Our Bright Future Can't Have Black Heart Of Coal

Fairfax - Elizabeth Farrelly

So we're driving from Jaipur to Agra – slowly, because northern India's December fogs are earlier than usual, and chewier. They're also smellier because – let's be frank – this is more smog than fog; weeks-long pea-soupers that seem like a hangover from industrial revolution London. Perhaps, indeed, they are – and perhaps if I'd seen it this way, more Hogarthian satire than sci-fi future, it wouldn't have scared the tripe outta me quite as it did.
Along the road, for hundreds of kilometres, people burn rubbish and crouch for warmth around small roadside fires. In stacks and house-sized mounds, on hayricks, rooftops and median strips, millions of cow-dung patties are drying for burning. In the fields, tall-chimneyed brick kilns belch black smoke into air already viscous with particulates. And then there are the vehicles, in their teeming, honking millions.

Adani mine project moves forward
Jobs, regional investement, and the battle against climate change... all will benefit, say Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Adani CEO Jeyakumar Janakaraj at an announcement in Townsville. Vision courtesy ABC News 24

As we cross from majestic Rajasthan to Uttar Pradesh, our driver, the stoic, blue-turbaned Mr Singh, welcomes us to the crime capital of India. If there's irony here it doesn't translate, but the shift is palpable. Suddenly, after Rajasthan's straight-backed, saried elegance, there are beggars, everywhere. Rag-clad people scrabble in the dust with pigs, monkeys, mangy dogs. Nature, what there is, looks beleaguered. The fog writhes with sirens, and massive black SUVs emblazoned with UP Police insignia swarm the streets like predatory megafauna. I have the impression we've driven onto some post-apocalypse movie set.
The previous day, India time, news hit that this week's Australia India Leadership Dialogue in Brisbane would see Malcolm Turnbull meet Gautam Adani to discuss a $1 billion subsidy for Adani's immense Carmichael coal mine. Subsidy, mind you, on top of the already controversial approvals, despite the already parlous state of the Great Barrier Reef and notwithstanding Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg's election promise that the project would need to "stand on its own two feet".

Illustration: Simon Bosch 

In  my mind, as we drive, the subsidy, the scrabble for existence and the hellish fog coagulate into the thought that scares me witless: is this the future? Is this the world's Lorax moment come to life, or at least to living death? Is this the extreme end of income disparity, where the unconscionably rich take all, leaving the inconceivably poor to squat in the dirt at their gates, unable to drink the water or breathe the air: unable even to cook food without making their own plight worse?
I'm reflecting that India is way ahead of us in this. We Australians get to behave like the world's irresponsible schoolboys because we have the gift (or theft) of a big clean continent that takes a lot of screwing up. But India has been at it for aeons. Throughout most of that time – arguably still – the rich have created vast and indescribable beauty by creating clearings in the forest of the ubiquitous poor. Using the poor to build the massive walls – the forts and palaces, villas and compounds – designed to keep their own filth and sound and stink at bay, the rich then shut the gates.
Now, although the clearing mentality persists still, it can no longer work. "This winter," declares an aircon ad in the Hindustan Times, "no matter how high the pollution is, the healthiest air is in your room". Do they not see that the "me-now" solution only makes everything worse for us-later? That even the grandest sultan can no longer wall his oasis. Eventually even Adani, even Turnbull, and their children and grandchildren, must breathe the air and drink the water.
This is the future that whacks me. I feel poisoned by it, infiltrated, sickened, as though a grime of death had covered the world, blocking all sunlight. Later that evening I discover that I have, in fact, been poisoned, not by smog or dystopia (although probably neither helped) but by a much more treatable gastritis, that earns me a stern talking-to from a handsome Brahmin doctor.

Australian coal is exported to India. Photo: Glenn Hunt

But the fog, and the dystopia, signal a real malaise, one for which there's no miracle antibiotic. Indeed, climate change is the world's superbug, bred from a billion unthinking me-now cures; just make it OK for me, for now, for here.
Australia, even in selling coal to countries like India, is acting like the worst kind of irresponsible patient, pretending – as Frydenberg has for years – that "most importantly" our purpose is to "help lift millions out of energy poverty" when it can only worsen their plight, and ours, while making the mega-rich richer. That's bad enough. Then to subsidise that racket, using public money to PAY the rich to destroy our reef, and our climate, is plain bonkers. What are they thinking?
It's especially bizarre given Adani Group's track record at a project in Gujarat which, according to a 2013 Indian Ministry of Environment report, has involved persistent and flagrant breaches of permit conditions, large-scale destruction of mangrove forests and creek systems, groundwater salination and unapproved reclamations.
Queensland law now requires mining licensees to be a "suitable person". Adani's licence was bought from another company before the suitable person test was in place, so it has never had to face scrutiny in this regard.
But regardless of fouling Australia's environment, there's the fouling of India, and the world, as all that coal is burned. And, yes, there are alternatives. Consider, for example, Pollinate Energy in Bangalore, co-founded by young Sydney law graduate Emma Colenbrander. In four years, Pollinate has quietly shifted more than 80,000 of India's 300 million without access to electricity onto solar LEDs.
Think what $1 billion could do in such a forum. Surely, if we really wanted to lift India's poor from the dust without worsening the grey scrabble of their lives, that would be the way to go?

Links

• Adani Coal Mine Project: Queensland Government Approves Rail Line, Camp
• IEA Says Australia’s Coal Plans Don’t Match Climate Realities
• Quentin Bryce In High-Powered Group Calling For Coal Power To Be Phased Out
• Hazelwood Will Close In March, French Bosses Tell Power Plant Workers
• Four Environmental Reasons Why Fast-Tracking The Carmichael Coal Mine Is A Bad Idea
• Coal Will Be Important 'For Many, Many Decades To Come', Says Turnbull
• Climate Change Challenge To Gina Rinehart’s Alpha Mine Dismissed By Court
• Dutch Parliament Votes To Close Down Country's Coal Industry
• Galilee Basin Coal Must Be Left In Ground As A ‘Priority’ – New Report
• Australian Coal Industry Records Large Losses, Experts Advise Against Investing Super Funds In The Industry
• Adani Should Bow Out Gracefully From Its Carmichael Coal Mine

United States Of Denial: Forces Behind Trump Have Run Australia's Climate Policy For Years

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

For more than a decade, Australia has been held back by climate science denial and an antipathy towards environmentalism

Climate capitulators: The former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott listens to the current prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AFP/Getty Images

If  you can hear what sounds like a faint drumroll coming from across the Pacific then it’s the sound of millions of jaws dropping on hard surfaces.
President-elect Donald Trump is a phrase journalists are regularly typing into their keyboards. That was jaw dropping enough, even for some Republicans.
But, adding to that drumroll has been the climate science community, the renewable energy industry, the conservation movement, federal environment regulators and climate change campaigners.
Trump has been nominating positions to the Environmental Protection Agency and other key government agencies and departments. To a man (because they’re almost all men), Trump’s picks are climate science deniers. His choice for secretary of state and lead diplomat is ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson.
Jaws have been dropping all over the place.
In the US, there is a large and well-funded network of so called “free market” thinktanks that pumps out manufactured doubt on climate change science with the help of funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Trump has been picking many his advisers from these groups, sending in climate science deniers to key agencies to prepare the ground for his administration.
Many, such as Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, the Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, have launched multiple lawsuits against the agency they’re going to soon be working for.
Trump also refuses to accept the thousands and thousands of scientific papers going back decades showing how burning fossil fuels is changing the climate.
He recently said he had an “open mind” on the issue – a position that’s about as intellectually redundant as having an open mind on heliocentrism. Sometimes minds are so open that the brain is in danger of falling out.
Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, ran the hyper-partisan Breitbart website that runs stories claiming climate change is a hoax and the “biggest scam in the history of the world” while denouncing people who accept the science as “pure scum”.
Trump has also appointed a team to prepare the ground in the EPA for the incoming administration.
Leading that group is Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Agency, alongside lawyers such as David Schnare and Christopher Horner – two individuals who have used the courts and FOIA laws to try and get access to the inboxes of climate scientists and, yes, administrators at the EPA.
Viewing this part-reality show, part-Shakespearean tragedy from Australia, some might think our own climate debate looks relatively sane. It’s not and it hasn’t been for a long time.
For well over a decade now, Australia’s climate policy has been battered, torn and held back by climate science denial and a broader antipathy towards environmentalism. The same interests and ideologies that have worked for decades to reach the current crescendo in the US have been doing the same thing here.
Neatly connecting Australia and the US is the One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, who earlier this week met with a who’s who of the climate science denial industry in Washington DC, including Ebell.
Think we’re immune to the Trump denialism? You haven’t been paying attention.
When Malcolm Turnbull lost the Liberal party leadership to Tony Abbott in 2009, it was Turnbull’s then refusal to back away from pricing greenhouse gas emissions that turned the party room against him. From that point onward, pricing carbon became a no-go zone for the Liberal party.
A chief architect of that leadership coup was the then South Australian senator Nick Minchin, who, a month earlier, told ABC’s Four Corners he didn’t accept that humans caused climate change. Rather, Minchin considered the issue a plot by the “extreme left” to “deindustrialise the world”.
After the ABC program aired, the journalist Sarah Ferguson said Turnbull had refused interview requests because he “didn’t want to face the sceptics”.
You might think Turnbull would have learned his lesson. But, from his latest meek surrender to the deniers in his party, it seems not. He still won’t take them on.
Earlier this month, the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, said a review of Australia’s climate change policy would include a look at an emissions trading scheme for the electricity sector – the biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the Australia.
Within 24 hours, Frydenberg backed down and, soon after, Turnbull said carbon pricing was not party policy and this would not be considered – even though all the expert advice tells him that it would be the cheapest way to cut emissions and would likely deliver billions of dollars in savings on power prices in coming years.
That capitulation was another example of Turnbull giving in to the deniers in the right of the party – in particular, another South Australian senator in the form of Cory Bernardi.
Bernardi, too, refuses to accept the mountains of evidence that burning fossil fuels is causing climate change.
The recently appointed chairman of the Coalition’s backbench environment committee is the Liberal MP Craig Kelly – another climate science denier.
Going further back, Abbott’s position on climate science was heavily influenced by the mining industry figure and geologist Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth – a tome packed with contradictory arguments, dodgy citations and errors too numerous to count (actually, celebrated mathematical physicist Dr Ian Enting did count them and found at least 126).
Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most senior Roman Catholic, also took his lead from Plimer’s book.
And who can forget Abbott’s business adviser Maurice Newman and his claims that climate science is fraudulent and acting as cover for the UN to install a one-world government – the exact same position taken by Roberts and other fake freedom fighters.
Another Coalition MP seen as influential is the Queensland Nationals MP George Christensen.
Like Roberts and Bernardi before him, Christensen has attended US conferences of anti-climate science activists hosted by the Heartland Institute (that group has been heavily funded by the family foundation of Robert Mercer, the ultrarich conservative hedge fund manager whose millions helped get Trump elected and whose daughter Rebekah is a pivotal member of Trump’s transition team).
Just like the US, Australia too has its own “free market” conservative groups pushing climate science denial. Look no further than Melbourne’s Institute of Public Affairs (which only last year was called in to “balance” a climate science briefing to Kelly’s committee).
How about the media? Rupert Murdoch’s outlets the Wall Street Journal and Fox News help to push themes that climate scientists are frauds, that action to cut greenhouse gas emissions will wreck the economy and that renewable energy can’t keep the lights on.
The stable of flagship commentators working on Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, led by the likes of Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Chris Kenny and Terry McCrann, are all happy to repeat and embellish those same talking points.
On the radio, the US has popular conservatives such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh pushing climate science denial. In Australia, we have Alan Jones and his stable of shouty Macquarie Radio colleagues.
At this point, some will argue Australia and the rest of the world is investing heavily in renewables. The US, like Australia, is seeing strong growth in the renewable energy sector. That’s all true.
Also true is the progress made through the international agreements made in Paris, even though the climate pledges that make up the deal still fall well short of averting dangerous climate change.
But there’s little doubt that climate science denial is on the march, backed by a conspiracy culture that’s rapidly gaining audiences online.
Trump is climate science denial’s greatest propaganda victory so far. Australia is not immune.

Links

• Fossil fuel divestment is worth $7tn globally yet Australia still clings to coal
• Mathias Cormann refuses to express confidence in Alan Finkel after climate criticism
• One Nation senator joins new world order of climate change denial
• More terrifying than Trump? The booming conspiracy culture of climate science denial
• Marrakech climate talks wind down with maze of ambition still ahead
• What's it like to represent the coal industry at the Marrakech climate summit?

Earth On The Docket: Why Obama Can’t Ignore This Climate Lawsuit By America’s Youth

The Conversation - Mary Wood | Charles W. Woodward | Michael C. Blumm

A group of youths are suing the federal government for action on climate change using a novel legal approach. AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, Photo by Robin Loznak, courtesy of Our Children's Trust

At  a time when humanity must reverse course before plunging over a climate cliff, the American public has elected a president who seems to have both feet on the fossil fuel accelerator. If there is a mechanism to force the Trump administration to put the brakes on dirty energy policy, a lawsuit brought by 21 young people against the Obama administration may hold the key.
Two days after the presidential election, on Nov. 10, a federal district court in Oregon issued a path-breaking decision in Juliana v. U.S. declaring that youth – indeed, all citizens – hold constitutional rights to a stable climate system.
The youth, aged nine to 20 years old, seek a court-supervised plan to lower carbon dioxide emissions at a rate set by a science-based prescription. The judicial role is analogous to court-supervised remedies protecting equal opportunity for students after Brown v. Board of Education.
The Juliana v. U.S. decision could be a legal game-changer, as it challenges the entire fossil-fuel policy of the United States.

Cruel irony
Environmental lawsuits typically rely on statutes or regulations. But Juliana is a human rights case that bores down to legal bedrock by asserting constitutional rights to inherit a stable climate system.
The court, which ruled the suit can proceed to trial, rightly described the case as a “civil rights action” – an action “of a different order than the typical environmental case” – because it alleges that government actions “have so profoundly damaged our home planet that they threaten plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to life and liberty.” The litigation, variously called “a ”ray of hope,“ a legal ”long shot“ and a ”Hail Mary pass,“ yielded its groundbreaking decision not a moment too soon.

At a rally for action on climate in 2014. The decisions made by adults will have broad implications for the planet today’s youth will live on as adults. Joe Brusky/flickr, CC BY-NC

The year 2016 is the hottest year on record, and Arctic sea ice has hit its lowest recorded level. Heated ocean waters threaten coral reefs and marine ecosystems.
To have any hope of reversing or stalling these effects of climate change, the world must restrict fossil fuel production and ultimately switch to safe renewable energy. Even continued production solely from currently operating oil and gas fields will push the planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures, beyond the aspirational limit set by the global Paris Agreement on climate change.
President-elect Trump, who notoriously claimed that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, has said he plans to immediately approve the highly contentious Keystone Pipeline, open public land to drilling, rescind Obama’s Clean Power Plan, eliminate NASA’s climate research, and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. He intends to spur production of US$50 trillion worth of shale, oil, coal and natural gas.
The 70-year-old president-elect will not live long enough to witness the worst consequences of rapidly expanding fossil fuel development. The cruel irony for young people is that actions taken during Trump’s time in office will lock in a future of severe disruptions within their projected lifetimes – and sea level rise that could make coastal cities uninhabitable. James Hansen, formerly the nation’s chief climate scientist at NASA, has warned, "Failure to act with all deliberate speed…functionally becomes a decision to eliminate the option of preserving a habitable climate system.”

Sea levels are projected to rise at least three feet, and perhaps much more, in the lifetime of children today, inundating some locations and making storm surges more dangerous. The Juliana lawsuit and others like it argue that citizens have a right to a stable climate. NOAA

Constitutional argument
For decades, the political branches have promoted fossil fuel consumption despite longstanding knowledge about the climate danger. President Obama ignored warnings when he charted a disastrous course of increased fossil fuel production early in office. In a last moment of opportunity to avert climate tipping points, Americans should recall an elementary school civics lesson: The United States has three, not two, branches of government. The founders wisely vested an independent judiciary with the responsibility of upholding the fundamental liberties of citizens against infringement by the other branches.
As the president-elect promises to ramp up fossil fuel production and dismantle Obama’s recent climate measures, and with no obvious statutory law to prevent him from doing so, only a fundamental rights approach carries any hope of trumping Trump.

The principle of public trust law, dating to the time of Roman Emperor Justinian, holds that natural resources, including the sea, the shores of the sea, the air and running water, are common to everyone. It has since become part of U.S. jurisprudence. Petar Milošević/wikipedia, CC BY

In Juliana, the youth asserted their fundamental rights under the Constitution’s substantive due process clause and the public trust doctrine. This is an ancient principle requiring government to hold and protect essential resources as a sustaining endowment for citizens. They contended that government infringed on their rights to life, liberty, and property by promoting fossil fuel policies that threaten runaway planetary heating – thereby jeopardizing human life, private property and civilization itself.
Judge Ann Aiken’s Juliana decision in November upheld both public trust and substantive due process rights under the Constitution and allowed the case to go forward. “I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society,” she wrote, explaining that public trust rights, which “both predated the Constitution and are secured by it,” cannot be “legislated away.”
The opinion is bound to have a rippling effect. The case is actually part of a wave of atmospheric trust litigation (ATL) cases and petitions across the U.S. and in other countries. Launched by the group Our Children’s Trust in 2011, the legal campaign asserts youths’ rights to a stable climate system and seeks court-supervised climate recovery plans.
Recent victories in Massachusetts, Pakistan, the Netherlands and Washington state indicate widespread judicial concern over the political branches’ failure to confront the climate emergency. The youth plaintiffs hope that the dominoes continue to fall in their favor in time to thwart climate catastrophe.
As ATL moves forward globally, the Juliana case will proceed to trial as early as next summer or fall. The plaintiffs’ attorneys aim to show the government’s deliberate indifference to mounting climate danger.
Already dubbed “the trial of the century,” this is the first time that U.S. fossil fuel policy will confront climate science in court. Any government denial of climate change will have to confront the scrutiny of a fact-finding judge.

Consent degree from Obama?
The case also offers President Obama a fleeting opportunity.
Five days after the election, Secretary of State Kerry proclaimed that President Obama would use his last days in office to “do everything possible to meet our responsibility to future generations to be able to address this threat to life itself on the planet.”
If so, the most viable way might be to offer a partial settlement of the Juliana case before going to trial. One form of settlement could be an enforceable consent decree consisting of interim steps to halt further fossil-fuel mining and infrastructure development. Such a settlement would help secure Obama’s measures to close the Arctic to drilling and halt coal leasing on federal lands.
Young Americans could use a down payment on the colossal climate mortgage hanging over their future. And President Obama could use a climate legacy. It may be worth his time now to sit down with the “plucky millennials” who sued him to save the planet – before his time in office runs out.

Links

• Doctrine of Public Trust
• Climate Lawsuit Awaits President Trump
• A Dramatic New Plan To Fight Climate Change: Sue The Federal Government
• Climate Change, Coastal Hazards And The Public Trust Doctrine
• Washington State Youth Sue Government Over Climate Change
• Company Directors To Face Penalties For Ignoring Climate Change
• Our Children's Trust
• Meet The 16-Year-Old Climate Change Activist Suing The U.S. Government
• These Kids Are Suing the Federal Government to Demand Climate Action. They Just Won an Important Victory
• "These Kids Can't Wait": New Win in Youth Climate Lawsuit in Washington
• Sorry, Feds: Kids Can Sue Over Climate Negligence, Judge Says
• Young People Are Suing Governments Over Climate Change
• What does the Dutch court ruling on climate targets mean for Australia?
• In Novel Tactic on Climate Change, Citizens Sue Their Governments
• Dr Jarrod Gilbert: Why Climate Denial Should Be A Criminal Offence
• Climate Change May Be Doubted by Some, But Now It’s the Law
• My Student Missed Class... To Sue The Government Over Climate Change
• Law Student Tackles NZ Govt On Climate Change
• Are Countries Legally Required To Protect Citizens From Climate Change?
• In Novel Tactic on Climate Change, Citizens Sue Their Governments

Inside The Largest Earth Science Event: 'The Time Has Never Been More Urgent'

The Guardian - Alan Yuhas

With Trump set to have a ‘chilling effect’ on environmental policy, 20,000 Earth and space scientists met in California to face up to a new responsibility

Scientists hold signs during a rally in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

They argued about moon-plasma interactions, joked about polar bears, and waxed nostalgic for sturdy sea ice.
But few of the 20,000 Earth and climate scientists meeting in San Francisco this week had much to say about the president-elect, Donald Trump – though his incoming administration loomed over much of the conference.
For some, the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) – the largest Earth and space science gathering in the world – was a call to action. California’s governor, Jerry Brown, addressed the scientists on Wednesday morning, telling them, “the time has never been more urgent or your work ever more important. The danger is definitely rising.”
Citing financial inequality, the risks of nuclear arms and the mounting effects of climate change, Brown said, “we’re facing far more than one or two or even thousands of politicians.
“We’re facing big oil, we’re facing big financial structures that are at odds with the survivability of our world. It’s up to you as truth tellers, truth seekers, to mobilize all your efforts to fight back.”
Brown compared the struggle to the campaigns waged by the tobacco industry, noting that health science and the law eventually curtailed its power. “Some people need a heart attack to stop smoking,” he said. “Maybe we just got our heart attack.”

Scientists rally during the American Geophysical Union meeting. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

“This is not a battle of one day or one election,” he added, calling scientists “foot soldiers” for truth. The governor promised to help lead the campaign, daring Trump to shut down climate science satellites and mocking Rick Perry, his pick for secretary of energy.
“If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch it’s own damn satellites,” Brown said. “Rick, I’ve got some news for you: California’s growing a hell of a lot faster than Texas. And we’ve got more sun than you’ve got oil.”
Not far away, a team of lawyers with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund met with scientists to discuss the threats ahead. The group helps defend scientists from harassment and suits over climate change research, most prominently a case brought by a climate change-denying organization to obtain emails and research of scientist Michael Mann.
At the AGU table, attorneys handed out guides to “handling political harassment and legal intimidation”.
Some scientists are taking action on their own, including Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist who has started one of several “guerrilla archiving” efforts to preserve public climate data on non-government servers. Holthaus and others fear that a Trump administration could take down the data, as former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper tried to silence scientists.
Sally Jewell, the outgoing secretary of the interior, tried to reassure scientists that the Trump administration could not quickly gut federal research. Science would be “foundational” to government, she told attendees: “We have a president-elect that likes to win, and we can’t win without science.”
Jewell argued that scientists should stress the benefits of science to industry, saying they should start speaking “in the language of business, perhaps, to translate” for the Trump administration.
Many federal researchers had already begun to speak in those terms. Scott Hagen, presenting on the dangers of rising tides to Louisiana, said the state could face losses of up to $280m in agricultural lands. Jennifer Francis, a Rutgers professor, said the extreme heat in the Arctic would almost certainly contribute to extreme weather around the world next year. Marco Tedesco, presenting on the “Arctic report card 2016” – a year of record lows – noted that changes in snowfall patterns would affect hydropower and freshwater resources.
“Snow melting sooner and faster is leaving a drier soil exposed to a drier summer,” he said. “You might have more drought, might have more forest fires, ramifications for economy, population.”
Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of Nasa’s science mission directorate, stressed that scientists should “behave like scientists” and “focus on the data that we get and not amplify the noise”.
He too drew a link between science and business: “What you’re carrying around in your pocket is a lot of space data that’s doing work for you.”

At the meeting, scientists were feeling the pressure of a looming Trump administration. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Jewell urged scientists to “speak up for scientific integrity”, and tried to assure them that pro-science policies “are not going to be easy to undo”. But uncertainty and anxiety reigned, for the future of research and the planet.
“Trump’s leadership will have a chilling effect on environmental and science policy no matter what,” said one climate scientist, who asked for anonymity for fear of work being politicized. “What worries me most is that this administration might launch a fundamental attack on the scientific process.”
The best-case scenario, the scientist said, would resemble the Bush administration, in which “leadership doesn’t care much about what the climate scientists say, but they continue to support funding for research”. A worst-case scenario would be “an effort to undermine the scientific infrastructure of the country”.

A worst case scenario would be 'an effort to undermine the scientific infrastructure of the country'

Agencies could radically restructure their staff, for instance, shuffling scientists to unappealing projects while Republicans in Congress slash budgets and Trump reneges on world climate talks. Charles Kennel, a former Nasa official, said that the US’s withdrawal for several years would be “serious but not fatal”.
Other scientists stressed that the world is already changing in dramatic, unpredictable ways. Donald Perovich, a professor at Dartmouth University, said that the Arctic in 2016 looked “as though part of the United States has melted”, a region comparable to all the states east of the Mississippi plus the midwest and North Dakota.
When the researchers began doing a yearly report card in the mid-2000s, Perovich said, “you kind of had to listen closely, because the Arctic was whispering change.”
“Now it’s not whispering anymore,” he said. “It’s shouting.”

Links

• Precarious Data: Notes for #datarescue + #datarefuge
• Lives in the balance: climate change and the Marshall Islands
• FAQ: The issues around muzzling government scientists
• Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

Climate Change Played A Role In Australia’s Hottest October And Tasmania’s Big Dry In 2015

The Conversation - Pandora Hope | Andrew King | Guomin Wang | Julie Arblaster | Michael Grose

Wildfires in Tasmania in 2016 were in part the result of an extended dry period beginning in 2015. Rob Blakers, CC BY-SA

Climate change made some of Australia’s 2015 extreme weather events more likely, according to research published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
As part of an annual review of global weather extremes, these studies focused on October 2015, which was the hottest on record for that month across Australia. It was also the hottest by the biggest margin for any month.
October 2015 was also the driest for that month on record in Tasmania, which contributed to the state’s dry spring and summer, and its bad fire season.
El Niño events usually drive global temperatures higher, and 2015 had one of the strongest on record. So were these records due to El Niño, or climate change? The research shows that while El Niño had some influence on Australia’s weather, it was not the only culprit.

El Niño packed a punch – or did it?
In 2015, a strong El Niño developed, with record high temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean contributing to 2015 being the hottest year on record globally (although 2016 will smash it). The Indian Ocean was also very warm.
El Niño is often associated with warm and dry conditions across eastern Australia, particularly in spring and summer. The new studies found that for Australia as a whole, while El Niño did make the continent warmer, its direct contribution to record temperatures was small.
Only in the Murray Darling Basin did El Niño make it more likely that the October 2015 heat would be a record. El Niño also played a small but notable role in the dry October in Tasmania.

Temperatures were at a record high across the south of the country. Bureau of Meteorology

The hottest October
Although record-high spring temperatures might not make you sweat as much as a summer heatwave, ecosystems and agriculture can be susceptible. October 2015 was 2.89℃ warmer than the previous hottest October in 2014, beating the margin set by September 2013, which was 2.75℃ warmer than the previous hottest September.
Even before October 2015 was over, Mitchell Black and David Karoly at the University of Melbourne reported that human-induced climate change played a strong role in the excessive October heat.
The first paper (chapter 23 in the annual review) explains this further. Using the citizen science Weather@home ANZ system, the researchers analysed thousands of simulations of the world’s climate of 2015, generated on home computers (you can donate your computer power here).
To find out whether climate change played a role, some of those simulations included the observed ocean temperatures of 2015, while some included ocean temperatures as if human-caused climate change had never occurred.
According to this method, climate change made breaking the October record four times more likely compared to a world without climate change.
The second paper (chapter 24 in the review) backed this up. This study used the Bureau of Meteorology’s seasonal forecast system to compare the real world to a world with less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The researchers came to exactly the same conclusion: rising carbon dioxide levels made a record October four times more likely.
This second study also found that the atmospheric conditions – the series of high and low pressure systems that shift heat from inland Australia towards the south – were more important in driving the extra heat than the extreme global ocean temperatures.
If these weather systems had occurred in a low-CO₂ world, it would still have been an extremely warm month. But for October 2015, climate change increased the temperature by an extra 1 degree.

Driest October for Tasmania
In October 2015, Tasmania received only 21mm of rainfall, just 17% of its normal amount. It was much drier than the previous driest October in 1965 (in the era with reliable record, when the state received 56mm). This was part of the driest spring on record, and a dry and warm run of months through spring and summer.
This run of warm and dry months had major impacts on agriculture and hydroelectricity, and helped to set up a catastrophic fire season.
Rainfall extremes can be complex, and it is generally much harder to figure out what caused them than temperature extremes. So the third Australian study (ch. 25 in the review) used two different methods to compare October 2015 to the previous record.
The results showed that El Niño did affect the October climate, but human-caused climate change also played a small but significant role. Climate change probably increased the chances of Tasmania having its driest October by 25-50%.
The record-dry October appears to be linked to higher atmospheric pressure in a band around the whole southern hemisphere, which is consistent with trends over recent time.

Rainfall across Tasmania was the lowest on record across nearly the whole state. Bureau of Meteorology

Climate change is altering our extremes
More extreme events and more broken climate records are causing many people to ask whether climate variability or climate change is to blame. But of course it is never just one of these; it is always a combination of both.
For the extreme October of 2015, while short-term weather patterns and the El Niño contributed to the extremes, breaking these climate records would have been substantially less likely without human-induced climate change.
Climate change has already altered the extreme weather we experience in Australia and will continue to do so over the coming years.

Links

• El Niño is over, but has left its mark across the world
• Australia’s climate in 2015: cool to start with a hot finish
• It’s been Australia’s hottest ever October, and that’s no coincidence

This Stunning Antarctic Lake Is Buried In Ice. And That Could Be Bad News

Fairfax - Chris Mooney

Atop the ice sheet covering the Arctic island of Greenland, you now see dramatic melting in the summer. It forms lakes, rivers and even dangerous "moulins" in the ice where rivers suddenly plunge into the thick ice sheet, carrying water deep below.
East Antarctica is supposed to be different. It is extremely remote and cold. It doesn't see such warm temperatures in the summer - yet - and so its ice tends to remain more pristine.

Underwater camera explores Antarctic lake
Video from inside a borehole showing an englacial lake four metres below the surface of East Antarctic ice shelf.

"Many people refer to East Antarctica as being too cold for significant melt," says Jan Lenaerts, a glaciologist with the Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "I mean there's marginal melt in summer, but there's not a lot."
That's the common wisdom, at least, but it is challenged in a new study in Nature Climate Change, by Lenaerts and his colleagues from universities in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. They do so based on research they conducted atop the very large Roi Baudouin ice shelf in East Antarctica, which floats atop the ocean, and where they found a very Greenland-like situation in early 2016.
The researchers had travelled to investigate what had been described as a nearly two-mile-wide "crater" in the shelf, glimpsed by satellite, which some sources believed had been caused by a meteorite. To the contrary, they found that it was a large, 10 foot deep, icy lake bed. In its centre, meanwhile, were multiple rivers and three moulins that carried water deep down into the floating ice shelf.
And even this, perhaps, was not the most dramatic finding. The researchers also drilled through the ice and found what they called "englacial" lakes, sandwiched between the surface of the ice shelf and its base, which is in contact with the ocean beneath it. They found 55 lakes in total on or in the ice shelf, and a number of them were in this buried, englacial format. The video of one such discovery, of a crystal blue lake four meters below the ice shelf surface, is shown above, and an image from the video is below:

Underwater picture of englacial lake 4m below the surface of the Roi Baudouin ice shelf, East Antarctica. Photo: Stef Lhermitte

This meant that the ice shelf is anything but solid - it had many large pockets of weakness throughout its structure, suggesting a greater potential vulnerability to collapse through a process called "hydrofracturing," especially if lake formation continues or increases. That's bad news because when ice shelves fall apart, the glacial ice behind them flows more rapidly to the ocean, raising sea levels.
But why was all this happening, and here?
The researchers postulate that a "microclimate" exists on the ice shelf that made it all possible - and that a similar mechanism is operating on other East Antarctic ice shelves. Here's what they believe happens to create so much wetness and melt:

In  East Antarctica, so-called "katabatic" winds blow downhill from higher reaches of the ice sheet toward the sea. These powerful winds scour the surface and lift off all the snow, exposing blue ice beneath. At the same time, they mix with warmer air higher in the atmosphere and pull it downward. (In this part of Antarctica there is a temperature "inversion" with cooler winds near the surface and warmer air aloft.)
This has a double melting effect: The warmth raises temperatures atop the ice, even as the exposure of the blue ice reduces the "albedo," or reflectivity, of the surface, meaning that more sunlight gets absorbed. The result is a pocket of melt in the form of a lake and in some cases the pouring of water into the ice shelf.
As for the submerged lakes, these appear to form from surface lakes that freeze over on top in winter, but stay liquid beneath, Lenaerts said. Then subsequent layers of snow may bury them, even as the steady flow of the glacier into the ice shelf carries them out further over the ocean.
Indeed, it turns out that the further out over the ocean you go, the deeper the lakes tended to occur, presumably due to this flow and burial process. The lake in the video provided is four metres below the ice surface, but "we have found one eight metres below the surface even further, and one 15 metres below the surface, even further," Lenaerts said.
As for the plunging moulins, where that water ends up remains mysterious. But it does not appear to be feeding the buried lakes. "We don't have the tools, the instrumentation, to detect this right now. This is a really big unknown," Lenaerts said. The water could even be travelling all the way through the ice shelf and pouring into the ocean.

Moulin inside the crater on the Roi Baudouin ice shelf showing the drainage of meltwater. Photo: Sanne Bosteels

Importantly, the researchers went to satellite images to show that what's happening on the Roi Baudouin ice shelf isn't unique to East Antarctica. Rather, they say, they have seen similar features atop other nearby East Antarctic ice shelves, at least remotely.
"We see similar things going on on neighbouring ice shelves, and also for instance on the Amery ice shelf, which is also a notorious, very large ice shelf on East Antarctica," Lenaerts said. "We see this link between strong winds and blue ice formation, enhanced absorption of solar radiation, and the melt that is enhanced by this process."
The researchers are not saying, to be sure, that these processes are caused by human-induced climate change - they note in particular that on the Roi Baudouin shelf, it appears that there has been some melting at the surface since the 1980s. However, Lenaerts said it is already clear that there is much more meltwater during warmer summers than in cooler ones. And global warming will gradually produce warmer Antarctic temperatures, which should increase the volume of meltwater atop of these ice shelves, pushing them still further in the Greenland direction.
What this means is that the shelves could be subject to the risk of what researchers call "hydro-fracturing": when a great deal of meltwater forms atop the shelf and pushes inside of it, eventually leading to a crackup. That's what's believed to have happened in the classic case of the shattering of the Larsen B ice shelf in the Antarctic peninsula in 2002. Now the fear is that it could happen in the East Antarctic too, where there is a massive amount of ice to potentially lose.
"If this region can get warmer in the future, the meltwater production will enhance a lot, and we can only expect these features, these processes to be more present than they are now," said Lenaerts said. "With potential implications for hydrofacturing to happen and for ice shelf stability."

Links

• Shrinking mountain glaciers are ‘categorical evidence’ of climate change, scientists say
• Trump names Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma attorney general suing EPA on climate change, to head the EPA
• Atmospheric levels of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, are spiking, scientists report
• Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings

Decarbonisation And Politics: How To Make It Matter To Voters

Renew Economy - David Leitch*

“If at first you don’t succeed”

AAP Image/Dean Lewins, File

Climate change doesn’t much matter to voters even though they (naturally) accept the science
The annual Climate institute survey shows that 75% of the public agree with the concept of climate change. On the other hand it doesn’t rate as a top 3 issue with voters. For those of us that think it’s a relatively urgent issue the challenge is how to make it front of mind for voters.
Power prices are going up. There will be a large blame game as to why. The anti renewables camp will say it is the fault of renewables, the pro renewables camp will say it’s the fault of lack of certainty around energy policy preventing the investment in new supply. This is not an easy argument to win as the facts cant be reduced to a simple slogan.
Do we need a national political champion that sees how decarbonization can be turned into an election winning issue?  No such person is in evidence at the moment. Kevin Rudd was the last such person but perhaps because he saw foresaw the political strength of the “big fat tax on everything” he dropped it, and having played the public for a fool paid the consequence.
Of course, it was a leading issue in the Gillard Govt and the experience has clearly left a sour taste in the “prgamatists” that drive ALP strategy. No leading  politician since has been prepared to back climate change as a front of mind  election issue.
A variety of NGOs from the CEC, the Climate Institute, Beyond Zero, IGCC, Climateworks are all out there but would it be better if there was an umbrella organization, better funded which undertook more direct action? Our view of direct action means reaching voters directly, via advertising, social media, but also influencing the conventional media. Making the jobs case. Making the lo
Or is it better just to stay with the incremental approach and simply allow the facts to gradually become clear? In the end incrementalism will get us there but only over time.

The public in Australia increasingly supports the concept that global warming is occurring
The Climate Institute published its annual survey of attitudes towards  Australia on climate change, and this didn’t perhaps get the attention it deserved. There is a lot of detail in the survey, and of course the answer to survey questions and the conclusions  drawn always depend on the exact question asked and the survey methodology.
The Climate Institute’s annual survey consists of a 2000 person Galaxy Research Poll in the first week of August with a 2.2% error margin and qualitative focus group interviews conducted in Brisbane, Melbourne and Newcastle.
About ¾ of Australians agree that Climate Change is occurring. This number has been climbing for the past five years.

Figure 1: Views on climate change. Source: Climate Institute

However it wasn’t  an election issue. Both major parties ran completely dead on climate change. And for good reason. The Coalition knew it was weak on the “bad boy” image and the ALP was still licking its wounds from having its butt kicked from West Australia to Queensland by Tony Abbott hammering the “big tax on everything” and “Julia’s a liar” images.
Essential Research found the economy and healthcare are the big issues.

Figure 2 Top 3 election issues. Source Essential Research July 26

According to vote compass, an opt in survey of ABC viewers, in the big three States, the environment only rated as a top 3 issue in Victoria.

Figure 3 Election issues: Source ABC vote compass May 2016

A Roy Morgan survey of the problems facing Australia and the world rated climate change at just 7% a long way below the economy at over 40%.

Figure 4 Problems facing Australia: Source Roy Morgan May 2016

Interestingly though for the first time in a number of years when Australians were asked the main problems facing the world they nominated the Environment and Climate Change as No 1 @ 25% just pipping the economy.

Figure 5 Problem facing world. Source Roy Morgan May 2016

Coalition response – turn climate change into a cost of living issue
Facing the fact that the majority of the people believe in climate change, the Coalitions’ response seems to be to turn it into an economic issue. Ie Climate change means renewable energy means less reliability and higher prices. However  they are still left with the intellectually indefensible position of having signed up for COP 21 without being able to demonstrate how that will be achieved. This is a weakness that can be exploited but probably won’t swing many votes.

ALP response – wedge Turnbull
The ALP’s response is to cast the Prime Minister as someone that believes in the problems Climate Change causes but is powerless to do anything about it because he does not have enough Cabinet Authority. Turnbull has recently been wedged on this issue in a textbook example of wedging. When a politician is effectively wedged it creates an impression of weakness or lack of guile. You didn’t see Bob Hawke or John Howard getting wedged all that often.
The ALP has also presented a 50% renewable energy by 2030 policy. The Coalition expressly rejects that this is achievable. So in a sense that is where the crux of the debate lies. State ALP Govts in Victoria and QLD have started their own policies to move towards the Federal ALP target.
If you think, as I do, that execution and management matter, then the appointment of Simon Corbell as advisor to the Victorian Govt is an extremely positive sign. Based on the ACT’s track record we can expect financially astute, progressive policy to be advanced in a straightforward and steady fashion with few errors.  If it goes well in Victoria it will build very strong national support. So we see the Victorian legislated policy as a key driver for public support. Of course its not enough on its own.

How to lift climate change up the list of issues that matter
Your analyst is more interested in issues  than political loyalty. We see climate change as a large, going on for existential,  global problem and believe that Australia as a wealthy, high emitting reasonably large country has a role to play.  From that perspective the challenge is to lift climate change out of the abstract “its happening but it doesn’t matter” into the “its happening and I’m going to vote for someone to do something about it” category. The question is how to achieve this.

Some questions for activists to consider
Should this be a party driven top down approach a la that taken by the Greens or should it be a bottom up approach in marginal electorates driven by being able to show to marginal voters why they should think about climate change?
How can the link be made from climate change as an “abstract future” issue to something that requires immediate vote driving action?
What would it take to get the ALP’s 50% renewable by 2030 policy as a vote winner instead of a  “we’ve got the greenies covered” policy not to be talked about. The ALP went to some lengths in the last election not to put its 50% renewable policy in front of voters. For instance we think extending the SREC benefit to household storage and allowing utility scale storage to gain REC credits would be vote winning policies.
In short how can we get climate change on the front page in a positive way?
Is it even a good idea to spend scarce resources on Federal policy or would it be preferable to assist State Governments that have gone down the higher renewables path and get them to do even more?

*David Leitch is principal of ITK. He was formerly a Utility Analyst for leading investment banks over the past 30 years. 

Links

• Climate Institute Climate of the Nation
• Climate change: Survey finds 77pc of Australians believe it is occurring
• Public support for climate action on the up after dark days: Climate Institute survey
• Federal election 2016: Polls point to rising support for climate change action