Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance," he said.
"It houses 13 per cent of the world's undiscovered oil, 30 per cent of its undiscovered gas, an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources, fisheries galore."
Although sea level rises caused by melting ice caps threaten coastal communities around the world, less ice in the Arctic means more access.
"This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days," Mr Pompeo said.
"Arctic sea lanes could become the 21st century Suez and Panama canals."
Warmer temperatures could unlock the Arctic for shipping and mineral extraction. (Supplied: Amelie Meyer)
Baseball sluggers
Researchers from the University of Michigan suggested the changing climate around the Mediterranean might be reducing the quality of cork that makes baseballs.
The outcome? More home runs.

Defence and aid contractors
Although Australia's defence force is still developing a climate change strategy, it's wary of risks and warns that a changing security paradigm may stretch its capability.
The Defence Force expects Australia might be called on to conduct more humanitarian and disaster relief operations as a result of climate change.
International experts have noted it's difficult to attribute an individual conflict to climate change, but that the risk of climate-induced violence grows as temperatures increase.
"Think of climate change as 'loading the dice', making conflict more likely to occur in subtle ways across a host of different country contexts," two professors wrote recently in The Washington Post.
A freedom of information disclosure from the Department of Defence last year stated the increased potential for conflict could lead to "an increase in the demand for a wide spectrum of Defence and Government responses".
Private Daniel Bond and resident at Dillon's Bay in Vanuatu work together on building repairs after Cyclone Pam in 2015. (ABIS Tom Gibson)
Canada
Earlier this year, the analysis branch of ratings agency Moody's released a report about the economic implications of climate change.
It predicted higher temperature increases would mean more global damage, but also that they would impact nations differently.
Canada is set to perform the best of the world's large economies, with little projected change to GDP in 2048, even in a scenario modelled on high temperature increases.
This outcome was linked to the changing climate creating more arable land and longer seasons in the region.
Joe Oliver, former minister of finance in the Conservative government, wrote an opinion article in response asking why Canada should fight climate change.
"Our focus needs to be on adaptation, reduction and protection, as well as on building resilience and increasing survivability."
The projected hit to Australia's GDP, according to Moody's, is proportionally similar to that to be experienced in China.

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Climate Scientist: Our Profession Is Letting Down Humanity – We Must Change The Way We Approach The Climate Crisis

The Conversation - 

A scientist monitoring solar activity at the North Pole. Andrey Pavlov/Shutterstock
As a climate scientist of more than 25 years, I’m proud of the work my profession has done in recent decades to alert humanity to the unfolding climate crisis. But as the emergency becomes ever more acute, we scientists need to alter the way we approach it – or face being part of the problem.
Climate science has in large part been a remarkable success story. Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius accurately calculated how much a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would warm the planet as early as 1896.
The 1979 Charney report raised concerns about an impending climate crisis long before we could directly evidence it. In response, the scientific community stepped up its research efforts, and has been conducting regular scientific assessments to build a consensus view, and send a strong message to policy makers to spur them into action.
The problem is that 40 years of these efforts, however well-intentioned, have not had any impact on the carbon course of humanity. Since the middle of the 19th century, CO₂ emissions from human activities have been growing exponentially, on average by 1.65% per year since 1850.
The UN has to date been powerless to stop emissions rising. Wolgang Knorr
There were times when economic hardships temporarily stalled emissions, such as the oil price shocks of the early 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet block, and the 2008 financial crisis. But these had nothing to do with climate policy.
If we continue this exponential rise for just five more years, we will have already exhausted the carbon allowance that gives us a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C. That’s according to the IPCC, the UN body responsible for communicating the science of climate breakdown. Other scientists estimate that we have already missed the boat.

Hedged bets
Our painful sluggishness to act is not the fault of scientists. But the crisis is now more urgent than ever, and our current approach to it is starting to make us part of the problem.
Scientists are by nature conservative. This tendency is intimately linked to the way science operates: before a new theory is accepted it needs to be repeatedly scrutinised to make sure we are absolutely sure it holds up.
Usually, this is good practice. But it has caused climate scientists to consistently underestimate both the speed at which the climate is destabilising, and the severity of the threat it poses.
The IPCC is a chief culprit for this. It has the added difficulty of having to seek ratification from the world’s governments for its summary reports, and has been consistently singled out for underselling the impending crisis.
The scientists across the world that contribute to the body’s reports must heed its track record of mistaken conservatism, and adjust their approach going forward. Uncertainties are of course inherent in modelling how and when the climate will destabilise, but when the stakes are as high as they are, we must operate on the precautionary principle – the normal burden of proof on scientists should be reversed.

Acceptable risk
At the current level of 1.1℃ of global heating, climate change and ecological breakdown are already displacing and killing hundreds of thousands of humans, and sending other species towards extinction. Above 1.5℃ though, risks to humanity and ecosystems amplify greatly.
Yet the UN’s target for global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 only gives us about a one-in-two chance of limiting global heating to below this level. This target is based on one of multiple potential pathways laid out by IPCC scientists in a special report in 2018.
Above 1.5℃, millions more around the world will struggle for fresh water amid crop failure and deadly heatwaves. ffmr/Shutterstock

Professions such as doctors wouldn’t take such a punt on preserving life if better odds were available. Why is the same not true of climate scientists? We need to shift both our own and society’s ideas about what is an acceptable level of risk to offer government leaders, and therefore the living planet’s inhabitants.

Here and now
Even the above pathways to a half-chance of limiting heating to 1.5℃ rely on unproven technologies to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the second half of the century. They also fail to take into account the political landscape in which these models are being applied. Leaders are well aware that the three to four degrees warming we’re headed for may be beyond civilisation’s ability to adapt, and yet are still to make any serious headway in phasing out global fossil fuel subsidies that total at least USD$100 billion a year.
In the face of a genuine existential threat to our civilisation, we scientists need to shift our focus from long-term models that give a false sense of control over the climate crisis and paint drastic emissions cuts as easily achievable.
Instead, we should focus on vulnerability in the here and now. For example, our global food system is already vulnerable to extreme weather events. If drought strikes in several countries at the same time, there are no guarantees that our food supply chains – in which deliveries arrive “just-in-time” to minimise costs – will not experience collapses in the next decade or two.
Yet compared to the vast amount of research focused on the uncertain impacts of global heating on humanity by 2050 and 2100, we know worryingly little about just how fragile our supply chains – or other parts of our highly efficient clockwork global economy – are in the near-term. Refocusing resources on such dramatically under-researched short-term vulnerabilities is vital, not least because it will make the climate and ecological crisis feel more close to home than abstract carbon budgets and temperature rises.
Ultimately, the way the world responds to the impending crisis depends on the extent to which its citizens and leaders feel radical action is necessary. By reframing our research and changing accepted levels of risk and uncertainty, perhaps climate scientists can finally help humanity change its carbon course.

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There’s An Effective And Progressive Solution For Climate Change. Why Won’t Democrats Embrace It?

Washington Post - Editorial Board

Smoke belches from a coal-fired power station near Datong, in China's northern Shanxi province. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)
IN AN ideal world, our leaders would acknowledge the danger of climate change and seek the best way to combat it.
If they did, they would easily find an answer that is effective and progressive: The latest bulletin from the International Monetary Fund maps what it would take to restrain warming to tolerable levels without wasting massive amounts of money or unnecessarily harming workers, companies and households.
In our far-from-ideal world, President Trump can’t even acknowledge the problem, and the Democrats who call for immediate action seem to be running from the best solutions.
The IMF reiterates what economists have long understood: Enacting a carbon tax is “the single most powerful and efficient tool” because pricing mechanisms “make it costlier to emit greenhouse gases and allow businesses and individuals to choose how to conserve energy or switch to greener sources through a range of opportunities.”
Politicians should favor choice and flexibility over central planning. “People and firms will identify which changes in behavior reduce emissions — for example, purchasing a more efficient refrigerator versus an electric car — at the lowest cost.”
By contrast, “regulations might not leave sufficient flexibility for households and firms to find least-cost options.” Regulators might not foresee or support novel technologies, and intrusive rules “motivate firms to collude with officials to alter or evade the regulations.” They also provide weak incentives for companies to invest in a wide range of better technology, because only the state’s favored approaches to decarbonizing the economy would be rewarded.
For these reasons, regulatory and other alternative approaches cost society some 50 to 100 percent more than a carbon tax for the same environmental benefits.
The IMF found that the average global price is a paltry $2 per ton of carbon dioxide, while the world requires a $75-per-ton global carbon tax by 2030 to keep warming below the 2-degree Celsius threshold scientists advise. 
Electricity prices would rise 70 percent on average — though only 53 percent in the United States — and gasoline prices 5 percent to 15 percent in most places.
But that’s the picture before one considers what the money raised by a carbon tax could do.
If governments recycled the revenue back to low-income and vulnerable people, and cut economically inefficient taxes — such as income taxes — a $50-per-ton carbon tax would feel to the economy more like $20 per ton.
The plan would help low-income households and place a higher burden on the upper-income bracket. There could also be money for essential research and development to aid the energy transition.
So is this the plan that the Democratic presidential candidates have embraced? If only. Though former vice president Joe Biden and former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke have cautiously acknowledged the importance of carbon pricing, they are far more specific in their ideas for spending lots of money.
 Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) recently adopted a regulate-and-spend program. And Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would have the federal government establish its own utilities and build its own power-generation facilities, from scratch, according to, yes, a central plan.
The science does not change because politicians deny that humans are warming the planet. Likewise the economics do not change because politicians find them ideologically or politically inconvenient.

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22/10/2019

The Culprit Behind East Australia's Big Dry

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

When leading climate scientist Matthew England began work at a lab in Hobart in the mid-1980s, visitors were greeted by a huge graphic depicting a tight correlation between El Ninos and Australia's farm yields.
Any government minister would leave understanding that "we’ve got a tremendous amount of economic wealth" dependent on Pacific climate influences, making El Nino research "iconic", England says.
It turns out more attention should have been paid to the Indian Ocean.
Climate scientists and meteorologists increasingly pay attention to what's happening in the Indian Ocean to help predict rainfall in south-eastern Australia. Credit: Andrew Weldon
As we have seen this year, conditions that drive El Ninos - relative sea-surface temperature differences between the western and eastern Pacific - have been neutral. But the counterpart ratio in the Indian Ocean has gone haywire. Known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), the gauge last week hit record levels.


In its so-called positive phase, tropical waters off Australia's north-west are relatively cool  - compared with those near Africa - strengthening easterly winds and reducing the potential convection that typically supplies much of south-eastern Australia's critical winter and spring rains. A negative IOD has the opposite effect.
“They used to think the Indian Ocean was a slave to the Pacific," says Cai Wenju, a senior climate researcher at the CSIRO, adding this year's IOD figures are "gigantic".
“The biggest clue" that the Indian Ocean could influence Australia independently came in 2007 and 2008 when the Pacific was in its La Nina phase, which should have raised the odds for good rains, Dr Cai said. Instead, the Millenium Drought was still playing out, and there were positive-phase IODs three years in a row.
"Sometimes, the El-Nino Southern Oscillation has copped a bad rap when it should have been the IOD," Andrew Watkins, head of long-range forecasting at the Bureau of Meteorology, says.
Australian researchers from the 1980s had started examining how relative warm or cool waters off Western Australia could affect rainfall over the continent. However, it took two papers published in Nature in 1999 by Japanese and North American scientists - including Australian Peter Webster - to tease out the potential of an independent IOD.

Average Australian rainfall for the first nine months of the year has been the lowest since 1965, made worse by poor cool-season rains. Credit: Nick Moir
Scientists including England and Cai will gather in China next month to mark that 20th anniversary, with the IOD now a key component of Australia's and global weather and climate predictions.
Scientists caution that reliable observation data only goes back a couple of decades but it is clear this year's positive-IOD is already one of the strongest of record. So-called "reanalysis" using a combination of observations and modelling suggests the event is also notable over the past 150 years.

Nerilie Abram, an associate professor at the Australian National University, published work in 2009 that used coral cores among other data to push IOD estimates back to the mid-1800s. Research awaiting publication will look back 1000 years. While the current event is significant, her study suggests “perhaps the instrumental record doesn’t tell us the full range what’s actually possible in the Indian Ocean”.
The magnitude of an IOD appears to matter more for rainfall over south-eastern Australia than the El Nino-La Nina flux, the Bureau of Meteorology's Watkins said: "The stronger the IOD, the stronger the impacts ... for Australia, and maybe for Africa."
Another difference is that Indian Ocean conditions are more regulated by the seasonal cycle than the Pacific. Positive or negative IODs typically take form by May or June, peak around September and October, and break down in November to December as the monsoon shifts south, disrupting the easterly winds.
Poor winter and spring rains from positive IODs are not just bad for farmers. Those rains also supply much of the run-off that let our rivers run and fill the dams. Heatwaves are more severe and prolonged as soils dry out, removing the cooling function from evaporation, and setting up a busy bushfire season.
Australia's year-to-date daytime temperatures are already running at a record high, the bureau says. "It’s not a great precursor for the summer ahead when we’ve had a strong positive IOD," Abram says. “We’ve tended to have very severe summer bushfires particularly in the Victoria area."
While researchers are yet to settle on how much of a role climate change is already playing in big El Ninos or IODs, "we’re seeing extreme events become more common”, Abram says.
Dr Cai says that while the Indian Ocean is warming - along with others around the world - “the west is warming faster”. Under such conditions, "it’s easier to have an extreme positive IOD event", he said.
Bad bushfire seasons in Victoria and elsewhere in Australia's south-east have often coincided with positive IOD events, such as in 2009. Credit: AAP

Such a future would be bad news for farmers, and raise doubts about the effectiveness of policies proclaimed to be "drought-proofing".“We change the average climate by having these events more frequently or more strongly,"  Abram says. "It has an effect of changing our average rainfall.”
England says that while IODs can act independently of the Pacific, the connections remain important. For instance, the so-called Indonesian Throughflow - where warm water from the Pacific funnels its way to the Indian Ocean - could change.
"The predictions are for that to weaken," he says. "If it does, that would be a double whammy of more El Ninos plus more positive-IODs."
The potentially huge consequences from such complex interactions are a reminder that researchers can't rest.
"We are perturbing the atmosphere in a profound way with greenhouse gases," England says. "How this changes our modes of variability is uncertain.”

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You Can't Save The Climate By Going Vegan. Corporate Polluters Must Be Held Accountable.

USA Today - Michael E. Mann | Jonathan Brockopp

Many individual actions to slow climate change are worth taking. But they distract from the systemic changes that are needed to avert this crisis.

Climate protest in Bangkok on May 24, 2019. (Photo: Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images)
Authors
“People start pollution. People can stop it.” That was the tag line of the famous “Crying Indian” ad campaign that first aired on Earth Day in 1971. It was, as it turns out, a charade. Not only was “Iron Eyes Cody” actually an Italian-American actor, the campaign itself successfully shifted the burden of litter from corporations that produced packaging to consumers.
The problem, we were told, wasn’t pollution-generating corporate practices. It was you and me. And efforts to pass bottle bills, which would have shifted responsibility to producers for packaging waste, failed. Today, decades later, plastic pollution has so permeated our planet that it can now be found in the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench 36,000 feet below.
Here is another Crying Indian campaign going on today — with climate change. Personal actions, from going vegan to avoiding flying, are being touted as the primary solution to the crisis. Perhaps this is an act of desperation in an era of political division, but it could prove suicidal.
Though many of these actions are worth taking, and colleagues and friends of ours are focused on them in good faith, a fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold corporate polluters accountable. In fact, one recent study suggests that the emphasis on smaller personal actions can actually undermine support for the substantive climate policies needed.
This new obsession with personal action, though promoted by many with the best of intentions, plays into the hands of polluting interests by distracting us from the systemic changes that are needed.
There is no way to avert the climate crisis without keeping most of our coal, oil and gas in the ground, plain and simple. Because much of the carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries, our choices in the next few years are crucial, and they will determine the lives our grandchildren and their grandchildren. We need corporate action, not virtue signaling.
Massive changes to our national energy grid, a moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure and a carbon fee and dividend (that steeply ramps up) are just some examples of visionary policies that could make a difference. And right now, the "Green New Deal," support it or not, has encouraged a much needed, long overdue societal conversation about these and other options for averting climate catastrophe.
But we need more than the left wing of the Democratic Party on board. We need a national plan of action that will include everyone.
Consider the benefits. With five years of concentrated effort, we could have a supply of clean, renewable energy that is virtually inexhaustible. We could have many fewer deaths from mercury, particulates and ozone produced by burning dirty fossil fuels. And, we could set a shining example for the rest of the world of how the climate crisis can be solved both equitably and productively.

Don't change light bulbs, change energy system
Focusing on policies that incentivize corporate environmental stewardship will force us to work together and cross political, racial and religious lines. It will connect us to the rest of the world as we aim to solve a truly global problem. In contrast, a focus on personal action can divide us, with those living virtuously distancing themselves from those living “in sin.”
A national plan of action, in fact, is not a new idea. It was proposed by Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992 when he promised “an action plan on climate change.” If we had taken up his challenge over a quarter century ago, when carbon dioxide levels were about 350 parts per million, this would all be much easier. Now they are surpassing 415 ppm and rising quickly, and we are locking in ever more dangerous climate change impacts.
What decades of industry obstinance bought us is a trip down a much steeper carbon emissions ramp, so now we must turn from changing light bulbs to changing our entire energy system. There is still time to avert the worst impacts of climate change, but not without immediate, collective action.

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Why We're Rethinking The Images We Use For Our Climate Journalism

The Guardian - 

Guardian picture editor Fiona Shields explains why we are going to be using fewer polar bears and more people to illustrate our coverage of the climate emergency
A villager shouts for help as a wildfire approaches a house at Casas da Ribeira village in Macao, central Portugal on July 2019. Photograph: Patrícia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images
At the Guardian we want to ensure that the images we publish accurately and appropriately convey the climate crisis that we face. Following discussions among editors about how we could change the language we use in our coverage of environmental issues, our attention then turned to images. We have been working across the organisation to better understand how we aim to visually communicate the impact the climate emergency is having across the world.
Our goal is to provide guidelines for anyone working with images at the Guardian. We are also asking the agencies and photographers we work with to provide images that are appropriate to the changing narrative.
The concern over how best to depict the climate emergency led us to seek advice from the research organisation Climate Visuals, who have found that “images that define climate change shape the way it is understood and acted upon”.
A man and his child wear masks to protect them from heavy smog as they visit Waitan in December 2013 in Shanghai, China. Photograph: VCG/VCG via Getty Images
The industrial landscape across the Dee estuary at sunrise as steam rises from Deeside power station, Shotton Steelworks and other heavy industrial plants in April 2016 in Flintshire, Wales. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
It was important to address our own use of images and understand the processes that lead to image selection for our environmental and weather stories. When given a story, a picture editor or subeditor may have a short time to choose an image from our database, which is why the availability and prominence of climate crisis photography is a key element in the process. It can also be difficult for photographers to capture images that reflect global heating, weather patterns and wildlife extinction, especially when trying to depict what cannot always be seen.
We know, from years of experience, that people love polar bears and pandas, so it is easy to see how these appealing creatures have become the emblems for the topics of endangered species and what we previously termed as global warming. Often, when signalling environmental stories to our readers, selecting an image of a polar bear on melting ice has been the obvious – though not necessarily appropriate – choice. These images tell a certain story about the climate crisis but can seem remote and abstract – a problem that is not a human one, nor one that is particularly urgent.
So it made sense when we heard that research conducted by the team at Climate Visuals has shown that people respond to human pictures and stories. Images that show emotion and pictures of real situations make the story relevant to the individual. Rather than choosing, say, an image of a smoke stack pumping out pollution or a forest on fire, such as this:
A wildfire burns uphill in the Appalachian mountains. Photograph: aheflin/Getty Images/iStockphoto

… we should consider showing the direct impact of environmental issues on people’s daily lives as well as trying to indicate the scale of the impact, such as these:
A woman and child wear masks on a polluted day in Beijing in October 2014. Photograph: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images
World Environment Day, Dimapur, India, June 2019. Photograph: Caisii Mao/REX/Shutterstock

Gordon Easter and Gail Hale embrace as they return to what remains of their home on Hopper Lane in Coffey Park, in October 2017 in Santa Rosa, Northern California, after a wildfire. Photograph: Kent Porter/AP
More than 6m metric tonnes of lead slag form Black Mountain, a 30-meter pile of toxic lead waste that still contains a sizable quantity of lead, copper, manganese and zinc, in Kabwe, Zambia. Photograph: Larry C. Price
In the UK, the weather is a national preoccupation and as such a subject of tradition for British newspapers. People enjoying a sunny holiday weekend, or a fresh fall of snow at home or abroad can deliver some delightful and beautiful images:
Kids make the most of the drifting snow on the Cotswold hills, Worcestershire, December 2017. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
People enjoy the sunshine on Bournemouth beach during the late August bank holiday 2019. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA
 A woman plays with her dog in a park in Moscow, Russia, February 2019. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA 
But as we have reported, the science tells us a much more sinister story of regular heatwaves and unseasonal weather being a defining indicator of the climate crisis. So, although scenes of children playing in fountains and everyone racing to the beach can be uplifting and irresistible, we have to be mindful of the tone of our journalism. This summer, the British media published dramatic headlines issuing climate warnings and covered in detail the negative impact of the crisis, but the images were typically of people taking pleasure in the environment. The contradiction in messaging, between the headlines and imagery, can undermine the effect of the reporting and how we perceive the risks.
In June this year we published a picture gallery on the heatwave across Europe. In its original form, this was of a lighter tone, but we felt on reflection this was wrong and disregarded the current context, so we amended the publication to include images that covered a range of human experience of the extraordinary temperatures.
The photographer Brook Mitchell made an impactful series about the drought in Australia affecting families in New South Wales, which we published as a photo essay in July. The environmental scenes of the scorched landscape were striking, as were the suffering animals, but the portraits and stories of the people battling the catastrophe really anchored the piece and drove the level of engagement.
It is an example of how, as picture editors and photographers, we are having to think again about finding the right focus. Many of the impacts to communities, biodiversity, agriculture, water and food supply represent the escalating crisis our planet faces, yet visually they can be far more challenging to depict. We need new imagery for new narratives. This can be challenging in a fast-paced newsroom but it is important to be nuanced and creative with search terms to unearth photography beyond the usual keywords of climate change, heatwave and floods.
As our stories make a journey from their initial point of publication through the various networks of social media we also have to be mindful of how the image is connected to the headline. We have to consider that the two must work together to allow the reader to make a broad sense of the article often simply at a glance. Relatable images that are not overly abstract have become a good choice.
However, in its simplest form, getting the emotional tone of imagery in line with the issue is critical, rather than the visual overload of society universally having fun in the sun. We hope that if we keep having these conversations, we will be able to have even more of an impact with our climate coverage, and others will follow suit.
If you are a journalist, a photographer or work with other news organisations depicting the climate crisis, please contact membershipeditorial@guardian.co.uk to join our conversation.

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21/10/2019

Why 'Doomism' Is Part Of The Latest Frontier In The Climate Wars

Sydney Morning Herald - Deborah Snow

Once if you were a climate scientist the chief enemy was denial. Now, says Michael E. Mann, it’s more likely to be “doomism”: the idea that taking action to reduce the threat of runaway climate change is pointless because it’s already too late.
Doomism, argues the internationally renowned climate scientist, is part of the latest frontier in the climate wars - a new tool being exploited by those resisting change in the way the world does business.
It sits alongside what he calls “soft denialism” (climate change is happening but it's OK, we can adapt) and “deflection” (sowing division by making it all about individual lifestyle choices). Such tactics, he says, are in some ways “even more pernicious” than the old arguments flatly rejecting human-induced climate change.
An Extinction Rebellion protest calling for stronger action to reduce climate change. Credit: AAP
“The greatest threat I see to climate action is the paralysis that comes from disengagement, disillusionment, despair,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on a flying visit from the United States this week. “It would be one thing if we were really doomed … as a scientist it would be disingenuous of me to argue otherwise. But the science tells us we can still make the reductions in carbon emissions necessary to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Yes there is urgency, but we still have agency.”The daily news cycle has served up grim warnings this year: the intensity and scale of wildfires from the Amazon to the Arctic, prolonged drought, hurricanes and storms of ever greater impact, the retreat of glaciers, and evidence of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and destabilisation of the West Antarctic ice sheet, happening now decades earlier than the predictions made 10 to 15 years ago.
"Dangerous impacts from climate change are with us in real time": Climate scientist Michael E. Mann. Credit: Getty Image
“We don’t have to use our imaginations anymore,” Mann says. “Dangerous impacts from climate change are with us in real time.”
Mann, who is professor of atmospheric sciences at Pennsylvania State University, believes the world has 10 years in which to make the profound systemic changes and cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that might limit warming to around 1.5 degrees centigrade.
Left to business as usual the world will warm 4 to 5 degrees, leaving the generations who follow with a “fundamentally different planet” - one where sea-level rise will wreak havoc on coastal cities and communities, while climate extremes devastate terrestrial and marine environments. The impacts, he says, would be irreversible, even if a way could be found to “magically” cool the planet again.
Mann found himself thrust into the midst of the climate wars after publication of his now-famous “hockey stick” graph of 1999, which depicted a sharp rise in global temperature as CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increased. The graph featured heavily in an early report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), making Mann a prime target for attack by climate change deniers.
“Politics came to us – we didn’t come to politics,” he says of the scientific struggle of the past two decades. While in many ways he’d love a return to his old life of research and number-crunching, necessity has forced him to embrace the role of what he calls “scientist advocate”.
That’s the mission that brought him to a roomful of hard-headed finance types in Sydney this week, at a conference organised by the Investor Group on Climate Change.
That Mann should be invited to address such a meeting makes perfect sense to the IGCC’s chief executive, Emma Herd.
Financiers and investors are now becoming ever more alert to the risks posed by climate change, she says. The dollars are starting to follow, even without the policy leadership which business has looked for in vain from the federal government. Collectively the group’s 74 members, based in Australia and New Zealand, have more than two trillion dollars’ worth of assets under management and they want assurances from companies that those investments have a long-term future.
“What I’m increasingly seeing - and investors are a big part of the reason for this - is that the private sector in Australia recognises that climate change is going to cause major economic shifts and are trying to manage it,” she says.
“Government is still fighting the political fight. The private sector is getting on with it and doing the best they can. That doesn’t mean you are not going to get different views from different sectors … but what you are not seeing is fighting the need to do anything about it at all.”
She says the “energy and momentum” at this week’s meeting was “palpable … It really feels like in the last 12 to 18 months investors are stepping up their engagement with companies and pushing companies to have a much better response”.
Icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland. Scientists are trying to understand the alarmingly rapid melting of the ice. Credit: AP
Geoffrey Summerhayes, an executive board member of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum, also sees investors becoming increasingly focused on climate change risk. “As I heard someone say recently, you can’t do business on a dead planet. These organisations understand the link between environmental sustainability and economic sustainability.”
“What is underway is a transition to a low-carbon future. That direction is irreversible and the smart money has worked that out and can see globally the trillions of dollars of infrastructure required to transition the world over the decades to come.”
The shift in the energy system is already playing out much faster than many predicted, Summerhayes adds. “The world went from no smart phones to saturation in 10 years. The economics will drive the shift to renewables in a similar way.”
As I heard someone say recently, you can’t do business on a dead planet.
Geoffrey Summerhayes, chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum
London-based Georg Kell, chair of influential Anglo-German asset management firm Arabesque Partners, was another panellist at the conference who, like Summerhayes, flags technological change as a key driver of change.
But he also takes heart from the growing impact of the case for intergenerational fairness, now being made more powerfully than ever by young activists like Sweden’s Greta Thunberg. (Mann joked this week that OPEC had zeroed in on her like the malevolent “Eye of Sauron” in fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings).
“We have to ask ourselves, honestly, when we pass away, are our children in a position to enjoy the world as we have done?” Kell says. “Will they be able to go camping, scuba diving, will they have the same beauties, or will they live in a different world that will be far more confronting?”
Climate change, he says, is not about “red, or blue, or green” politics. “In Europe, new alliances are coming into being … CEOs of leading companies are now teaming up with green parties, unheard of years ago, teaming up to win over mainstream parties and help re-shape the political landscape.”
Any business leader that played the denial card was guilty of “stupidity at best, and gross negligence, I would argue, almost criminal behaviour, at worst,” he says. “The evidence has been compelling for years already.”
A striking theme at the investor conference was frustration over the inability of Australia’s political parties to resolve the climate wars after a decade of bickering and stalemate. Government actions were seen as piecemeal and sometimes a direct obstacle to private sector investment. “If electric vehicles had been cast as a cost-of-living issue we would have them by now … instead it was cast as a climate-change initiative so it became a political football,” one speaker pointed out.
The Australian Industry Group’s Innes Willox complained that the energy wars had become “Australia’s Brexit”.
“Industry finds it increasingly difficult to make reasoned, calculated investment in the energy space … so it is going its own way,” he told the conference. Others worried that various state governments – including NSW and Victoria – have declared goals of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but with no clarity for business about how to get there.
(The Morrison government’s insistence that it is on track to meet its modest Kyoto and Paris carbon emission reduction targets were dealt a blow by the International Monetary Fund earlier this month, which said Australia on current trajectories would fail to meet those targets even with a steep carbon tax).
Tony Maher of the CFMEU, representing mine workers, appealed to investors to prioritise the social and political dimensions of tackling climate change as well as the financial risks. “So far Germany is the only country that can say there has been a just transition [out of coal],” he told the conference. “Workers always get screwed, communities get broken … we have to prove to them that [that won’t happen].”
Mann warned his business audience this week that there are uncertainties in the climate modelling but that was not a reason for inaction. “If anything, it's the opposite ... things are happening faster and with greater magnitude than we predicted a decade or so ago. There are things missing from the models that are causing them in some sense to be overly conservative.”
One example is the massive undulations in the northern hemisphere jet stream that locked in both extreme low- and extreme high-pressure weather systems in different parts of the US this year. That, he said, was “not captured in the modelling”.
Mann, who will take up a visiting professorship at the University of New South Wales in 2020, insists the world doesn’t need “a miracle” to avert the most devastating climate change scenarios. “We have the solution in our hands. We simply need to find the political will to provide the incentives necessary to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”
Not all sections of the business community are alive to the need for urgent action, but building alliances with those that are is, he says, “a huge opportunity”.
“It’s one thing when environmental groups are leading the communication effort. But when you have the business community, the finance community, the insurance and reinsurance communities talking about climate change as an existential threat, it potentially … really broadens the constituency for climate action.”

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