17/09/2021

(AU ABC Media Watch) Climate Conversion?

 ABC Media Watch

News Corp says it will explore net-zero emissions in an 'editorial series on the environment'. A change in how the media group covers climate change or just hot air?

6min17sec Broadcast Mon 13 Sep 2021

Transcript

(AU Canberra Times) Agriculture Roadmap To Net Zero By 2040

AAP - Georgie Moore

A new report predicts the agriculture sector can achieve net zero emissions within two decades. Image by Tracey Nearmy/AAP PHOTOS

Climate-conscious farmers are backing a roadmap to achieve net zero emissions by 2040 without shrinking the agriculture sector.

Changing how livestock are bred and fed and vaccinating them to reduce methane production are among the proposals in an EY report commissioned by Farmers for Climate Action.

It recommends shifting to renewable energy and electric-powered machinery, re-foresting less productive land and restoring degraded farmland so CO2 can be better sequestered in soil.

Compared to a business-as-usual trajectory, the report predicts the $67 billion-a-year agriculture sector can cut emissions by 40 per cent by 2030, 65 per cent five years later and achieve net zero within two decades.

Farmers for Climate Action believes the changes will boost farm productivity and profits by scaling up initiatives, including around land use and management, already under way.

“Farming families should be able to diversify to use their land to grow profitable, productive carbon and biodiversity crops which provide them rare drought-proof payments when and where they choose,” the group’s chief executive Fiona Davis said.

Methane produced through livestock digestive processes accounts for a significant source of on-farm emissions. 

Feed supplements, including a seaweed additive, have the potential to reduce this, as does selective breeding of sheep and cattle. 

The report also points to work on a vaccine to influence methane-producing microbes in livestock. 

It touts the potential for electricity to power tractors and heavy machinery as well as a shift to renewable energy used farms.

A case study looking at the southern Queensland region of Maranoa models how ramping up carbon abatement could increase revenue by up to $2.4 billion and create between 14,000 and 17,000 extra jobs over a decade.

The report also urges the sector to look beyond net zero by 2040 so it can amass and sell carbon credits to other sectors seeking to decarbonise.

“The carbon offset surplus past net zero is a value bank. The speed at which the industry can achieve net zero will help determine the value that farmers can access,” it said.

The agriculture sector accounted for nearly 15 per cent of Australia’s emissions last year, equating to around 70 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Links - Farmers for Climate Action

16/09/2021

(BBC) Climate Change: Young People Very Worried - Survey

BBC -  Roger Harrabin

Over half of those surveyed said they thought humanity was doomed and that governments were failing to respond adequately. Image source Getty Images

A new global survey illustrates the depth of anxiety many young people are feeling about climate change.

Nearly 60% of young people approached said they felt very worried or extremely worried.

More than 45% of those questioned said feelings about the climate affected their daily lives.

Three-quarters of them said they thought the future was frightening. Over half (56%) say they think humanity is doomed.

Two-thirds reported feeling sad, afraid and anxious. Many felt fear, anger, despair, grief and shame - as well as hope.

One 16-year-old said: "It's different for young people - for us, the destruction of the planet is personal."

The survey across 10 countries was led by Bath University in collaboration with five universities. It's funded by the campaign and research group Avaaz. It claims to be the biggest of its kind, with responses from 10,000 people aged between 16 and 25.

Many of those questioned perceive that they have no future, that humanity is doomed, and that governments are failing to respond adequately.

Many feel betrayed, ignored and abandoned by politicians and adults.

The authors say the young are confused by governments' failure to act. They say environmental fears are "profoundly affecting huge numbers of young people".

Chronic stress over climate change, they maintain, is increasing the risk of mental and physical problems. And if severe weather events worsen, mental health impacts will follow.

The report says young people are especially affected by climate fears because they are developing psychologically, socially and physically.

Meet the people taking climate change action

The lead author, Caroline Hickman from Bath University, told BBC News: "This shows eco-anxiety is not just for environmental destruction alone, but inextricably linked to government inaction on climate change.

"The young feel abandoned and betrayed by governments.

"We're not just measuring how they feel, but what they think. Four out of 10 are hesitant to have children.

"Governments need to listen to the science and not pathologise young people who feel anxious."

The authors of the report, to be published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, say levels of anxiety appear to be greatest in nations where government climate policies are considered weakest.

There was most concern in the global south. The most worried rich nation was Portugal, which has seen repeated wildfires.

Tom Burke from the think tank e3g told BBC News: "It's rational for young people to be anxious. They're not just reading about climate change in the media - they're watching it unfold in front of their own eyes."
I don't want to die, but I don't want to live in a world that doesn't care for children and animals
Young person answering survey
The authors believe the failure of governments on climate change may be defined as cruelty under human rights legislation. Six young people are already taking the Portuguese government to court to argue this case.

The survey was carried out by the data analytics firm Kantar in the UK, Finland, France, the US, Australia, Portugal, Brazil, India, the Philippines and Nigeria. It's under peer review on open access.

Young people were asked their views on the following statements:
  • People have failed to care for the planet: 83% agreed globally, UK 80%
  • The future is frightening: 75%, UK 72%
  • Governments are failing young people: 65%, UK 65%
  • Governments can be trusted: 31%, UK 28%
The researchers said they were moved by the scale of distress. One young person said: "I don't want to die, but I don't want to live in a world that doesn't care for children and animals."

Links

(Vice) 56 Percent Of Young People Think Humanity Is Doomed

ViceSophia Smith Galer

A major study of 10,000 young people across 10 different countries lays bare the scale of climate crisis-related anxiety felt around the world.

Children play on melting ice at the village of Napakiak on the Yukon Delta in Alaska, in April 2019. Photo: MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images

Lichen, an 18-year-old living in Hawaii, used to worry about the end of the world, but lately that doesn’t feel all that distant. Now, they’re simply worried about what’s next. And it’s a worry that is affecting nearly half of the world’s young people.

According to what its authors say is the world’s largest ever study into young people’s fears about the climate crisis, 45 percent of 16-25-year-olds said climate-related anxiety and distress is affecting their daily lives and ability to function normally.

Almost 60 percent of the 10,000 young people surveyed across 10 countries attributed this to their national governments, who they said were “betraying” them and future generations through their inaction.

Fifty-six percent of people surveyed said they agreed with the statement that humanity is doomed, while 75 percent said they believed the future was frightening.

The study, published today in Lancet Planetary Health and led by academics and professionals at the University of Bath, Stanford Medicine Centre for Innovation in Global Health, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and others, found that people from countries more directly and immediately impacted by climate change tended to be more worried about the future.

Ninety-two percent of young people in the Philippines said they felt like the future was frightening, compared to just 56 percent in Finland. 


But young people in the UK and the U.S. had less faith in their governments than countries like Nigeria and India. Only 28 percent and 21 percent of young Brits and Americans thought the government could be trusted when it came to the planet – whereas 51 percent of Indians had faith in the authorities. 

The report’s authors say that climate anxiety is an “inescapable stressor,” and that unpredictable and extreme weather patterns are likely to further add to psychological distress.

For Lichen, watching the wildfires in their father’s native Australia was “really scary”, and that when they were younger left them feeling a kind of “raw fear.” 

“I’d just zone out something thinking about it,” they told VICE World News via Instagram. Now, they want to pursue environmental journalism – action that they say makes them feel better. 

A volunteer rests as flames rise from a wildfire in Mugla province in Turkey last month. YASIN AKGUL/AFP via Getty Images

But for Malika, a 15-year-old from Lebanon, climate anxiety has exacerbated her mental health problems. She remembers contracting a virus as a child from swimming in one of Lebanon’s polluted rivers; it’s one of many memories she recalls as she thinks about the anxiety disorder diagnosis that she received last year, and how much worrying about the planet is part of it.

She feels like the school projects on climate change that she is doing aren’t enough. “I felt like I’m doing something just very small, I don’t have that influence in the world,” she told VICE World News via Instagram. “So I was always and I’m still anxious about what’s going to happen in this world. Are we going to die of climate change? After we die, will people suffer?”

The co-lead author on the study, Caroline Hickman from the University of Bath, said: “Our children’s anxiety is a completely rational reaction given the inadequate responses to climate change they are seeing from governments. What more do governments need to hear to take action?”

Some politicians are trying to address climate anxiety directly, on top of actual climate action. Last month, Coalition MPs asked the Australian Prime Minister to fund climate change chaplains in schools.


But posts on social media suggest young people aren’t necessarily always identifying what they’re experiencing as climate anxiety.

In the Global North, young people from Portugal were the most worried out of the countries surveyed, having experienced a dramatic increase in wildfires since 2017, but just looking at Instagram alone, there are few Portuguese-language posts on the topic; #ecoansiedade only has around 100 posts and #ansiedadeclimatica even fewer. #Ecoanxiety in English only stands at 14,000 posts itself, which seems small when #anxiety stands at 18 million. 

On TikTok, however, #climateanxiety has 370,000 views. Alaina Wood, a TikTok creator and sustainability scientist, says she is worried about content she sees on the app, particularly the trend of spreading climate nihilism to the TikTok sounds of Bo Burnham's dystopian Inside film.

“Young people have seen this climate nihilism videos and believe it is too late to do anything about the climate crisis, so they often decide to stop pushing for climate action,” Wood said. “I’ve made numerous videos discussing climate anxiety and debunking climate nihilism, and I receive daily comments thanking me for putting a name – climate anxiety – to how they feel.” 

So what could be signs of climate anxiety? Megan Kennedy-Woodward and Dr Patrick Kennedy-Williams are the co-founders of Climate Psychologists, an organisation that provides psychological support and communication tactics for those committed to saving the planet. “Climate and eco anxiety blanket over a wide range of emotions that the climate crisis can provoke,” Kennedy-Woodward said. “Guilt, anger, grief, despair.” 

Kennedy-Williams added: “It can result in social withdrawal, sleep or concentration issues, to name a few. Clinically speaking, for younger children we aim to support parents to have meaningful and productive conversations with their kids.” 

Kennedy-Woodward recommends that young people lean into self-care, and take social media and climate information breaks when necessary, to alleviate climate anxiety. If you are feeling like it is too much, she advises speaking with a healthcare professional. 

But the authors of the study are eager for governments to realise the impact that their lack of climate action is having on young people, rather than expecting young people to handle it alone.

“Public discourse should encourage the expression of feelings that 60% of young people in this survey have described as being ignored or dismissed,” wrote the study’s authors. “We argue that the failure of governments to adequately reduce, prevent, or mitigate climate change is contributing to psychological distress, moral injury and injustice.”

Links

(AU Canberra Times) AMA And Medical Colleges Write To PM To Warn Of Climate Health Risk

Canberra Times - Harley Dennett

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison with AMA President Dr Omar Khorshid. Picture: Getty Images

As world leaders gear up to meet in Glasgow in November for the UN climate summit billed as the most significant since the 2015 Paris Agreement, doctors have penned an open letter to Australia's Prime Minister warning he must lift the nation's commitment to the global effort to save lives and protect health.

The open letter, signed by the Australian Medical Association, Doctors for the Environment Australia and 10 medical colleges, calls on Scott Morrison to commit to science-based targets for cutting Australia's emissions this decade.

"As doctors, we understand the imminent health threats posed by climate change and have seen them already emerge in Australia," the letter states.

"The 2019-2020 bushfire season in Australia saw parts of the country afflicted by the poorest air quality in the world, with large numbers of the population enduring weeks of bushfire smoke and the related adverse health impacts. That climate disaster also tragically took more than 30 lives as a direct result of the fires.

"Since then, we have seen the stark impacts of extreme weather events playing out in the northern hemisphere in 2021. Flooding, fires and heatwaves not only have immediate health risks, but also come with the longer-term physical, economic and mental impacts of displacement, loss of life and loss of livelihoods."

They called for policies that accelerate the transition to renewable energy and acknowledge its health benefits, and plan to increase Australia's commitments to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

Doctors for the Environment Australia chair John Van Der Kallen said doctors were already dealing with the reality of climate change in their surgeries and in emergency departments.

"Failure to act urgently on climate change risks unmanageable threats to the health of all Australians," Dr Van Der Kallen said.

AMA president Dr Omar Khorshid said, "the government must urgently act to significantly reduce emissions this decade. Severe fires, superstorms and floods have arrived and are destroying lives".

The organisation's ACT branch is also rolling out a campaign urging patients to speak to their GP about managing their health in response to rising temperatures and increasing natural disasters.

It comes in the wake of the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which found that without "immediate, rapid and large-scale" cuts to record high levels of greenhouse gas emissions then hopes of containing global warming to even 2 degrees would be "beyond reach".

Links

15/09/2021

(The Guardian) Earth’s Tipping Points Could Be Closer Than We Think. Our Current Plans Won’t Work

The Guardian

Climate policies commit us to a calamitous 2.9C of global heating, but catastrophic changes can occur at even 1.5C or 2C

A flash flood caused by Tropical Storm Henri in Helmetta, New Jersey, on 22 August 2021. ‘The extreme weather in 2021 – the heat domes, droughts, fires, floods and cyclones – is, frankly, terrifying.’ Photograph: Tom Brenner/AFP/Getty Images

Author
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist and the author of Feral; The Age of Consent, and Out of the Wreckage
If there’s one thing we know about climate breakdown, it’s that it will not be linear, smooth or gradual.

Just as one continental plate might push beneath another in sudden fits and starts, causing periodic earthquakes and tsunamis, our atmospheric systems will absorb the stress for a while, then suddenly shift.

Yet, everywhere, the programmes designed to avert it are linear, smooth and gradual.


Current plans to avoid catastrophe would work in a simple system like a washbasin, in which you can close the tap until the inflow is less than the outflow. But they are less likely to work in complex systems, such as the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere. Complex systems seek equilibrium.

When they are pushed too far out of one equilibrium state, they can flip suddenly into another. A common property of complex systems is that it’s much easier to push them past a tipping point than to push them back. Once a transition has happened, it cannot realistically be reversed.

The old assumption that the Earth’s tipping points are a long way off is beginning to look unsafe. A recent paper warns that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – the system that distributes heat around the world and drives the Gulf Stream – may now be “close to a critical transition”.

This circulation has flipped between “on” and “off” states several times in prehistory, plunging northern Europe and eastern North America into unbearable cold, heating the tropics, disrupting monsoons.

Other systems could also be approaching their thresholds: the West and East Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest, and the Arctic tundra and boreal forests, which are rapidly losing the carbon they store, driving a spiral of further heating. Earth systems don’t stay in their boxes.

If one flips into a different state, it could trigger the flipping of others. Sudden changes of state might be possible with just 1.5C or 2C of global heating.

A common sign that complex systems are approaching tipping points is rising volatility: they start to flicker. The extreme weather in 2021 – the heat domes, droughts, fires, floods and cyclones – is, frankly, terrifying. If Earth systems tip as a result of global heating, there will be little difference between taking inadequate action and taking no action at all. A miss is as good as a mile.

So the target that much of the world is now adopting for climate action – net zero by 2050 – begins to look neither rational nor safe. It’s true that our only hope of avoiding catastrophic climate breakdown is some variety of net zero.

What this means is that greenhouse gases are reduced through a combination of decarbonising the economy and drawing down carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere. It’s too late to hit the temperature targets in the Paris agreement without doing both. But there are two issues: speed and integrity. Many of the promises seem designed to be broken.

At its worst, net zero by 2050 is a device for shunting responsibility across both time and space. Those in power today seek to pass their liabilities to those in power tomorrow. Every industry seeks to pass the buck to another industry. Who is this magical someone else who will suck up their greenhouse gases?

Their plans rely on either technology or nature to absorb the carbon dioxide they want to keep producing. The technologies consist of carbon capture and storage (catching the carbon emissions from power stations and cement plants then burying them in geological strata), or direct air capture (sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and burying that too).

But their large-scale use is described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “subject to multiple feasibility and sustainability constraints”. They are unlikely to be deployed at scale in the future for the same reason that they’re not being deployed at scale today, despite 20 years of talk: technical and logistical barriers. Never mind: you can keep smoking, because one day they’ll find a cure for cancer.

So what’s left is nature: the capacity of the world’s living systems to absorb the gases we produce. As a report by ActionAid points out, there’s not enough land in the world to meet the promises to offset emissions that companies and governments have already made.

Even those who own land want someone else to deal with their gases: in the UK, the National Farmers’ Union is aiming for net zero. But net zero commitments by other sectors work only if farmland goes sharply net negative.

That means an end to livestock farming and the restoration of forests, peat bogs and other natural carbon sinks. Instead, a mythical other will also have to suck up emissions from farming: possibly landowners on Venus or Mars.

Even when all the promised technofixes and offsets are counted, current policies commit us to a calamitous 2.9C of global heating. To risk irreversible change by proceeding at such a leisurely pace, to rely on undelivered technologies and nonexistent capacities: this is a formula for catastrophe.

If Earth systems cross critical thresholds, everything we did and everything we were – the learning, the wisdom, the stories, the art, the politics, the love, the hate, the anger and the hope – will be reduced to stratigraphy. It’s not a smooth and linear transition we need. It’s a crash course.

Links - Stories by George Monbiot

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