Huffington Post
Twenty-one young people from around the country filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on Tuesday accusing the federal government of violating their rights by contributing to climate change through the promotion of fossil fuels.
The plaintiffs, who range in age from 8 to 19, filed their complaint in U.S. District Court in Oregon. The complaint lists numerous defendants, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency.
"Defendants have for decades ignored their own plans for stopping the dangerous destabilization of our nation's climate system," the plaintiffs said in their complaint, which was filed with the help of the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children's Trust. "Defendants have known of the unusually dangerous risk of harm to human life, liberty, and property that would be caused by continued fossil fuel use and increase [carbon dioxide] emissions."
While setting new policies to reduce carbon emissions, the Obama administration has often touted an "all of the above" approach to energy policy that includes oil, natural gas, coal and renewable energy, the complaint continues. By continuing to promote the development and use of fossil fuels, the federal government violated their constitutional rights, the young plaintiffs allege.
"What we are providing is an opportunity for them to participate in the civic democratic process and go to the branch of government that can most protect their rights," said Julia Olson, the lead counsel on the case.
Olson, a public interest attorney, has been working closely with plaintiff Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 15, since 2011. It was Martinez who originally asked Olson to prepare the case against the United States government.
Martinez, who serves as the youth director for Earth Guardians, spoke before the United Nations General Assembly in June and demanded world leaders take action against climate change. It was his third time addressing the United Nations.
Climate change threatens the forests surrounding Martinez's home in Boulder, Colorado, and will lead to a scarcity of water, the complaint says. Another plaintiff, 18-year-old Alexander Lozak, said that extreme drought conditions are threatening the Oregon land that his great, great, great, great, grandmother first farmed.
"The health and bodily integrity of his family and their farm, which they rely on for food and as a source of income—as well as for their personal well-being—increasingly are harmed by climate change caused by Defendants," the complaint says.
The youngest plaintiff, 8-year-old Levi Draheim, said he can no longer swim in the river near his home in Indialantic, Florida, because of an increase in bacteria and fish die-offs.
In response to the complaint, the Environmental Protection Agency defended its work to confront climate change, which it described as "the biggest environmental challenge we face."
"That's why President Obama launched the Climate Action Plan and why EPA is taking action with our Clean Power Plan: to give our kids and grandkids the cleaner, safer future they deserve," Laura Allen, deputy press secretary for the EPA, said in a statement to The Huffington Post. "We have a moral obligation to leave a healthy planet for future generations."
"A child born today will turn fifteen in the year 2030 – the year when the full benefits of the Clean Power Plan will be realized," Allen added. "The actions we take now will clear the way for that child – and kids everywhere – to learn, play, and grow up in a world that’s not only clean and safe, but full of opportunity."
In early August, Obama called climate change "one of the key challenges of our lifetime."
"We're the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it," the president told an audience at an event in the White House's East Room, where he unveiled new regulations on emissions from power plants.
But in the eyes of Olson and the plaintiffs, that's not enough. They are asking for a court order to force Obama to immediately implement a national plan to decrease atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million -- a level many scientists agree is the highest safe concentration permissible -- by the end of this century. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already hit 400 parts per million.
"It's really important that the court step in and do their jobs when there's such intense violation of constitutional rights happening," Olson said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
14/08/2015
Review: Emissions Reduction Target
The Australian Government has announced that it will cut emissions by 26%-28% on 2005 levels by 2030, far below the 45-65% target recommended by the Climate Change Authority (or 40 to 60% on 2000 levels).
There are two key tests for an emissions reduction target:
There are two key tests for an emissions reduction target:
- Is it grounded in science? This would mean Australia is playing its role in keeping global temperature rise below 2°C, which is critical to protecting Australia in the long-term from the worsening impacts of climate change, like more frequent and terrible extreme weather.
- Are we doing our bit internationally?
Not only are the targets vastly inadequate to protect Australians from the impacts of climate change, they simply don’t represent a fair contribution to the world effort to bring climate change under control.
Over the last 6 months Australia has attracted significant criticism from our trading partners,including China and the U.S., over concerns that we’re free-riding on the backs of other countries’ efforts to tackle climate change. Former UN chief Kofi Annan said we’re not doing our bit, stating that Ethiopia and Rwanda are even doing more than Australia. Today’s announcement will only reinforce this criticism.
As the 13th largest emitter in the world, Australia is a crucial global climate change player - larger than 180 other countries. We’re also one of the largest consumers of coal per capita, and one of the most pollution-intensive economies in the world. Even if we reduce our emissions by 26% by 2030, we’ll emit 3 times more per person than the UK and 1.5 times more than the USA.
Tackling climate change is firmly in Australia’s national interest – it’s about protecting the Great Barrier Reef, protecting Australians against worsening heatwaves and bushfire conditions, and protecting our coastal communities from sea-level rise.
These targets fall short of the science, they fall short of global action and they fall short of what’s necessary to protect Australians from the impacts of climate change. By every measure, they fail to make the grade.
We’ve pulled together a list of key details that will help you cut through the spin, and get straight to the facts.
Over the last 6 months Australia has attracted significant criticism from our trading partners,including China and the U.S., over concerns that we’re free-riding on the backs of other countries’ efforts to tackle climate change. Former UN chief Kofi Annan said we’re not doing our bit, stating that Ethiopia and Rwanda are even doing more than Australia. Today’s announcement will only reinforce this criticism.
As the 13th largest emitter in the world, Australia is a crucial global climate change player - larger than 180 other countries. We’re also one of the largest consumers of coal per capita, and one of the most pollution-intensive economies in the world. Even if we reduce our emissions by 26% by 2030, we’ll emit 3 times more per person than the UK and 1.5 times more than the USA.
Tackling climate change is firmly in Australia’s national interest – it’s about protecting the Great Barrier Reef, protecting Australians against worsening heatwaves and bushfire conditions, and protecting our coastal communities from sea-level rise.
These targets fall short of the science, they fall short of global action and they fall short of what’s necessary to protect Australians from the impacts of climate change. By every measure, they fail to make the grade.
We’ve pulled together a list of key details that will help you cut through the spin, and get straight to the facts.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
1. Why do targets matter?
The Government is setting a target for how much pollution Australia will reduce in the next 15 years. Emissions reduction targets demonstrate how serious we are about tackling climate change and how quickly we intend to drive our economy away from polluting energy sources like coal, towards clean power sources like solar and wind.
Australians are already feeling the impacts of climate change. Hot days have doubled, heatwaves are becoming hotter and longer. Heatwaves kill more Australians than any other natural hazard, particularly vulnerable people like the very old and very young. Setting pollution reduction targets are crucial to tackling climate change.
2. Are the targets announced by the government adequate?
The targets are out of step with the science.
Australia, along with 193 other countries, has agreed that keeping global temperature rise below 2°C is necessary to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.
Australia’s leading climate policy advisory body the Climate Change Authority (consisting of top scientists, economists and business leaders) has done the analysis, and found we need to reduce pollution by a bare minimum of 45% on 2005 levels (or 40% on 2000 levels) to give us a reasonable chance of meeting that goal. Unfortunately, the announced targets are about half of what is needed.
Australia is already experiencing damaging climate change impacts with just 0.9°C of warming, including longer, hotter and more intense heatwaves; more frequent and intense droughts; and more frequent and severe high fire danger weather.
These targets are too weak to put Australia and the world on the path of staying below a 2°C rise in global temperature and won’t protect Australians from worsening extreme weather.
Australia is one of the most pollution intensive economies in the developed world, and these targets mean that Australia will remain one of the most pollution intensive economies in the world.
The targets are out of step with the rest of the world.
Australia is one of the highest per capita emitters in the world. For example, on a per capita basis Australians emit more than the Europeans or Chinese. Australia is also the 13th largest overall emitter in the world, larger than 180 other nations.
The targets announced today mean that Australia will:
- continue to have one of the highest emissions per capita rates in the world, higher than its major trading allies (such as the USA, China, Japan and the EU).
- have low annual rates of emissions reduction, meaning most countries would be reducing emission quicker than us.
- have a lower absolute target than other nations. As ANU economist Professor Frank Jotzo stated today, “Australia’s target for reduction in absolute emissions is significantly weaker than that of the United States and the EU, weaker than Canada’s, and on par with Japan’s.”
For the full details of how the world is tracking on climate change, check out our latest report, Halfway to Paris.
3. What science is Australia’s emissions reduction target based on?
It's important that Australia’s climate response be grounded in good science. As we've stated above, that would mean a target of a bare minimum of 45% by 2030. The government’s targets are significantly below this, and it's unclear what scientific basis the government has used to make its assessment.
4. Are other countries on track to meet their 2020 emissions reduction targets?
Many of the world’s economies are on track to meet their 2020 emissions targets. Case in point, the European Union (which comprises 28 countries and some of the world’s largest economies like Germany and the UK) has decreased emissions by 19% below 1990 levels already, and is looking to redouble its efforts post 2020. The European Union has a reduction target of 40% by 2030 relative to 1990 levels.
The U.S., once considered a climate laggard, is now on track to meet its 2020 emissions reduction targets, particularly given President Obama’s recent commitments.
5. Is Australia’s target the same as the U.S?
No. The U.S. has an emissions reduction target of 26-28% by 2025 on 2005 levels. They are aiming to achieve this reduction 5 years earlier than Australia.
6. Is Australia on track to meet its 2020 target?
On current trajectories it's not clear that Australia will achieve its 2020 target of a 5% reduction on 2000 - the 2014 UN Emissions Gap Report has found that Australia is no longer on track to meet its 2020 emissions reduction target, due to a variety of reasons including a lack of strong domestic policies.
7. Will a strong emissions reduction target damage the economy?
ClimateWorks has found that Australia could achieve a 50% emissions reduction target by 2030 with existing technology and while growing the economy.
In 2014 global emissions stalled whilst the economy grew and nations took action on climate change. The International Energy Agency found that in 2014, for the first time in 40 years, energy-related global emissions of carbon dioxide stalled, while the world’s economy continued to grow. At the same time nations around the world were moving to lower their emissions. For example in early 2014, 144 countries had renewable energy targets and 138 had renewable energy support policies in place.
It's important to remember that the cost of inaction is extremely high:
- Sea level rise will cost billions. For instance, a sea level rise of 1.1m exposes more than $226 billion in commercial, industrial, road, rail and residential assets around Australian coasts to flooding and erosion.
- Heatwaves cost Australian lives each year. Heatwaves have killed more Australians than any other natural disaster and deaths from heatwaves are projected to double over the next 40 years in Australian cities.
- The cost of the impact of coal on health is measured in millions. The Hunter Valley Coal’s annual health bill is $600 million per year according to the latest Climate and Health Alliance report.
- The cost of bushfires in Australia is measured in billions. In the decade up to 30 June 2013 the insured losses due to bushfires in Australia totalled $1.6 billion. This translates to an average loss of approximately $160 million per year over the period.
- Drought will affect Australia’s GDP. From 2020 onwards, the predicted increase in drought frequency is estimated to cost $7.3 billion annually, reducing GDP by 1% per annum.
The world’s economies are moving and Australia risks being left behind. The world is moving away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, with more clean energy capacity being added per year than fossil fuels. In fact, by 2030, more than four times as much renewable capacity will be added in comparison to fossil fuels. And all the while, Australia is missing out on the global renewable energy boom.
26% Target 'Does Not Stack Up'
David Rossiter, former greenhouse energy and data officer, Royalla, NSW
Canberra Times Letter to the Editor
At the Copenhagen climate change meeting in 2009, Australia joined around 150 other countries in committing to ensuring that global warming did not exceed 2 degrees.
Experts have estimated that this equates to a total world budget of 565 billion tonnes of carbon emissions. Australia's share of this would be about 10.1 billion tonnes beyond 2013. It sounds like a lot, but with no significant reduction from the emissions of some 550 million tonnes yearly, our budget would be used up by about 2032.
The Abbott Government's announcement of a new target of 26 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 (based on 2005 emissions) will only marginally improve that situation.
The new emissions reduction target translates to a numeric target of 450 million tonnes a year for the year 2030.
Assuming a steady drop in emissions from now to 2030 (and how this will be achieved is another question entirely), we will have used about 8 of our 10.1 billion tonnes by 2030.
The remaining allocation of 2.1 billion tonnes is likely to be used up by 2034 or 2035.
We can expect huge international pressure to remain within our 10.1 billion tonne allocation.
On this basis, therefore, we should aim to transition to a zero-carbon economy by 2035. A gentler transition to a zero-carbon economy over 30 or 40 years is possible, but only if the targets set now are more realistic and robust, say 40 per cent or 50 per cent by 2030.
In this context, Tony Abbott's comment that the 26 per cent target is both economically and environmentally responsible does not actually stack up.
He is simply making it much more difficult for future governments to manage a smooth transition to a zero-carbon economy.
Canberra Times Letter to the Editor
At the Copenhagen climate change meeting in 2009, Australia joined around 150 other countries in committing to ensuring that global warming did not exceed 2 degrees.
Experts have estimated that this equates to a total world budget of 565 billion tonnes of carbon emissions. Australia's share of this would be about 10.1 billion tonnes beyond 2013. It sounds like a lot, but with no significant reduction from the emissions of some 550 million tonnes yearly, our budget would be used up by about 2032.
The Abbott Government's announcement of a new target of 26 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 (based on 2005 emissions) will only marginally improve that situation.
The new emissions reduction target translates to a numeric target of 450 million tonnes a year for the year 2030.
Assuming a steady drop in emissions from now to 2030 (and how this will be achieved is another question entirely), we will have used about 8 of our 10.1 billion tonnes by 2030.
The remaining allocation of 2.1 billion tonnes is likely to be used up by 2034 or 2035.
We can expect huge international pressure to remain within our 10.1 billion tonne allocation.
On this basis, therefore, we should aim to transition to a zero-carbon economy by 2035. A gentler transition to a zero-carbon economy over 30 or 40 years is possible, but only if the targets set now are more realistic and robust, say 40 per cent or 50 per cent by 2030.
In this context, Tony Abbott's comment that the 26 per cent target is both economically and environmentally responsible does not actually stack up.
He is simply making it much more difficult for future governments to manage a smooth transition to a zero-carbon economy.
13/08/2015
Australia's Reduction Target 'Pathetic'
The Guardian
Australia’s “pathetic” 2030 emissions reduction target shows the country has opted out of the global effort to limit warming, according to the head of the British government’s climate change advisory body.
Lord Deben, previously a minister in the government of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, said Australia’s 26% to 28% reduction in emissions by 2030, based on 2005 levels was “simply not enough”.
“Australia is fundamentally out of step and this decision puts Australia among the ‘don’t cares’ of the international community,” said Deben, who is the chairman of the Committee on Climate Change.
“Global warming won’t wait for Mr Abbott and his government. Mr Abbott’s hubris is staggering.”
Deben, formerly known as John Gummer, said Australia’s “pathetic” target showed it had “opted out of the greatest physical challenge of our times” and ignored the leadership of US president Barack Obama, the European Union and Pope Francis.
“Australia’s friends know she could do so much better than this and all of us abroad will work with all those people who are determined to overturn this irrational decision,” he said.
The condemnation of Australia’s climate commitment, to be taken to crunch international talks in Paris later this year, was echoed by the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands – one of the low-lying Pacific nations at acute risk from sea level rises.
“Australia’s weak target is another serious blow to its international reputation,” said Tony de Brum.
“As with prime minister Abbott’s attempt to ignore climate change when hosting the G20 last year, this will send a serious shudder through the Pacific and raise concern amongst its closest allies, including the United States and Europe.”
De Brum, who has repeatedly called on Australia to show regional leadership on climate change, said it was disappointing Abbott had not embraced clean energy more readily.
“If the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, the Great Barrier Reef would disappear,” he said. “So would my country, and the other vulnerable atoll nations on Australia’s doorstep.”
Tony Abbott has defended yesterday’s announcement of Australia’s post-2020 emissions target, insisting it was “highly comparable” to what other industrialised countries have committed to.
“This is a very respectable figure, it’s environmentally responsible – and above all else, it’s economically responsible,” he told the ABC on Wednesday.
“We are confident we can achieve this without clobbering jobs and growth because in the end that’s what we want – we want more jobs and we want higher economic growth because that means more prosperity.
“We are not expecting a reduction in the coal industry. Obviously in the ordinary course of events some mines will close, but I suspect more mines will open.”
Environmentalists have lambasted Australia’s target, although comparisons to other countries are not straightforward due to the differing starting points for emissions cuts. According to Bloomberg New Energy finance, Australia’s emissions pledge is less ambitious than the EU and US, but more ambitious than Japan and South Korea.
When commitments are translated to the 2005 baseline year used by Australia, it appears the 26% to 28% reduction is towards the lower end when compared to other countries.
The US has a 26% to 28% reduction target, but for five years earlier in 2025. The equivalent 2030 target is 41%. The UK has a 50% reduction by 2025, based on 1990 levels, which translates as a 48% cut when compared directly to Australia’s 2005 baseline.
New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, the EU and Canada also have greater planned cuts than Australia when their commitments are considered with a 2005 starting point.
Conversely, Japan and Norway have weaker targets than Australia. China, the world’s largest emitter, has no set reduction target beyond a pledge its carbon dioxide emissions will peak by 2030.
The government’s independent Climate Change Authority recommended emissions be slashed between 45% to 65% by 2030, based on 2005 levels. The decision not to adopt this recommendation means Australia will remain the highest per capita emitter in the industrialised world.
Beyond the target itself, there are serious questions over whether the Coalition has adequate policies to accelerate emissions cuts. Just $200m a year until 2030 has been set aside to buy abated emissions through the Direct Action plan, despite several studies of the plan showing it won’t be sufficient.
The Australian Industry Group, which represents more than 60,000 businesses, said the Direct Action emission reduction fund would need between $100bn and $250bn in taxpayer funds in the decade to 2030 to reach the target. The Climate Institute estimates the cost at between $28bn to $200bn.
The government is pinning a large portion of its emissions cuts on “other” means of reductions, including technology changes that do not yet exist. A price on carbon, which was dismantled last year, will not return under the Coalition due to its insistence it will drive up electricity prices and cause job losses.
Australia’s “pathetic” 2030 emissions reduction target shows the country has opted out of the global effort to limit warming, according to the head of the British government’s climate change advisory body.
Lord Deben, previously a minister in the government of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, said Australia’s 26% to 28% reduction in emissions by 2030, based on 2005 levels was “simply not enough”.
“Australia is fundamentally out of step and this decision puts Australia among the ‘don’t cares’ of the international community,” said Deben, who is the chairman of the Committee on Climate Change.
“Global warming won’t wait for Mr Abbott and his government. Mr Abbott’s hubris is staggering.”
Deben, formerly known as John Gummer, said Australia’s “pathetic” target showed it had “opted out of the greatest physical challenge of our times” and ignored the leadership of US president Barack Obama, the European Union and Pope Francis.
“Australia’s friends know she could do so much better than this and all of us abroad will work with all those people who are determined to overturn this irrational decision,” he said.
The condemnation of Australia’s climate commitment, to be taken to crunch international talks in Paris later this year, was echoed by the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands – one of the low-lying Pacific nations at acute risk from sea level rises.
“Australia’s weak target is another serious blow to its international reputation,” said Tony de Brum.
“As with prime minister Abbott’s attempt to ignore climate change when hosting the G20 last year, this will send a serious shudder through the Pacific and raise concern amongst its closest allies, including the United States and Europe.”
De Brum, who has repeatedly called on Australia to show regional leadership on climate change, said it was disappointing Abbott had not embraced clean energy more readily.
“If the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, the Great Barrier Reef would disappear,” he said. “So would my country, and the other vulnerable atoll nations on Australia’s doorstep.”
Tony Abbott has defended yesterday’s announcement of Australia’s post-2020 emissions target, insisting it was “highly comparable” to what other industrialised countries have committed to.
“This is a very respectable figure, it’s environmentally responsible – and above all else, it’s economically responsible,” he told the ABC on Wednesday.
“We are confident we can achieve this without clobbering jobs and growth because in the end that’s what we want – we want more jobs and we want higher economic growth because that means more prosperity.
“We are not expecting a reduction in the coal industry. Obviously in the ordinary course of events some mines will close, but I suspect more mines will open.”
Environmentalists have lambasted Australia’s target, although comparisons to other countries are not straightforward due to the differing starting points for emissions cuts. According to Bloomberg New Energy finance, Australia’s emissions pledge is less ambitious than the EU and US, but more ambitious than Japan and South Korea.
When commitments are translated to the 2005 baseline year used by Australia, it appears the 26% to 28% reduction is towards the lower end when compared to other countries.The US has a 26% to 28% reduction target, but for five years earlier in 2025. The equivalent 2030 target is 41%. The UK has a 50% reduction by 2025, based on 1990 levels, which translates as a 48% cut when compared directly to Australia’s 2005 baseline.
New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, the EU and Canada also have greater planned cuts than Australia when their commitments are considered with a 2005 starting point.
Conversely, Japan and Norway have weaker targets than Australia. China, the world’s largest emitter, has no set reduction target beyond a pledge its carbon dioxide emissions will peak by 2030.
The government’s independent Climate Change Authority recommended emissions be slashed between 45% to 65% by 2030, based on 2005 levels. The decision not to adopt this recommendation means Australia will remain the highest per capita emitter in the industrialised world.
Beyond the target itself, there are serious questions over whether the Coalition has adequate policies to accelerate emissions cuts. Just $200m a year until 2030 has been set aside to buy abated emissions through the Direct Action plan, despite several studies of the plan showing it won’t be sufficient.
The Australian Industry Group, which represents more than 60,000 businesses, said the Direct Action emission reduction fund would need between $100bn and $250bn in taxpayer funds in the decade to 2030 to reach the target. The Climate Institute estimates the cost at between $28bn to $200bn.
The government is pinning a large portion of its emissions cuts on “other” means of reductions, including technology changes that do not yet exist. A price on carbon, which was dismantled last year, will not return under the Coalition due to its insistence it will drive up electricity prices and cause job losses.
12/08/2015
Climate Change: CSIRO Axes Annual Attitudes Survey
SMH
The CSIRO has cancelled its annual survey of Australians' attitudes to climate change and won't release the results of its 2014 study until late this year.
The delay, says Labor, means the public will miss out on information that counters the Abbott government's "scare campaign" on climate issues.
The science agency had conducted the annual survey for five years, mostly in July and August, often polling the same people to create a long-term view of how Australians view global warming and their support for action.
In the most recent published report, released in February 2014, about 40 per cent of the 5219 people surveyed had participated in a previous study.
In the 2013 poll, 86 per cent agreed with the statement that climate change was occurring and 7.6 per cent disagreed.
CSIRO conducted another survey last year but the findings will be about 14 months old by the time it is released. It is understood financial constraints are a factor behind the change.
The CSIRO's funding has been cut several times in recent years, including $111 million in the first Abbott government budget. The cuts were expected to lead to the loss of as many as a fifth of its staff over two years.
"We are currently in the process of analysing the results, which will be communicated by the end of the October," a spokeswoman said. "We have no plans at the moment for further surveys."
News of the cancelled surveys comes as the Abbott government is expected to release its post-2020 carbon reduction goals on Tuesday that it will take to the global climate summit planned for Paris starting November 30.
The government on Tuesday announced Australia would aim to reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 26-28 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030.
That goal, which is about a 19 per cent reduction on 2000 levels, would be among the least ambitious by an industrialised nation, according to data compiled by the Climate Change Authority. Australia should be aiming for a 40 to 60 per cent reduction by then, the agency said in a recent report.
Most surveys find Australians overwhelmingly support action on climate change, with about two in three people saying the government should take the issue more seriously, according to a report released on Monday by the Climate Institute.
A spokeswoman for Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said the issue was one for the CSIRO to address: "CSIRO manages its own day-to-day decisions and allocation of resources, so it's not something the Minister would comment on."
'Sick' of reports
"Tony Abbott is sick of all the reports that show Australians want climate change action," said Mark Butler, Labor's climate change spokesman.
"This is obviously at odds with Tony Abbott's views on climate change, and he would prefer to keep ignoring the problem," Mr Butler said. "Removing this important report from the public domain shows Tony Abbott's general disregard for science, but also his frustration that his scare campaigns on climate change are not working."
Greens deputy leader and environment spokeswoman Larissa Waters said the government's "pathetic" carbon reduction targets indicate it is beholden to its "big polluting donors".
"The Abbott government needs to start listening to everyday Australians scientists and the international community, instead of blocking his ears and acting as a puppet for the dying coal industry," Senator Waters said.
Last year's report found that attitudes to climate change had "remained relatively stable since 2010", with repeat respondents increasing their levels of trust in agencies "including environmental group scientists and government scientists to provide truthful information about climate change".
Stable view
Separately, a study by researchers in the US and CSIRO, has found that public acceptance and support for action on carbon pricing held steady during the two weeks before and after the 2013 federal election.
Despite the carbon tax issue being one of the most contentious during the run-up, support remained little changed during the elections, the researchers including Iain Walker, who works at CSIRO and the University of WA, found.
"[T]he carbon pricing legislation was not as unpopular as many, especially on the conservative side of politics claimed, with nearly half of the population finding the policy acceptable..," according to the paper published this week in the Nature Climate Change journal.
Acceptance of carbon prices was higher than support for the policy, however, implying that future proponents of such policies should design their approach to deal with acceptance and support differently, the researchers said.
"Future research should attempt to disentangle opposition from lack of support, ambivalence from apathy, and 'rejection' from 'resistance'," the paper said.
The CSIRO has cancelled its annual survey of Australians' attitudes to climate change and won't release the results of its 2014 study until late this year.
The delay, says Labor, means the public will miss out on information that counters the Abbott government's "scare campaign" on climate issues.
The science agency had conducted the annual survey for five years, mostly in July and August, often polling the same people to create a long-term view of how Australians view global warming and their support for action.
In the most recent published report, released in February 2014, about 40 per cent of the 5219 people surveyed had participated in a previous study.
In the 2013 poll, 86 per cent agreed with the statement that climate change was occurring and 7.6 per cent disagreed.
CSIRO conducted another survey last year but the findings will be about 14 months old by the time it is released. It is understood financial constraints are a factor behind the change.
The CSIRO's funding has been cut several times in recent years, including $111 million in the first Abbott government budget. The cuts were expected to lead to the loss of as many as a fifth of its staff over two years.
"We are currently in the process of analysing the results, which will be communicated by the end of the October," a spokeswoman said. "We have no plans at the moment for further surveys."
News of the cancelled surveys comes as the Abbott government is expected to release its post-2020 carbon reduction goals on Tuesday that it will take to the global climate summit planned for Paris starting November 30.
The government on Tuesday announced Australia would aim to reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 26-28 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030.
That goal, which is about a 19 per cent reduction on 2000 levels, would be among the least ambitious by an industrialised nation, according to data compiled by the Climate Change Authority. Australia should be aiming for a 40 to 60 per cent reduction by then, the agency said in a recent report.
Most surveys find Australians overwhelmingly support action on climate change, with about two in three people saying the government should take the issue more seriously, according to a report released on Monday by the Climate Institute.
A spokeswoman for Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said the issue was one for the CSIRO to address: "CSIRO manages its own day-to-day decisions and allocation of resources, so it's not something the Minister would comment on."
'Sick' of reports
"Tony Abbott is sick of all the reports that show Australians want climate change action," said Mark Butler, Labor's climate change spokesman.
"This is obviously at odds with Tony Abbott's views on climate change, and he would prefer to keep ignoring the problem," Mr Butler said. "Removing this important report from the public domain shows Tony Abbott's general disregard for science, but also his frustration that his scare campaigns on climate change are not working."
Greens deputy leader and environment spokeswoman Larissa Waters said the government's "pathetic" carbon reduction targets indicate it is beholden to its "big polluting donors".
"The Abbott government needs to start listening to everyday Australians scientists and the international community, instead of blocking his ears and acting as a puppet for the dying coal industry," Senator Waters said.
Last year's report found that attitudes to climate change had "remained relatively stable since 2010", with repeat respondents increasing their levels of trust in agencies "including environmental group scientists and government scientists to provide truthful information about climate change".
Stable view
Separately, a study by researchers in the US and CSIRO, has found that public acceptance and support for action on carbon pricing held steady during the two weeks before and after the 2013 federal election.
Despite the carbon tax issue being one of the most contentious during the run-up, support remained little changed during the elections, the researchers including Iain Walker, who works at CSIRO and the University of WA, found.
"[T]he carbon pricing legislation was not as unpopular as many, especially on the conservative side of politics claimed, with nearly half of the population finding the policy acceptable..," according to the paper published this week in the Nature Climate Change journal.
Acceptance of carbon prices was higher than support for the policy, however, implying that future proponents of such policies should design their approach to deal with acceptance and support differently, the researchers said.
"Future research should attempt to disentangle opposition from lack of support, ambivalence from apathy, and 'rejection' from 'resistance'," the paper said.
Point of No Return
RollingStone
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization." Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."
Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."
Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still "unclear" whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.
And yet, these aren't even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth's biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.
Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life.
Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. "It's unbelievable," Thomas told a local paper. "Whales are all over the place." Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented "haul out" of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.
Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that's ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs.
No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he's been seeing this year is deeply troubling.
Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn't exist without salmon.
But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.
"You talk to fishermen, and they all say: 'We've never seen anything like this before,' " says Peterson. "So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, 'What the hell's going on?' "
Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year's, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven't yet figured out precisely what's behind them and why they happen when they do. It's not a permanent change — the ocean's temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.
"The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature," says Peterson, "but the main problem we've had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can't keep up with it, and neither can the animals." Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: "At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over."
Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean's food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a "quite traumatic" impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it's converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means "the whole food chain is going to be different."
The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we're heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she's trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren't. The ancient data she studies shows "really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We're talking less than a decade."
For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling "the blob" — a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that's thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.
Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what's happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.
A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that's persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" — weather patterns just aren't supposed to last this long.
What's increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world's oceans, it's not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world's reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.
Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it's also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it's been blamed on accelerated beach erosion "almost as significant as some hurricane events."
Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study's authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails' shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled "cauliflower" or "sandpaper." A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world's top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an "effectively irreversible" change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world's oceans.
"I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct," James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. "But this change we're seeing is happening so fast it's almost instantaneous."
Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next.
The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.
So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.
Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.
Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered "Great Dying" took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.
With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans' most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. "Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today," Moffitt said.
As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.
For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she's seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world's marine ecosystems.
The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: "A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn't mean it's not a good indicator of change."
Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: "This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?"
Alin's frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins "heightened the whole issue," she says. "I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed."
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she's already planning her exit strategy: "If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don't have an exit strategy. . . . So that's who I'm here trying to help."
James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That's because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that's also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.
One group Hansen is helping is Our Children's Trust, a legal advocacy organization that's filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.
A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn't just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it's also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.
Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that's enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph.
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization." Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."
Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."
Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still "unclear" whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.
And yet, these aren't even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth's biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.
Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life.
Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. "It's unbelievable," Thomas told a local paper. "Whales are all over the place." Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented "haul out" of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.
Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that's ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs.
No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he's been seeing this year is deeply troubling.
Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn't exist without salmon.
But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.
"You talk to fishermen, and they all say: 'We've never seen anything like this before,' " says Peterson. "So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, 'What the hell's going on?' "
Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year's, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven't yet figured out precisely what's behind them and why they happen when they do. It's not a permanent change — the ocean's temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.
"The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature," says Peterson, "but the main problem we've had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can't keep up with it, and neither can the animals." Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: "At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over."
Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean's food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a "quite traumatic" impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it's converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means "the whole food chain is going to be different."
The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we're heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she's trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren't. The ancient data she studies shows "really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We're talking less than a decade."
For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling "the blob" — a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that's thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.
Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what's happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.
A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that's persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" — weather patterns just aren't supposed to last this long.
What's increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world's oceans, it's not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world's reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.
Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it's also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it's been blamed on accelerated beach erosion "almost as significant as some hurricane events."
Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study's authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails' shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled "cauliflower" or "sandpaper." A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world's top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an "effectively irreversible" change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world's oceans.
"I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct," James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. "But this change we're seeing is happening so fast it's almost instantaneous."
Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next.
The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.
So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.
Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.
Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered "Great Dying" took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.
With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans' most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. "Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today," Moffitt said.
As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.
For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she's seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world's marine ecosystems.
The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: "A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn't mean it's not a good indicator of change."
Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: "This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?"
Alin's frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins "heightened the whole issue," she says. "I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed."
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she's already planning her exit strategy: "If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don't have an exit strategy. . . . So that's who I'm here trying to help."
James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That's because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that's also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.
One group Hansen is helping is Our Children's Trust, a legal advocacy organization that's filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.
A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn't just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it's also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.
Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that's enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph.
Carbon Emissions Comparison
ABC
Australia has set a target to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 26 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030.
Australia is the world's 13th biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and the highest emitter per capita among the top 15.
It has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030.
In July, the Climate Change Authority said if the Australian Government was to do its fair share to keep the 2C commitment, it would need to reduce emissions by 40 to 60 per cent by 2030, based on the level of emissions from the year 2000.
That translates to an emissions reduction of 45 to 65 per cent from the levels of the year 2005.
The Climate Action Tracker group says current policies "will result in emissions increasing by 12 to 18 per cent above 2000 emissions levels".
The countries mapped here are the top 15 emitters of carbon dioxide, according to 2011 data from the World Resources Institute.
China is the world's top emitter in total and of the top 15 emitters, Australia is the largest emitter per capita.
Who has set what emissions reduction targets?
Over the past year, countries have been announcing their emissions reductions targets for beyond the end of the decade, summarising the positions they intend to commit to at the United Nations' Paris climate summit in December.
The pledges also form part of a commitment to keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times (1880).
Currently, temperatures have risen by 0.85C between 1880 and 2012, according to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In July, the Climate Change Authority said if the Australian Government was to do its fair share to keep the 2C commitment, it would need to reduce emissions by 40 to 60 per cent by 2030, based on the level of emissions from the year 2000.
This translates to an emissions reduction of 45 to 65 per cent from the levels of the year 2005.
Notes:
Australia has set a target to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 26 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030.
Australia is the world's 13th biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and the highest emitter per capita among the top 15.
It has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030.
In July, the Climate Change Authority said if the Australian Government was to do its fair share to keep the 2C commitment, it would need to reduce emissions by 40 to 60 per cent by 2030, based on the level of emissions from the year 2000.
That translates to an emissions reduction of 45 to 65 per cent from the levels of the year 2005.
The Climate Action Tracker group says current policies "will result in emissions increasing by 12 to 18 per cent above 2000 emissions levels".
The countries mapped here are the top 15 emitters of carbon dioxide, according to 2011 data from the World Resources Institute.
China is the world's top emitter in total and of the top 15 emitters, Australia is the largest emitter per capita.
Who has set what emissions reduction targets?
Over the past year, countries have been announcing their emissions reductions targets for beyond the end of the decade, summarising the positions they intend to commit to at the United Nations' Paris climate summit in December.
The pledges also form part of a commitment to keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times (1880).
Currently, temperatures have risen by 0.85C between 1880 and 2012, according to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In July, the Climate Change Authority said if the Australian Government was to do its fair share to keep the 2C commitment, it would need to reduce emissions by 40 to 60 per cent by 2030, based on the level of emissions from the year 2000.
This translates to an emissions reduction of 45 to 65 per cent from the levels of the year 2005.
Notes:
- The top end of Australia's target range of 26 per cent to 28 per cent has been included.
- The US target is for a 26 per cent to 28 per cent reduction based on 2005 levels, however its longer-term target is for an 83 per cent reduction by 2050 based on 2005 levels. Based on this, the Climate Institute estimates the 2030 target will need to be 41 per cent based on 2005 levels.
- The UK has committed to reduce emissions by at least 80 per cent in 2050 based on 1990 levels. Based on this, the Climate Institute estimates the 2030 target will need to be 48 per cent based on 2005 levels.
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