(US) Cities Are Becoming Climate Death Traps

New Republic - Eric Margolis

A new era of heat waves is here. We aren’t ready.

A man cools off in the spray of a fire hydrant during a heat wave in Philadelphia. Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images

As the coronavirus pandemic continues throughout the United States, another deadly pandemic comes out to strike in the summer: extreme heat. Year after year, more people are dying because it’s simply too hot. As of right now, both this country and others lack even an accurate way of counting those deaths—let alone a comprehensive plan to reduce them. Thanks to climate change, it’s about to get much worse.

For the past week, the American South and Southwest have been experiencing record-breaking temperatures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted above-average heat for nearly the entire U.S. this summer. Unprecedented, early-summer heat waves roasted the Middle East in May and Siberia in June, setting the latter on fire. Arizona had its earliest-ever hundred-degree heat wave in April—and another 110 degree heat wave in May. Spain endured 105 degree heat this month.

When the heat index, a “feels-like” combination of temperature and humidity, reaches 104 degrees Fahrenheit indoors or out, human body temperature risks rising above the typical roughly 99 degrees Fahrenheit. When body temperature rises above 104 degrees, the consequences can be fatal within 30 to 60 minutes.

“Heat-related deaths are notoriously difficult to track because the role of heat isn’t always obvious. One 2017 study found that extreme heat can kill people in 27 different ways,” Juanita Constible, senior advocate, climate and health at the National Resources Defense Council, told me. “If someone dies of a heart attack during a heat wave, there’s a good chance that’s how their death will be recorded by officials, even if high temperatures were the trigger.”

Many scientists argue that official heat-death counts underestimate substantially. According to the World Health Organization, 166,000 people died due to heat waves between 1998 and 2017, but the true figure may be far higher. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only count deaths where heat illness is explicitly noted, so the official CDC count of heat-triggered deaths sits at just around 600 per year. Epidemiologists estimate that the real figure may be closer to 12,000—20 times higher than the official count.

Climate change is making heat waves longer, hotter, and more deadly. Scientists estimate that 80 percent of record-breaking heat waves would not have occurred without human-caused warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. And urban areas, in particular, face special risk of heat deaths because of the heat island effect, in which dark pavement, roofs, and concrete absorb additional heat, making temperatures much hotter than the reported weather in any given city.

In the U.S., heat deaths have more than doubled in Arizona in the last 10 years. Last year, a dangerous heat wave hit while storms left residents in the D.C. and New York City metro areas without power. Power outages can be deadly in a heat wave because without air conditioning, many people can’t cool off. In two heat deaths in a 2018 Arizona heat wave, the deceased were found indoors with a broken air conditioning unit that they couldn’t afford to fix.

“Some people won’t use their air conditioning because they’re afraid of the bills,” Patricia Solís, executive director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, told National Geographic. “They think they’re OK without it, but that’s how people die.”

“There are huge policy gaps in the U.S. with respect to extreme heat protections,” Rachel Licker, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me. “We found that without real action on climate change, by midcentury more than 250 cities across the U.S. are projected to experience 30 or more days with a heat index above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This includes many cities that historically haven’t experienced this level of extreme heat.”

Low-income communities are especially vulnerable. A 2020 study in Environmental Research Letters found that residents in low-income census tracts were less likely to use air conditioners when temperatures got hot. Heat wave exposure also disproportionately affects communities of color that have faced housing discrimination. Researchers at Portland State University and the Science Museum of Virginia found that urban neighborhoods denied municipal services during the mid-twentieth century are now the hottest areas in 94 percent of the 108 cities analyzed.

Extreme heat is a labor issue, as well. “One of the most urgent needs is an enforceable heat health standard for all workers from the [Occupational Safety and Health Administration],” said Constible. The current rule “has too much wiggle room for employers.”

 Licker pointed to the proposed Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act of 2019, which has yet to get out of the House Committee on Education and Labor, as a potential solution. The bill, sponsored by Democratic Representative Judy Chu of California, is named after Asuncion Valdivia, a California farmworker who died of a heat stroke in 2004 after picking grapes for 10 hours in 100 degree weather. The U.S. Postal Service has also received criticism for its role in workers’ heat deaths, for example in a troubling report from HuffPost this past week.

But killer heat is a worldwide phenomenon. In Europe, heat waves killed as many as 70,000 in 2003 and more than 1,500 last year. Good heat wave adaptation measures—such as handing out water at train stations, asking people to check on the elderly, and opening air-conditioned shelters for residents—likely contributed to the substantial reduction in deaths from 2003 to 2019. Accurate weather forecasting also allowed for greater preparedness. Still, just 5 percent of European households are air conditioned and scientists estimate that three degrees Celsius of warming could kill an additional 86,000 people each year in the EU.

While China and Japan are used to some sweltering-hot summers, record-breaking heat waves have nevertheless proved deadly. Consecutive heat waves in 2018 and 2019 in Japan hospitalized tens of thousands and killed hundreds. Japan doesn’t use excess mortality to calculate heat-related deaths like Europe does, which means that, as in the U.S., these numbers may be huge undercounts. In China, extreme heat combines with poor air quality to produce harmful ozone. Scientists estimate that three degrees of global warming could kill an additional 30,000 people each year in China.

Meanwhile, the impact of extreme heat on the global south remains underreported in Western media. Since developing countries tend to lack the cooling infrastructure present in North America and East Asia, regions in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan could soon face regular summer heat waves that are impossible to survive.

A recent Tokyo Institute of Technology study shows that heat-related deaths in Jakarta are expected to increase by 15 times by 2060. And while some regions of Africa are used to heat waves as a regular occurrence, the heat island slums of large cities such as Nairobi can create fatal conditions. A 2017 John Hopkins study found that temperatures in Kibera, one of the largest “slum” settlements in Nairobi, were typically 5 to 10 degrees higher than the official weather report.

The dual threat of extreme heat and the coronavirus makes for an especially challenging summer for policymakers and city-dwellers. Many cities this year and for each additional year that the pandemic persists will have to choose between opening public cooling centers and risking transmission of Covid-19 or keeping them closed and risking preventable heat-related deaths.

And the coronavirus also complicates the labor aspect of extreme heat. The current U.S. heat standard, for example, which is only a recommendation that employers take precautions when temperatures reach a certain threshold, was created in pre-Covid times. “A heat standard is especially important this summer because of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Constible. “The masks and other protective gear needed to slow transmission of the virus have the potential to trap heat and increase heat-health risks to some workers.”

Faced with record temperatures, many cities in the U.S. have taken aggressive adaptation measures. “Dozens of cities and some counties and states have mandatory, incentivized or city-led initiatives using features such as cool roofs, cool pavements, and trees,” Laura Brush, resilience fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told me. “However, funding is a significant barrier for many communities, especially during the pandemic.”

“More diverse funding sources and innovative finance mechanisms are needed to invest in resilience projects. These could include a national infrastructure bank, loan programs, and tax incentives for companies and individuals,” Brush said. Brush points to Louisville, Kentucky’s regional climate and health assessments and cool roof rebate and installation programming as one effective example of a city taking action.

The tragedy of heat-related deaths is that they are almost always preventable. Distributing free air conditioners, paying residents’ summer cooling bills, and simply encouraging people to check in on vulnerable relatives or neighbors can save lives. All of these are extremely feasible policy measures.

At the same time, nothing will slow the urban heat-death pandemic like climate mitigation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), for example, could save 2,700 lives per year in New York City alone, according to recent estimates. What’s known for sure is that ignoring either approach—the immediate or the long-term—will come with a body count.

Links

• Heatwaves
• Temperatures soar as heatwave hits Spain and Portugal
• Climate crisis: alarm at record-breaking heatwave in Siberia
• Climate change made Siberian heatwave 600 times more likely – study 
• Heat Waves in the Age of Climate Change: Longer, More Frequent and More Dangerous
• Extreme temperatures and health
• Tens of thousands additional deaths annually in cities of China between 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C warming

(AU) Climate Change-Driven Disasters Making Insurance Premiums Too Dear For Farmers

ABC Rural - Jane McNaughton

Peter Holding is a mixed farmer from Harden, NSW, and member of Farmers for Climate Action. (ABC News: Anna Vidot) 

Key Points A NSW farmer says the fossil fuel industry is effectively killing the agriculture sector Insurance premiums are being driven to unaffordable levels by the impacts of climate change The Insurance Council of Australia says 80 per cent of Australian homes are underinsured — and that figure's likely higher in the bush

Australian farmers are facing increasingly frequent droughts, floods, hailstorms and bushfires, resulting in insurance premiums rising to the point where cancelling or underinsuring are the only options.

Climate change has already cost farmers more than $1 billion since 2000, according to ABARES.

Third-generation lamb and cropping farmer Peter Holding said government inaction on global warming could have disastrous flow-on effects to the agriculture industry.

"Climate change poses a cataclysmic set of challenges for farmers," the Farmers for Climate Action member said.

"It's pretty severe and it's getting worse.

"As the frequency [of natural disasters] increases, the insurance premiums are just going to go up — there's no doubt about that."

The southern New South Wales farmer and volunteer firefighter said prolonged fire seasons are just one example of how climate change is affecting agricultural practices.

"The Canberra fires in 2003 was when we first saw the phenomenal firestorm effect," he said.

"And that's getting more common."

Fire surrounds a homestead during the Canberra fires in January 17, 2003. (Copyright: Jeff Cutting)

Rising risks, rising costs

Insurance Council of Australia spokesman Campbell Fuller said the industry was worried about the effects of man-made climate change.

"The insurance industry is very aware of concerns in the rural sector about climate change, natural disasters and about access to insurance," he said.

"Insurers gather the latest available data from governments, especially around bushfire exposure and flood exposure, as well as seasonal forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology."

Mr Fuller says insurers build a robust picture of the seasonal exposure that properties have per annum, which is then is priced into premiums.

"As the climate changes, and as risks are reassessed, that logically leads to changes in premiums to reflect the risks," he said.

Effect of climate variability on average farm profits 1949-50 to 2018-19 at current farms and commodity prices.(Supplied: ABARES)

'No silver bullet'

Mr Fuller said appropriate land use and resilient infrastructure in areas of higher risk to natural disasters needed to be prioritised.

"Changes in risk that can be predicted by climate change modelling need to be taken into account," he said.

"In many parts of Australia there's plenty of evidence that primary producers are taking measures to reduce the risks to their properties into their own hands."

Eighty per cent of Australian households are underinsured, and Mr Fuller says that percentage is probably much higher in rural areas.

This banana plantation at Taylors Arm, west of Macksville, was destroyed by fire in 2019. (ABC Rural: Claire Wheaton)

"Underinsurance and non-insurance is an issue in rural areas, and it is a constant concern to the industry as well as regulators and government agencies," he said.

"When properties are not insured, communities can struggle to rebuild after natural disasters and the burden falls more heavily on charities and government in the recovery phase."

Mr Fuller said farmers were likely to insure infrastructure such as their homes, sheds and equipment, but fences, livestock and crops were less likely to be included.

"There is no real silver bullet here," he said.

"It's a combination of actions that need to take place at a community level, and involving all levels of government."

Mr Holding said the cost of premiums meant insurance was not an option for some producers.

"I've had to pull back the farm's scale an awful lot to cut debt and make sure that we're still viable," he said.

Valuable farm machinery was destroyed by fire on the Duff beef and soybean property in the Upper Macleay Valley in 2019. (Supplied: Carolyn Duff)

Fossil fuels 'undermining' agriculture

Financial strain is not the only issue climate change has delivered to farmers.

"Unfortunately we're getting less good years and a lot more variability," Mr Holding said.

"There's a lot of impacts and I can't see it stopping any time soon.

"The droughts are just continuing, since the turn of the century we've had [so many years] of drought, interlaced with floods."

This map shows the decline of winter rainfall across southern Australia over the past 20 years. (Supplied: CSIRO/BOM)

Mr Holding said although farmers had "been adapting since the day they invented the plough", it would become impossible if the rate of environmental change continued to increase.

"Cutting emissions is the only option there, and that means moving away from fossil fuels — but the government seems wedded to that," he said.

"The fossil fuel industry is creating emissions and that is slowly but surely making agriculture unviable.

"We've cut the emissions from livestock probably in half, farmers in cropping areas have done all sorts of things to reduce the use of diesel and better use fertilisers.

"So farmers are working on all of these problems to cut their own emissions, but we definitely need some quick action to reduce the emissions of fossil fuel."

Links

• (AU) Climate Change Has Cut Australian Farm Profits By 22% A Year Over Past 20 Years, Report Says
• (AU) Climate Change Slashes More Than $1 Billion From Farm Production Value Over Past 20 Years: ABARES
• Fear Of Drought, Flood And Fires Leads Farmers To Plea For Urgent Action On Climate Change
• Insurers Urge Morrison To Take On Climate Action
• Climate Change Predicted To Wipe $571 Billion Off Property Values
• Australian Insurer QBE To Exit Thermal Coal Over Climate Change
• Climate Change Could Make Insurance Too Expensive For Most People – Report 
• Australian Insurers Say 'Act Now' On Climate Change
• From shiraz to Wagyu, fires and floods have ruined Australia's fresh food image. So what happens now?
• Are farmers getting climate change support?

(AU) Australia Is About To Blow A Once-In-A-Generation Opportunity

Sydney Morning Herald - Kevin Rudd | Patrick Suckling

Authors Kevin Rudd is president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and was the 26th prime minister of Australia. Patrick Suckling was Australia’s Ambassador for the Environment and recently joined Pollination, a specialist climate investment and advisory firm.

As the International Monetary Fund recently underlined in sharply revising down global growth prospects, recovering from the biggest peacetime shock to the global economy since the Great Depression will be a long haul.

There is a global imperative to put in place the strongest, most durable economic recovery.

This is not a time for governments to retreat.

Recovery will require massive and sustained support.

Beijing is approving plans for new coal-fired power plants at the fastest rate since 2015. Credit: Getty

At the same time, spending decisions by governments now will shape our economic future for decades to come. In other words, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity and can’t blow it.

But it’s looking like we might. This is because too few stimulus packages globally are reaping the double-dividend of both investing in growth and jobs, and in the transition to low emissions, more climate-resilient economies. And in Australia, this means we risk lagging even further behind the rest of the world as a result.

As Australia’s summer of hell demonstrated, climate change is only getting worse. It remains the greatest threat to our future welfare and economic prosperity.

And while the world has legitimately been preoccupied with COVID-19, few have noticed that this year is on track to be the warmest in recorded history. Perhaps even fewer still have also made the connection between climate and biodiversity habitat loss and the outbreak of infectious diseases.

Stimulus decisions that do not address this climate threat therefore don’t just sell us short; they sell us out. And they cut against the grain of the global economy. This is the irreducible logic that flows from the 2015 Paris Agreement to which the world – including Australia – signed up.

Unfortunately, as things stand today, many of the biggest stimulus efforts around the world are in danger of failing this logic.

For example, the US economic recovery is heavily focused on high-emitting industries. The same is true in China, India, Japan and the large South-East Asian economies.

In fact, Beijing is approving plans for new coal-fired power plants at the fastest rate since 2015. And whether these plants are now actually built by China’s regional and provincial governments is increasingly becoming the global bellwether for whether we will emerge from this crisis better or worse off in the global fight against climate change.

And for our own part, Australia’s COVID Recovery Commission has placed limited emphasis on renewables despite advances in energy storage technology and plummeting costs.

But as we know from our experience in the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, it is entirely possible to design an economic recovery that is also good for the planet. This means investing in clean energy, energy efficiency systems, new transport systems, more sustainable homes and buildings, and improved agricultural production, water and waste management.

In fact, as the management consultancy McKinsey recently found, government spending on renewable energy technology creates five more jobs per million dollars than spending on fossil fuels.

Despite these cautionary tales, there are thankfully also bright spots. Take the European Union and its €750 billion ($A122 billion) stimulus package. It will invest heavily in areas such as energy efficiency, turbocharging renewable energy, accelerating hydrogen technology, rolling out clean transport and promoting the circular economy.

To be fair, China is also emphasising new infrastructure such as electric transport in its $US500 billion ($A716 billion) stimulus package. India is doubling down on its world-leading renewable energy investments.

Indonesia has announced a major investment in solar energy. And Japan and South Korea are now announcing climate transition spending. But whether these are just bright spots among a dark haze of pollution or genuinely light the way is the key question that confronts these economies.

In Australia, the government has confirmed significant investment in pumped-hydro power for Snowy 2.0. The government has also indicated acceleration of important projects such as the Marinus Link to ensure more renewable energy from Tasmania for the mainland. But much more is now needed.

An obvious starting point could be a nation-building stimulus investment around our decrepit energy system. By now the federal and state governments have a much stronger grasp of what we need for success, encouragingly evident in the recent $2 billion Commonwealth-NSW government package for better energy access, security and affordability.

Turbocharging this with a stimulus package for more renewable energy and storage of all sorts (including hydrogen), alongside extension and stabilisation technology for the electricity grid, and investment in dramatically improving energy efficiency would – literally and figuratively – power our economy forward.

In the aftermath of the drought and bushfires, another obvious area for nation-building investment is our land sector. Farm productivity can be dramatically improved by precision agriculture and regenerative farming while building resilience to drought.

New sources of revenue for farmers can be created through soil carbon and forest carbon farming. Carbon trading from these activities internationally is set to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming decade.

Importantly, the Australian business community is not merely calling for policy certainty but is ushering in change itself.

The Australian Industry Group has called for a stronger climate-focused recovery. And in recent days, our largest private energy generator, AGL, has announced a significant strengthening of its commitment to climate transition, linking performance pay to progress in the company’s goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 – a goal that BHP, Qantas and every Australian state and territory has signed up to. HESTA has announced it will be the first major Australian superannuation fund to align its investment portfolio to this end.

These sorts of decisions are being replicated at a growing rate by companies around the world and show that business is leading.

It is time for governments – including our own – to do the same. Whether we can use this crisis as an opportunity to emerge better equipped to tackle critical global challenges remains to be seen, but it rests on many of the decisions to be taken in the months to come.

Links

• World Economic Outlook Update, June 2020: A Crisis Like No Other, An Uncertain Recovery
• Study: Climate Change Crisis Requires Less Growth-Oriented Global Economy
• Our Pandemic Response Was A Disaster. We Can't Afford To Make The Same Mistakes With Climate Change
• The Economic Theory That Could Fuel A Climate Change Revolution
• Why It Doesn’t Make Economic Sense To Ignore Climate Change In Our Recovery From The Pandemic
• In The Midst Of An Economic Crisis, Can 'Degrowth' Provide An Answer?
• (AU) Want An Economic Tonic, Mr Morrison? Use That Stimulus Money To Turbocharge Renewables
• (US) Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming
• Strengthen Worldwide Climate Commitments To Improve Economy, Study Finds

(AU) Climate Change Is The Greatest Threat

Canberra Times - Editorial

Australia's next bushfire season is just around the corner. Picture: Karleen Minney

While the world was preoccupied with an ever increasing number of coronavirus cases this week, a hugely significant scientific report was allowed to pass under-reported and unremarked.

This was the study of the 2020 Siberian heatwave by World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who have been monitoring extreme weather events for years.

The heatwave had contributed to raising the world's average temperature to the second highest on record for the period from January to May this year.

WWA said Siberia had experienced "unusually high temperatures", including a record-breaking 38 degrees celsius in the town of Verkhoyansk on June 20, causing wide-scale impacts including "wildfires, loss of permafrost, and invasion of pests".

The Russian government was forced to declare a state of emergency in response to these disasters. It is believed that at least 56 Megatons of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere in June alone. There has also been an explosion in the population of Siberian silk moths with massive swarms causing further damage to forests, making them even more prone to fire.

While all of this, and reports food supplies are being affected with fish swimming deeper in search of cooler water, is alarming, the real cause for concern is the finding the prolonged heatwave had been made "600 times more likely as a result of human-induced climate change".

"Even with climate change, the prolonged heat was a very rare event expected to occur less than once every 130 years," the report said. "The results for the town of Verkhoyansk shows that the record breaking June temperatures were also made much more likely - upwards of many thousands of times [by climate change]."

The scientists said if the heat wave, the result of a strong jet stream moving warm air over the region, had occurred in 1900 instead of 2020, temperatures would have been at least two degrees celsius lower.

Siberia is one of the most fragile environments on earth due to the adaptation of plants and animals to year-round low temperatures.

It has vast reserves of methane gas, a potent greenhouse gas, locked beneath the permafrost.

Melting permafrost has also been blamed for damage to infrastructure, including fuel pipelines. This has led to other environmental disasters across the region.

And, while it is a given that the climate deniers will dismiss the report as "bunkum" and "fake news", those who actually know what they are talking about have no such doubts.

Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - who was not involved in the study - said the methodology was "state of the art" and that the findings were, if anything, "conservative".

If, as many believe, temperatures in Arctic and Antarctic regions are "canaries in the coal mine", this latest report is a warning that should not be ignored. Given it comes on top of linkages between Australia's spring and summer bushfires and man-made global heating, it is yet another argument for this country to do much more to reduce to carbon dioxide emissions as a matter of urgency.

And let's not forget, if 2019 was anything to go by, our next bushfire season is just around the corner.

While the federal government has done a commendable job in seeking the best possible expert advice on the coronavirus and then following it, it has yet to do the same with climate and energy policy. That has to change. Coronavirus is a crisis, climate change is an existential threat.

Links

• Siberian heatwave of 2020 almost impossible without climate change
• Siberian heat streak and Arctic temperature record virtually ‘impossible’ without global warming, study says
• ‘Zombie fires’ are erupting in Alaska and likely Siberia, signaling severe Arctic fire season may lie ahead
• NASA Images Show Extreme Heat And Fires Raging Across Siberia
• Arctic Circle Sees 'Highest-Ever' Recorded Temperatures
• Devastating Simulations Say Sea Ice Will Be Completely Gone In Arctic Summers By 2050
• The Arctic May Have Crossed Key Threshold, Emitting Billions Of Tons Of Carbon Into The Air, In A Long-Dreaded Climate Feedback

(AU) Wild Weather Leaves NSW Homes At Risk Of 'Structural Collapse Due To Beach Erosion'

Sydney Morning Herald - Sally Rawsthorne | Matt Bungard

Beachfront homes on the state's Central Coast are at significant risk of structural collapse after large and powerful surf smashed the beaches on Thursday.

Police, the State Emergency Service and NSW Fire and Rescue were called to homes on Ocean View Drive in Wamberal on Thursday night following reports of serious beach erosion at the properties.

Erosion due to wild weather at Wamberal Beach on the Central Coast. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

The NSW coast was hit by a low pressure system, with large swells and a high tide damaging the region's beaches and leaving some homes perched dangerously close to collapsing into the ocean.

Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Bimal Kc said waves at the beach were up to 7.8 metres high.

"We have seen a large and powerful swell developing in NSW in the past three days, due to the deep low pressure system over the Tasman Sea," he said.

There is a hazardous surf warning in place for the entire coastline.


Residents living along the NSW coast are on edge after days of extreme surf have caused significant erosion leaving homes exposed to the elements.

A crane was seen on Thursday night putting large concrete blocks in to slow the damage to property along the stretch of coastline.

Four homes were evacuated overnight.

"It’s both terrifying and extremely frustrating as well," said Chris Rogers, who lives on Ocean View Drive with his wife and two young daughters.

"Realistically, this is a massive community problem and the council’s just completely ignored it. They’ve known for years and years that this is a problem."

Erosion at Wamerbal Beach on Friday morning. Credit: Nine News

In a Facebook post, Terrigal Fire and Rescue said the homes were at "significant risk of structural collapse due to beach erosion".

On Friday, council engineers were going door to door and assessing the damage to properties, after sandbags that were put in place to protect the homes were ripped away by the damaging weather.

Mr Rogers dismissed the actions of the Central Coast Council on Friday, saying it had dragged its heels in the past when it came to a solution.

"They were all over us today saying, 'We’re gonna do something' but we’ve heard that before. It makes you angry, it makes you frustrated. It scares your kids, scares you as a family," he said.

The waves continue to push further inland. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

"This is the third or fourth episode this year alone – the whole beach is destroyed, there’s massive amounts of asbestos going into the water."

Mr Rogers said he was frustrated that the council had not reached out to state Liberal MP Adam Crouch, the member for Terrigal, about a subsidy program to guard against erosion - as the Northern Beaches Council did for Collaroy last year.

"In 2018 the NSW government provided $207,500 for the council to develop plans for a long-term solution to the erosion issues at Wamberal, and we stand ready to assist council further," Mr Crouch said.

"This is not just about protecting homes on the coastline - the hundreds of millions of dollars of public infrastructure along Ocean View Drive also needs to be protected."

It was imperative that the council immediately placed temporary structures such as sandbags on Wamberal Beach and engaged personnel such as geotechnical and coastal engineering experts, who are needed to assist community members, he said.

"NSW government coastal engineers are currently working with council staff, and the Minister for Local Government has instructed that any funding application be rapidly assessed," he said.

Mr Rogers and his wife are at home for the time being, but have sent their daughters to their grandmother's house while they assess the situation.

"We’ll gladly put our hand in our pocket to secure our homes, but the council has to give us a guaranteed, sure solution," he said.

"It’s heartbreaking to think that you’ve got a council that really doesn’t give a shit."

Central Coast Council has been contacted for comment.

Links

• (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
• (AU) Thousands Of Kilometres Of Australia's Beaches At Risk From Rising Seas
• Rising Sea Levels Pose Threat To Homes Of 300m People – Study
• Extreme Sea Level Events ‘Will Hit Once A Year By 2050’
• Rising Sea, Erosion To Wreak Havoc In Low-Lying Suburbs: Report
• Rising Seas Threaten Australia’s Major Airports – And It May Be Happening Faster Than We Think
• Climate Change Predicted To Wipe $571 Billion Off Property Values

(NZ) New Zealand Turns To Clean Energy To Cut Government Emissions

RenewEconomy - Michael Mazengarb

The New Zealand "beehive", home to the NZ executive

After successfully legislating one of the world’s first commitments to zero net carbon emissions, the New Zealand government is putting its money where its mouth is and installing solar across a range of government buildings.

New Zealand climate change minister James Shaw announced that the government would see solar installed across six of its buildings, including offices of the NZ defence force, as part of a $200 million ‘clean-powered public service fund’.

Clean energy projects will be installed at The University of Canterbury, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand Defence Force, Inland Revenue, and MidCentral and Lakes District Health Boards, as part of a range of building upgrades.

“Upgrading our public services to run on clean energy is a hugely important part of the work this Government is doing to create jobs and tackle the climate crisis,” Shaw said.

“For too long, we have relied on climate-polluting fuels to keep parts of our public organisations running. Today’s announcement is another step towards changing this and ensuring climate-friendly energy solutions are a part of our everyday lives.”

“Upgrading our public services to run on clean energy is a hugely important part of the work this government is doing to create jobs and tackle the climate crisis.

“For too long, we have relied on climate-polluting fuels to keep parts of our public organisations running. Today’s announcement is another step towards changing this and ensuring climate-friendly energy solutions are a part of our everyday lives,” Shaw added.

The upgrades include a $NZ15.5 million replacement of a coal boiler a the University of Canterbury with a biomass-fuelled boiler, that is expected to cut the university’s carbon footprint by 9,000 tonnes each year.

The New Zealand Defence Force will also receive a $NZ9.6 million for its own coal boiler replacement – a heat pump that will cut its emissions footprint by almost 5,000 tonnes per year.

The Inland Revenue department will commit $NZ2 million to replace 33 of its vehicle fleet with electric vehicle replacements, as well as funding the installation of charging infrastructure.

This investment will contribute to the NZ government achieving a goal of a 100 per cent low-emissions government vehicle fleet by 2025-26.

“Our government has put in place in place some of the world’s most ambitious climate targets, and made policy and institutional changes that will help us to bend the curve of our emissions downwards, something that has never happened before in New Zealand,” Shaw added.

“However, the passing of world-leading climate laws must always be followed by detailed work in communities all over the country, and that’s exactly what we are doing. The clean-powered public service fund is about supporting the public services we all rely on to be part of the solution to climate change,”

Further announcements under the clean energy public service fund are expected to follow these latest commitments and will target emissions reductions across hospitals, schools and government departments.

Links

• NZ Govt announces six new public sector clean energy projects
• Which country uses the most solar power?
• (AU) Public Debut For Printed Solar
• Plunging Solar Energy Prices Spell Bright Future For Clean Electricity
• Wind And Solar Plants Will Soon Be Cheaper Than Coal In All Big Markets Around World, Analysis Finds
• AU) New CSIRO, AEMO Study Confirms Wind, Solar And Storage Beat Coal, Gas And Nuclear
• Wind And Solar Set New Generation Records Across Australia Grid In July

Lessons From A Hotter Planet: Things Escalate Quickly

Grist - Nathanael Johnson

Grist / Olaf Simon / EyeEm / pialhovik / Getty Images

The story of our warming planet can be told by degrees. 

The global thermostat has gone up 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, and rivers of meltwater are now coursing off Greenland’s glaciers. 

Two degrees could mean crop failures and 500,000 deaths from malnutrition a year. 

Three degrees would be a hotter world than our species has ever experienced: The last time the temperatures rose that high was 2 million years before the evolution of homo sapiens.

Creep up another 2 degrees, and it could lead to the greatest mass extinction in earth’s history. To paraphrase Ron Burgundy, things escalate quickly.

If you are like most people, you have a sense that climate change is bad, but would be hard-pressed to explain the exact consequences of each additional degree of heat. A few degrees of warming doesn’t sound that bad, maybe no more dangerous than nudging up your thermostat. So at what point do sweaty summers and mild winters turn into extinction and the collapse of civilization?

A new book fills that knowledge gap: Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas, an influential environmentalist in England. Lynas is known for his ability to spin stultifying scientific evidence into compelling prose and for conducting long-simmering public debates with other public intellectuals. 

Back in 2007, Lynas published another book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, but in the intervening years the climate changed so rapidly that he decided it needed not just an update, but a top-to-bottom rewrite.

As of 2015, a world warmed by 1 degree is reality, not a speculative future. Sea levels have climbed 6 centimeters, and evidence that fossil-fuel emissions are amplifying hurricanes has solidified. There’s so much new evidence that Lynas had to start over and write an entirely new book built on the same structure as the old one.

Lynas recently spoke with Grist about how much has changed in the last 15 years, how the COVID 19 pandemic resembles climate change, and how he manages to live happily while carrying the knowledge of looming doom.

Q. There’s a similar book to yours that got a lot of attention in the States, Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace Wells, which got into some trouble for conflating the worst-case scenarios with the likeliest future. How did you deal with the tension between telling a gripping story and being rigorous about facts?

A.The beauty of using 6 degrees of warming as a framing is you can have it both ways. It’s a grippingly terrifying story because you’ve got a strong narrative going from the relatively moderate 1-degree world up to the utterly terrifying 6-degree world, and you can read it almost like a novel as those worlds unfold. I’m not saying that we will ever see 6 degrees; that’s a product of decisions we have yet to make. I just think it’s useful to get outside these polarized debates about what the future will bring, because that’s not actually the question. The question is: What will happen if we do X? I don’t have to address the question of how likely it is, that’s a collective decision humanity will make over the next few decades.

Q. One of the scariest things you mention is the positive feedbacks, where, for instance, a world with 4 degrees of warming melts the Arctic permafrost, which could release enough methane to bump us up to 5 degrees.

A.Yeah, and that’s probably what David Wallace Wells would point to. Even if we are not going to quadruple our coal consumption, we still face the possibility of crossing these tipping points which make the global heating process unstoppable. Perhaps I’m more nuanced on that than I was in the first book: Some people thought that it was saying that if we crossed 2 degrees it would trigger a tipping point which would get you to 3, and then a tipping point which takes you to 4 like a line of dominoes. It’s not quite like that because we are not sure where the tipping points are, and because it takes time for them to play out. That Arctic permafrost is meters thick, it takes decades to melt, rot, and hit the atmosphere, and then decades more for that to turn into warming and then melt more permafrost.

On a lot of these tipping points, we are talking about centuries. For instance, I think we have already crossed the tipping point where the melting of Greenland has become irreversible, but it will still take centuries to unfold.

Q. After writing this book, how seriously do you take the threat of climate change?

A.I’m a pretty strong climate hawk I would say. If we want to save even a semblance of the world’s coral reefs, we have to stay on a 1.5 degree pathway, even 2 degrees leads to the bleaching of something like 99 percent of coral reefs. The saddest things for me are the annihilation of our biological inheritance — rainforests, coral reefs, the Arctic. You can argue that humans can survive perfectly happily for the first couple of degrees. But for me, it’s nonetheless profoundly important, and something I’m quite happy to spend my entire life advocating on.

Q. What about the scenarios that might not lead to the collapse of civilization but that would create mass suffering among people without access to air conditioning in, say, South Asia?

A.The date at which we make parts of the world uninhabitable because of extreme heat keeps coming forward. The first research on this put that date within a 5-degree scenario. It’s now between 3 and 4 degrees. We’ve already been close to conditions that make it lethal to stay outside in some parts of the Persian Gulf — just about touched it for a few hours. It wasn’t supposed to happen for another 2 or 3 degrees. That suggests it’s going to come more quickly. In terms of human consequences, the two issues that stand out are extreme heat and food production. I’m not confident that we can adapt the world’s breadbaskets to survive even 2 degrees warming.

Q. How does this grim knowledge make you feel day to day? Does it make you depressed, energized, or what?

A.I’ve been through all that stuff. I’ve had my periods of depression and profound sense of loss. To be honest, I’m so used to it, I don’t find it difficult to cope. I’m quite good at compartmentalizing. And these aren’t immediate things — it’s not the same as a war or pandemic, so you can actually forget about it for a bit.

Q. Do you see a parallel with the COVID pandemic?

A.The pandemic is like climate change on warp speed. The cause and effect are much more closely linked.

The lockdown is also a bit like the need to change our lifestyles to reduce carbon. So we stopped the flying, we change our diets, we make the sacrifices needed to bend the [carbon] curve. And then in the longer term, you’ve got the prospect of a vaccine. The climate parallel is technology substitution: You can replace dirty power with clean power, you can find ways to do zero-carbon travel. Those all take time, so in the short term, yes, we need to stop flying, but you can’t maintain lockdown forever, either for this virus, or for climate change.

Q. It sounds like you see both a need to live more simply, and embrace technology?

A.Well, the living simply thing isn’t going to work in the long run. The part of the world that is living simply, namely sub-Saharan Africa and other places way below the poverty line, don’t want to stay in that condition. It’s not a viable argument in a practical or even moral sense. Yes, it’s a lifestyle choice for certain people, but to pretend even for an instant that it’s a climate solution is insane.

Q. Wait, but you just mentioned flying less, don’t you think the richer world must make sacrifices?

A.I do, but only in the short term. Remember you can only sustain things by moral exhortation for a short period of time, and then people tire of it and move on. Like with the lockdowns, it’s a matter of months really. I think the same thing will apply to climate. Look, there are technologies available that would allow us to decarbonize and continue to grow prosperity, especially in the developing world.

Q. But in this book you are just laying out the consequences. You don’t propose solutions.

A.I just thought, fuck that, I wrote that book five years earlier, called Nuclear 2.0 It’s got a whole strategy mapped out for a transition to renewable energy and nuclear, etcetera, etcetera. Plus, I’d never be able to sell the book in Germany if I mentioned the “N” word. I would rather have a book that could be read by a wider group of people and allow them to then investigate solutions in whatever way they want.

Links

• Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency
• Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
• 7 Climate Change Novels That Imagine Our Possible Futures
• Facing The Climate Change Crisis, Three Books Offer Some Ambitious Proposals
• Everyone, Everywhere: The Global Challenge Of Climate Change
• Gift Guide: 12 Books On Climate Change And The Environment
• A Better Planet: Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future
• More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
• On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
• The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720
• Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America
• Waters of the World: The Story of the Scientists Who Unraveled the Mysteries of Our Oceans, Atmosphere, and Ice Sheets and Made the Planet Whole
• McSweeney’s Issue 58: 2040 AD
• Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age
• Greta and the Giants: Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s Stand to Save the World
• Imagining both utopian and dystopian climate futures is crucial – which is why cli-fi is so important