Truth About Australia’s Coal Industry And Climate Policy

The Saturday Paper - Guy Pearse

If Malcolm Turnbull or freshly appointed Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg stood on Queensland’s coast and saw a coal-fired power station float past, they’d notice, right? If more than half a million new cars drove past, they’d surely raise an eyebrow. Or would they? Each day, more than a million tonnes of Australian coal sails up that coast, past the Great Barrier Reef, to power stations or steel mills elsewhere, quietly fuelling climate change and bleaching the reef. Once used, the coal exported daily generates about as much carbon pollution as a 500-megawatt coal-fired power station, or 570,000 cars, in a year.
Yet for 30 years, Australia has quarantined the CO2 exported in our coal from climate policy attention. Governments get the link between fossil fuel use, climate change and coral bleaching, but the link between the bleaching and “our” coal eludes them still. Their capacity to mentally detach the bleaching below the surface from the coal ships above knows no bounds.

The significance of the industry to the economy is in freefall, and it has happened in spite of huge increases in coal export volumes ... We’re left with an industry of much less value doing far more harm.

The recent election campaign provided a perfect example. Malcolm Turnbull held a press conference in Townsville to announce a $1 billion Reef Fund “for projects that will both reduce emissions, use clean energy and, of course, protect the reef”. Farmers living near the reef could get loans from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation for solar-powered or energy-efficient projects to reduce agricultural runoff. Solar could “substitute for diesel”, drive water-efficient irrigation, or power electric fences to keep cattle out of creeks.
Turnbull didn’t say how much CO2 would be saved by the undoubtedly worthwhile projects supported by the Reef Fund. Progress to date with the government’s Emissions Reduction Fund suggests eight million tonnes a year might be achievable. Pretty impressive, except that the carbon pollution exported in our coal negates that saving every three days. We’re meant to ignore such facts, but take the environmental commitment seriously.
It’s the same with approval processes for new coalmines and export terminals, all subject, as Turnbull’s government says each time, to the “strictest conditions in Australian history”. From protecting endangered species and water quality, to requiring dredging spoil to be disposed on land, we’re assured no stone is unturned. When then environment minister Greg Hunt approved the largest coalmine in Australian history, he said the conditions would ensure “that all impacts, including cumulative impacts, are avoided, mitigated or offset”. Except one, which happens to be the biggest by far: the emissions that occur when the coal is eventually used.
Ignoring the carbon exports in coal is only possible because the globally agreed carbon accounting system counts emissions where they occur. It enables fossil fuel exporters to focus on emissions produced within their own borders, and disown exported emissions. It has been a very convenient arrangement for the export-oriented Australian coal industry, but will it last?
This year, Australia will export about one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in coal. Yet the emissions being produced domestically are roughly what they were in 1990 – about 560 million tonnes. They’d be much higher without all the policy attention, but our domestic contribution to climate change hasn’t changed much. What’s changed is the nearly fourfold increase in coal exports.
When local emissions comprised most of our contribution to climate change, a focus on domestic policy made sense, particularly given the global carbon accounting rules. Now, we export nearly twice the emissions produced domestically, but the policy debates haven’t kept pace. Factor in the 280 per cent increase in coal exports, and Australia’s yearly contribution to climate change has nearly doubled in 25 years. All that effort to cut emissions, billions of dollars invested by government and business, millions of Australians doing their bit with solar panels on the roof, all those years spent arguing over carbon taxes, emissions trading and Direct Action – all quietly negated by our coal exports.
Today, as well as our domestic emissions, one in every 35 tonnes of CO2 emitted worldwide comes from exported Australian coal. It ends up counting in someone else’s domestic tally, but it’s facilitated by Australia. By peddling coal on a grand scale, and targeting poorer countries with modest emission commitments, we’re keeping the dirtiest power generation and steelmaking options cheaper for longer. In this, we’re now surprisingly isolated.
Among developed countries whose fossil fuel-based industrialisation caused the problem, none has expanded coal exports on remotely the same scale. Indeed, Australia exports three times as much coal as all other OECD countries combined. Canada has done something similar with oil exports in recent years, but it involves less than half the carbon exported in Australian coal, and Canada’s domestic emissions still eclipse their carbon exports. The only country approaching the coal example of Australia is Indonesia, which briefly rivalled us as the largest coal exporter before cutting production. The big difference is that Indonesia’s domestic emissions are close to 2.5 billion tonnes, primarily because of deforestation. So their carbon exports in coal are less than half as significant as their domestic emissions.
China and India have dramatically increased coal production, too, but the coal is used locally, so the emissions aren’t being disowned. The same goes for the gas boom in the United States, which remains a net importer. Even in Russia, which has sought to increase coal and oil exports, domestic emissions remain more significant than exported emissions, notwithstanding a 50 per cent decline since the fall of the Soviet Union.
By contrast, 80 per cent of Australia’s contribution to climate change could soon come from carbon exports not covered by our international commitments. Over the next five years, our annual carbon exports in coal could even overtake Saudi Arabian oil exports. By 2030, we might export nearly four times the carbon pollution we produce. As domestic emissions become less significant, so, too, does our domestic response.
On current projections, if Australia meets the commitment made in Paris to reduce domestic emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030, coal exports will erase the saving nearly seven times over. The Adani coalmine proposed in Queensland’s Galilee Basin on its own would add three-and-a-half times as much carbon pollution between 2020 and 2030 as the government hopes to save through the Emissions Reduction Fund. Coal exports would even negate Labor’s commitment to “net zero” emissions by 2050. “Net zero” counts cheap imported carbon credits, but there’s no indication that Labor would count carbon in coal exports, in which it says, “Australia will continue to have a competitive advantage”. Factor that in, and Australia could still contribute more emissions in 2050 than today.
Somehow, both major parties remain convinced that expanding coal exports for decades to come, and disowning the emissions, is consistent with an effective global response. Underpinning their delusion is a steadfast faith that Australia’s interests and the coal industry’s interests are inseparable. Coal is presumed an indispensable contributor to gross domestic product, exports and employment. The funding required for roads, schools, hospitals, police and much else are presumed to depend on the taxes and royalties raised from coal.
There’s just one very big problem – the economy is leaving coal behind. What was a $54 billion export industry looks like being worth $31.5 billion this financial year. What was worth nearly 5 per cent of GDP is about 2 per cent and falling. Coalmining jobs have shrunk nearly 30 per cent. Coal royalties are providing 58 per cent less revenue in Queensland than in 2009, and 37 per cent less in New South Wales. Federally, the tax the industry claims to pay accounts for 0.63 per cent of total revenue. The significance of the industry to the economy is in freefall, and it has happened in spite of huge increases in coal export volumes as the investment and construction phase of the boom gives way to a production boom. We’re left with an industry of much less value doing far more harm.
Some dismiss this as a transient downturn from which the industry will bounce back. Once an oversupplied global coal market shakes out less competitive producers, it is assumed prices will rise, and profits and royalties will start flowing. But this misses the broader economic transformation under way – the very one Malcolm Turnbull keeps talking up, as Australia diversifies away from reliance on resources.
While the value of coal exports has shrunk by nearly a third, GDP has grown by a third. Coal shed nearly 20,000 jobs, but the broader economy has added more than 1.1 million. Total exports grew, too, so where coal used to account for 22 per cent of exports, this year it could fall below 10 per cent. Other sectors have filled the vacuum left by coal many times over. The myth that coal is indispensable is being utterly shattered, time and again, in spite of government policy.
It’s great news for Australia, a cue to move on. Yet government policy is stuck in a different world: where domestic emissions are our main contribution to climate change; where coal is indispensable to Australia; where it makes expedient sense to keep green-lighting new coalmines, railways and terminals; and where the global community forever lets us ignore the consequences. It’s a la-la land in which we’re “overachievers” at reducing emissions, where lending farmers money to erect solar-powered electric fences is a big deal, but exporting a coal-fired power station worth of emissions each day goes routinely unnoticed.
If the reef could speak, it would scream, “Snap out of it.” But you wonder whether they’d notice that either.

Links

• The links between big polluters and politicians
• Great Barrier Reef dredging goes to federal court
• Malcolm Turnbull’s climate change thimble trick
• Rise for the oceans
• Media silence on the Barrier Reef

Graphic: Global Warming From 1880 To 2015

NASA


NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Data provided by Robert B. Schmunk (NASA/GSFC GISS).

Earth’s 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius). Only once before, in 1998, has the new record been greater than the old record by this much.
This color-coded map displays a progression of changing global surface temperature anomalies from 1880 through 2015. Higher than normal temperatures are shown in red and lower then normal termperatures are shown in blue. The final frame represents the global temperatures 5-year averaged from 2011 through 2015. Scale in degree Celsius.

Links

• Infographic: Earth's carbon cycle is off balance
• Infographic: Sea level rise
• Eyes on the Earth
• Graphic: Measuring carbon dioxide from space

Ghastly Weather: What Frankenstein Can Tell Us On Climate Change

New Scientist - Boyd Tonkin

How should we respond to our ever-more-stormy planet? Read the Romantics, says Boyd Tonkin

Frankenstein was written in the wake of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, which was followed by "a year without a summer" AP Photo/KOMPAS Images, Iwan Setiyawan

"Really we have had lately such stupid mists, fogs, rains and perpetual density," Lord Byron wrote from Switzerland to fellow poet Samuel Rogers in July 1816, "that one would think Castlereagh had the foreign affairs of the kingdom of Heaven also upon his hands."
By mock-blaming the dreadful weather of mid-1816 – soon dubbed "the year without a summer" – on the policies of Britain's reactionary foreign secretary, Byron spoke a century or two ahead of time. Without any human agency, the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), at 10 times the force of the legendary Krakatoa in 1883, threw enough volcanic ash, dust and debris into the atmosphere to ruin crops and trigger famines from China to New England. The disaster also killed around 90,000 local people, mostly through starvation.

Year without a summer
Historian John Post called the aftermath "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world". Average global temperatures fell by an estimated 0.4 to 0.7 °C. Land became flooded or parched.
In faraway Virginia, where it snowed in June 1816 and crops failed, Thomas Jefferson lamented "the most extraordinary year of drought and cold" America had ever seen. In Bengal, three years of skies shrouded in a sulphate veil impeded the monsoons and led not only to mass hunger but also to the spread of a new strain of cholera, triggering a global epidemic.
And in Switzerland, where the scandal-clouded Byron had fled to spend the sodden summer with his new poetic soulmate Percy Shelley, Shelley's teenage lover Mary Godwin and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, rain fell on 130 of 153 days between April and August.
At the dawn of Europe's industrial revolution, a purely natural disaster – possibly the most extreme volcanic eruption since the Hatepe event in New Zealand around AD 185 – thus convulsed societies and states across the globe.
Two centuries later, in a world of frets and fears about human responsibility for climate change, the cultural fallout from that "year without a summer" still colours the stories we tell.
As Byron's jokey aside about Castelreagh hints, for post-Enlightenment minds in the early 19th century, it was no longer easy to endure climate calamities as the simple will of God. In the US, penitent cults spread as ruined farmers migrated from the cold, barren soils of New England.
For free-thinking Europeans such as the Bryon-Shelley crew, these grim months came swiftly on the heels of Napoleon's defeat and the collapse of hopes for change. However much it rested on coincidence and contingency, the collision of social and natural catastrophes gave rise to long, dark nights of the Romantic soul.

Stormy origins
On one of those dark nights, in late June 1816, an evergreen myth was born. The story of how 18-year-old Mary Godwin, the precocious daughter of two notorious radical thinkers (Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin) and already mother to a baby boy, came to compose Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, has been told many times. The most gripping account remains her own. It appears in the preface to an 1831 edition of the novel, in which Mary Shelley (she married Percy in December 1816) distilled the hopes and fears of Enlightenment enquiry and Romantic imagination into a deathless story of curiosity and obsession.
In that "wet, ungenial summer", she recalls, "incessant rain often confined us for days to the house". One soaking night, at Byron's rented Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the company of rebels had spooked themselves by reading a collection of German horror stories. "We will each write a ghost story," Byron imperiously declared afterwards. Nothing came to Mary.
A few days later, however, she sat silent and attentive while Byron and Shelley ruminated over galvanism, the experiments of physician Erasmus Darwin and "the principle of life" itself. Later that night, sleepless and "possessed… beyond the usual bounds of reverie", Mary in a "waking dream" saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together".
In the morning, dread yielded to exultation: "What terrified me will terrify others," she later wrote. By January 1818, she had published Frankenstein. It shocked the critics but thrilled its readers. With lordly understatement, Byron told his publisher John Murray: "Methinks it is wonderful work for a girl of nineteen – not nineteen, indeed, at that time." The "girl" had changed, forever and everywhere, the popular conception of Western science.

Weird weather
That "ungenial summer" lends the novel its backdrop of meteorological shock and awe. Weird weather scours the book. The sense of transgression and reversal, as summer became winter and day night, also underlies The Vampyre, the clumsy but influential entry in the ghost-story contest by John Polidori, Byron's doctor and companion. In this uncanny season, as the frontiers among the elements collapsed, so did frontiers in the mind: between reason and magic, daylight and dream, the living and the dead.
Byron himself, in response to those "stupid" mists, fogs and rains, wrote the apocalyptic poem Darkness, with its vision of a "void" planet: "A lump of death, a chaos of hard clay", where "Morn came and went, and came, and brought no day".
Mary, too, felt horror at these atmospheric breakdowns – but also a sense of galvanising possibility. Frankenstein's mission, and his noble Creature, excites as much it dismays. As the cultural historian Alexandra Harris puts it in Weatherland, her book about climate in English literature, "Where Byron saw lumpen deathliness that summer, Mary Shelley saw terrifying new forms of vitality."
Darkness is a mesmeric piece of verse, much quoted during Cold War-era panics about the threat of "nuclear winter". Frankenstein, though, conceives of something grander than another doomsday chill. Along with its mood of risk and guilt come idealism and hope – dashed not by the high-minded Creature, but by the self-hatred and broken vows of his fabricator. Mary Shelley delivers heroism along with hubris.

The age of cli-fi
Now, 200 years after her world-shaking summer, the art that responds to human-made environmental peril may have more to learn from Shelley than from her aristocratic ally.
At least since J. G. Ballard published his great twin tales of planetary catastrophe in the early 1960s (The Drowned World and The Burning World, later retitled The Drought), climate-change fiction has spread like livid algae across a stagnant pool. "Cli-fi", as the critic Dan Bloom called it, now stretches across 200-odd titles – from early visions such as Arthur Herzog's Heat to the ecological precision of Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour and the exuberant end-time speculation of David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks.
Even before the hard news came in about greenhouse gas emissions, weather-driven apocalypse had long lost its novelty. In Mary Shelley's spirit of excitement and enchantment, writers and other green-minded artists may now need to recalibrate their instruments of warning and prophecy.
A couple of years before Ian McEwan published Solar – his bold bid in 2010 to do exactly that – he told me in an interview about the limits of disaster narratives. "We've had so many dystopias that we're brain-dead in that direction," the novelist argued. Instead, climate change called for fiercer, nimbler forms of art. "It's got to be fascinating, in the way that gossip is. It's got to be about ourselves. Maybe it needs an Animal Farm. Maybe it needs an allegory. But if you're going in that direction, you need a lot of wit."

A light in the darkness
With wit, cunning and a measure of satirical ferocity, McEwan went on to create (in Solar) the Nobel-prizewinning slob Michael Beard: a guzzling, boozing, one-man embodiment of human overconsumption, but also a potential saviour with a mind to change the world.
Although more comic than tragic, Beard perhaps has something in common with Victor Frankenstein himself. As the Genevan scientist and his undead progeny celebrate their bicentenary, remember that their inventor reacted to the crashing turbulence that oversaw their birth more with delight than dismay.
"One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld," she wrote to her half-sister Fanny Imlay. Mark the verb. While Mount Tambora's ash cloud did its remote, unknown worst, the lightning bolts lit creative exhilaration rather than frozen doom and gloom. As Mary Shelley intuited, and Ian McEwan knows, the art of climate crisis demands more than endless downpours of apocalypse. It's high time for a break in the clouds.

Links

• Race to save hidden treasures under threat from climate change
• Drowned rat first mammal wiped out by human-made climate change
• Drowned rat first mammal wiped out by human-made climate change
• A new politics of climate change could save the world
• Victorians experienced early climate change but missed the signs

Cheap And Clean: Australian Company Creates Hydrogen With Near-Zero Emissions

The Guardian - Myles Gough

With hydrogen tipped to become an important clean energy fuel, a new process may be the solution to powering electric vehicles and heating buildings

A new process for converting natural gas into hydrogen could be the solution for powering electric vehicles Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

An Australian company is using "cheap as dirt" iron ore to convert methane in natural gas into hydrogen. Importantly, their process generates near-zero emissions, as the carbon content of the gas is captured in the form of high-quality graphite.
As a clean-burning fuel, hydrogen could play a key role in future energy markets, but production methods are still too energy-intensive and costly.
Hazer Group is a Perth-based company, spun out of the University of Western Australia, which plans to halve the cost of hydrogen production. It is currently scaling-up its patented process, based on "methane cracking".
"The chemistry is remarkably simple," says Geoff Pocock, the managing director of the ASX-listed company, which raised A$5m at its initial public offering in September 2015. "You can think of it as a self-sequestering energy production system."
As natural gas passes through the heated iron ore catalyst, methane in the gas breaks down into its constituent elements: hydrogen and carbon. But instead of carbon dioxide, would-be emissions are captured in the form of solid graphite.
Some of the hydrogen is used to power the system, and in the surplus "you've got a hydrogen source, which hasn't got a CO2 footprint," he says.

Halving the cost of hydrogen
What's most intriguing about Hazer's process is the ultra-cheap catalyst and the secondary commodity in graphite, which can be sold to offset production costs.
Graphite is used in the production of lithium-ion batteries, and while prices vary depending on the quality, Pocock says it averages at about US$1,000 per tonne. Globally, the graphite market is worth around US$13bn annually.
"The early stage indication is certainly that it has the potential to be not only the cleanest but the cheapest way of making hydrogen globally," says Pocock.
"We're using a catalyst that, in Western Australia in particular, is as cheap as dirt. You can throw it away when you don't need it anymore, and it suddenly means that the catalyst cost comes out of the economics of the process.
"Our goal is to be halving or more than halving the cost [of hydrogen production], so taking it from $1 to $1.50, down to $0.50 to $0.75 per kilogram."

A gateway to cleaner energy
When hydrogen is combusted to generate heat, or used in fuel cells to generate electricity, the only byproduct is water. As a result, it has long been heralded as a low-carbon energy carrier, which could replace gasoline as a transport fuel, powering electric vehicles, or natural gas as fuel to heat buildings.
But less than 5% of the 65m tonnes of hydrogen produced each year (comprising a market worth about US$100bn annually) is currently used for energy applications, says Pocock.
Hydrogen is primarily used as an industrial chemical in the oil and gas industries, and for producing ammonia, which is used to make fertiliser and explosives. Many companies set up energy-intensive, greenhouse gas-emitting production plants on-site, to make hydrogen where it's needed.
Hazer has long-term plans to build and operate small and medium-sized plants that will be cost-competitive with on-site industrial chemical plants. Pocock says there would also be an opportunity to sell hydrogen to buyers in energy markets, either as a bulk commodity or as electricity.
With a clean, cost-effective production process enabling more energy applications, he says the $100bn per year hydrogen market could grow significantly.

Methane cracking made viable with iron ore
The chemistry of methane cracking has been understood since the 1950s. But until now, catalysts – such as nickel – were typically more expensive than the resulting graphite.
This created an economic dilemma: graphite forms in layers on the surface of the catalyst, and at a certain point, causes it to deactivate, or stop working.
But because the catalysts were so expensive, producers needed a way to recover them for future use. This additional step in the process was costly and involved burning off the graphite.
"That's why the use of iron ore is such a benefit," says Pocock. "What it's doing is reducing the economic barrier of this process being commercialised."
While there are some CO2 emissions associated with mining iron ore, Pocock says these aren't a factor for Hazer because they use a relatively small amount of the mineral.
For each tonne of iron ore used as a catalyst, Hazer will be able to produce up to 10 tonnes of hydrogen, says Pocock.
Similarly, the company doesn't factor in the emissions associated with producing natural gas. Pocock says this is true of alternative hydrogen producers, who also rely on fossil fuels.
"As long as you're comparing like for like, you are getting a legitimate picture of the overall CO2 reduction between each process", he says.

Advances in iron ore catalysis of interest to science
Dr Ken Chiang is a chemical engineer at CSIRO, who is not involved with Hazer Group.
While Chiang couldn't comment on Hazer's specific process, he says iron ore has been "considered as an option for a catalyst by many research groups".
"Iron ore is much cheaper than many commercial catalysts," he says. "Any development in iron ore catalysis will be very interesting fundamentally."
He says graphite will provide the company with an additional income stream.
Hazer Group, which formed in 2010, is currently working with scientists at the University of Sydney's Laboratory of Sustainable Technologies to scale up their process.
By the end of 2017, the company plans on having a pilot plant capable of producing tens to hundreds of kilograms of hydrogen per day, or about 30 tonnes per year.
To reach an industrially relevant scale, it will need to build plants that can produce more than 10,000 tonnes per year, says Pocock.
He says the company is also interested in using methane from bio-gas, derived from plants and other organic matter.
In this way, Hazer could effectively become a carbon sink, he says.
"If you look at the whole [carbon] cycle, the carbon that was previously atmospheric CO2 could be stored in the form of sustainable, commercially viable graphite."

Links

• Cutting the cable: Kangaroo Island eyes switch to 100% renewable energy
• Is aluminium the answer to all our battery prayers?
• Electric cars 'will be cheaper than conventional vehicles by 2022'
• Garbage in, energy out: creating biofuel from plastic waste
• Al Gore attacks CSIRO's climate cuts and praises Labor's proposals

Greenland Lost A Staggering 1 Trillion Tons Of Ice In Just Four Years

Washington Post - Chelsea Harvey


Greenland ice loss has recently contributed to twice as much sea-level rise than in the preceding two decades. (Reuters)

It’s no news that Greenland is in serious trouble — but now, new research has helped quantify just how bad its problems are. A satellite study, published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the Greenland ice sheet lost a whopping 1 trillion tons of ice between the years 2011 and 2014 alone. And a big portion of it came from just five glaciers, about which scientists now have more cause to worry than ever.
It’s the latest story in a long series of increasingly worrisome studies on ice loss in Greenland. Research already suggests that the ice sheet has lost at least 9 trillion tons of ice in the past century and that the rate of loss has increased over time. Climate scientists are keeping a close eye on the region because of its potentially huge contributions to future sea-level rise (around 20 feet if the whole thing were to melt) — not to mention the damage it’s already done. Ice loss from Greenland may have contributed as much as a full inch of sea-level rise in the last 100 years and up to 10 percent of all the sea-level rise that’s been documented since the 1990s.
The new study takes a detailed look at ice loss in Greenland between 2011 and 2014 using measurements from the CryoSat-2, an environmental research satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 2010. It relied on a type of measurement known as altimetry — basically, measuring how the surface of Greenland’s altitude changed over time in response to ice gains or losses.
“Simplistically, if the ice sheet’s going up, we can find that as evidence that the ice sheet is growing,” said lead author Malcolm McMillan, a research fellow at the University of Leeds. “And where we see that the ice sheet surface is lowering, we can find that the ice sheet is losing ice.”
But he cautioned that this is something of a simplification. The researchers also had to consider how other factors such as snowfall — which would be difficult to differentiate by satellite — might be affecting changes on the surface of the ice sheet.
“Snow and ice are at different densities, so they’re associated with a different amount of mass loss,” McMillan explained. “We used a regional climate model and a model of the surface of the ice sheet to really inform us and tell us about the nature of the changes that we’re seeing.”
Using this method — combining the satellite observations with modeling — the researchers found that the Greenland ice sheet lost mass at an average rate of about 269 billion tons per year from January 2011 through December 2014. Altogether, this comes to about 1 trillion tons of ice loss over the four-year period.
That said, there were some major fluctuations from one year to the next — an observation that University of Sheffield climate expert Edward Hanna (who was not involved in the new study) said is one of the paper’s most notable findings. The biggest losses were observed in 2012, when an unusually warm summer helped bring about a loss of more than 400 billion tons of ice. The next year, 2013, saw a comparatively modest loss of just over 100 billion tons.
“There’s not so many studies that do these sort of trend analyses or time studies for the latest few years,” Hanna noted. “So it’s really trying to assess how the ice sheet is responding to ongoing climate variability or change.”
Overall, the ice loss was particularly prevalent in the southwest, but the scientists noted that there were also losses observed in the cooler, northern parts of the ice sheet. Notably, the researchers also found that a solid 12 percent of all the ice loss came from just a handful of glaciers composing less than 1 percent of the ice sheet’s total area.
Each of these five glaciers flows outward into the sea, so that a combination of both rising air temperatures and ocean temperatures likely play a part in their ongoing retreat. Among these was the iconic Jakobshavn glacier, a well-studied location now famous for its recent massive ice losses. It’s been known to calve blocks of ice boasting several square miles in surface area, as measured from above.
Scientists were already fairly well aware of the massive losses being suffered by these glaciers, McMillan acknowledged. But the finding helps reinforce previous observations and drive home their disproportionate role in the ice sheet’s contributions to sea-level rise. “Also … it means that going forward, we’re able to kind of develop long-term and systematic records that we can [use to] regularly monitor these glaciers and see how they’re changing into the future,” he said.
In fact, the study’s results match up reasonably well with measurements taken by certain other satellites. After doing some comparisons, the researchers found that data from NASA’s GRACE satellites, for instance, suggest that Greenland is losing ice at a rate of about 287 billions tons per year. And according to Hanna, the results stand well with scientists’ overall estimates of recent ice loss in Greenland, which he says are consistently suggested to be around 250 billion tons annually for the past few years.
In this way, the study reinforces many beliefs that were already widely held about Greenland’s precarious condition. But the techniques used to do so may strengthen future measurements, which will be used to inform the climate models that help scientists make predictions about how the ice sheet will behave in the future — a crucial step in determining the amount of sea-level rise we might expect over any given time period.
“I guess the most significant or the most novel aspect of the study is really the resolution or the detail that we’re able to measure,” McMillan said. “Although satellite techniques give us a holistic view of how the ice sheet as a whole is changing, what we’re able to do by using this specific technique is identify specific regions that are changing. And that’s really important because it kind of gives us more of an idea of the processes that are causing the changes.”

Links

• The world’s clouds are in different places than they were 30 years ago
• Scientists think they’ve just pinpointed the key driver of ice loss in Antarctica
• The diversity of life across much of Earth has plunged below ‘safe’ levels

2016 On Pace To Be Hottest Year Ever As Climate Change Trends Reach ‘New Climax’– UN

UN News Centre

Wilted crops in Neno district, Malawi. Photo: OCHA/Tamara van Vliet

Global temperatures for the first six months of this year reached new highs, setting 2016 on track to be the hottest-ever on record, the United Nations weather agency said today.
"Another month, another record. And another. And another. Decades-long trends of climate change are reaching new climaxes, fuelled by the strong 2015/2016 El Niño," said World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a press release.
The El Niño event, which turned up the Earth's thermostat, has now disappeared, but "climate change, caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases, will not," he stressed. This means more heatwaves, more extreme rainfall and potential for higher impact tropical cyclones.
Arctic sea ice melted early and fast, another indicator of climate change. Carbon dioxide levels, which are driving global warming, have reached new highs.
To calculate global temperature statistics for its annual state of the climate report, WMO uses datasets from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), and the UK's Met Office and reanalysis data from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF).

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (second from left) in discussion with Petteri Talaas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), at the WMO Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. UN Photo/Rick Bajornas.

Two separate reports from NOAA and NASA GISS both highlighted the dramatic and sweeping changes in the state of the climate.
June 2016 marked the 14th consecutive month of record heat for land and oceans. It marked the 378th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th century average. The last month with temperatures below the 20th century average was December 1984.
Carbon dioxide concentrations have passed the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million in the atmosphere so far this year. CO2 levels vary according to the season, but the underlying trend is upwards. They showed a surprising increase for the first half of 2016, rising in June 2016 to nearly 407 ppm, 4 ppm greater than June 2015.
"This underlines more starkly than ever the need to approve and implement the Paris Agreement on climate change, and to speed up the shift to low carbon economies and renewable energy," said Mr. Taalas.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited leaders to a special event on 21 September to deposit their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession to the Paris Agreement on climate change, which was adopted by last December. The event will also provide an opportunity to other countries to publicly commit to the agreement before the end of 2016.

It's getting hotter
The average temperature in the first six months of 2016 was 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial era in the late 19th century, according to NASA.
NOAA said the global land and ocean average temperature for January–June was 1.05 degrees Celsius (1.89 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th century average, beating the previous record set in 2015 by 0.20 degree Celsius (0.36 degree Fahrenheit).
Each month in 2016 was record warm. Most of the world's land and ocean surfaces had warmer to much-warmer-than-average conditions.
The El Niño event which developed in 2015 and was one of the most powerful on record contributed to the record temperatures in the first half of 2016. It dissipated in May.

Arctic Sea ice is melting faster
The extent of Arctic sea ice at the peak of the summer melt season now typically covers 40 per cent less area than it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Arctic sea ice extent in September, the seasonal low point in the annual cycle, has been declining at a rate of 13.4 per cent per decade.

A view from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's small plane on arrival in King George Island, Antarctica. The Secretary-General traveled to Antarctica to see the effects of climate change on melting glaciers.

Depending on where you are, it's either too wet or too dry
Rainfall in June 2016 varied significantly around the world. It was notably drier than normal across the western and central contiguous US, Spain, northern Colombia, northeastern Brazil, Chile, southern Argentina, and across parts of central Russia.
Wetter-than-normal precipitation was observed across northern Argentina, northern and central Europe, much of Australia, and across central and southern Asia.
From January to 4 July, China saw 21.2 per cent above average precipitation. South China entered the flood season on 21 March, 16 days earlier than normal and more than 150 counties were record wet, according to the China Meteorological Administration. More than 300 rivers crossed the water level warning mark.

Coral reefs are under increasing threat
Temperatures in the Coral Sea (including the Great Barrier Reef), and the Tasman Sea were highest on record for extended periods since late summer 2016, according to Australia's Bureau of Meteorology.
These warm waters have also contributed to surface temperature warmth over Australia and unprecedented bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, according to Australia's independent Climate Council. There has been widespread bleaching of reefs in many other parts of the world.

Links

• With hottest April on record, streak of above-average global temperatures continues – UN
• UN chief invites leaders to fast-track ratification of Paris climate deal
• Trees contribute to reducing carbon footprints even after being cut down – UN report
• Ban urges burden-sharing, solidarity to combat effects of El Niño and mitigate climate change

A Brief History Of Fossil-Fuelled Climate Denial

The Conversation - John Cook

Fossil fuel industry-funded organisations have played a big role in climate denial. Coal power image from www.shutterstock.com

The fossil fuel industry has spent many millions of dollars on confusing the public about climate change. But the role of vested interests in climate science denial is only half the picture.
Interest in this topic has spiked with the latest revelation regarding coalmining company Peabody Energy. After Peabody filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, documentation became available revealing the scope of Peabody's funding to third parties. The list of funding recipients includes trade associations, lobby groups and climate-contrarian scientists.
This latest revelation is significant because in recent years, fossil fuel companies have become more careful to cover their tracks. An analysis by Robert Brulle found that from 2003 to 2010, organisations promoting climate misinformation received more than US$900 million of corporate funding per year.
However, Brulle found that from 2008, open funding dropped while funding through untraceable donor networks such as Donors Trust (otherwise known as the "dark money ATM") increased. This allowed corporations to fund climate science denial while hiding their support.
The decrease in open funding of climate misinformation coincided with efforts to draw public attention to the corporate funding of climate science denial. A prominent example is Bob Ward, formerly of the UK Royal Society, who in 2006 challenged Exxon-Mobil to stop funding denialist organisations.

John Cook interviews Bob Ward at COP21, Paris

The veils of secrecy have been temporarily lifted by the Peabody bankruptcy proceedings, revealing the extent of the company's third-party payments, some of which went to fund climate misinformation. However, this is not the first revelation of fossil fuel funding of climate misinformation – nor is it the first case involving Peabody.
In 2015, Ben Stewart of Greenpeace posed as a consultant to fossil fuel companies and approached prominent climate denialists, offering to pay for reports promoting the benefits of fossil fuels. The denialists readily agreed to write fossil-fuel-friendly reports while hiding the funding source. One disclosed that he had been paid by Peabody to write contrarian research. He had also appeared as an expert witness and written newspaper op-eds.

John Cook interviews Ben Stewart, Greenpeace at COP21, Paris.

The bigger picture of fossil-fuelled denial
Peabody's funding of climate change information and misinformation is one episode in a much larger history of fossil-fuel-funded misinformation. An analysis of more than 40,000 texts by contrarian sources found that organisations who received corporate funding published more climate misinformation, a trend that increased over time.
The following figure shows the use of the claim that "CO₂ is good" (a favourite argument of Peabody Energy) has increased dramatically among corporate-funded sources compared with unfunded ones.

Prevalence of denialist claim from corporate funded and non-funded sources. Farrell (2015)

In 1991, Western Fuels Association combined with other groups representing fossil fuel interests to produce a series of misinformation campaigns. This included a video promoting the positive benefits of carbon dioxide, with hundreds of free copies sent to journalists and university libraries. The goal of the campaign was to "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)", attempting to portray the impression of an active scientific debate about human-caused global warming.
ExxonSecrets.org has been tracking fossil-fuel-funded misinformation campaigns for more than two decades – documenting more than A$30 million of funding from Exxon alone to denialist think tanks from 1998 to 2014.
Exxon's funding of climate science denial over this period is particularly egregious considering that it knew full well the risks from human-caused climate change. David Sassoon, founder of Pulitzer Prize-winning news organisation Inside Climate News led an investigation into Exxon's internal research, discovering that its own scientists had warned the company of the harmful impacts of fossil fuel burning as long ago as the 1970s.

John Cook interviews David Sassoon from Inside Climate News.

Even Inside Climate News's revelation of industry's knowledge of the harmful effects of climate change before engaging in misinformation campaigns has precedence. In 2009, an internal report for the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing fossil fuel industry interests, was leaked to the press.
It showed that the coalition's own scientific experts had advised it in 1995 that "[t]he scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO₂ on climate is well established and cannot be denied". Nevertheless, the organisation proceeded to deny climate science and promote the benefits of fossil fuel emissions.

Ideology: the other half of an "unholy alliance"
However, to focus solely on industry's role in climate science denial misses half the picture. The other significant player is political ideology. At an individual level, numerous surveys (such as here, here and and here) have found that political ideology is the biggest predictor of climate science denial.
People who fear the solutions to climate change, such as increased regulation of industry, are more likely to deny that there is a problem in the first place – what psychologists call "motivated disbelief".
Consequently, groups promoting political ideology that opposes market regulation have been prolific sources of misinformation about climate change. This productivity has been enabled by the many millions of dollars flowing from the fossil fuel industry. Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt, refers to this partnership between vested interests and ideological groups as an "unholy alliance".

Reducing the influence
To reduce the influence of climate science denial, we need to understand it. This requires awareness of both the role of political ideology and the support that ideological groups have received from vested interests.
Without this understanding, it's possible to make potentially inaccurate accusations such as climate denial being purely motivated by money, or that it is intentionally deceptive. Psychological research tells us that ideologically driven confirmation bias (misinformation) is almost indistinguishable from intentional deception (disinformation).

Video from free online course Making Sense of Climate Science Denial (launches August 9).

The fossil fuel industry has played a hugely damaging role in promoting misinformation about climate change. But without the broader picture including the role of political ideology, one can build an incomplete picture of climate science denial, leading to potentially counterproductive responses.

Links

• Exxon climate revelations are just part of a long history of science misinformation
• Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?
• The science for climate change only feeds the denial: how do you beat that?
• Future Fund drops tobacco: should fossil fuels be next?