Human-Induced Climate Change Began Earlier Than Previously Thought

The Guardian - Ian Sample

Signs of warming appear as early as 1830 say researchers, whose analysis will help build accurate baseline of temperature before influence of human activity

The first signs of warming from the rise in greenhouse gases which came hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution appear as early as 1830. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images

Continents and oceans in the northern hemisphere began to warm with industrial-era fossil fuel emissions nearly 200 years ago, pushing back the origins of human-induced climate change to the mid-19th century.
The first signs of warming from the rise in greenhouse gases which came hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution appear as early as 1830 in the tropical oceans and the Arctic, meaning that climate change witnessed today began about 180 years ago.
Researchers in Australia found evidence for the early onset of warming after trawling through 500 years of data on tree rings, corals and ice cores that together form a natural archive of Earth's historical temperatures.

Temperature trends for the continents and tropical oceans over the last 500 years. Credit: Abram et al. 

Much of what is known about Earth's climate history is based on instruments that have monitored temperatures from the 1880s onwards. But while these capture the changing conditions seen in the 20th century, they miss the start of the warming trend.
"A lot is known about the climate record for the time when we have instrumental records," said Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at the Australian National University. "We wanted to look at whether these records give us the full picture."
Pooling the data, the scientists found that temperatures in the tropical oceans and in the air above northern hemisphere land-masses began to rise above natural variations in the 1830s, just as greenhouse gas emissions edged upwards.
The scientists first thought that they were seeing the climate rebound after a period of natural cooling brought on by particles thrown high into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions. But climate simulations showed that the warming they observed could be explained purely by the small rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
"The changes in greenhouse gases in the 19th century were small compared with the fairly rapid changes we see now, so seeing the climate respond this way was a surprise," said Abrams.

'I brought the graph': Brian Cox refutes claims of climage change denier on Q&A

The southern hemisphere, including Australasia and South America, appeared to start heating up 50 years later, near the turn of the century, while no sign of warming on the continental scale was noticed in Antarctica. The lack of appreciable warming in Antarctica may be down to ocean currents carrying warm waters to the north and away from the frigid continent.
The results are important to build up an accurate baseline of the Earth's temperature before human activity began to wield an influence on the climate. Details of the study, which involved 25 scientists across Australia, the US, Europe and Asia, are published in the journal Nature.
Industrialisation led to only minor rises in greenhouse gases in the 1800s, but what struck the scientists was how swiftly the climate changed as a result. "There is a potential that this could have a flip side," Abram said. "If we can do anything to slow down greenhouse gas emissions, or even start to draw them back, there may be at least some areas of the climate system where we get a rapid payback."
Ed Hawkins, a meteorologist at Reading University, said the results show how tree rings, corals and other natural material can be used to understand the regional and global changes that unfolded during and since the pre-industrial period. "This is further evidence that the climate has already changed significantly since the pre-industrial period," he said.

Links

• Revealed: first mammal species wiped out by human-induced climate change
• Climate change is corroding our values, says Naomi Klein 
• Climate change, chaos and inexact computing
• Can game theory help solve the problem of climate change?
• India unveils climate change plan
• Climate change? Try catastrophic climate breakdown
• Cameron cools on climate change
• Climate change is a human rights issue – and that's how we can solve it

What Will It Take For Us To Pay Attention To Climate Change?

ABC Science Show - Bob Beale

Australia's coastline has seen massive changes in the past six months, 2015 was recorded as the hottest year on record, and 2016 is shaping up to be even hotter. Former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Bob Beale laments that nobody seems to be taking any notice.

Australians are experiencing an influx of destructive storms and cyclones. (Torsten Blackwood/Getty Images)

My Facebook page prompts me to say what is on my mind. Actually I'm feeling quite wretched. I have a very bad dose of solastalgia, a term coined by my friend Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher.
Solastalgia is feeling homesick while you are still at home, a melancholy brought on by the loss or degradation of a treasured environment. My solastalgia is for my country, indeed for my whole planet. I'm asking myself, what exactly does Earth need to do to get our attention?

To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this.

No, really, what the heckedy-heck does it take to make us truly sit up and notice the massive changes going on in the natural world around us? It's a travesty that so many people are fixated by staring at their so-called smart phones in a search for imaginary Pokémon creatures, while the real plants and animals of the world are turning up their toes in their billions.
Look what has been happening lately around Australia's coastline alone. If our home is girt by sea, as our national anthem says, then all the signs are that we are effectively burning the floorboards. Disaster after disaster is happening.
Think I'm being alarmist? Well, think about this—off Queensland, more than nine-tenths of the Great Barrier Reef has just been bleached. Perhaps a quarter of it has died and likely won't come back.
Look up north in the Gulf—the worst mass die-off of mangroves ever seen, 10,000 hectares of it along great lengths of the coast. Look off Western Australia—960 square kilometres of kelp forest has just disappeared. More than a third of it is now extinct. And all of this has become evident in just the past six months alone. It's as if our oceans have just suffered a massive stroke.
And don't get me started about the terrible decline in bird populations around our shorelines, or about the rapid southward shift of tropical and subtropical fish, seaweeds and urchins. We are finding Nemo in Tasmanian waters!
And don't mention the millions of tonnes of man-made polymer waste materials, PET bottles, caps, bags, disposable plates, wrappers, you name it, that enter our oceans every year, turning them into one great plastic soup. The sand on every single Australian beach is now made up in part of countless grains of plastic. I could go on—but what's the point?
I know I'm far from alone in being aghast about all this. But if the list I have just reeled off hasn't got Australians off their butt demanding action and marching in the streets, I don't know what will.
So friends, I ask again, what will it take?
Climate records are falling with menacing regularity. In recent years we've broken record after record for heat, extreme rain and other disruptive weather events. Last spring we broke heat records. Last summer we had searing heat waves, and extreme temperatures smashed records across south-eastern Australian, followed by our warmest autumn on record.
Sea surface temperatures have been going off the charts as well. The world in general has been cooking too, with June being the hottest month ever recorded globally. 2015 was the warmest year on record, beating the previous mark set in 2014, and now 2016 is likely to break the record again.
Climate change is not some nebulous political game that might affect our grandchildren. To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this. Yet climate change was not even mentioned in the Turnbull government's first budget in May. Not a word, not a sausage. Such assiduous avoidance. Incredible, isn't it?
Worse still, that same budget gouged $1.3 billion in funds away from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. You have to ask, what on earth were they thinking? And climate change barely caused a flicker of debate in our recent federal election as well.
Instead we were fobbed off yet again by the major parties, and now we have Pauline Hanson elected once again on a platform of outright denial of climate science, to nourish fresh cankers of complacency and social division in our Parliament.
The real border security issue is the appalling damage we ourselves are doing to our coasts and oceans. The real negative gearing is the one we've been imposing on our planet. And the real superannuation problem is the squandering of natural resources, consumption for consumption's sake, at the expense of our kids and grandchildren.
Our civic leaders, our intellectuals, our politicians, and our mass media are playing Pokémon Go with us. When we try to reflect on, to consider and absorb the significance and meaning of these disasters, they blur our field of view by invoking phantoms to distract us. Indeed, they are worse than negligent, they are complicit. They know what needs to be done, but it's so much easier to deflect, distract, deny and delay.
Here's a word I just made up to describe our politicians in action on climate change—stagnertia.
A pox on all of them. A pox on them for leaving unattended and untreated the raging fever afflicting our planet.
One more time I ask, what will it take?


Bob Beale says the Earth is sending strong messages that things are seriously out of balance.

Links

• Oh Pod, where art thou? Cows and climate change
• Climate Change and Insurance Companies
• Mr Murdoch and climate change
• How climate change impacts health

Climate Change Is Thawing Deadly Diseases. Maybe Now We'll Address It?

The Guardian - Mona Sarfaty*

An anthrax outbreak in Russia came from a 75-year-old caribou carcass thawing out. This is only the beginning of this sort of thing happening

'In addition to releasing ancient microbes, melting layers of permafrost also release methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, that in turn causes further warming.' Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Earlier this month, an outbreak of anthrax in northern Russia caused the death of a 12-year-old boy and his grandmother and put 90 people in the hospital. These deadly spores – which had not been seen in the Arctic since 1941 – also spread to 2,300 caribou. Russian troops trained in biological warfare were dispatched to the Yamalo-Nenets region to evacuate hundreds of the indigenous, nomadic people and quarantine the disease.
Americans are likely to associate anthrax with the mysterious white powder that was mailed to news media and US Senate offices in the weeks following 11 September 2001. The bacteria – usually sequestered in biological weapons labs – killed five people and infected 17 others in the most devastating bioterrorism attack in US history.
But in Russia, the spread of illness was not the result of bioterrorism; it was a result of global warming. Record-high temperatures melted Arctic permafrost and released deadly anthrax spores from a thawing carcass of a caribou that had been infected 75 years ago and had stayed frozen in limbo until now. This all suggests that it may not be easy to predict which populations will be most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change.
In 2013, the National Academy of Sciences hosted a forum on the influence of global environmental change on infectious diseases. In his keynote speech, Dr Jonathan Patz stood in front of a large slide of a mosquito and warned: "Global warming's greatest threat may also be the smallest." The forum focused on many causes of disease, from fungi, bacteria, viruses and mold spores, to vectors like bats and mosquitoes. Climate change can exacerbate the spread of infectious disease by changing the behavior, lifespans and regions of diseases and their carriers.
This can sometimes be hard to prove directly. It can be challenging, for example, to isolate the avenues by which climate change drives emerging infections in warm climates where travel, trade, land use and dense urban living can all lead to the spread of disease. At other times, the signal is bright. Looking way up north in the Arctic – where there are far fewer people, less travel and trade, and fewer infectious diseases – the signal that climate change is a source of disease outbreaks is clear.
It is usually so cold in the tundra that the ground is perennially frozen in deep layers that can date back 3m years. But the usual circumstances no longer apply at the top of the world. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. In fact, the area of the anthrax outbreak was 18F (10C) hotter than average, with temperatures reaching 95F (35C). In addition to releasing ancient microbes, melting layers of permafrost also release methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, that in turn causes further warming.
It is not just animal carcasses that are thawing. Indigenous groups living in the tundra do not bury their dead deep underground, opting instead for wooden coffins arranged in above-ground cemeteries. This raises the potential for infections to spread from this source as well.
Could some of the severe infectious diseases that have threatened the planet in the past be reactivated as our northernmost regions thaw? It's not just climate scientists that are concerned about the health threats of a warming world. Public health experts and physicians are also speaking out. The Lancet Commission released a report in 2015 asserting that climate change could reverse the last 50 years of public health advances.
As risk is added to risk, the signals of our changing climate underscore the urgent need to put climate change solutions in place. Even more than we know, our health may depend on it.

*Mona Sarfaty is the director of Program for Climate and Health, Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason

Links

• Russian anthrax outbreak linked to climate change
• Giant virus revived from ancient permafrost
• Climate change threatens 50 years of progress in global health, study says
• Climate change biggest threat to health, doctors say

Seven Charts Showing How Countries’ Carbon Footprints Compare

Carbon Brief - Sophie Yeo

Oil refinery, chemical and petrochemical plant at night. Photo: zorazhuang/E+/Getty Images.

The UN's climate body, which was responsible for the Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015, has long been collecting detailed data on greenhouse gas emissions.
When countries met in 2014 for their annual climate conference, they decided that it would be easier to track progress if some of the data from developed countries — annex one countries in UN jargon — was collected together in one document.
The UN produced such a document for the first time in 2015, which compiled emissions data from 2013. At this time, only 31 countries had submitted their data.
The UN has now released the latest version, with emissions compiled for 2014, and this time including 43 countries. Carbon Brief has mined the latest document for the most interesting nuggets of information.
All data is self-reported and, therefore, based on a range of different assumptions and methods, although countries do undergo a check-up by expert review teams. This process of data collection is seen as key to ensuring that each country is sticking to its commitments.
Greenhouse gases come from a variety of sources, including power generation, industry, cars, planes, aviation and leakages. Not every potential source of pollution contributes equally to a country's emissions.
Knowing the composition of a country's carbon footprint provides an insight into its economy, and also highlights which sectors it should be targeting as it tackles climate change.

Oil and gas platform. Photo: curraheeshutter/iStock/Getty Images.

Transportation
Road transport accounts for around 20% of countries' footprints, on average. Emissions are estimated based on fuel sales in each country, which explains why transport makes up 56% of Luxembourg's total footprint. Vehicles entering the country to buy fuel, thanks to low VAT and excise duty, raise its emissions on paper, even though the fuel is probably burnt outside the country's borders.

Road transport's share of total emissions in developed countries (%), 2014. Source: UNFCCC. Chart by Carbon Brief, using Highcharts.

The data for aviation tells a different story. Countries have reported the share of total emissions taken up by domestic aviation — that is, flights that stay within the country's borders.
Here, Norway takes the top spot, with 2.4% of its total emissions taken up by domestic flights. Hungary and Luxembourg, which run no internal flights, emit nothing in this category.

Percentage share of total emissions from domestic aviation for developed countries, 2014. Source: UNFCCC. Chart by Carbon Brief, using Highcharts.

Emissions from international aviation are not included in a country's individual inventory, but the data does compare how much fuel is consumed by domestic and international flights leaving each country.

Jet kerosene and aviation gasoline consumed by domestic (blue columns) and international aviation (yellow columns) in developed countries (exajoules, EJ), 2014. Source: UNFCCC. Chart by Carbon Brief, using Highcharts.

For almost all countries, most of the fuel is used in international flights — a sector which currently does not have an emissions reduction target.
The US is a notable exception to this rule, due to a number of factors, including its size, a preference for holidaying in America and poor public transport. Here, domestic flights consume more fuel than international flights, showing the significance of the recent move in the US to pave the way towards regulations that would limit emissions from domestic flights.

Fugitive emissions
Fugitive emissions are greenhouse gas emissions, mainly methane, that are accidentally lost during the production, storage or transport of oil, coal and gas.
These are, therefore, included in the data that countries have to report. They do so separately for coal, and oil and gas.
The following graph shows each country's total coal production set against the fugitive emissions this causes, expressed as a share of its total emissions.

Coal production in developed countries (blue bars, millions of tonnes, Mt, left-hand axis). Share of total emissions from coal production fugitive methane (purple dots, %, right-hand axis), 2014. Source: UNFCCC. Chart by Carbon Brief, using Highcharts.

The chart shows that producing a large amount of coal does not necessarily mean that the resulting fugitive emissions from mining and handling will occupy a large slice of a country's overall emissions.
The US is a case in point. It produces more coal than any other developed country, yet its fugitive emissions from coal occupy a small share of the country's total emissions, at just 1%. Compare this to Kazakhstan, at the other end of the scale, where coal production is comparatively low, but is nonetheless responsible for 8.5% of the country's emissions.
Such disparities will depend on factors such as the extent to which the economy depends on coal mining as a whole, and whether its mining technology is modern and efficient.
For oil and gas, fugitive emissions are only shown as a percentage of total aggregated emissions in the UNFCCC document, as the graph below shows.

Fugitive methane and CO2 emissions from oil and gas in developed countries as a share of total emissions (%), 2014. Source: UNFCCC. Chart by Carbon Brief, using Highcharts.

By this metric, Russia clearly has the biggest problem with fugitive emissions in its oil and gas sector, with leaked methane and CO2 responsible for more than 30% of its total footprint.
The following graph takes the total share of fugitive methane emissions for oil, coal and gas production in each country and compares it to the total volume of fugitive methane emissions. Countries submit the latter data to the UNFCCC, although it was not included in the aggregation document.

Fugitive methane emissions from oil, coal and gas (blue bars, Mt of CO2 equivalent, left-hand axis). Fugitive emissions' share of developed countries' total footprint (purple dots, %, right-hand axis). Fugitive emissions data for the US, Ukraine, Australia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, New Zealand, Austria and Ireland is for 2012, as 2014 data was not yet available. All percentage share data is for 2014. Source: UNFCCC and Annex 1 Global Map. Chart by Carbon Brief, using Highcharts.

This shows that Russia both emits more fugitive methane from its fossil fuel production than any other developed country, and that this occupies a larger share of the country's total emissions. The US emits the next largest volume of emissions, through this occupies a smaller slice of its overall emissions.
There are several reasons why fugitive methane emissions differ so drastically as a share of total emissions between countries.
It will partly depend on the size of the country's energy extraction industry compared to other emitting sectors, but also on the extent to which the sector is regulated and the type of fossil fuel production.
The inventory reports reflect estimates, rather than measurements of emissions. As a result, some of the reported differences could be down to the choice of accounting method rather than actual emissions.
According to a 2015 study of fugitive emissions by the economic research firm, Rhodium Group:
"Reported leakage rates can vary due to type of oil and gas produced (offshore generally has lower leakage rates than onshore), the state of national infrastructure, air quality and safety policies, and industry management practices, as well as differences in measurement accuracy. For example, using EPA emissions estimates, the US natural gas leakage rate is 1.3%. China's national methane emissions estimates imply a leakage rate of about 0.02%."

Animals
In some countries, agriculture may be responsible for a greater share of emissions than energy.
Countries have provided detailed estimates of their "enteric emissions" — that is, the methane emitted by cows, pigs and sheep. The following chart shows the number of these animals in each country, and the share of total emissions for which they are responsible.

Numbers of pigs, cows and sheep (blue and yellow columns, millions, left-hand axis). Enteric emissions as a share of total emissions (purple dots, %, right-hand axis), 2014. Source: UNFCCC. Chart by Carbon Brief, using Highcharts.

It is in this category that New Zealand dominates. Its 40 million pigs, cows and sheep are responsible for 35% of its emissions. The US has 163 million livestock, yet their methane emissions are responsible for only 5% of its total footprint.
Agriculture is responsible for 46% of New Zealand's emissions, with energy making up just 42%. In the US, energy is responsible for 85%, leaving agriculture responsible for just 11%.
Manure management is also responsible for a chunk of agricultural emissions. This is mainly small as a share of total emissions, but can be significant. For instance, in Denmark, it is responsible for 4% of the country's emissions.

Links

• 10 charts showing why carbon emissions stalled last year
• Seven charts showing how the EU's energy use is being transformed
• Five charts showing the EU's surprising progress on renewable energy
• Seven charts showing why we need China's help to stop dangerous warming
• Three charts showing why the world needs to take climate change action now

2 Critical Climate Change Problems Most People Don’t Know About

CleanTechnica - Zachary Shahan

Global warming and climate change get a lot of attention — well, not in the mainstream media, but among niche media outlets like CleanTechnica. However, whether in the mainstream media or in niche publications, some of the big challenges of a quickly changing climate are not often highlighted, and I'm quite confident that most people haven't considered them at all.

Yes, people probably get the point that global warming and climate change mean higher sea levels, melting ice in the Arctic, fewer species, less snow for skiing, and bigger storms and droughts. But thinking 1–3 steps further doesn't seem to be all that common, and media coverage of the following topics has been slim or nonexistent in much of the mass media.

Climate Change = Mass Migration

Immigration and war are two hot topics of this year's US presidential election season. I'm an American immigrant living in Europe and I'm well aware that the United States itself is a country built by immigrants, pretty much continuously. I'm certainly not against immigration! However, without a doubt, fast, large-scale immigration often poses a challenge for countries taking in the immigrants.

The Migration Policy Institute writes: "The impact of climate change as a driver of human migration is expected by many to dwarf all others. … The most significant mechanisms of displacement are sea-level rise, higher temperatures, disruption of water cycles, and increasing severity of storms."

In the US, Mexican immigration is expected to increase due to global warming, according to Princeton University researchers. These immigrants have already been termed "climate migrants."

A study published in Nature Climate Change found that heat stress is a driver of migration out of rural Pakistan. Who's surprised?

A few major media outlets have covered this topic. The Guardian, TIME, and The Independent all have great pieces on it.

An article in The Guardian states: "Thanks to global climate change, mass migration could be the new normal."
An article in TIME writes: "Even as Europe wrestles over how to absorb the migrant tide, experts warn that the flood is likely to get worse as climate change becomes a driving factor."
From The Independent: "The current refugee crisis marks a watershed moment in the history of global warming because it's the first wave of emigration to be explicitly linked to climate change, according to one leading scientist, who predicts rises in temperature and increasingly extreme weather will unleash many more mass movements of people in the future."

Here's an extended quote from The Guardian:

"There are lots of estimates as to what we can expect to see in the near future, but the best known (and controversial) figure comes from Professor Norman Myers, who argues that climate change could cause 200 million people to be displaced by 2050.
"In fact, it's already happening. According to the Pentagon, climate change is a 'threat multiplier' and does appear to be increasing risk of conflict.
"Indeed a new study released in March suggests this is exactly what happened in Syria, after a severe drought in 2006. As the study's co-author, Professor Richard Seager, explains, 'We're not saying drought caused the [Syrian conflict]. We're saying that added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.' "

Luckily, some leading bloggers have been writing about these connections for several years. From Think Progress, see this piece, this piece, this piece, and this piece. That last one leads into the logical next issue of concern about global warming and climate change ramifications in society.

Climate Change = War

Naturally, mass migration will put stresses on the countries where migrants are trying to move, and the stresses that lead to mass migration will also spur civil unrest within those countries.
From that last article linked above:

"A new study finds that human-caused climate change was a major trigger of Syria's brutal civil war. The war that helped drive the rise of the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) was itself spawned in large part by what one expert called perhaps 'the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent,' from 2006 to 2010."

I know, it's shocking. Who would have thought that an extremely long and harsh period of drought and crop failures would lead (in part) to civil unrest and war?

Going on:

"That drought destroyed the livelihood of 800,000 people according to the U.N. and sent vastly more into poverty. The poor and displaced fled to cities, 'where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011,' as the study's news release explains.The study, 'Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought,' found that global warming made Syria's 2006 to 2010 drought two to three times more likely.

A long article on the topic from Science Heathen eloquently summarizes:

"Modern civilization, and its massive number of infrastructure-dependent people, is almost entirely reliant upon the delicate infrastructure of the modern world for its survival. If any significant damage were to occur to this delicately-balanced infrastructure, large numbers of people would starve, be forced to migrate, or be motivated to war — while, in the process, becoming increasingly susceptible to disease and illness. …"Large scale war or civil collapse is almost an inevitability in regions facing very scarce freshwater resources, very limited agricultural-land/productivity, and large-populations. And these are exactly the conditions that many regions of the world are expected to face as climate change intensifies."

Indeed.

So, seriously, if you are concerned about the "modest" amount of migration and war we are seeing today, you better be concerned about global warming and climate change, and the ridiculous amount of societal disruption they will cause as they get more and more extreme.

(IMAGE)

The time is now to make a monumental shift to clean, renewable energy and electrification of transport, among other things.

Links

• 7 Factors Show Why Wind & Solar Are The 1st Choices
• 13 Charts On Solar Panel Cost & Growth Trends
• Solar Power Facts
• The Inuit & Greenpeace Demand #SolarNotSeismics
• Trump's Climate Proposals = "Existential Threat To This Planet," Michael Mann States
• Are TV Meteorologists Finally Embracing The Science Of Climate Change?
• July 2016 Claims Title Of Hottest Month On Record (By Far), Continuing Trend Of Blowout Year

Neither Coalition Nor Labor Emissions Reduction Targets Are Good Enough, Says Climate Body

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Climate Institute report says negative-emissions technology is imperative because risks of global temperature reaching 2C are 'unmanageable'

2C of global warming would move the world into 'uncharted territory', analysis by Climate Analytics found. Photograph: John Giles/PA

Australia will blow its carbon budget with either the Coalition's emissions reduction targets, or those suggested by the Labor opposition, highlighting the urgent need for negative-emissions technology, analysis commissioned by the Climate Institute shows.
"Everyone is just now beginning to work out the implications of the 1.5C goal, and how hard it is to get to it," said John Connor, chief executive of the Climate Institute.
The report found that while the policy measures needed to keep global warming to 1.5C or 2C were similar, the risks and costs associated with letting global temperatures reach 2C would be "unmanageable".
Global warming of 1.5C would make rare events such as extreme heat waves and coral bleaching the new normal, but 2C of warming would move the world into "uncharted territory", the report by Climate Analytics found.

AUDIO ABC Radio National Breakfast: A new report for the Climate Institute has found significant differences between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius warming for Australia.

For Australia to cut its emissions in line with either target, it will almost certainly need to achieve negative emissions towards 2050.
But if the country follows its current targets to 2030 (26% to 28% below 2005 levels) it will then need to make devastating cuts, dropping to zero emissions within five years to stay within the carbon budget.
Even on the plan Labor took the election, which involved a cut to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050, will blow the carbon budget by 15%, the report found.
It said that "some level of negative emissions is virtually unavoidable at this stage, even with very rapid emissions reductions between now and 2050".
An earlier Climate Institute report, the group found technology such as bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage could play a role in removing 65m tonnes of CO2 annually by 2050.
The report argues that a carbon-budget approach should be taken by policymakers, rather than simply focusing on an emissions target for a particular year: "Australia's contribution to limiting warming to 1.5C-2C is determined by cumulative emissions, not emissions in a single year."
The report noted that decarbonisation of the electricity sector should be the biggest priority, since it is the biggest contributor to emissions. Doing that would also allow emissions in transport and other sectors to be cut by electrifying them.
For the world to achieve the more ambitious 1.5C goal, the strategies would be the same but would just need to occur faster. It said doing it faster would cost between 1.5 times and twice as much, but "the benefits would be vast".
Warming of 2C would destroy almost all tropical coral around the world, but keeping warming to 1.5C could save 10% of coral cover.
And 2C of warming would increase heatwave days in northern Australia by 60 a year; the lower target would save 20 of those days from such hot weather.
The stronger target would also have dramatic impacts on water availability and sea level rise.
Connor said the government's review of climate policies, which will occur next year, is an opportunity to create bipartisan support for credible targets. "It will quite possibly be the first credible national climate policy conversation for five years or so," he said.
For Australia to start moving towards an emissions goal that is consistent with the commitments made in Paris last year, the Climate Institute called for three broad actions.
First, a pathway to zero emissions needed to be designed, and it needed to get Australia to zero emissions well before 2050.
Second, it called for climate and energy policies to be fully integrated so that coal power can be phased out and businesses can invest with confidence in renewable energy.
Finally, it called for Australia to take the lead from business and defence agencies around the world that were integrating climate costs and opportunities into their everyday decision making. That should involve a "national adaptation strategy", it said.

Links

• New research shows climate extremes of today will be the normal of tomorrow
• Climate change: Warning of extreme events and a move into uncharted territory
• Keeping global warming to 1.5C, not 2C, will make a crucial difference to Australia, report says
• Richard Di Natale: global warming is the most urgent threat to Australia's security

Historical Documents Reveal Arctic Sea Ice Is Disappearing At Record Speed

The Guardian - Dana Nuccitelli

Summer Arctic sea ice is at its lowest since records began over 125 years ago

The 2015 Arctic sea ice summertime minimum (699,000 square miles below the 1981-2010 average) is seen in a NASA visual representation of satellite data. Photograph: NASA/REUTERS

Scientists have pieced together historical records to reconstruct Arctic sea ice extent over the past 125 years. The results are shown in the figure below. The red line, showing the extent at the end of the summer melt season, is the most critical:

Time series of Arctic sea ice extent, 1850-2013, for March (blue line) and September (red line). Illustration: Walsh et al. (2016)

Arctic sea ice extent in recent years is by far the lowest it’s been, with about half of the historical coverage gone, and the decline the fastest it’s been in recorded history. Florence Fetterer, principal investigator at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, described the data reconstruction process in a guest post at Carbon Brief:

Prof John Walsh, now at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Dr Mick Kelly, from the University of East Anglia (now retired), were pioneers at retrieving data. They hand-digitised information from sources, such as aerial surveys, from the US Navy and UK Meteorological Office, and from the Danish Meteorological Institute’s yearbook maps (see examples from 1978 and 1979 – both pdfs).
Walsh, along with Prof William Chapman from University of Illinois, used these various sources to make monthly grids in Arctic and Southern Ocean sea ice concentrations, covering the period 1901-95.

However, as Fetterer explains, gaps remained in their records, which have now been filled into the NSIDC dataset using a variety of sources:

• The sea ice edge positions in the North Atlantic, between 1850 and 1978, derived from various sources, including newspapers, ship observations, aircraft observations, diaries and more. 
• Sea ice concentration data from regular aerial surveys of ice in the eastern Arctic by the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia, beginning in 1933. 
• Sea ice edge positions for Newfoundland and the Canadian Maritime Region from observations, for 1870 to 1962. 
• Detailed charts of ice in the waters around Alaska for 1954 to 1978, originally the property of a consulting firm (the Dehn collection). 
• Arctic-wide maps of ice cover from the Danish Meteorological Institute from 1901 to 1956. 
• Whaling ship logbook entries that noted ship position along with an indication of whether the ship was in the presence of ice.

A Danish Meteorological Institute ice chart for August, 1926. The red symbols mark the location of observations recorded in ship logbooks. Illustration: Walsh et al. (2016).

It’s not just the area of ice-covered ocean that’s shrunk; in fact, the volume of Arctic sea ice has declined even faster. As illustrated in this video created by Andy Lee Robinson, about two-thirds of the summer sea ice has disappeared in just 36 years as the warming oceans have thinned the ice.

Annual minimum Arctic sea ice volume 1979–2015, created by Andy Lee Robinson. 

Previous research has also shown that Arctic sea ice is at its lowest level in at least 1,450 years, and the recent decline is mostly due to human-caused global warming.
This dramatic change may be causing ripple effects throughout the Earth’s climate system. For example, some research has suggested a possible connection between the Arctic sea ice decline and the intensity of California’s recent record drought (although the connection is not definitive). Those record drought conditions in turn contributed to the intense wildfires currently raging across California. Other research has suggested possible connections between disappearing Arctic sea ice and extreme weather events, but again, these connections aren’t yet definitive.
The loss of ice causes what scientists call a feedback effect. Ice is highly reflective, while the ocean beneath is dark. When the ice on the ocean surface melts, the Arctic becomes less reflective and absorbs more sunlight, causing it to warm faster, melting more ice, causing more warming, and so on. This feedback is one of the main reasons why the Arctic is Earth’s fastest-warming region, with temperatures rising about twice as fast as in lower latitudes.
Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius predicted this Arctic amplification effect in 1896. As a result, the Arctic is effectively the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of the Earth’s climate, showing us the dramatic effects human-caused global warming can have on the climate system. The signal is clear, but the question remains whether we’ll take action, or stay in the coal mine.

Links

• Climate urgency: we've locked in more global warming than people realize
• Climate scientists make a bold prediction about sea level rise
• Rejection of experts spreads from Brexit to climate change with 'Clexit'
• New research shows penguins will suffer in a warming world