Obama’s Climate Change Legacy

TIME

President Barack Obama brought his crusade against climate change to Alaska this week with a three-day trip designed to highlight the devastating effects of global warming and promote initiatives to address the issue.
“Human activity is disrupting the climate, in many ways faster than we previously thought,” Obama told a meeting of international delegates in Anchorage Monday. “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem. It is happening here. It is happening now.”
The visit to Alaska, a state that is both rich in fossil fuels and particularly vulnerable to climate change, places Obama at the heart of the struggle to adapt. Rising sea levels, devastating wildfires and coastal erosion all threaten communities across the state, thanks largely climate change. But, at the same time, Alaska benefits from the very fossil fuels that help cause man-made global warming. Oil resources support thousands of jobs in the state and allow the state to avoid levying income or sales tax. Every year the state government issues a royalty check to state residents (nearly $1,900 in 2014) funded by the oil industry.
While Obama has billed his trip as an opportunity to highlight the threat of climate change—and the steps his Administration is taking to fight it—his policies embody the tension between the vital fossil fuels play in the U.S. economy and the need to reduce carbon emissions. Obama has proposed aggressive U.S. action on climate change, including a 26% to 28% reduction in carbon emissions by 2025 from 2005 levels. But he has also supported measures to open oil drilling in the Arctic, a move condemned by environmentalists angered over the danger of an disastrous oil spill and the threat of more carbon emissions.
“Obama’s visit to Alaska is really significant, not just because he’s the first sitting president to visit this state, but because Alaska is really at the front lines of climate change in the U.S. right now,” said Marissa Knodel, a climate change campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “But, while he’s claiming he wants to be a climate leader, he’s doing the exact opposite by opening offshore oil and gas to companies like Shell for drilling.”
Obama, whose arrival in Anchorage on Monday was met with protest from opponents of drilling, has said that allowing limited drilling will allow the U.S. to remain energy independent while it pursues alternatives to fossil fuels. “Now even as we accelerate [the clean energy] transition, our economy still has to rely on oil and gas,” Obama said in his weekly radio address days before traveling to Alaska. “As long as that’s the case, I believe we should rely more on domestic production than on foreign imports.”
Citing academic research, climate change advocates argue that burning all the fossil fuels buried in the Arctic would contribute to global warming to an unsafe degree. The region contains nearly a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And a 2014 study published in the journal Nature concluded that “development of resources in the Arctic and any increase in unconventional oil production are incommensurate with efforts to limit average global warming” to a level deemed acceptable by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Not that you’d know the President supported Arctic drilling from his Alaska visit. In appearance after appearance, the President highlighted the ways in which climate change has threatened the region. There may not have been a better place for such a pitch. The state has warmed by 3.4°F (1.9°C) over the past 50 years, twice as fast as the country at large over, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This past winter was especially warm in Alaska, with temperatures 4 to 10°F (2 to 5.6°C) warmer than normal, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Experts expect temperatures to rise as much as 7.0°F (3.9°C) by 2100.
Temperature increases have contributed to melting ice and glaciers in the region. In total, 75 billion tons of ice from glaciers melts in the state each year, according to a recent study in Geophysical Research Letters. The melting of glaciers contributes to global sea level rise, in addition to destroying a local treasure and tourist draw. In the Alaskan Arctic, melting ice has threatened the habitats of many native animals, including the polar bear. Just last week thousands of Arctic walruses flocked to an Alaskan shore, likely because they couldn’t find ice haul out. Ice loss, sea level rise and warmer waters have also contributed to the erosion of the state’s coast at an average rate of 4.6 feet (1.4 meters) each year. Entire communities may need to be relocated just to survive.
At the same time the gradual loss of Arctic sea ice has opened new shipping possibilities in the far North—which in turn has contributed to a battle of influence in the Arctic between the U.S. and Russia, one Washington is seen at risk of losing. During his trip, Obama announced a number of measures aimed at quelling those concerns, including an expanded U.S. naval presence in the region.
Beyond melting ice, Obama highlighted a laundry list of climate facing the region: melting permafrost, dramatic storm surges and changing migratory routes for animals hunted by native Alaskans.
The trip to Alaska is the latest in a series of effort by the President to draw attention to global climate change and position the U.S. as a leader on the issue. The White House recently finalized the Clean Power Plan, which mandates emission reductions from power plants, and announced initiatives to expand solar power and billions of dollars in private sector commitments to finance renewable energy production. Climate change was also in the background of Obama’s visit to New Orleans last week for the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
The White House hopes that recent climate actions will give the U.S. a leadership position at a United Nations conference on climate change in Paris later this year. Climate advocates and global leaders alike hope that summit will yield the world’s first binding and global agreement to address global warming that will require concrete cuts to curb carbon emissions.
“This year, in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reaches an agreement to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can,” said Obama in a speech on Monday. “We can have a legitimate debate about how we are going to address this problem; we cannot deny the science.”

Why NASA’s so worried that Greenland’s melting could speed up

The Washington Post

NASA has briefed the press on its “intensive research effort” into the rate and causes of sea level rise, releasing a suite of new graphics and visualizations showing how precisely the agency is measuring the upward creep of the oceans, currently at a rate of 3.21 millimeters per year.
It would be easy to lose yourself in all of the new material, but if there’s one slide above all that really matters, it’s this one:

NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) twin satellites have measured the loss of ice mass from Earth’s polar ice sheets since 2002. (Credit: Steve Nerem/CU-Boulder)

Antarctica contains vastly more ice than Greenland. However, Greenland is subjected to the rapidly warming temperatures of the Arctic. The result is that for now at least — and as you can see above — it is losing ice mass considerably faster than Antarctica is, to the tune of several hundred gigatons a year.
That’s an almost unfathomable amount — a gigaton is a billion metric tons — but spread around the world, it’s only equivalent to .74 millimeters of average sea-level rise per year (that’s the figure in the center of the graph). Thus, adding together Greenland and Antarctica’s contributions right now gives you a millimeter of annual sea level rise, roughly — and the remaining 2 millimeters  comes from the expansion of ocean water as it warms, and from the melting of mountain and tidewater glaciers around the world (Alaska’s, for instance, are losing  75 gigatons a year).
The expansion of sea water will continue as the world warms further — but glaciers around the world will contribute less and less to sea level rise in the future, as they have less ice to lose. But the planet will still be able to look forward to the long melting of Greenland and Antarctica, which have 20 feet and 200 feet of potential sea level rise, respectively, contained in their ice sheets.
The critical question thus becomes: Is Greenland likely to lose even more ice than it’s currently losing per year — and could Antarctica do the same?
What’s pretty clear from NASA’s recent briefings and communications on this subject is that its scientists very much worry that they might.
NASA is flexing its muscles to study Greenland in particular, and that entails two major types of research: studying the melting that is occurring on top of the ice sheet, and studying the melting of its outlying, oceanfront glaciers, which often calve off gigaton-sized icebergs into the sea, with enough force to generate powerful earthquakes.
1. Water flow on the ice sheet’s surface. On top of the ice sheet, summer meltwater forms lakes and fast-running rivers, which sometimes plunge deep below the ice sheet when they hit sudden “moulins,” or crevices. Lakes also sometimes vanish suddenly, draining water down into the ice sheet below. Both of these mechanisms not only give the surface water access to the ocean, they also move the ice sheet itself, by lubricating its base. It’s a potential feedback and accelerator of Greenland’s melting, which is why the process is so important to further investigate.

Frightening, yet beautiful: Greenland’s melting glaciers

Thus, one of the key NASA research projects is to actually measure the water flow that is occurring atop the Greenland ice sheet. As Laurence Smith, a University of California Los Angeles researcher conducting the work explained on a Friday NASA TV program detailing the Greenland work, “the overall trend has been an increasing extent, intensity, and duration of the melt season on the surface of the ice.”

Smith and his team camped atop the ice sheet and sought to measure the flow rate. The ice sheet surface contains thousands of moulins, notes Vena Chu, a University of California-Berkeley researcher who collaborated with Smith and also appeared on NASA TV Friday. When water falls down the moulins, “it takes water into the bottom of the ice sheet, and that’s where it can really affect how fast the ice is flowing.”
This surface melt process is one way that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could speed up. But it’s not the only one:
2. Ocean water melting glaciers. Along the outside of the ice sheet, multiple glaciers stretch finger-like towards the sea, often flowing out into deep fjords — submerged canyons scraped by glaciers of long-ago eras — with their bases anchored well below the level of the water. The rapidly retreating Jakobshavn glacier is one of these — it’s the fastest-moving glacier in Greenland, and single-handedly contributed about a millimeter to sea level rise from 2000 to 2011. 
Currently, the glacier’s submerged bed is some 1,300 meters below sea level, and this great depth seems to be enabling its rapid retreat, because there is so much contact with the warmer ocean. “The potential for large losses from Greenland is likely to be determined by the depth and inland extent of the troughs through which its outlet glaciers drain,” noted a recent study of the Jakobshavn glacier.
“Observations suggest we should be very cautious to conclude too soon that conservative scenarios are reasonable. They may not be,” said Eric Rignot, a University of California Irvine and NASA glaciologist, at a NASA press call Wednesday in which he discussed changes to both Antarctica and Greenland. “And this is at the heart of what we at NASA, and other national and international agencies are working on right now.”
That’s what NASA’s aptly–named OMG (Oceans Melting Greenland) mission aims to study. Over the next five years, ships, aircraft overflights, and deployed sensors will attempt to map the depths and shapes of the ocean floor and undersea canyons all around Greenland’s glaciers, as well as the temperature and salinity characteristics of the water. The goal is to see just how much warm water is reaching them, which in turn will influence their capacity to melt.
The key thing to understand about this region is that in the oceans around Greenland, water has some strange characteristics. “What’s really interesting is that the water around Greenland is sort of upside down. You have warm water underneath a layer of cold water,” explained Josh Willis, NASA’s lead researcher on OMG, on the NASA briefing Friday.
“The warm water is at depth because it’s extra salty,” Willis continued. “The cold water comes from the Arctic and it’s very fresh.”
The question then becomes how much of the warm water manages to sneak up to to the glaciers. And that depends on a complicated system deep below the water surface where bedrock, glacier, and ocean meet. The nature of that system can be different at every glacier.
And there’s yet another complexity — water that originated on the ice sheet’s surface, but then escaped down to its base, can flow out at the location of the glaciers. Sometimes, this water “comes out right at the bottom of the ice, and it’s light and fresh, it surfaces,” Willis said on Friday. “That can pull warm water in towards the glacier.”
That’s where OMG comes in — trying to map and record all of this, and get a handle on the complexities of glacier position, seafloor features, and ocean water characteristics.
So in sum, as NASA deploys new resources to Greenland, we may soon know whether on the figure above, Greenland’s line will continue its current downward slope, or plunge more steeply.

Australia Lagging Behind In Climate Action

The Canberra Times -  Paul Malone

If you examine a graph of Australian sharemarket prices over the last 50 years you will notice a long upward trend broken by periods such as those from 1970 to 1978 and from 2007 to 2013 when overall prices were flat.
This is typical of any graph of a trend. The real world doesn't run smoothly.
Scientists know that data will not always sit comfortably on the line. If it does, they'd be inclined to suspect something was amiss.
Global warming deniers either do understand this or choose to mislead their followers. Advertisement
For some years now they have claimed that global temperatures have "plateaued". They argue that the data does not support the theory of human-induced climate change.
Now retired Liberal senator Nick Minchin led the Australian deniers, saying back in March 2011: "I think what's occurred is that there was a warming period from about '75 to the year 2000. It was part of a natural cycle of warning that comes in 25, 30-year cycles. The world has basically stabilised in terms of temperature since about 2000. There are many, many scientists who actually think we could be entering a cooling phase and I for one think that is more than likely."
Such views have been promoted in many media outlets and been given undue prominence, particularly by News Ltd papers.
Unfortunately for the deniers, the latest report from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does not support their claims. Gathering data from 1500 weather stations and numerous buoys and ships around the world NOAA has found that July was the warmest month in its 136 years of temperature records.
Not only that. The first seven months of 2015 were the warmest such period on record – 0.85 degrees above the 20th century average; and the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has been as fast, or faster than that of the last half of the 20th century.
Australian scientists have found much the same as their American counterparts. The Climate Council reported last week that the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s and the 2000s were warmer than the 1990s. All three decades were hotter than any preceding decade since 1850.
The line may not be perfect, the gradient may not be as steep as some had predicted, but the trend is clear.
The evidence for climate change comes from a host of different scientific perspectives – from basic physics and chemistry, to the meteorology and climate change sciences themselves; marine and coral studies; Arctic and Antarctic research; geology and biology.
To accept the deniers' argument requires you to believe in a conspiracy of unbelievable dimensions. The starting point would be to get researchers from 195 countries on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to come to the same conclusion. (Anyone who's ever been on a committee knows how hard it is to get three people to agree on something.)
There's no doubt about the science – the burning of coal, oil and gas is driving dramatic changes in our climate.
The latest report from the Climate Council says climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of many extreme weather events, including heatwaves and extreme bushfire conditions. Hot days have doubled in the last 50 years, while heatwaves have become hotter, last longer and occur more often.
Over the last 30 years extreme fire weather has increased in the populous south-east region of Australia – southern NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and parts of South Australia. Extreme sea-level events have tripled at Sydney and Fremantle since the middle of the 20th century.
Further increases in extreme heat in Australia are likely, with more frequent and more intense hot days and longer and more severe heatwaves. Deaths from heatwaves are projected to double over the next 40 years in Australian cities.
And, the council says, while action is building worldwide, Australia is lagging behind.
The constraints to moving forward are no longer technological or economic. They are political, institutional and ideological.
Australia must cut its greenhouse gas emissions much more deeply and rapidly, the council says. The government's recent pledge to cut emissions by 26 to 28 per cent compared with 2005 levels, by 2030 is not good enough.
Two maps (7a and 7b page C13) in the council's report compare rainfall from 1997 to 2013 with the rainfall over the reference period 1900 to 2013 and deserve careful policy consideration.
They suggest that cool-season rainfall is likely to decline across the southern part of Australia with the winter decreases as much as 50 per cent for south-west Western Australia.
The researchers say that the direction and magnitude of rainfall change in other seasons in southern Australia, and across the rest of the continent in all seasons, are uncertain.
But a layperson might conclude that northern and central Australia is getting a lot more rain. What might governments make of that? Will the flooding of Lake Eyre become a regular event?
There are many other policy matters that must be considered.
The Climate Council points out that the quantity of fossil fuel reserves that can be burned must be reduced if we want a better than even chance of limiting the rise in global temperature to no more than 2 degrees.
"Under any set of assumptions, effectively tackling climate change requires that most of the world's fossil fuels be left in the ground, unburned," the council concludes.
Coal, Australia's second-largest export, is the fossil fuel with the greatest proportion that cannot be used. The council says 88 per cent of global reserves are unburnable.
For Australia under any set of assumptions, including the use of carbon capture and storage technology, more than 90 per cent of coal reserves cannot be burned.
Furthermore, the council says, meeting the 2 degrees policy target implies that it is highly unlikely that any of Australia's potential coal resources beyond the reserves already being exploited can ever be developed.
It's time governments and policymakers accepted and planned for this reality.

Extreme Weather

Catalyst, ABC Television

TRANSCRIPT

Comments

download segment mp4 (average size 10 MB)

NARRATION
Heat waves that kill tens of thousands. Apocalyptic floods. Blizzards in the Middle East. How is it that a slightly warmer atmosphere can create weather that swings from one extreme to the next? From lazy jet streams to baking soils, in this report we explain the mechanisms behind some of the most catastrophic events of the decade.

Anja Taylor
Understanding exactly how a warmer world drives weather wild is crucial to predicting just how bumpy a ride we're in for.

NARRATION
In 2003, a heatwave settled over Europe. But this was no ordinary heatwave. By the time it was over, more than 40,000 people were dead.

Dr Erich Fischer
So 2003 was remarkable in many aspects. It was far warmer than ever before - two to five degrees on average over the whole summer.

NARRATION
It was likely the hottest weather event in Europe in 500 years. Yet, just seven years later, an even more intense heatwave hit Russia, setting the country on fire. Summer temperatures reached up to 13 degrees above average, and the death toll from heat stress and respiratory illness was estimated at more than 50,000.

Dr Erich Fischer
It was much larger in spatial extent, so it covered almost two million square kilometres. Really, we're not that used to such extremely hot summers. So it is surprising to see a clustering of such strong events. It wasn't only the two, there were three other very warm summers within the same decade.
Anja Taylor
Global average temperatures have only increased by 0.8 of a degree Celsius. One would think that this would just lead to slightly warmer summers. But, actually, it's greatly increasing the chances of extremely hot weather.

NARRATION
This past year in Australia, we've seen plenty of heat. At the Bureau of Meteorology, forecasters have been watching record after record tumble.

Dr Karl Braganza
January was the hottest month on record. The summer was the hottest on record. And the sea surface temperatures around Australia were the hottest on record. We had temperatures in Bass Strait, south of Melbourne and south of Adelaide, up to six degrees above average. But, in terms of heatwaves, what we find is the elevated ocean temperatures reduce the amount of cold outbreaks we get. And, particularly during April, we had a prolonged heatwave with very hot night-time temperatures, and those sustained night-time temperatures are indicative of warmer waters to the south of Australia, and that's what we saw.

NARRATION
Although an exceptional year, it's not outside the range of what's now considered normal. If you plot temperature records, they fall in a typical bell-curve pattern, with the majority only a small deviation from the average, and the outliers representing extreme hot or cold events. With a 0.8 degree rise in temperature, a much larger portion now sits in the warmer-than-average section, and hot to extremely hot days are far more frequent.

Dr Karl Braganza
Suddenly, you've actually doubled the frequency of those events - and, in Australia's case, up to five times an increase in the frequency of extreme heat compared to the middle of last century. And that has all sorts of implications. Just in January alone, we did about 1,600 spot-fire forecasts. That's this very detailed forecast for the firefighters. And that's the equivalent of the last several years.

NARRATION
Worldwide, heatwaves have been increasing in duration and frequency since the 1950s.

Dr Lisa Alexander
What we thought as kind of exceptional in the past has really started to become the norm.

NARRATION
But even in the context of global warming, the European and Russian heatwaves are way off the charts. Is this just natural variability, or is something else happening to make temperatures soar? The Swiss Institute of Technology is a world leader in climate modelling. Here, Dr Erich Fischer has focused intensive research on the causes of the 2003 scorcher and other recent severe heatwaves in Europe.

Dr Erich Fischer
What's mainly the key factor is always the atmospheric circulations, so there needs to be a high-pressure system in place to get such an extreme heatwave.

NARRATION
But there was something else they all had in common - dry soils.

Dr Erich Fischer
All of them were actually preceded by very dry conditions in the spring. So we think that these conditions were already preconditioning the later heatwave.

NARRATION
Low rainfall in the spring months led to an early and rapid loss of soil moisture. And dry soils can be a double whammy on an evolving heatwave.

Anja Taylor
When the sun's rays hit the land surface, a lot of their energy goes into evaporating moisture from the soil and from plants as they transpire. But when soils dry out and plants stop transpiring, the sun's energy is no longer channelled into that process. Instead, it's free to heat the surface.

NARRATION
The result is a jump in temperatures. It was dry soils that turned the European heatwave of 2003 into a deadly scorcher.

Dr Erich Fischer
With the very same conditions in the atmosphere, but wet soils rather than dry soils, the 2003 summer would have still been a very warm summer, but much less extreme, with much less devastating impacts.

NARRATION
An early snow melt and dry soils also amplified the Russian heatwave of 2010. What's disturbing is that many regions appear to be trending to patterns of lower rainfall in winter and spring months, making those areas more prone to mega heatwaves.

Dr Erich Fischer
Europe and central Europe was always thought to be always humid basically. So, it was a surprise that in that event more dry conditions was actually enough to amplify the heatwave - something that usually only occurs over dry regions, such as the Mediterranean or the central US or Australia, for instance.
Anja Taylor
From where I'm standing, heatwaves seem a long, long way away. So do dry soils. And although this summer has been the hottest on record, it's also had some torrential downpours. So how is it that it can be getting hotter, drier and wetter at the same time?

NARRATION
It's simple physics. When air gets warmer, it can carry more water vapour - much more. So any rise in temperatures should lead to considerably more moisture being sucked from the Earth's surface. But what goes up must eventually come down.

Dr Susan Wijffels
Rainfall, as we all know from personal experience, is really spotty. I mean, it can be raining, you know, in your suburb, and next door not raining at all. And so that spatial sort of graininess of rainfall makes it an incredibly hard thing to measure - and, in particular, to measure over larger areas accurately.

NARRATION
To find out if a warmer climate is cranking up the water cycle, scientists have been searching for clues in the restless, churning oceans.

Dr Susan Wijffels
Most of the evaporation and most of the rainfall in the world actually cycles through the ocean surface, not through the land. Because it covers 75 percent of the Earth, most of the action's actually happening over the ocean.

NARRATION
Every time rain falls or water evaporates from the sea, surface salinity changes.

Dr Susan Wijffels
When we look at the ocean salinity field right now, we see this beautiful reflection of what happens in the atmosphere. So the places that are very rainy - say, the Tropics, where there's a large amount of rainfall all the time - the surface salinity field is very fresh. When we go to the parts of the atmosphere where we find deserts on land, there are desert equivalents over the ocean, where evaporation dominates, and that's where we find the surface of the ocean is very, very salty.

NARRATION
Keeping track of how salty seas change, more than 3,000 ocean robots called 'Argo floats' have been bobbing about on the global currents, beaming back data over time. The oceans are always mixing, so results are smoothed out instead of patchy like land records. Argo data and long-term records from research vessels reveal an unmistakable trend.

Dr Susan Wijffels
Over the last 50 years, that contrast has gone up quite markedly. So, for instance, the Atlantic Ocean is becoming saltier and saltier and saltier. And the Pacific is becoming fresher and fresher. Essentially translates to the fact that the wet areas have become wetter and the dry areas have become drier.

NARRATION
The big surprise is how fast the change is occurring. For every degree rise in air temperature, the water cycle is intensifying by percent. That's double the climate-model predictions.

Dr Susan Wijffels
The intensity of the storms are likely to go up, because the moisture in the atmosphere is actually the feeder energy stop that drives storms. And we expect droughts and floods to amplify as well.

NARRATION
And that's what's happening. These days, when it rains, it really pours. In January 2011, Toowoomba set a terrifying example of what can happen when too much water comes down too fast.

Man
The house... We are moving!

NARRATION
The town experienced an inland tsunami as 100mm of rain fell in under an hour.

Dr Lisa Alexander
You get very intense rainfall events in a very short period of time, like you did in Toowoomba. The soil just can't absorb that much water. And then you do start getting these very large inland flooding events.

NARRATION
By studying over 8,000 rain gauges across the world, Australian scientists have confirmed that extreme rainfall events have also been intensifying. That means we're getting more water from a big storm than we would have 30 or 40 years ago. Around 7 percent more per degree rise in temperature.

Dr Lisa Alexander
It surprised us all, I have to say, that we got the answer we expected. So... Because usually, in science, you don't always end up with the answer you expect. So, to sort of see this coming out consistently in the data, was... was somewhat of a surprise.
Dr Susan Wijffels
We're already starting to detect and see big changes in the extreme events. And we've only really warmed the Earth by 0.8 of a degree. If we were to warm the Earth by 3 or 4 degrees, the changes in the hydrological cycle could be near 30 percent. I mean, that's just a huge change, and it's very hard for us to imagine.
Anja Taylor
Well, that explains heatwaves and floods, but it doesn't take a genius to work out that higher temperatures don't set the scene for blizzards. In marked contrast to a sweltering March last year, this year the US suffered through nailbiting cold. In fact, much of the Northern Hemisphere was buried under record-breaking snowfalls. How can global warming possibly explain that?

NARRATION
To understand how, you need to consider the basic drivers of climate. As the sun heats the Earth unevenly, it sets up temperature gradients on many different scales. These create the winds and currents that influence weather.

Dr Karl Braganza
All the ocean currents are driven by basically the temperature gradient between the Equator and the Pole, and it's the same in the atmosphere.

NARRATION
The atmospheric gradient between the Tropics and the Poles creates the major westerly winds called 'jet streams'. Wind rushes down a slope from a warm, puffed up atmosphere to a cold, compressed atmosphere.

Dr Jennifer Francis
The stronger that gradient, the stronger the force that that wind is being pulled by, if you will, and then, because the Earth is spinning, instead of flowing directly from the south to the north, it actually gets turned to the right by the spinning of the Earth.

NARRATION
These fast-moving wavy winds encircle the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and mark the divide between cold, polar air and warm, tropical air.

Dr Jennifer Francis
They swing north and then they swing south, and the weather that you experience is completely related to where you are relative to one of these waves.

NARRATION
But what happens when you mess with a temperature gradient? It's a hotly debated topic, and, right now, we're running an extraordinary real-world experiment by turning up the thermostat in the Arctic.

Dr Jennifer Francis
It's hard to get your mind around how fast the Arctic is changing. It's really mind-boggling - even to someone like me, who's been studying it for decades now.

NARRATION
The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere on Earth, largely to do with the feedback effect of melting sea ice. White, bright ice bounces the sun's rays back into space before they have a chance to warm the surface. But when a small rise in temperatures melts some of the ice, the dark ocean below is exposed. This absorbs almost all the sun's energy, and heats up, causing more ice to melt, leading to more warming and so on.

Dr Jennifer Francis
What we're seeing is the Arctic sea ice disappearing at just an amazing rate. This is the ice that's floating on top of the Arctic ocean. This past summer, it was half as big as it was only 30 years ago.

NARRATION
Research by Dr Jennifer Francis has shown that Arctic summers with a low sea ice extent leads to a gentler atmospheric gradient.

Dr Jennifer Francis
The force that's creating those winds in the jet stream is getting weaker as well.

NARRATION
Like fast-flowing mountain rivers meander when they slowly cross the coastal plain, Jennifer predicted a weaker, slower jet stream would display a much wavier pattern.

Dr Jennifer Francis
We were able to determine that, in fact, these waves are actually getting larger in the north-south direction, which we know through weather theory that those waves then tend to move more slowly from west to east.

NARRATION
And a lazy, meandering jet stream can have an extraordinary effect on weather.

Dr Jennifer Francis
A big dip south, for example, will allow that cold air from the Arctic to plunge farther south. And, conversely, if you have a big swing northward in one of what we call a 'ridge', then that allows the warm, tropical air to extend farther northward. So, in both of these cases, we tend to get more unusual weather patterns setting up.

NARRATION
That's exactly what happened when frigid Arctic weather plunged into Europe and south-eastern US this March, bringing record snowfalls and leading many to wonder what happened to global warming. The year before, the US was caught in a jet-stream upswing. Unprecedented heat smashed over 1,000 temperature records and set the scene for a staggering drought and massive agricultural losses. This decade the Northern Hemisphere has seen some catastrophic results from a highly deformed jet stream. While a big, stagnant high settled over Russia in 2010, cold air from Siberia plunged into Pakistan, colliding with warm, wet air from the Bay of Bengal. As Russian burned, Pakistan drowned under a deluge that lasted nearly two months.

Dr Jennifer Francis
As the jet stream takes on this wavier character, what this means is that the weather that you're experiencing in your location is going to stick around longer. It's going to feel like those weather conditions just won't give up and bring something else. It feels like it's stuck.

NARRATION
How jet streams are being affected by a warming Arctic is still highly unpredictable, with many other interactions affecting their speed and movement. But one thing's certain - we'd better get used to wacky weather.

Dr Karl Braganza
And we talk about climate change in the future of 1, 2, 3 degrees - that's actually hard to imagine.
Dr Jennifer Francis
It's going to be a difficult next few decades, I think.
Anja Taylor
When it comes to extreme weather, the connection is pretty clear. The warmer the world, the wilder it gets. And, with the speed that emissions still enter the atmosphere, we're right on track for an unrecognisable future.

Ice Loss Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae Glacier

MashableAustralia

One of the world's most rapidly flowing glaciers may have just set another record, and it's not one not that bodes well for low-lying coastal cities and nations around the world, which are vulnerable to sea level rise.
During the past month, a NASA satellite captured images showing a sudden loss of ice, also known as a calving event (or in this case, possibly multiple events) from Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae Glacier between July 31 and August 16, 2015.
Images posted on the Arctic sea ice blog, which closely tracks developments in the Arctic, narrowed the timeline of the ice loss to between August 14 and 16.

NASA satellite images on July 31, 2015 (first) and then on August 16, 2015 (second), showing the movement of the calving front further inland, or to the right.

It's unclear if this sudden ice loss set a record, according to NASA.
"Some observers have speculated that the area of ice lost could be the largest on record. However, these estimates are preliminary, and satellite images from before and after an event cannot show whether the ice was lost all at once, or in a series of smaller events," NASA stated on its Earth Observatory website.
Nevertheless, the event was significant because it once again signaled the rapidly changing ice conditions in Greenland as air and ocean temperatures increase.
“The calving events of Jakobshavn are becoming more spectacular with time, and I am in awe with the calving speed and retreat rate of this glacier,” said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement.
Studies have shown that Jakobshavn's summer flow speeds have sped up dramatically during the past few decades, and this one glacier was responsible for raising global average sea level by about 1 millimeter, or .04 inches, between 2000 and 2010, a figure that is likely to increase as global warming continues.
Jakobshavn retreated more than 25 miles between 1850 and 2010, and since 2010, the retreat has sped up dramatically.
In fact, a 2014 study published in the open access journal Cryosphere found that the glacier was moving at average speeds of about half-a-mile per year, or more than 150 feet per day, during the summers of 2012 and 2013.
“We are now seeing summer speeds more than four times what they were in the 1990s, on a glacier which at that time was believed to be one of the fastest, if not the fastest, glacier in Greenland,” said study author Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington, in a press release when that study was published.
Jakobshavn is not just any old glacier. It's important because it helps drain a large portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet. As it moves faster, it transports more ice at a faster rate into the sea, adding to sea level rise.
"This glacier alone could contribute more to sea level rise than any other single feature in the Northern Hemisphere," NASA stated on its website.
Given its rapid movement, Jakobshavn has been the scene of several famous large calving events, including one in July 2010, when the glacier shed a 2.7 square-mile chunk of ice in the span of 24 hours, pushing the calving front one mile further inland.
Scientists think the ice loss has sped up so much because of a combination of warmer air temperatures during the short Greenland summers, as well as warmer ocean temperatures, which are undermining the glacier's ice tongue — the part that sticks out into the ocean and serves as a brake to all the ice behind it — speeding up the ice's movement into the sea.
Climate scientists have raised alarms about such outlet glaciers in recent years, both in Greenland and Antarctica, because when they become unstable and move more swiftly into the sea, the ice they hold back begins to move as well, endangering low-lying coastal cities and countries around the world.

Massive calving event seen on the Ilulissat Glacier in western Greenland in 2008, as shown in the film "Chasing Ice."

In the case of Jakobshavn, as the ice has retreated, the calving front has reached a deeper area of the fjord, and this has further sped up the melting.
The calving front is now located in an area where the base of solid rock that it rests upon is more than 1,000 feet below sea level, making the glacier especially vulnerable to intrusions from relatively mild water as ocean currents in the regions change in response to global warming and other factors.
“What is important is that the ice front, or calving front, keeps retreating inland at galloping speeds,” said NASA's Rignot, in a statement.

Worries about Greenland's stability
Greenland is the world's largest island, extending more than 1,200 miles from its southern to northernmost points, and if all of its ice were to melt — which would likely take many centuries — the oceans would rise by more than 20 feet.
Already, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is one of the largest contributors to global sea level rise, accounting for about .02 inches of the .13 inches per year global average sea level rise (local rates of sea level rise vary significantly).
A study published last year found that glaciers long thought to be stable and resistant to rapid melting in northeastern Greenland, which tends to be colder than the area where Jakobshavn is, may nonetheless share the latter glacier's fate.

Retreat of the calving front of Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland. Image: NASA

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that three glaciers holding back a vast ice stream in northeast Greenland, are now thinning and moving more rapidly into the sea.
The most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that global average sea level is likely to increase by 10.2 to 32 inches by the year 2100, with a highest emissions scenario showing a sea level rise of between 21 and 38 inches by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unabated.
The recent observations from Jakobshavn and the glaciers in northeast Greenland, plus data showing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be increasingly unstable, suggest that sea level rise is likely to be at the higher end of the predicted range, if not significantly higher than that.

Environmental Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999

The Canberra Times - Professor Don Anton, Centre for Climate Law and Policy, ANU College of Law
George Brandis' recently announced plans to repeal a key provision in the Environmental Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 – a provision that allows the public to challenge the legality of decisions made by government – cannot stand scrutiny. It runs against the rule of law, democratic accountability, and history. It should be seen for what it is – another attempt to stop environmental concerns from getting in the way of economic priorities. It is a reactionary response to the successful challenge, by the Mackay Conservation Group, of the decision to approve the Carmichael coal mine. It builds on the government's draconian funding cuts already made to public interest environmental litigation.
The EPBCA is the Commonwealth's flagship environmental legislation. It was enacted (by the Howard Coalition government) to improve on Australia's first-generation environmental laws dating back to the early 1970s. It was touted by the Coalition government for its efficiency and streamlined approached. It was the product of some very hard political bargaining between the government and the now defunct political party of the Democrats, which at that time held the balance of power in the Senate.
The Democrats supported the establishment of the GST in exchange for significant amendments to the exposure draft of the EPBC Bill before its enactment. Those amendments are reflected most prominently in a host of section numbers peppered through the act that are followed by capital letters (eg, sections 146A–146L on strategic impact assessment).
One innovation in the EPBCA is reflected in section 487 of the act. Note that there is no capital letter following the section number because it was enacted in terms drafted by the government. Until section 487 was passed, environmental decisions of the Commonwealth were generally non-justiciable under ancient common law rules to which the Attorney-General seeks to return.
An individual or group concerned with ensuring compliance with environmental law had to establish special interest over and above the general public (ordinarily a direct injury to an economic interest) caused by the alleged breach before a court would entertain a lawsuit. Without a special interest, a person or group did not have "standing" – a sufficient connection with the alleged breach of law – to complain before a court. This was a very high hurdle and, not surprisingly, few individuals or green groups could meet the test.
Section 487 relaxed this standing requirement in connection with judicial review of decisions made under the EPBCA. Individuals and groups are deemed to have a special interest (are "persons aggrieved") if at any time within the two years prior to the decision challenged, they have engaged in activities associated with environmental protection. In the case of a group, its explicit purposes must include some form of environmental concern. It is true that the Democrats wanted more than this limited expansion of standing, but it was accepted for other trade-offs.
The Democrats were pushing of the sort of "open standing" provisions pioneered by NSW and other Australian states in the late 1970s and early 1980s. For a long time now, the default position in many environmental laws found in the states is to allow "any person" to seek judicial review of decisions. Many also allow "any person" to sue to restrain or remedy a breach of environmental law. No track record necessary. It is not hard to understand why. The environment is a public good, deserving of public protection in cases of government failure. State parliaments saw this, so did the international community.
By 1992 we had Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration in which every country in the world proclaimed with unequivocal certainty that "environmental issues are best handled with participation of all concerned citizens … In order for participation to be effective, Principle 10 makes clear that access to judicial … proceedings, including redress and remedy, shall be provided."
This approach rests on the sound view that environmental protection cannot be left to governments alone. Rather, it requires and benefits from civic participation, including by way of standing to challenge environmental decisions. This is now a firmly entrenched principle in international environmental law and policy today, reflected in a host of laws around the world.
It is not difficult to see why generous standing provisions are the norm in an environmental context. They bring more brains to decision-making and promote the rule of law. In an open democracy, it is essential that the citizenry be able to test the validity of governmental decisions about the environment in order to check what would otherwise be naked power.
In the mid-13th century, Bracton famously proclaimed the superiority of the law over the king as a norm necessary to eliminate arbitrary rule. So by giving the public a right to seek redress when the government fails execute environmental laws as required, the rule of environmental law is strengthened.
Moreover, by providing generous standing provisions and third party appeal rights, the legitimacy of the governmental decision-making process is enhanced. People have a strong sense that losing is not quite so bad if they have had a fair chance at playing the game. Sir Robert Megarry once observed that the most important person in a courtroom was the litigant who was about to lose, and it was the primary duty of the court to convince that person that his or her point of view had been heard and understood, even if the court found it necessary to reject it.
Why, then, does Attorney-General Brandis want to repeal a law enacted by his political forebears and recognised as salutary by state governments and countries around the world? This question becomes more perplexing when one considers recent data from the Australian Institute. Since the EPBCA began in July 2000, it has been used a total of 33 times to challenge 27 projects out of a total of the 5500 referred to the minister for a decision.
In only two cases of those 33 did a green group challenger succeed in obtaining the relief it sought. That's a success rate of 0.04 per cent, rounded up. Add to that a miserly denial rate of 1.3 per cent of applications made for approval under the EPBCA – yes, developers currently have a better than 98 per cent chance of approval – and one is left with a sense that we have environmental law, but we do not have environmental protection.
Nevertheless, according to Senator Brandis, a repeal is urgently needed. Some worn-out arguments have been used to try and turn back time. The biggest criticism levelled against section 487 standing has been clothed with pejorative language. Suddenly, it supposedly permits "vigilante" litigation and "lawfare". Putting the rule of law to one side, existing rules have long prohibited vexatious and frivolous litigation. You can be sure that if the Mackay Environmental Group had been a vexatious, "vigilante" litigant engaged in "lawfare", then government and highly paid mining lawyers would have disposed of the challenge to the decision on the Carmichael coal mine post haste with little trouble.
Another complaint by Senator Brandis is that "statutory language is extremely loose" so that "virtually anyone" has legal standing to challenge developments. That is the point, of course. That is what is desired and intended. The complaint is really an appeal to the old "flood-gates" argument; that every man and his dog will rush to the courthouse and sue with open standing.
The reality behind the statistics above makes this complaint absurd. It's been recognised as false since at least 1989 when a judge with direct experience, former Chief Judge Harold Cripps of the NSW Land and Environment Court, wrote: 'It was said … in 1980 that the presence of [open standing] would lead to a rash of harassing and vexatious litigation. That has not happened and, with the greatest respect to people who think otherwise, I think that that argument has been wholly discredited'.
The long-recognised, simple fact is that the environment is just too important to be left to the government alone. Public participation and open standing provide critical input from those who actually live in the environment subject to controversy. The public provides both an essential source of information about the environment and, with open standing, in ensuring that the government's feet are held to the fire in the proper implementation of the law. The people of Australia should accept nothing less.

Abbott's Smoke And Mirrors Before Paris Climate Summit

THE SATURDAY PAPER

Imagine, if you will, two people planning to go on a diet. One of them is a moderately fit but overweight bloke weighing, say, 100 kilograms. The other is morbidly obese, and weighs twice as much.
Time passes and they both shed weight. Now the formerly overweight bloke has reached his ideal weight of  75 kilograms.
The obese guy has lost the same amount, in percentage terms. But he still weighs 150 kilos. He’s still grossly overweight. Clearly, for the sake of his health, he has to lose a lot more.
We use the analogy to point to one of the several specious arguments Prime Minister Tony Abbott has been using to create the impression – the false impression – that his government is serious about acting to limit climate change.
After the announcement of the government’s long-awaited new target for greenhouse gas emissions last week – a reduction of 26 per cent, and possibly 28 per cent on 2005 levels, by 2030 – Abbott fronted the media to insist it was “foursquare in the middle” of the pledges made by other nations ahead of the United Nations climate summit in Paris at year’s end.
“It’s better than Japan,” he boasted. “It’s almost the same as New Zealand. It’s a whisker below Canada. It’s a little below Europe. It’s about the same as the United States. It’s vastly better than Korea. Of course, it is unimaginably better than China.”
Except, of course, none of this is true.
The Australian government’s target is not in the middle of the range, and Abbott had no right to be satisfied, for exactly the same reason the hypothetical morbidly obese man above should not be satisfied with his weight-loss achievement.
In greenhouse gas terms, Australia starts out as the obese man in the developed world, and will still be the obese one in 2030.
Let’s go to some of the examples. Japan, as Abbott noted, has set a target slightly less ambitious in percentage terms than Australia’s: 25 per cent by 2030, compared with 26. But when you look a little closer, it’s immediately apparent that the percentage reduction is not the significant measure. What counts is the weight at the end of the process. In 2030, assuming it reaches its goal, Japan will produce the equivalent of eight tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita. If Australia reaches its 26 per cent goal, it will still produce twice as much. Sixteen tonnes.
The comparable figures for other developed countries, according to the Climate Institute, which crunched all the numbers to allow a real, apples-to-apples comparison of carbon dioxide per capita are: New Zealand, 11 tonnes; the European Union, six tonnes; Britain, five tonnes; the United States 10 tonnes. Only Canada will be anywhere close to us, at 14 tonnes.
So, what about the other countries Abbott cited: China and South Korea?
He is right in saying that in percentage terms, our target is more ambitious. Korea’s 2030 goal is to keep its emissions broadly as they were in 2005 – that is somewhere between a 5 per cent decrease and a 1 per cent increase. China looks a whole lot worse. Its emissions are forecast to increase between 72 and 96 per cent.
But once again, as with our hypothetical overweight men, it is instructive to look at their weights at the start and end of the process. In 2005, South Korea generated about 10 tonnes of CO2 per capita. China emitted about four tonnes.
Assuming they meet their 2030 targets, they will still produce only 50 to 60 per cent as much greenhouse gas, per capita, as Australia does.
That’s still a problem for the planet, because the populations of both countries are large. But that’s not really the point.
The point is Australia is not – pardon the pun – pulling its weight.

Deceptive figures
The statistics cited by Abbott in his media conference were not actual lies, but they were deceptive. And the prime minister, his environment minister Greg Hunt, and their supporters in the press, have sought to mislead in other ways, too.
For example, when Abbott says Australia’s target is “about the same as the United States” he relies on another bit of statistical sleight of hand. The US has committed to making its emissions reductions within 10 years, whereas ours are over 15.
“If you take theirs out to 2030, it becomes 41 per cent,” says Will Steffen, a councillor with the Climate Council and emeritus professor of earth systems science at the ANU.
Then there’s the matter of base years.
“By choosing different baselines you can make it appear your effort is much greater or much less,” says Steffen.
“The Europeans choose 1990 because they started acting to reduce their emissions much earlier, and have done a lot of heavy lifting already.
“You can see how significant the choice of base year is by looking at Australia’s current bipartisan target, of reducing emissions 5 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020.
“If you translate that to a 2005 baseline it becomes 13 per cent, because emissions were higher in 2005. If you take 2010, it becomes 8 per cent. But it’s exactly the same amount of emissions.
“So we chose 2005 for our Paris target because our emissions were really high at that time, which makes our effort look greater.
“The point is that as far as the atmosphere is concerned, as far as the climate is concerned, it’s only the actual tonnage of emissions that matters.”
According to the best current climate science, if the world is to have a reasonable – 66 per cent – probability of avoiding an increase of more than 2ºC in average temperatures, we have to stay within a global emissions budget equivalent to 17,000 gigatonnes (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes) of carbon dioxide between 2000 and 2050.
To have a 75 per cent probability of staying below 2ºC warming, the global budget drops to about 15,000Gt.
That sounds like a huge amount, but it’s not, given the rate at which we are burning fossil fuels.
“We, humanity as a whole, are emitting 30 or 40 billion tonnes a year now, so you can do the sums. We’ve got about 20 years left at current rates. We’ve got to decarbonise, fast,” says Steffen.
And by the Abbott government’s policy, that will not happen.
“We are on course for a three- or four-degree rise,” he says.
That would mean no coral reefs, mass extinctions, the likelihood that Australia could not feed itself, huge global refugee flows, economic collapse.
“At that level of warming you’re talking about a vastly different world and one that humans have never experienced in our evolutionary history,” Steffen says.

International co-operation
The science is clear; the politics isn’t. How do you divide the task among the world’s countries? What allowances should be made for those countries that have only recently industrialised and are emitting a lot now, compared with those that have recently cut their emissions but emitted a lot historically? How do you weigh the needs of poor countries in Africa and Asia that are struggling to drag their people out of poverty? How do you assess capacity to pay?
There are innumerable potential points of dispute.
“Conceptually, the establishment of a formula for the apportionment of a global carbon budget sounds very neat, but practically it’s not,” says the chairman of the government’s Climate Change Authority, Bernie Fraser.
It does, however, provide a reference point for countries in setting their individual targets and justifying them to the world.
“What countries have been asked to do, when they advance their [Paris summit] targets, is show how they are making a contribution towards that commonly agreed two-degree goal,” says Erwin Jackson, deputy CEO of the Climate Institute.
“Unfortunately, some countries, such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, have ignored it altogether and provided no justification to argue their target is a fair contribution.
“Others like the US, EU, Mexico, South Korea, Norway, Switzerland – a whole range of countries – have actually put forward an argument.”
There are no prizes for guessing why Australia has not done as asked, Jackson suggests: “The Australian government just can’t pretend its target is a fair contribution.”
So, what would be a fair contribution?
Last year – even as the Abbott government was trying unsuccessfully to abolish it – Fraser’s Climate Change Authority gave its judgement.
“The authority believes an emissions budget of 10.1Gt of CO2 2013-2050 (or about 1 per cent of the remaining estimated global budget) would represent an equitable share for Australia,” it said in its targets and progress review.
Allowing that Australia might fairly emit 1 per cent of global carbon dioxide was actually pretty generous, given we have only about 0.3 per cent of world population. To make a contribution consistent with staying below 2ºC, according to the authority, it would require a reduction in our emissions of between 45 and 65 per cent.
The lower end of that range, says Jackson, would give Australia a 66 per cent probability of not exceeding 2ºC warming, while the upper end would give a 75 per cent chance.
“We at the institute advocate a target towards the top of that range,” he says.
But it is a moot point, because the government ignored the advice from scientists and made a decision based on politics. On one hand, the polls show the public wants more action to combat climate change. On the other, the powerful fossil fuel lobby, which contributes handsomely to conservative coffers, demands protection.

Concocted reports
And the politics of this issue are very ugly. When it is not using dodgy statistics to pretend it has set an ambitious target, the government is using equally dodgy numbers to pretend that doing any more would be unaffordable.
The clearest example of this came last week, in a screaming front-page story in the Sydney Murdoch tabloid The Daily Telegraph. Almost every aspect of the story, planted by the government with its favourite partisan media outlet, was either wrong or misleading, starting with the headline: “Labor’s carbon emission plan would strip $600b from economy.”
In reality, the Labor opposition has not yet formulated its target. Nor was there anything secret about the “plan”, as The Telegraph suggested. The modelling, commissioned by the government’s statutory adviser, the Climate Change Authority, was public information. In the skilled hands of The Telegraph, it became public disinformation.
Bernie Fraser, economist, former Treasury head and Reserve Bank governor before he came to the Climate Change Authority, knows a thing or two about the use – and misuse – of economic modelling.
“The Tele report was a concoction,” he says partway through a 10-minute deconstruction of it. “Bullshit is too kind a description, really.”
Space prevents us repeating his detailed critique but should you wish, you can read a swingeing debunking of the story on the academic website The Conversation.
One of the great ironies of contemporary politics is that it was mining baron Clive Palmer who stopped the government from abolishing the Climate Change Authority, in return for his support in getting rid of the previous government’s carbon price.
As a consequence, the authority was charged with delivering three pieces of work.
The first task was to advise what Australia’s future emissions should be. That advice was ignored.
The second, due in December, is to examine the policy options for reducing our emissions. It will recommend an emissions trading scheme, or as Abbott, Hunt and the climate change deniers derisively call it, a carbon tax.
“You can’t get away from a price on carbon,” Fraser says.
The third report, due by the middle of next year, will consider a comprehensive suite of other measures for energy efficiency.
“We’re working on it, despite the dismal atmospherics,” Fraser says in his mild, uninflected voice.
He’s anticipating a lot more “crap” from the Abbott government and parts of the media when those reports come down. All of which means the debate about climate change is going to get a lot hotter in the near future.
Just like Earth itself.