(UK) 'The Human Fingerprint Is Everywhere': Met Office's Alarming Warning On Climate

The Guardian - Jonathan Watts

Exclusively compiled data from the Hadley Centre’s supercomputer shows alarming climate trajectory

Scientists at the Hadley Centre, which has been on the global frontline of climate monitoring, research and modelling since 1990, say their early theories have been proven by facts. Photograph: Hadley Centre

The human fingerprint on the climate is now unmistakable and will become increasingly evident over the coming decades, the UK Met Office has confirmed after 30 years of pioneering study.

Since the 1990s, global temperatures have warmed by half a degree, Arctic sea ice has shrunk by almost 2 million km2, sea-levels have risen by about 10cm and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 60 parts per million (17%), according to figures exclusively compiled for the Guardian to mark the 30th anniversary of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for climate science and services.

The data highlights how a young generation has grown up in a climate unprecedented in a millennium. Future projections suggest that by mid-century a 60-year-old Briton is likely to be living in a climate 1.2C warmer than when they were born.

Scientists at the Hadley Centre, which has been on the global frontline of climate monitoring, research and modelling since it opened in 1990, said early theories about fossil-fuel disruption have been proven by subsequent facts.

“The climate now is completely different from what we had 30 years ago. It is completely outside the bounds of possibility in natural variation,” said Peter Stott, a professor and expert on climate attribution science at the centre.

Margaret Thatcher, with Sir John Houghton, opening the Hadley Centre. She said the UK needed a world-leading climate centre to assess the “serious consequences” of greenhouse gas emissions. Photograph: Hadley Centre

In the Hadley Centre’s early projections, he said, scientists forecast 0.5C of warming in the UK between 1990 and 2020 as a result of emissions from oil, gas and coal: “We got it spot on.”

With new heat records being broken with increasing frequency, he said global temperatures were now above any level in the Met Office measurements since 1850, or indirectly calculated through tree rings going back thousands of years.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are also higher than anything seen in million-year-old ice cores.

“We are seeing an unprecedented climate,” Stott said. “The human fingerprint is everywhere.”

The impact was less obvious in 1990, when the centre opened in conjunction with the publication of the first report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - both were overseen by the UK scientist John Houghton, who died earlier this year.

Change in September Arctic sea ice extent
Million sq km, relative to the 1981-2010 average

Guardian graphic. Source: Met Office 2020. Observed figure for 2019 not yet available. Full source notes are included at the end of the article.

At the inauguration, the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, said the UK needed a world-leading climate centre to assess the “serious consequences” of greenhouse gas emissions. “What it predicts will affect our daily lives. Governments and international organisations in every part of the world are going to have to sit up and take notice and respond,” she said.

Thatcher, who studied science at Oxford, needed little convincing, but she had to overcome a sceptical cabinet. Atmospheric physicists had been warning oil companies and policymakers about the dangers of fossil fuels for decades, but the “greenhouse effect” was still a relatively novel concern for the broader public. Nobody felt a change. The world had already warmed by about half a degree from pre-industrial levels, but this was low enough to be within natural variation.

Few people knew the difference between short-term “weather” and the “climate”, which is usually measured over a much longer period of 30 years.

Back then, there was also considerable scepticism about the ability of meteorologists to forecast change, even on a daily basis. Memories were fresh of the BBC weatherman Michael Fish infamously reassuring viewers that fears of a hurricane were unfounded, just hours before the fiercest storm in generations hit the UK.

Change in global annual mean sea level
Centimetres difference, compared with 1981-2000 average

Guardian graphic. Source: Met Office 2020. Full source notes are included at the end of the article.

“It was unglamorous” recalls James Murphy, a science fellow who was posted to the Hadley Centre from the beginning. “But the mood in the first decade was one of great excitement, because it was a chance to do a lot of pioneering research in a growing field.”

As acceptance and importance grew, so did scepticism. Critics, often funded by oil firms, pushed back against climate science because they did not like its political and economic implications. Ahead of the climate summits in Kyoto (1997) and Copenhagen (2009), fossil fuel companies funded misinformation campaigns to cast doubt on climate models.

The Hadley Centre remained focused on science. Researchers expanded and refined their models by incorporating new knowledge on biological carbon cycles and the likely impact of fossil fuels not only on temperature, but on Arctic ice, sea-level rise, flooding, storms, droughts and other atmospheric phenomena.

Supercomputer advances enabled much greater precision. Early models mapped the impact on grid cells of 300km on each side. Today that is down to 2.2km, which allows detailed predictions of which stretches of river basins and coastlines will need the most protection.

Researchers are discovering the impacts go far beyond the initial focus on average temperature. Heat records are being set with increasing frequency. Rainfall patterns are noticeably shifting beyond natural variation. Arctic ice is shrinking faster than expected. The rising seas have already left some places, such as Fairbourne in Wales, below spring-tide levels.

Global average temperature change
Celsius change, compared with pre-industrial conditions

Guardian graphic. Source: Met Office 2020. Full source notes are included at the end of the article.

By 2050 – the year the UK plans to achieve carbon neutrality – the direct impact on Britain will be moderated by the surrounding ocean and there may be opportunities to plant new crops, but these benefits will be dwarfed by trade disruption, migration, humanitarian disasters and shifting ecosystems.

“Overall it’s bad. The negatives outweigh the positives,” said Richard Betts, a Met Office scientist who is leading scientific analysis for the next UK climate change risk assessment. “It stands to reason that if the world keeps gets hotter and hotter, sooner or later we’ll reach the point where it is first uncomfortable and then hard to function. This won’t be seen in the UK, but in parts of the world that are already hot and humid it could increasingly get too hot to function.”

The Hadley supercomputer calculates myriad possible pathways depending on how much carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere. The good news is that the worst-emissions scenario, known as RCP 8.5, is considered less likely than before because the global coal industry has not grown as feared. The bad news is current emissions trends (which lie between the RCP 4.5 and RCP 6 pathways) could take the planet to 2C warmer than pre-industrial levels by mid-century, which will increase storm damage, heatwaves, sea-level rise and the already great risk that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer.

The climate trends are based on multiple-year averages rather than year-on-year comparisons, which are more subject to natural variation.

Even the current best-case scenario – RCP 2.6, which is roughly in line with the Paris agreement – would leave the world hotter than today.

“What stands out is that even in the lowest current scenario, we get warming. We’ll need to prepare and adapt,” says Jason Lowe, the head of climate services at Hadley. He predicts extreme summer heatwaves, such as those seen in 2018, will become the norm rather than an exception.

Changes in UK temperature
Celsius, based on annual average temperature

Guardian graphic. Source: Met Office 2020. *2019 figure for observed temperature is provisional. Full source notes are included at the end of the article.

“As a scientist, I want to narrow the uncertainty so the information is as good as possible so we can plan. I think of the generations to come. I have a nine-year-old daughter. I find myself wondering which of these pathways we will be on when she is 80 or 90.”

More extreme results are possible at both ends of the spectrum. The next set of climate assessments will introduce a more ambitious best-case scenario (RCP 1.9) that would mean a faster transition to zero-carbon energy and a greater chance of holding temperature rises below 1.5C. But the situation could worsen rapidly if the climate hits tipping points, such as the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet.

“There are still dangers out there that we don’t fully understand,” said Stott. “Much of the uncertainty lies on the bad side. It could be terrifying. Can we grow enough crops to feed the population? Can we cope if some places are battered by storm after storm?”

Such concerns explain why the anniversary cannot be entirely triumphant. Despite growing evidence of climate risks, governments have been slow to act. Apart from downward blips such as the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus lockdown, emissions have steadily increased. The Hadley Centre’s work now is not only about predicting impacts, but preparing for them.

“Reality has proven that what we were saying 20 to 30 years ago was right. As scientists, that is vindication. But on a personal level, I hoped we would track a different emissions trajectory from where we are now,” Stott said.

“The worry is that we are now taking risks globally that we don’t fully understand ... there will be no winners of climate change if we continue. Scientific evidence has been around for a while. It is time it was taken seriously.”

Data source notes

1. Observed September Arctic sea ice extent from HadISST.2.2.0.0 (selected as single source from Met Office climate dashboard.) Emission scenarios are the mean averages for climate scenarios SSP1-2.6 (low), SSP2-4.5 (medium-low) and SSP5-8.5 (high).
2. Observed changes in global mean sea level (GMSL) in metres from Nasa satellite data relative to 1981-2000 average. Emissions scenarios are 50th percentile projections from UKCP18 estimates, RCP2.6 (low), RCP4.5 (medium-low), and RCP8.5 (high).
3. Observed annual global temperature data from HadCRUT4. Emissions scenarios as above.
4. Annual temperature for the UK based on HadUK-Grid observations. Emissions scenarios as above.
5. All hindcast data omitted.

Links

• Markets not paying attention to climate crisis, IMF says
• Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow likely to be delayed by a year
• Climate change is turning parts of Antarctica green, say scientists
• Dust bowl conditions of 1930s US now more than twice as likely to reoccur
• World cannot return to 'business as usual' after Covid-19, say mayors
• One billion people will live in insufferable heat within 50 years – study
• 'The parallels between coronavirus and climate crisis are obvious'
• UN chief: don't use taxpayer money to save polluting industries

(AU) Finally There Is Real Movement On Australia's Climate Policy But Time Isn’t On Our Side

The Guardian - Anna Skarbek

If speed weren’t a factor, we could rely on the market to incentivise green technology at its own pace – but the clock is ticking

‘Both the response to the King review and the new technology investment roadmap discussion paper provide a better basis for accelerating action than Australia has had for some years.’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Anna Skarbek is the chief executive of ClimateWorks Australia, an independent not-for-profit organisation working within the Monash Sustainable Development Institute.

“It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.”

The maxim attributed to Deng Xiaoping comes to mind in relation to the federal government’s technology investment roadmap discussion paper and its response to the King review.

If we look beyond the headlines, both interventions provide some reason for optimism.

As Frank Jotzo notes, the discussion paper acknowledges that Australia’s future lies with low-carbon energy, industry and transport. That’s a step forward – and it should be acknowledged as such.

Some have complained that, by surveying 140 technologies, the paper takes too broad a view.

Actually, the acknowledgement of a wide array of technologies for carbon abatement methods constitutes positive progress given Australia’s climate policy history.

In a report entitled Decarbonisation Futures, ClimateWorks modelled multiple pathways by which Australia might reach net zero emission by the year 2050, in accordance with the Paris climate agreement goal.

Those models show that decarbonisation won’t be the result of a single technology, but rather that different solutions (from renewable power to sustainable transport to new forms of energy efficiency) will play important roles in particular economic sectors.

Fortunately, the priority technologies identified in Decarbonisation Futures all feature in the roadmap discussion paper.

Much commentary has focused on the government allowing the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to support loans for carbon capture and storage.

We have entered a crucial decade in the race against climate change

In the past, that technology was associated with proposals to extend the life of coal-fired power stations. With renewables becoming far cheaper, far more quickly than expected, we now know that CCS is not competitive in the electricity supply.

But that doesn’t mean that it can’t play a role elsewhere.

The Decarbonisation Future modelling identifies CCS as necessary, not in power generation, but in harder-to-abate sectors like heavy industry, where it can help capture non-energy emissions such as fugitive methane from gas extraction and process emissions from cement. That’s a position accepted by both the International Energy Agency and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If speed weren’t a factor, we could probably rely on the market to incentivise the uptake of green technology at its own pace. Battery costs per kilowatt hour are now 80% less expensive than in 2010; new renewables generate power more cheaply than fossil fuels, and this year the US will probably produce more electricity from renewable power than from coal for the first time.

But time isn’t on our side. We have entered a crucial decade in the race against climate change, with the UN and scientists declaring that emissions must halve in the next 10 years, and halve again in the 10 after.

That’s why the actions arising from the roadmap need to accelerate the deployment of abatement technologies, stimulating the market so widespread deployment occurs, which both brings down emissions and brings down cost.

In an interview with the ABC’s AM program, Angus Taylor, the energy and emissions reduction minister, explained that the government would “love to achieve net zero by 2050”, before adding that the target will “depend on the pathways of technologies to deliver … without damaging the economy”.

In fact, it’s precisely by setting targets that we can ensure decarbonisation and robust economic growth go hand in hand.

Research by ClimateWorks shows that incentives to use technologies matter as much as initial investment in their development, with deployment spurring improvements in price and performance.

Those incentives can take many different policy forms. Investments of the kind discussed in the government’s technology roadmap paper can foster development and commercialisation of zero-emissions emerging solutions like renewable hydrogen and green steel for harder-to-abate sectors such as heavy industry, agriculture and land.

At the same time, commitments in government procurement might, for instance, scale up the deployment of emerging technologies, as might the establishment of industry standards in particular sectors.

By setting targets immediately, decision makers (in business as well as in government), can support technology development, demonstration and deployment, and capitalise on opportunities for investment.

Innes Willox of the Ai Group is right when he says, in his responses to the King review and to the technology investment roadmap, that we still need “a clear long-term vision and strategy”.

Yet behind the government’s careful rhetoric, we can see the first substantive movement on climate policy for some time.

The recommendations accepted by Taylor aim, for instance, to give industry greater incentive to embrace new climate solutions as they emerge, something demonstrably necessary for decarbonisation to proceed on track.

Willox cautions – correctly, I believe – that the government must back its vision with “adequate funding”. But if that funding materialises, along with clear signals of longer term demand for the technologies, it could spur the kind of response that rapidly drives down costs of emissions-saving technology.

In that respect, both the response to the King review and the new technology investment roadmap discussion paper provide a better basis for accelerating action than Australia has had for some years.

With the climate clock ticking, now the focus must be on the accelerant that is applied to these foundations. We can’t afford to debate the colour of the climate cat.

It’s way past time to catch some mice.

Links

• Rapid shift to renewable energy could lead Australia to cheap power and 100,000 jobs
• Angus Taylor's 'tech, not taxes' approach is likely to create more problems than it solves
• Climate change poses a clear financial risk to Australia
• Australia's Technology Investment Roadmap: discussion paper
• The curious case of Taylor's technology road map
• Decarbonisation Futures: Solutions, actions and benchmarks for a net zero emissions Australia
• EU's greenhouse gas emissions continue to fall as coal ditched
• Could a voluntary emissions trading scheme could be on the cards?
• Climate review tools can help strategy, with resources
• Tech towards net zero competitiveness comes into sharper focus

(AU) Climate Disclosure 'Box Ticking' Could Trigger Director Lawsuits: KPMG

AFR - Michael Roddan

There is a "real danger" company directors are exposing themselves to litigation by taking a "box ticking" approach to disclosing climate change-related financial risks in annual reports, KPMG warns.

KPMG global head of sustainability Adrian King and Australian head of audit Eileen Hoggett, in a world-first guide to be released on Monday, said climate-related disclosures were often "siloed" in a front-loaded section of the annual report, rather than incorporated throughout financial documents relied on by shareholders and investors.

Drought-stricken countryside in western NSW ... companies have been warned to properly disclose climate-related financial risks.  Janie Barrett

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission earlier this year told parliament it would target companies providing "minimal disclosure" to the market about climate risks, and has urged business to adopt disclosures based on recommendations set by the G20 financial stability board's taskforce on climate-related financial disclosures (TCFD).

"There is real danger that climate-related risks and their impact on performance and prospects are under-disclosed in annual reports," write Mr King and Ms Hoggett in their report, which seeks to provide guidance to firms on how to fulfil expectations set by regulators on the evolving issue.

KPMG said disclosures outlining the risks faced by investors due to a changing climate, financial risks caused by a warming planet, or by regulations to cap emissions, or legal, social and reputational risks, were often being lumped into a separate "sustainability report".

Also, they were not connected to financial statement disclosures and were not consistent with disclosures being made in other company documents.

"While this may allow companies to feel they have 'ticked the climate box', this is not the approach which regulators, investors and other key stakeholders wish to see. It is not considered good practice," the report said.

"Climate risk impacts on governance, business model, strategy, risk management and performance and prospects should be made in the annual report – if material, and not hidden away in a separate sustainability report.

"Disclosure cannot be approached as a box-ticking exercise."

In rating agency sights

KPMG said companies should disclose the assumptions behind estimations of potential exposure to climate risks where there was significant uncertainty on the effects of climate change, and warned that rating agencies were also likely to probe businesses for information on climate exposure.

Last week, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority told a senate committee it would delay the introduction of new climate-focused stress tests on the local banking sector because of the coronavirus pandemic.

However, prudential regulators, global central banks and securities regulators are increasingly incorporating climate-related risks and disclosures into their regulatory toolbox.

A landmark legal opinion published by barristers Noel Hutley, SC, and Sebastian Hartford Davis, which argued boards that failed to consider climate-change risks could be found liable for breaching their duty of care and diligence, has been endorsed by Australia's financial regulators and royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne.

Recent research from investment bank Citi found Australian corporations were producing lengthy sustainability reports that had no influence on company decision-making as business chiefs were continuing to buy emissions-intensive assets ­despite flagging emissions as key business risks.

Citi analyst Zoe Whitton found more than 3000 major global companies had started to disclose climate-related risks, meaning two-thirds of companies were giving investors guidance on how climate change or the transition to a low-emissions economy could affect operations.

However, only one-third of current market disclosures were "quality".

Mr King said climate change had taken a back seat to short-term financial survival during the pandemic, but investors were still hungry for information on climate risk.

"There's no doubt regulators are coming, but regulators usually set the minimum standards to pick up the laggards," Mr King said.

"There's a real opportunity to demonstrate that you fully understand this topic, communicating the response and demystifying this topic. All anyone wants to know is do you understand the risk and how are you going to respond to it."

Links

• QBE accused of 'crocodile tears' on climate change
• Norway's oil fund drops AGL over coal
• RBA warns climate risks may become uninsurable
• The shadow carbon price companies are already paying
• Hayne rebukes directors on climate risk failure
• Big Oil Loses Bid To Move California Climate Court Fight
• (AU) Australia’s ‘Failing’ Environmental Laws Will Fuel Further Public Health Crises, Nobel Laureate Warns
• (AU) Youth Activists Challenge Clive Palmer's Waratah Coal Mine Saying It Impacts Their Human Rights
• Climate Change Has Created 'Altered World' For Young People, Lawyers Say In Child Climate Case
• Dutch Officials Reveal Measures To Cut Emissions After Court Ruling
• (AU) 'Kick Them Into Action': Fire Group Takes EPA To Court Over Climate
• Why Public Health Experts Support These Youth Suing The Us Government Over Climate Change
• How You Can Take Your Government To Court For Not Acting On The Climate Crisis
• (AU) Can Legal Action Force Governments And Businesses To Respond To Climate Change?
• Climate Change Litigation Update

(AU) Land Projected To Be Below Annual Flood Level In 2050

Climate Central

Coastal Risk Screening Tool

Click here for land in Australia projected to be below annual flood level in 2050

Improved elevation data indicate far greater global threats from sea level rise
and coastal flooding than previously thought, and thus greater benefits from reducing their causes.

FLOODED FUTURE

Global vulnerability to sea level rise worse than previously understood (pdf)

Full Report (pdf)

SUMMARY As a result of heat-trapping pollution from human activities, rising sea levels could within three decades push chronic floods higher than land currently home to 300 million people By 2100, areas now home to 200 million people could fall permanently below the high tide line The new figures are the result of an improved global elevation dataset produced by Climate Central using machine learning, and revealing that coastal elevations are significantly lower than previously understood across wide areas The threat is concentrated in coastal Asia and could have profound economic and political consequences within the lifetimes of people alive today Findings are documented in a new peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature Communications

Sea level rise is one of the best known of climate change’s many dangers.

As humanity pollutes the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the planet warms. And as it does so, ice sheets and glaciers melt and warming sea water expands, increasing the volume of the world’s oceans.

The consequences range from near-term increases in coastal flooding that can damage infrastructure and crops to the permanent displacement of coastal communities.

Over the course of the twenty-first century, global sea levels are projected to rise between about 2 and 7 feet, and possibly more.

The key variables will be how much warming pollution humanity dumps into the atmosphere and how quickly the land-based ice sheets in Greenland and especially Antarctica destabilize.

Projecting where and when that rise could translate into increased flooding and permanent inundation is profoundly important for coastal planning and for reckoning the costs of humanity’s emissions.

Projecting flood risk involves not only estimating future sea level rise but also comparing it against land elevations.

However, sufficiently accurate elevation data are either unavailable or inaccessible to the public, or prohibitively expensive in most of the world outside the United States, Australia, and parts of Europe.

This clouds understanding of where and when sea level rise could affect coastal communities in the most vulnerable parts of the world.A new digital elevation model produced by Climate Central helps fill the gap.

That model, CoastalDEM, shows that many of the world’s coastlines are far lower than has been generally known and that sea level rise could affect hundreds of millions of more people in the coming decades than previously understood.

Based on sea level projections for 2050, land currently home to 300 million people will fall below the elevation of an average annual coastal flood. By 2100, land now home to 200 million people could sit permanently below the high tide line.

Adaptive measures such as construction of levees and other defenses or relocation to higher ground could lessen these threats.

In fact, based on CoastalDEM, roughly 110 million people currently live on land below high tide line. This population is almost certainly protected to some degree by existing coastal defenses, which may or may not be adequate for future sea levels.

Links

• Climate Central
• Surging Seas: Sea level rise analysis by Climate Central
• Flooded Future: Global vulnerability to sea level rise worse than previously understood
• New report triples estimates of vulnerability to sea level rise
• New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding
• Better elevation data for better flood risk assessment
• Doomsday: By 2300, Global Sea Levels Could Rise by An Astounding 16 Feet
• (AU) Erosion From Surging Seas Threatens Roads, Homes And Beaches
• Climate Crisis: Sea Level ‘On Course To Rise By One Metre By 2100’ If Global Emissions Targets Are Missed
• Satellites Show Melting Ice Sheets In Antarctica And Greenland Have Contributed To 14 mm Sea Level Rise In 16 Years’
• A Life Too Often Lived Underwater’: How Tidal Flooding Is Wreaking Havoc In Bangladesh
• (US) Climate Change Turns The Tide On Waterfront Living
• Greenland's Melting Ice Raised Global Sea Level By 2.2mm In Two Months

BBC Science & Environment - Roger Harrabin

Switching to a vegan diet can help but doesn't quite have the impact of other measures. Getty Images

Climate change can still be tackled – but only if people are willing to embrace major shifts in the way we live, a report says.

The authors have put together a list of the best ways for people to reduce their carbon footprints.

The response to the Covid-19 crisis has shown that the public is willing to accept radical change if they consider it necessary, they explain.

And the report adds that government priorities must be re-ordered.

Protecting the planet must become the first duty of all decision-makers, the researchers argue.

The authors urge the public to contribute by adopting the carbon-cutting measures in the report, which is based on an analysis of 7,000 other studies.



Top of the list is living car-free, which saves an average of 2.04 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person annually.

This is followed by driving a battery electric car - 1.95 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person annually - and taking one less long-haul flight each year - 1.68 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person.

Switching to a vegan diet will help - but less than tackling transport, the research shows.

It says popular activities such as recycling are worthwhile, but don’t cut emissions by as much.

Change of mindset

The lead author, Dr Diana Ivanova from Leeds University, told BBC News: “We need a complete change of mindset.

“We have to agree how much carbon we can each emit within the limits of what the planet can bear – then make good lives within those boundaries.

“The top 10 options are available to us now, without the need for controversial and expensive new technologies.”

Dr Ivanova said the coronavirus lockdown has shown that many people could live without cars if public transport, walking and cycling were improved.

Her research highlights rich people who typically take more flights, drive bigger cars and consume the most.

A 'moral issue'

She said: “All the world suffers from climate change, but it’s not the average person who flies regularly – it’s a small group, yet aviation is under-taxed. It’s a moral issue.”

• What is climate change?
• Climate-related words and phrases explained
• How much warmer is your city?
• What is your diet's carbon footprint?
• Where we are in seven charts

In her league table, buying renewable power and using public transport rank fourth and fifth.

Sixth is insulating your home well, which saves 0.895 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Seventh is switching to a vegan diet, which saves 0.8 tonnes.

Effectively insulating your home is an important step. PA Media

Other top actions are using heat pumps; switching from polluting cookstoves (in developing countries) to better methods of cooking, and heating buildings with renewable energy.

Dr Ivanova said that if people implemented the measures, it would save around nine tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per person per year.

Current annual household emissions are around 10 tonnes in the UK, and 17 in the US.

'Valuable' study

The study, out soon in the journal Environmental Research Letters, says the following are worthwhile, but of lesser benefit to the climate: green roofs; using less paper; buying more durable items; turning down the thermostat - and recycling, which saves 0.01 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, according to Dr Ivanova.

Outside of lockdown, taking fewer flights can make a major contribution to cutting carbon. Reuters

Some of the findings will be questioned. Polls suggest some people think climate is as important as the virus, for instance, but some don’t.

Professor Tommy Wiedmann from the University of New South Wales in Australia, said: “This is a valuable study. But it only looks at the carbon footprint and not at other impacts like water scarcity because of lithium mining for electric car batteries.

Libby Peake, from the Green Alliance think tank, told BBC News: “People shouldn’t stop good habits like recycling, which saves some carbon while preventing waste and conserving resources.”

“Better design allows people to buy fewer but higher-quality things and to live in buildings with lower carbon footprints. These savings aren’t necessarily covered by this study.”

Links

• 12 Climate Actions To Make An Impact
• 10 Things You Can Do About Climate Change, According To The Shepherds Of The Paris Agreement
• Quiet Australians Decide It Is Time To Speak Up On Climate Change Action
• (AU) How Is Australia Tackling Climate Change?
• IPCC Climate Change Report Calls For Urgent Overhaul Of Food Production, Land Management
• The Next Step In Fighting Climate Change
• Can coronavirus crisis spur a green recovery?
• Download the updated BBC Energy Briefing (pdf 10.4MB)
• Coronavirus: Five charts about the biggest carbon crash
• Climate change food calculator: What's your diet's carbon footprint?

India Is Facing A Locust Invasion Directly Related To Climate Change

One Green Planet - Eliza Erskine

Image Source : Jen Watson/ Shutterstock.com

India is being swarmed with locusts, according to the Indian Express. Jaipur is experiencing a locust invasion that’s eating crops.

Farmers told news outlets that the invasion is the worst one they’ve seen.

Images and videos show hoards of insects on multiple surfaces. In Jaipur, locusts have not been seen since 1993.

While swarms have been spotted in Rajasthan in the past twenty years, the insects have spread to other parts of the country, including Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

Locusts have amazing appetites and a single swarm in a square kilometer can eat as much as 35,000 people. As India already deals with the effects of COVID-19 and subsequent lockdowns, this is another problem for the country.

Akhilesh Litoria owns a farm in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh.

He told The Wire about the swarms, “It looked like someone had placed a huge white sheet on top of the entire field. They finished the entire crop in the area. We had planted moong and they ate all of it. They did not even spare leaves on trees. Some of them sat on trees and ate all the leaves.”

Climate scientists say that warm waters due to heavy rainfall made the areas susceptible to the swarms.

Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told The Wire in an email, ” Heavy rain triggers the growth of vegetation in arid areas where desert locusts can then grow and breed. These locusts which migrated to India early this year might have found greener pastures as the pre-monsoon rains during March-May were in excess over north India this year.”

#ALERT Swarm Of Locust (Desert Locust) Reached Panna Tiger Reserve,MP. From Twitter Feed of @ParveenKaswan #LocustAttack #locust https://t.co/vpNid2xUDV

— Rudro Singha Ray (@rudrosray) May 26, 2020

After 28 years, Jaipur suffers major locust attack; 2,500 hectares of land ruined ... pic.twitter.com/Q4g3h3Mnx9

— - Julien - (@Dravida07153855) May 26, 2020

Links

• Locust Swarms, Some 3 Times The Size of New York City, Are Eating Their Way Across Two Continents
• Locust Crisis Poses A Danger To Millions, Forecasters Warn
• Locust swarms and climate change
• How climate change has triggered locust plagues across East Africa
• Locust plagues point to grim future of climate change
• Scientists turn to tech to prevent second wave of locusts in east Africa
• Locust Swarms Threaten Food Security For Millions; Climate Change Contributing To Breeding, Spread
• Climate change linked to African locust invasion

(AU) Bushfire Hearings Spotlight Climate Change

Saturday Paper - Mike Seccombe

Experts called during the opening week of the bushfires royal commission warned the Black Summer will not be an isolated event.

Ian Livingston and his son Sydney, 6, among the ruins of their family home, lost to the New Year’s Day bushfires in Cobargo. Credit: Brook Mitchell / Getty Images

It was February 18, and Scott Morrison was being pressed for government action in response to a growing emergency.

The prime minister justified his refusal to act with these words: “No one can tell me that going down that path won’t cost jobs.”

The emergency at hand was not the coronavirus; Australia was almost two weeks away from recording its first death from Covid-19.

The focus then was the summer of bushfires and the role climate change had played in the devastation. Morrison had been asked why his government, unlike many others around the world, and all Australian states and territories, had refused to commit to a target of net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

His answer – that it would cost jobs and money – rang hollow in light of the lived, breathed experience of Australians during the summer. Climate change already was costing jobs, thousands of them. And vast sums of money. And lives.

But it looks even more hollow now, not least because his inertia in the face of that crisis so sharply contrasted with his urgency on the next.

Within a month of dismissing the need for an emissions target, Morrison and his emergency cabinet of state and territory leaders responded to the threat posed by Covid-19 with a national lockdown.

While the decisive action was driven by the states, Morrison went along, enthusiastically serving as chief marketer for their collective decision. At no point did he cavil on the basis that jobs might be lost. Instead, he followed the advice of the experts and did what had to be done in order to avoid a greater catastrophe.

Then this week, the bushfires royal commission – more properly, the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements – began its public hearings. And the evidence given by a succession of expert witnesses served to remind us there was a bigger crisis that preceded Covid-19, one that will persist long after it.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate monitoring, Karl Braganza, gave a PowerPoint presentation filled with alarming graphs and maps, showing the extent to which carbon pollution had altered Australia’s climate, and how much worse things will get in the absence of action.

Already, he told the commission, the fire season is starting three months earlier in much of south-eastern Australia. Fire danger index readings that would typically have occurred at the start of summer in the 1950s are now recorded at the start of spring.

Temperatures are higher, rainfall and humidity lower, soils and vegetation drier, and westerly winds, blowing from the arid centre of the continent, are more frequent.

Indeed, Braganza said, referring to one of his frightening maps, “almost over all of Australia we’re seeing a longer fire season with more fire danger days during that season, and the severity of the worst fire danger days is becoming more severe”.

He was clear: the tragedy of the so-called Black Summer was not a “one-off event”.

“Since the Canberra 2003 fires, every jurisdiction in Australia has seen some really significant fire events … [that] have really challenged what we thought fire weather looked like.”

In the first two decades of this century, there were only four wet years, Braganza said. The 10-year period from 2009 to 2019 was the hottest decade this country had seen, with 2019 the hottest and driest year on record.

Not every coming year will be so bad, of course.

It seems the coming season will be less severe, assuming the good rains so far this year persist as forecast. But the longer-term trends, Braganza said, “probably load the dice towards worse fire seasons in general”.

Karl Braganza and the other experts who followed him – not only climate scientists but also insurers and actuaries whose businesses depend on accurately assessing risk – provided a comprehensive and dark picture of increasing threats from climate change.

They spoke of rising sea levels; more intense cyclones that would strike further south, if less frequently; worse storms and floods; many more days of extreme heat.

Ryan Crompton of Risk Frontiers, an outfit that provides risk-assessment services, including what it calls “catastrophe modelling”, told the commission that between 1900 and 2015, heatwaves were “Australia’s deadliest natural hazard”.

“They account for almost half of the total number and almost five times the number of fatalities than do bushfires,” he said.

The two phenomena – heatwaves and fires – often coincide. Crompton pointed to the example of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, during which 173 people died as a direct result of the fires, while a further 374 deaths were attributed to the preceding heatwave. Melbourne saw three days above 43 degrees the week of that tragic Saturday.

A study undertaken by a team at the Australian National University medical school – published last week in The Lancet Planetary Health – re-examined the causes of more than 1.7 million deaths in Australia between 2006 and 2017 and found that heat was likely to have contributed to at least 37,000 of them.

In the case of last summer’s bushfires, there was another peril, too. Smoke.

Associate Professor Fay Johnston, of the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania, said about 80 per cent of Australians were affected by bushfire smoke at some point during last year’s fire season.

On the basis of analysis carried out by her team, Johnston said, there were 445 “excess deaths” attributable to smoke, along with 3340 admissions to hospital for heart- and lung-related problems and 1373 additional presentations to an emergency department for asthma.

She estimated the cost associated with premature loss of life and admissions to hospitals at $2 billion.

This did not include a range of other health impacts that her team had not modelled, including, among other things, “loss of work time, missing school, needing medications, impacts on diabetes, impacts on ambulance callouts”.

“Covid showed that people’s attitudes and behaviours can change. We had leadership, crafting a sense of who we are and what we should do and how we should act in the interests of ourselves and our communities.”

There is also the cost, unquantifiable in dollar figures, to the mental health of the tens of thousands of people who lost loved ones or homes in the fires.

Professor Lisa Gibbs, of the University of Melbourne, an expert in disaster recovery and community resilience, and child health and wellbeing, told the hearings that advancing climate change introduced a worrying new element for mental health, in that such disasters were “no longer perceived as rare events”.

She expressed concern the perception of a “new reality”, wherein devastating fire seasons keep happening, could undermine the sense of hope that those affected need to get their lives back on track.

The commission was provided with a long list of other costs, too: 3117 homes and 6310 outbuildings destroyed; 89,000 kilometres of fencing and 880 kilometres of roads burnt.

Some $2.2 billion of insurance claims have already been lodged, says the Insurance Council of Australia.

The loss of economic output is “in the order of $3.6 billion”, according to the consultancy group EY. Hundreds of millions in welfare payments have been made by the federal government, hundreds of millions more for clean-up and recovery from state and local authorities. The average cost of removing the debris from one destroyed home is more than $50,000.

There are dollar costs, but there are also intrinsic values that are harder to assess.

How do you value 8.27 million burnt hectares of land, an estimate that doesn’t even include Western Australia and the Northern Territory, when most of it is covered by bush? Or the deaths of a billion native animals?

How do you calculate the impact of habitat loss on 300-odd plant and animal species already considered endangered or threatened, or the many others that were considered “secure” before the fires but now are not?

The entire range of some species was burnt, according to evidence Threatened Species Commissioner Dr Sally Box gave the commission this week. Extinctions could follow, perhaps even the end of species not yet known to science.

It is difficult, of course, to compare the impacts of the Black Summer with those of the coronavirus. The toll of Covid-19 could have been orders of magnitude larger, if swift action wasn’t taken. The chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, says the nation’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has avoided about 14,000 deaths.

But timely action was taken and, as of Thursday, the federal Health Department has recorded 103 Covid-19 fatalities in this country. This is a little more than one-fifth of the number of deaths attributed to the fires – 33 direct and another 445 from smoke.

Yet in response to the health emergency, our leaders were prepared to shut down large sections of our economy, tolerate the loss of maybe a million jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars, and enforce major changes to the way all members of society live and work.

To the question of why our government was prepared to do all this in response to one crisis, while doing so little in response to the greater threat, Professor Warwick McKibbin, economist, specialist in public policy at the ANU’s Crawford School and an expert in both pandemics and climate issues, offers some insight.

With pandemics, he says, the cost of the response always vastly exceeds the cost of the disease itself. It’s par for the course. Even without a government-mandated domestic lockdown, much of the economic loss would have happened anyway as people self-isolated for fear of infection.

“I haven’t got the final numbers yet, but my guess is that about 10 per cent of the lost economic activity – that’s 10 per cent of the total loss – is probably due to government [lockdown],” he says.

The rest was largely attributable to other factors, including the impact on international trade and the spontaneous behavioural change by the populace.

McKibbin cites a real-time case study in the differing responses of two otherwise similar nations: Denmark and Sweden. The former imposed a tight lockdown; the latter didn’t. While the Swedes hoped their response would keep their economy humming, it didn’t.

“The death rate in Sweden is orders of magnitude bigger than Denmark, and the economic costs are about the same,” says McKibbin. “The Swedish central bank is forecasting a contraction in the economy of about 8 per cent.

“So, if all Sweden’s trading partners have a recession, then the chances are they’ll have a recession.”

This is compounded by the fact that in Sweden, even without a mandatory lockdown, many people changed their behaviour.

It is all very interesting but only broadens the question about the differing responses to the two crises from both the government and the community.

McKibbin says one crisis was perceived as being personal and immediate. The threat horizon for the virus was days or weeks; climate change, meanwhile, has loomed for decades.

“We were watching morgues in New York overflowing, watching people dying in the streets in Italy,” McKibbin says. “The impact of the pandemic was already real.”

The virus set down a clear either/or: “If you don’t do anything in Australia, you’re going to get it. If you do something in Australia, you may not get it.”

In relation to climate change, though, the widely held perception is fatalistic – that, regardless of any actions Australia might take, “climate change is going to happen anyway, if nobody else does anything either”.

This sentiment is the subtext of Scott Morrison’s words back in February: why suffer the costs of change, if no benefit will flow?

But there is growing evidence to suggest this is a false narrative.

The Australia Institute recently conducted a meta-analysis in response to claims that an ambitious climate response would “wreck the economy”, combing through 19 reports published in the past five years in peer-reviewed journals, and from academics and government agencies, along with three major Treasury reports from 2008 to 2013.

A number of these went to the electricity sector only, with five modelling a 100 per cent renewable grid. Others looked at the broader economy. Most of the models showed negligible economic cost would be incurred by meeting targets broadly in line with the goal of the Paris climate change agreement. And some showed positive economic gains.

Nonetheless, as McKibbin acknowledges, Australia cannot make much difference to the climate crisis on its own.

But, he says, Australia’s role is bigger than that, as “a laboratory” for the rest of the world when it comes to policy.

“If you do something on climate in Australia … and you demonstrate that a very high carbon economy can end up with a low carbon economy, cheaply, then people will copy your policies. And that can actually totally change the global emissions profile,” he says.

This country has served as such an example to the world many times before.

“We’ve done that when it comes to monetary policy. We’ve done it in fiscal policy with the tariff policy,” says McKibbin. “We’ve done it in health policy, [and] designing our education funding through the HECS scheme. We’ve demonstrated to other countries and they’ve adopted that scheme. And that’s improved the quality of life for everybody.

“So, Australia’s role is not to be the leader because we’re going to make a difference to emissions. It’s because we’re going to demonstrate policy that will make a difference to emissions.”

The question that remains, though, is do we have the will?

The signs from our current federal government are not promising. But it seems the Covid-19 crisis hasn’t distracted people from the climate emergency.

An Essential poll conducted in mid-March, at the height of the coronavirus outbreak in Australia, found 31 per cent of those surveyed were more concerned about climate than they were a year ago, before the fires.

Is it possible, then, that rather than supplanting concern about the climate, the Covid-19 episode has accentuated the popular sense of urgency?

Kate Reynolds, professor of psychology at the ANU, thinks so. Having successfully faced one existential threat, she says, people are more inclined to believe they can deal with another.

“Covid showed us a few things,” she says. “It showed that people’s attitudes and behaviours can change.

“We had leadership, crafting a sense of who we are and what we should do and how we should act in the interests of ourselves and our communities. Call it a social identity, a sense of shared social identity, and a common cause.”

She says that people came to feel in some ways a greater “efficacy”, in the psychological sense: “Things that seemed hard before Covid – in making profound changes in the way we went about our lives – proved possible.”

It will be harder for governments to now make excuses on the basis that change is too big, too costly, too hard.

Reynolds says that as social creatures, humans are motivated to “protect the group, to act in the best interests of the group”.

As civilisation has advanced, that understanding of “the group” has, on the whole, grown more encompassing.

What the coronavirus crisis has shown – and this stands true for the climate crisis, too – is that our conceptualisation of who is part of the group will need to further expand.

For when it comes to the really big issues, there is no immunity to the risk. And no one is safe unless all are.

Links

• 'Some Things Were Out Of Bounds': Fire Chiefs 'Gagged' On Climate Change Warnings To Government, Inquiry Told
• (AU) Hundreds Of Species At Risk Of Extinction After Australia's Black Summer Bushfires
• Summer bushfires an ecological disaster
• Australia Heading Into New 'Fire Age', Warns Global Fire Historian
• This bushfire-hit NSW town has been pleading for more mental health support for months
• Rights group says children were 'systematically overlooked' during Australian bushfires
• Bushfire haze killed 455 people and reached 80 per cent of Australia, royal commission hears
• (AU) Bushfires Left Estimated 445 Dead From Smoke And A Nation Traumatised
• Mallacoota's school was saved from fire, now it's become the focus of the town's renewal
• 'A phonecall would have been nice': RFS volunteers feel forgotten after summer fires
• 'It would have helped confusion': Regional students call for school bushfire training
• (AU) Fire Season Extends By Almost Four Months In Parts Of Australia
• 'Incredibly blessed': Royal commission to eye fire success and failure
• 'Unbelievable what's happening': Fire inquiry reviews 1000 submissions
• Bushfire royal commission: 'Black Summer' played out exactly as scientists predicted it would
• Bureau of Meteorology predicted the devastating "Black Summer" weather
• Ex-ESA Chief wants Bushfire Royal Commission to address climate change
• Australia's 'Black Summer' bushfires 'not a one-off event', royal commission hears
• Royal commission into bushfire crisis begins hearings with focus on impact of climate change