Climate Pledges Will Fall Short of Needed 2 Degree C Limit

Scientific American - Umair Irfan, ClimateWire

Just a day before the Paris accord takes effect, the U.N. says nations must make deeper emissions cuts

Credit: FLICKR, CC BY-SA 2.0

The U.N. Environment Programme dumped a bucket of cold water this morning on nations riding high from the Paris climate change accords’ taking effect this week.
In a new report, UNEP found that even if every country that made an emissions-cutting pledge in the Paris Agreement keeps its promise, the world will still fall 12 to 14 gigatons short each year of keeping temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.
The individual commitments would only keep warming below 3 degrees at best, the report finds. Meanwhile, nations are on course to further miss the mark of the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious pledge to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels” by 15 to 17 gigatons per year.
“If we don’t start taking additional action now, beginning with the upcoming climate meeting in Marrakesh, we will grieve over the avoidable human tragedy. The growing numbers of climate refugees hit by hunger, poverty, illness and conflict will be a constant reminder of our failure to deliver. The science shows that we need to move much faster,” UNEP chief Erik Solheim said in a statement.
The annual report comes as climate diplomats prepare for two weeks of U.N. negotiations in Morocco that will be aimed at making the promises of the Paris Agreement a reality. The deal officially goes into effect tomorrow.
“Compared to the 2°C goal that was the reference point of earlier Emissions Gap Reports, these new objectives require stronger short-term action and deeper cuts in the medium and longer term, as the remaining carbon dioxide budget is now considerably lower,” according to the report.
Researchers said the Paris Agreement’s early entrance into force signals a strong commitment from countries to address climate change—but this concern wasn’t reflected in their pledges to ratchet down their emissions.
“In summer 2015, all major countries had submitted INDCs [intended nationally determined contributions], and they showed in aggregate that there is a large [emissions] gap,” said Niklas Höhne, a researcher at the NewClimate Institute in Germany, who was the lead author of two chapters of the UNEP report.
“This insufficiency was accepted in Paris but led to several provisions in the Paris Agreement meant to encourage countries to increase their ambition level,” he added in an email. “The first opportunity to raise ambition was to change the ‘intended’ contribution into a more ambitious final one when ratifying the Paris Agreement. But no major country has done that.”
The planet’s current policies put it on a trajectory to emit carbon dioxide at a rate between 58 and 62 gigatons in 2030. Pledges under the Paris Agreement would bring that down to a range between 52 and 57 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Keeping the planet’s temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius would require limiting greenhouse gas emissions between 31 and 44 gigatons per year.
In response, the report called for strong climate mitigation efforts before the year 2020, at which point the world will be on a warming trajectory that would be hard to reverse. This would require much stronger policies, deploying vastly more clean energy, reducing costs and coming up with new ways to cut greenhouse gases.
“The large number of nationally determined contributions was only possible because renewable energy has become so cheap,” Höhne said. “But also other areas see breakthroughs such as electric mobility, where the transition seems to happen faster than expected. In addition, the cost of air pollution is more and more factored into the economic evaluation and often point against coal.”
Philip Killeen, a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute, who was not involved with the UNEP report, noted that 2015 was a record year for the deployment of clean energy but that the pace of progress still isn’t fast enough to meet climate targets (ClimateWire, Oct. 28).
“We still need to double what we achieved in 2015 every year for the next 20 years,” he said.

Links

• Emissions-Impacts-Climate Change
• How the World Has Changed Since the Paris Agreement on Global Warming
• "Impossible Is Not a Fact--it's an attitude": The Inside Story of the Paris Climate Agreement [Video]
• U.S. and China Formally Commit to Paris Climate Accord

Earth ‘At Risk Of Ecological Breakdown’

EIN Presswire - Springer International

Earth's life support systems are at risk

The Earth is risking a major ecological breakdown that could eventually render it largely uninhabitable.
This is one of the warnings contained in "Surviving the 21st Century" a powerful new book released recently by global science publisher Springer International.
Our combined actions may be leading to "…a gross ecological breakdown that will strike humanity harder than anything in our experience", the book cautions.

This is absolutely a book about solutions – and opportunities. It is about hope – though a hope that is well-founded, on science and fact. — Julian Cribb

Author and science writer Julian Cribb says, "In the past week alone has come news that global populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles declined by 58 per cent between 1970 and 2012. From 20-30 per cent of known species now appear at risk of extinction.
"This is an extermination of life on Earth without precedent. The human impact is on track to exceed the catastrophe that took out the dinosaurs.
"Many people don't realise it, but our own fate is completely bound up with these other creatures, plants and organisms we heedlessly destroy. They provide the clean air and water, the food, the nutrient recycling, the de-toxing, the medications, the clothing and timber that we ourselves need for survival.
"Humans are now engaged in demolishing our own home, brick by brick. Every dollar we spend on food or material goods sends a tiny, almost-imperceptible signal down long industrial and market chains to accelerate the devastation.
"Together those signals are causing the very systems we ourselves need for survival to break down."
A recent study by Princeton University found oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere have fallen by 0.1 per cent in the past 100 years, probably due to land clearing, ocean acidification and burning of fossil fuels.
"Though it is still a small signal, it is another indicator of our ability to disrupt the Earth's life-support system," Cribb says.
The world is currently burning enough fossil fuels to raise its temperature by 4-5 degrees Celsius by 2100 – an event that will probably prove unsurvivable for the majority of large wild animals, and most humans too.
"Yet we're still arguing about whether its real and what we should do," he adds.
"Today humanity is facing ten huge existential threats, all of our own making. The good news is that we have the brains and the technologies to solve them – and to prosper from their solution.
"However we currently lack the collective will, the ability to co-operate and the institutions to save ourselves. That is a worry."
Drawing on the world's leading scientific thinkers, "Surviving the 21st Century" identifies systemic solutions for all of the ten major threats facing humanity, and actions which we must take both as a species and as individuals.
"This is absolutely a book about solutions – and opportunities. It is about hope – though a hope that is well-founded, on fact and science, not simply on belief, ignorance or wishful thinking. It's about understanding and facing up to the things which imperil out future, so that we can overcome them," Cribb says.
In the book he argues that by moving food production back into cities, using advance technologies and recycling of water and nutrients, humanity can re-wild 24 million square kilometres of the Earth's surface. This would help to end the 'sixth extinction' now taking place as well as locking up huge amounts of carbon causing climate change. It would create new jobs and new industries for both urban and rural populations.
'Surviving the 21st Century – Humanity's ten greatest challenges and how to overcome them', is published by Springer US and Springer International Publishing AGF, Switzerland.

Links

• Surviving the 21st Century
• Surviving the 21st Century: Table of contents
• World wildlife 'falls by 58% in 40 years'
• Julian Cribb & Associates Press Releases

Show This Cartoon To Anyone Who Doubts We Need Huge Action On Climate Change

Vox - Alvin Chang | David Roberts

This is Earth. It's a crisp fall day. So why would you believe Earth is in a dire situation?

Let's look a little deeper. The brown area below represents all the fossil fuels — oil, coal, and natural gas — that humans have identified as recoverable with current technology. The black spot is what we're currently harvesting with mines and wells.

So what if, tomorrow, all the world leaders got together and decided to stop building new mines and wells?

And then we used all the fuel in existing mines and wells.What would that do to Earth?

It  would release about 1.1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Scientists have figured out that this scenario would almost certainly drive up the Earth's average temperature by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), relative to preindustrial levels. That's not a big deal, right?

Actually, it would be a massive catastrophe. The human suffering would be unthinkable.

When most of us think about Earth warming by 2 degrees, we think about it being, well, 2 degrees warmer.

But that's not quite right. First of all, it means Earth would get an average of 2 degrees warmer. This means some regions, especially on land, will get much hotter — far more than 2 degrees.

The Arctic, which houses much of the world's ice, would warm by almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

The US Southwest, already suffering from increased drought, could warm by almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to create near-permanent "superdroughts."

The other problem is that Earth's ecosystems would behave differently. For humans, it would mean rising sea levels, freshwater shortages, reduced agricultural productivity, food stress, and the conflicts and emigration that come in their wake.

A lot of people will die, and not because they burn to death. It'll be because we don't have enough food and water.

It would be like slightly heating up a fish tank, which is okay for the fish but kills the algae the fish eats.

All of this will be well underway by the time we hit 2 degrees — and the further we go past it, the worse it will get.
So we all agreed, in Paris, not to let it happen.

About 200 countries, including all the world's major emitters, agreed at a summit in Paris in 2015 that letting the planet warm beyond 2 degrees is unacceptable, and even 2 degrees is awful. We vowed to do our best to stop warming at 1.5 degrees — although most climate researchers believe that target is no longer realistic.

That's why we hear so much about efforts to stop warming at 2 degrees.

But how do we do it?

First, we figure out how much carbon dioxide we're allowed to emit

When we burn fossil fuels, we emit several harmful gases. But we focus on carbon dioxide for one reason: It stays in the atmosphere for centuries, accumulating and trapping heat.

This means we can calculate how much carbon dioxide it would take to warm the Earth a certain amount.

According to our best calculations, it would take about 843 billion tons of carbon dioxide to warm Earth about 2 degrees.

If  we decide to keep using fossil fuels at the same rate, we'll hit our limit in 21 years

Currently we emit about 39.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year — and that number is only rising. But if we were able to keep it at that amount, what would happen?

After one year, our mug would look like this:

It's not a huge hit. But after 21.5 years, we'd be here:

That's the year 2037.
If we reduce emissions until we get to zero in the year 2065, we still need to invent world-changing technology.

Let's say that over the next 49 years, we drive down our use of fossil fuels all the way to zero.

It's an optimistic long shot. But this is the scenario climate scientist Joeri Rogelj proposes:

The kicker is that even in this crazily ambitious scenario, we have to rely on "negative emissions" technologies that pull carbon out of the air and bury it.

The problem: We have no clue if that's even possible.

Negative emissions technologies have not been tested or proven at any scale. We are literally gambling our species' future on the idea that we're going to be able to invent it and scale it up to enormous size ... by 2065.

Let's say, somehow, we get to no emissions in 2065 — and we invent this world-changing technology.

We've saved the world, right?

Not definitely. It would only give us a 50 percent chance at staying under 2 degrees.

Remember when we all agreed in Paris that 2 degree warming cannot happen? This long shot is what they were committing to.

Given the evidence, the global community has committed not to let the Earth warm by more than 2 degrees. In doing so, countries committed to rapidly reducing and eliminating all production and use of coal, oil, and natural gas and to inventing and scaling up negative emissions technology.

The problem is they don't seem to realize that's what they committed to.

No country is taking this long shot seriously. This means Earth will probably warm past 2 degrees. It's terrifying.

Right now, the cool fall wind is flowing through windows, and everything feels fine. Nothing seems dire. So it's understandable why many of us don't feel this is an urgent political priority.

But here's the reality: We're heading toward a global catastrophe that will cause unthinkable human suffering. The data is clear: We need to turn the ship now — or else we'll never be able to avoid disaster.

But no country is taking this 2 degree goal seriously. It hasn't even been mentioned in a presidential debate.

Instead, we're focusing on threats that feel more imminent. It's just the way most humans are calibrated. So our true test is figuring out a way to comprehend that a mortal threat is on the horizon, and act accordingly.

Links

• No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously
• Goodbye, HFCs: The world just took one of the biggest steps yet to fight global warming
• Elections, storms, and campaigns: none have changed public opinion on climate change

As Climate Disaster Looms, Malcolm Turnbull Needs To Stop Appeasing And Start Leading

The Guardian - Greg Jericho

Hazelwood’s closure should force both federal and state governments to acknowledge the future is here already

Malcolm Turnbull has long shed the leather jacket persona of his Q&A days, when he took pride in his then principled stand on climate change policy. Photograph: Leigh Winburn/AAP

As the Chicago Cubs finally won the baseball World Series, Twitter was awash with comments on things that had happened since 1908 – the last time the Cubs won. For example, since then there had been two world wars, the beginning and end of the Soviet Union and media had moved from a time when baseball wasn’t even broadcast on radio to when you could watch the game in HD on your phone on the other side of the world.
And also, in the time since, the planet has warmed by around 1.5C.
I throw in this little nugget of information because it’s always worth reminding ourselves that while the flotsam and jetsam of daily news and politics flies by, so too are the temperature records.
Nasa recently announced that September was the warmest September on record. There’s nothing too surprising about that – 11 of the past 12 months have been the warmest of each month. Only July did not set a record – it had to be content with being the third-warmest July on record.
The 12 months to September set a new high for the warmest 12-month period recorded (breaking the old record set in August) of 1.04C above the average of the 1951-1980. The same period in 1908 was 0.42C below the average.
So things have changed.
Back in 1908 there was also a US presidential election. There were no debates then but, ironically, the same number of questions on climate change were asked in this year’s debates as back then – zero.
We now have the prospect of a US president who either believes climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, or at best believes it’s just a hoax perpetrated by some vague group because “it’s a money-making industry”. And yet this hardly rates a mention – lost amid an avalanche of stories about the emails of the other candidate.
Now we could get on a high horse, except Australia doesn’t fare much better. Climate change at least was the topic of one question in the leaders’ debate but it hardly dominated the election. And, like the US, we also have multiple politicians who fall at the first hurdle when it comes to intelligence by professing that climate change is a con.
Mostly here, the topic comes up as the cause of blame – such as renewable energy being cited as the cause for the blackout in South Australia or even again this week with the announcement of the Hazelwood power station closing.
As such, the discussion revolves around the negative aspect of the cost of policies that will reduce carbon emissions. It’s a framing that has the underlying foundation that not pursing policies to reduce carbon emissions is a credible alternative.
It is rather similar to businesses complaining of the cost of introducing domestic violence leave rather than worrying about the horrific fact that there is actually a need for such a type of leave.
As Gay Alcorn noted on Friday – the closure of the Hazelwood power station was inevitable – and yet the sense is that both state and federal governments were caught flat footed.
Unsurprisingly, the first reaction was to focus more on compensation packages for the workers. But there is a lack of any sense of governments accepting this is just the first of such closures and that plans and responses for them should be well in place by now.
As the Climate Council noted this week, Australia’s climate change policy is mired in a valley of uncertainty, where our emissions reductions target for 2030 are based on measures that have been yet to be brought into force.
We don’t have a gibbering fool like Trump for a leader who screams about China and international hoaxes on climate change but Turnbull has long shed the leather jacket persona of his Q&A days when he took pride in his then principled stand on climate change policy.
Now more likely we’ll hear him talk of the great future for coal and rush to blame renewable energy rather than to push it as a solution. No, he’s not the gibbering fool; he is just the appeaser of those fools within his government. And that is no less damaging.
It is not a strategy that can last, because while it might help to keep the issue off the political agenda, and keep his leadership somewhat more safe, the months keep passing and the temperature keeps rising.
Because of its size, age and dirtiness, Hazelwood carries with it greater significance than do other coal-fired power stations. Perhaps its closure – regardless of the reasons for it – will force both federal and state governments to acknowledge that the future is here already.

Links

• The Paris climate agreement is a game-changer – and business risks being left behind
• Hazelwood's closure was inevitable. So where was the transition plan?
• Nicholas Stern: cost of global warming ‘is worse than I feared’
• To deal with climate change we need a new financial system
• What's in store at the Marrakech climate talks – and will Australia still back coal?

The World Is Racing To Stop Climate Change. But The Math Still Doesn’t Add Up

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

The Paris Agreement is expected to come into force within the next few months. The Post's Chris Mooney explains where we go from here. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

The entire globe is moving fast to stop climate change. The Paris climate agreement enters into legal force on Friday, and then shortly afterwards comes a first global meeting to start implementing it in Marrakech, Morocco. (Yes, there’s also a U.S. election in there somewhere that could, er, complicate things.)
But this flurry of activity nonetheless faces a grim mathematical reality, a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme finds. In essence, while the Paris agreement sets extremely ambitious temperature goals — holding the world’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and striving for a 1.5 degree limit — current policies and promises alone have little chance of attaining them.
Moreover, because of the unforgiving nature of carbon math — once you emit a ton of carbon dioxide, you can’t get it back, and it accumulates steadily in the atmosphere — there is exceedingly little time to change course and increase ambitions.
“It’s just too little, and it’s not happening quickly enough,” said Jacqueline McGlade, UNEP’s chief scientist. “If we don’t see emissions peaking by 2020, then the chances of getting to 1.5 degrees is vanishingly small.”
Such is the upshot of UNEP’s latest installment of its “emissions gap” report, perhaps the definitive study of how much the world is currently emitting, and how much it can emit to remain on course to meet its goals. The difference between the two comprises the gap.
Here are the details (warning, this stuff gets complicated quickly).
Right now, due to causes ranging from deforestation to transportation, the world is emitting about 52.7 billion tons, or gigatons, of carbon dioxide equivalents per year as of 2014. That’s mostly just plain carbon dioxide, but it also includes emissions of methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases that are converted into units comparable to carbon dioxide. If you leave those out, the pure carbon dioxide emissions are about 36 billion tons per year.
However, to hold global warming below 2 degrees (at least with good odds), the world can emit no more than 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the year 2011 onwards — the famous carbon budget. And given that it’s 2016 already, that number has already shrunken a good bit, by about 150 gigatons. And of course, the carbon budget is even narrower to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
This is the logic behind the inescapable emissions “gap”: If we want to hold global warming to 1.5 C, we need to be emitting only 38.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents by the year 2030. For 2 degrees C, there’s only slightly more leeway — 41.8 gigatons.
The promises countries have made under the Paris agreement don’t remotely get there — at best, they’d have us at about 53.4 billion tons in 2030. The emissions gap is therefore between 12 and 14 gigatons per year if you want to keep the planet at 2 degrees, and between 15 and 17 gigatons per year for 1.5 degrees, says UNEP.
“When you think that one gigaton is the equivalent of taking all European vehicles off the road for one year, and the gap is between 12 and 14 gigatons, you see what the scale of the problem is,” explains McGlade.
Thus, we’re way off course with very little time to turn things around. The world’s current promises, says UNEP, would allow the planet to warm by about 3 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.
And by the way: even these numbers for keeping warming below 1.5 or 2 degrees tend to assume something that many scientists think is dubious. They tend to rely on the assumption that we’ll bust through our carbon budgets but somehow get a second chance later in the century, once we create technologies that can somehow withdraw carbon dioxide out of the air again. These scenarios often have the world removing net amounts carbon dioxide from the atmosphere after 2050, rather than putting more there. It’s far from clear that will actually happen, at least at the scale that would be required.

Granted, McGlade underscores that this doesn’t mean there is no hope — it just means that the world has to do massively more, and it has to do it quickly. Every year, we bank more carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Every year we fail to bend the curve sharply downwards, it becomes that much harder to get on the right course.
This is why, McGlade asserts, emissions have to peak and start to decline by 2020 — just four short years from now — or else the 1.5 degree target could be gone.
The Marrakech meeting beginning next week won’t be the place to raise global ambitions under the Paris process — at the earliest, it appears that may happen in 2018. But McGlade says in the meantime, there are other actions that can shrink the emissions gap, including moves by sub-national players like major corporations, cities, and large scale land users in the agricultural and forestry sectors. Precious gigatons can be won back in this way, potentially narrowing the gap.
“Cities don’t have to wait, companies don’t have to wait, society doesn’t have to wait,” says McGlade.

Links

• Global warming could be breaking up this 200 million year old relationship
• We’re adding record amounts of wind and solar — and we’re still not moving fast enough
• It could be the nation’s first carbon tax. And environmentalists are fighting over it

Stratosphere Shrinks As Record Breaking Temperatures Continue Because Of Climate Change

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Those warning of climate change impacts have been likened to Chicken Littles, scuttling around, warning the sky is falling.
That worry, it turns out, is based on fact too. Cooling in the stratosphere is causing it to shrink, lowering that layer by "a number of kilometres", NASA noted recently.

The state of our climate in 2016
Australia is already experiencing an increase in extreme conditions from climate change - and it's projected to get worse.

Our burning of fossil fuels and emissions of other greenhouse gases mean more of the earth's heat that would have been radiated back to space – warming the stratosphere on the way – is being trapped at lower levels of the atmosphere.
"It's like when you insulate your roof – your house warms but your attic will get a bit cooler," says Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of NSW. Those "attic" temperatures have cooled 2-3 degrees since the 1960s.
To be sure, the shrinking stratosphere is only partly climate-change related, with the emergence of ozone holes the other main factor. Still, "it's all about the human impact on the climate system", Professor Sherwood says.
That impact has lately been on full display as rising background temperatures – with an El Nino boost – drove 2014, 2015, and now 2016 to record-breaking warmth.
As the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO stated recently, Australia can expect more severe heatwaves, extreme fire weather and intense rain events as the planet warms further.
Our coral reefs are particularly threatened, with widespread mortality of the northern Great Barrier Reef after a severe oceanic heatwave, seen as a sign of what's to come.
Last December, almost 200 nations decided to act to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris climate agreement aims to keep global temperatures increases to no more than 2 degrees – or about 1 degree more than has already occurred in the past century.

The Paris climate agreement, which came into force on November 4, is just the first step. Photo: AP

The Paris accord came into force on Friday, which is a record pace for such a global deal. There's a chance the Turnbull government will announce Australia's ratification – joining the 94 nations to have done so – at the follow-up climate summit that begins on Monday in Marrakech, Morocco.

Marrakech, Morocco, will host COP22, the follow-up summit to Paris from November 7. 

The 12-day gathering will likely focus on how national ambitions can be raised to close the so-called emissions gap. According to the United Nations, the Paris emission-reduction pledges fall at least 25 per cent short of what's needed by 2030.Australia's promise to cut 2005-level carbon pollution 26-28 per cent by 2030 will also come under scrutiny in Morocco with a range of questions already lodgedabout the nation's rising trajectory. (That assumes a shock Donald Trump victory in Tuesday's US presidential elections hasn't diverted all attention stateside.)

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull addressing the Paris climate summit last year. Photo: AP

The Turnbull government will argue Australia's 2030 goal is one of the most ambitious efforts in terms of per capita emissions.Even so, a lack of action over the past couple of decades and the dominance of coal in the electricity sector mean Australia is still on course to remain the third-worst polluter among G20 nations by 2030.

Renewable energy investment has now topped spending on new fossil fuel power plants. Photo: Rohan Thomson

The global emissions reduction goals will depend in large part on the acceleration of the take-up of renewable energy.The world added half a million new solar panels each day last year, a pace that will quicken to 30,000 an hour - or more than 700,000 panels a day - over the next five years, the International Energy Agency said recently. New wind turbines will go up at the rate 2.5 an hour.
The agency lifted its overall forecast for clean energy by 2021 to account for 28 per cent of electricity by then. Australia's Renewable Energy Target is aiming for about a 23 per cent share for hydro, wind, solar and other renewables by 2020 - a goal possibly out of reach as shifting policies and patchy political support continue to rattle investor confidence.The Turnbull government's seriousness in tackling climate change, though, won't be tested until its planned policy review in 2017, which may include lifting its 2030 target made a year ago in Paris.
According to the Environment Department, Australia's commitments requires the elimination of 900 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions between 2020 and 2030. (Emissions rose 1.1 per cent in 2015 to 535.7 million tonnes.)
However, most of the planned abatement has little if any policy backing to achieve it. (See chart below).
For instance, improving energy efficiency is supposed to deliver about a third of the planned savings.
Despite phenomenal returns on investment,that were recognised last week when the Baird government committed NSW to net-zero emissions by 2050 the government has so far earmarked just $18m for a national energy productivity plan.
The Abbott government shuttered the successful Energy Efficiency Opportunities despite costing an estimated minus-$95 for every tonne of CO2 abated.
The Emissions Reduction Fund and its related safeguard mechanism – which may morph into a carbon price – is supposed to account for an even larger chunk of savings.
The existing ERF, which may splurge the bulk of its remaining $800 million at an auction next week, has a dubious record.
A recent report by The Green Institute found about $1 billion of the $1.7 billion ERF money spent so far had gone into conserving mulga-dominated areas of south-west Queensland and western NSW on land that might not have been cleared anyway.
Moreover, about a quarter of the land sector abatement has a "permanence" of just 25 years.
That sort of performance is hardly like to impress those nations meeting in Marrakech to press for carbon neutrality – if not negative emissions – by mid-century.
Without that transition, it's likely we won't avoid that sky falling further – and many other anticipated climate-linked calamities from global warming.

Links

• Why our fire season has become weeks longer
• 'Milestone': Global greenhouse gas levels accelerate past key marker
• Australia facing questions at UN over post-2020 climate change stance

Federal Parliament Yet To Ratify Paris Agreement Ahead Of Marrakech Meeting

ABC News - Lexi Metherell

The Paris Agreement commits countries to achieving zero net emissions. (AFP: Philippe Huguen)

Australian action on climate change has not kept pace with global momentum, climate groups say, with the Federal Parliament yet to ratify the Paris Agreement a week out from the first global meeting on the issue since the landmark talks which forged the deal last year.

Key points: Paris Agreement commits countries to achieving zero net emissions, limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius Australia has signed the Paris Agreement but it has not been passed by the Parliament Climate experts concerned Australia's emission cuts target 'too weak'

Advocacy group Climate Council said 85 of the 195 countries who met in Paris last December have ratified the deal — including the United States and China who formally lodged their ratification documents at a joint announcement in September.
The Paris Agreement commits countries to achieving zero net emissions and limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius.
It has now been ratified by countries responsible for more than 55 per cent of emissions and will come into force on November 4.
Australia has signed the Paris Agreement, but will not be legally bound by it until it is ratified — that is, passed — by the Parliament.
The Government said it tabled the Paris Agreement at the first opportunity after the election, and the ratification is now in its final stages, with the agreement before the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties.
"It's unlikely that Australia will have ratified the agreement prior to the global talks starting, which is unfortunate," chief executive of the Climate Council Amanda McKenzie said.

"Part of the important thing in Australia's contribution to the international movement on climate change is that we're trying to establish some momentum.

"So the US in particular, as well as China, has really been driving momentum in the last few years on climate change and it requires countries to step up and say what they're going to do, so it's unfortunate that Australia hasn't ratified the agreement prior to the Marrakech talks."

Questions over whether Australia's policies are up to scratch
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg are expected to attend the international climate meeting which begins next week in Marrakech in Morocco.
The Climate Council said they were likely to face questions from other countries about whether Australia could meet the terms of the Paris Agreement with its current policies and emissions targets since Australian emissions are still rising.
Climate experts have raised concerns that Australia's emission cuts target of 26–28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 are too weak to meet the international target and that the current suite of policies are unlikely to meet even the domestic targets.
"We've already seen [in UN forums] other countries questioning Australia's capacities to meet its emissions reduction targets with our current policies," Ms McKenzie said.
"The US, China and New Zealand have all raised questions about whether our current policies are up to scratch.
"So you'd expect to see in Morocco that there will be substantial pressure applied to Australia to up our game on climate change."
In a statement, the Environment Minister's office said Australia was reducing emissions through policies including the $2.55-billion Emissions Reduction Fund.
"We successfully met our first Kyoto target by 128 million tones and we are on track to beat our 2020 target by 78 million tones," it read.
The statement did not make any reference to meeting the 2030 targets.

Australia's emission reduction targets are 'weak'
The Government is planning to review its climate policies next year, in what Mr Frydenberg has described as a "sit-rep" to look at the effectiveness of meeting its targets, but he has signalled that it is unlikely to lead to a major overhaul of policies or revised targets.
Ms McKenzie said it was critical the targets were reviewed.

"Reviewing Australia's emission reduction targets must be on the agenda because they are weak," she said.

"They're not sufficient to protect Australia from climate change, from intensifying extreme weather events and they're not in line with what our allies, what our trading partners around the world, are doing.
"Other countries are now doing far more than Australia. So the Government needs to step up our emissions targets and do more."
The Climate Council has released a report titled Towards Morocco: tracking global climate progress since Paris, which also catalogues a series of extreme weather events around the world since last year's meeting — including deadly heatwaves, coral bleaching and eight one-in-500-year rainfall events in the US.

Links

• What will the deal mean for Australia?
• The road to ratification
• Australia the Pacific pariah
• World's third largest emitter India ratifies Paris climate change deal
• 'The world is now watching', DiCaprio tells leaders signing Paris climate deal
• PNG calls for Australian coal mining slowdown