Climate Change And The NSW & ACT Bushfire Threat

Climate Council - Lesley Hughes

NSW and the ACT are bracing for another severe bushfire season, as climate change continues to drive extreme conditions, our new report has revealed.
The ‘Climate Change and the NSW and ACT Bushfire Threat’ report finds the economic cost of bushfires in the NSW and ACT is approximately $100m this year, with annual bushfire costs projected to more than double by 2050.

KEY FINDINGS

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1. Climate change is already increasing the risk of bushfires in New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

• Since the 1970s, extreme fire weather has increased across large parts of Australia, including NSW and the ACT.
• Hot, dry conditions have a major influence on bushfires. Climate change is making hot days hotter, and heatwaves longer and more frequent, with increasing drought conditions in Australia’s southeast.
• The 2015/16 summer was Australia’s sixth hottest on record and in NSW and the ACT the mean maximum temperatures were 1.4°C and 1.9°C above average, respectively. February 2016 was also the driest that NSW has experienced since 1978. Hot and dry conditions are driving up the likelihood of dangerous fire weather in NSW and the ACT.

2. In NSW and the ACT the fire season is starting earlier and lasting longer. Dangerous fire weather has been extending into Spring and Autumn.

• 'Above normal' fire potential is expected in most of NSW for the 2016-17 bushfire season, because of high grass growth experienced during spring and predicted above average temperatures during summer.
• In the ACT, predicted hotter and drier weather during summer will produce conditions conducive to bushfire development.

3. Recent severe fires in NSW and the ACT have been influenced by record hot, dry conditions.

• Record-breaking heat and hotter weather over the long term in NSW and the ACT has worsened fire weather and contributed to an increase in the frequency and severity of bushfires.
• In October 2013, exceptionally dry conditions contributed to severe bushfires on the Central Coast and in the Blue Mountains of NSW, which caused over $180 million in damages.
• At the beginning of August in 2014, volunteers were fighting 90 fires simultaneously and properties were destroyed.

4. The total economic costs of NSW and ACT bushfires are estimated to be approximately $100 million per year. By around the middle of the century these costs will more than double.

• Bushfires cost an estimated $375 million per year in Australia. With a forecast growth in costs of 2.2% annually between 2016 and 2050, the total economic cost of bushfires is expected to reach $800 million annually by mid-century.
• These state and national projections do not incorporate increased bushfire incident rates due to climate change and could potentially be much higher.
• In 2003, abnormally high temperatures and below-average rainfall in and around the ACT preceded bushfires that devastated several suburbs, destroyed over 500 properties and claimed five lives. This also had serious economic implications for the ACT with insured losses of $660 million.

5. In the future, NSW and the ACT are very likely to experience an increased number of days with dangerous fire weather. Communities, emergency services and health services must keep preparing.

• Fire severity and intensity is expected to increase substantially in coming decades, especially in those regions currently most affected by bushfires, and where a substantial proportion of the Australian population lives.
• Increased resources for our emergency services and fire management agencies will be required as fire risk increases.

6. This is the critical decade to protect Australians.

• Australia must strive to cut emissions rapidly and deeply to join global efforts to stabilise the world’s climate and to reduce the impact of extreme weather events, including bushfires.
• Australia’s very weak target of a 26-28% reduction in emissions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels – and we are on track to miss even this target – leaves Australia lagging well behind other OECD countries. 

Links

• WATCH: Feeling the heat?
• VIDEO: South Australian storms – blaming the solution
• Mythbusting Guide: South Australian storms and power outages

Scientists Confirm That Warm Ocean Water Is Melting The Biggest Glacier In East Antarctica

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

A Conductivity-Temperature-Depth profiler being deployed near the front of the Totten Glacier. (Credit: Steve Rintoul CSIRO and ACE CRC)

Scientists at institutions in the United States and Australia on Friday published a set of unprecedented ocean observations near the largest glacier of the largest ice sheet in the world: Totten glacier, East Antarctica. And the result was a troubling confirmation of what scientists already feared — Totten is melting from below.
The measurements, sampling ocean temperatures in seas over a kilometer (0.62 miles) deep in some places right at the edge of Totten glacier’s floating ice shelf, affirmed that warm ocean water is flowing in towards the glacier at the rate of 220,000 cubic meters per second.
These waters, the paper asserts, are causing the ice shelf to lose between 63 and 80 billion tons of its mass to the ocean per year, and to lose about 10 meters (32 feet) of thickness annually, a reduction that has been previously noted based on satellite measurements.
This matters because more of East Antarctica flows out towards the sea through the Totten glacier region than for any other glacier in the entirety of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Its entire “catchment,” or the region of ice that slowly flows outward through Totten glacier and its ice shelf, is larger than California. If all of this ice were to end up in the ocean somehow, seas would raise by about 11.5 feet.
“This ice shelf is thinning, and it’s thinning because the ocean is delivering warm water to the ice shelf, just like in West Antarctica,” said Don Blankenship, a glaciologist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study’s co-authors. Blankenship was not on the research vessel, but he and his colleagues helped the Australia-based researchers with understanding the contours of the seafloor so they could plan their field investigations into where warm and deep waters could penetrate.
The lead author of the research, published Friday in Science Advances, was Stephen Rintoul, a researcher with the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. Totten glacier is, more or less, due south of Australia and relatively close to one of Australia’s bases of operations on the ice continent, Casey Station.
Rintoul and his colleagues, on board the government vessel Aurora Australis, were able to navigate extremely close to the Totten ice shelf edge in January of 2015, when an opening in the sea ice allowed the ship to get in closer than one ever has before. This is how they were able to gather the required ocean observations — and to detect the warm water.

A view of the Totten Glacier from RSV Aurora Australis in January 2015. (Australian Antarctic Division (Photo: Paul Brown, Australian Maritime College))

The researchers took ocean measurements at 10 separate points along the floating Totten ice shelf. And at two of the stations, they found that the ocean underneath was extremely deep. There was a six-mile-wide canyon at a depth of 600 meters (nearly 2000 feet) that then branched into two narrower canyons, each reaching greater depths. One of them was over 800 meters deep (more than 2,500 feet) the other was 1,097 meters deep (3,600 feet). Each was about one to two miles wide.
It was in these deep undersea canyons, and a few shallower areas as well, that warm ocean water, called modified circumpolar deep water, was flowing inward powerfully towards Totten glacier. And the previously measured loss of ice from the ice shelf matched closely with the amount of heat that the ocean was delivering, the paper found.
Granted, calling the waters reaching Totten at great depths “warm” is a bit of a misnomer —they are slightly below the freezing point. However, at the extreme pressures and depths involved, the freezing point of ice itself lowers, making these waters more than warm enough to melt ice.
Measuring the warm water reaching Totten was, until now, a missing puzzle piece in determining what’s happening with the glacier. Prior research, for instance, had shown the presence of cavities that warm water could enter, and scientists believed this was occurring because they had observed Totten thinning and lowering in the water. But as NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot put it to the Post at the time, “it is one thing to find potential pathways for warm water to intrude the cavity, it is another to show that this is actually happening.”
Now, scientists are showing that it’s actually happening.

The researchers are interested in Totten not only because of the massive global consequences were it to be destabilized, but also because it could help solve a riddle from the Earth’s past. Researchers have calculated that during previous warm eras, such as during the Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, global temperatures not too much higher than those that exist today led to radical amounts of sea level rise. It’s too much of an ocean surge for the loss of West Antarctica, alone, to explain — so they’ve been going looking to East Antarctica to close the sea-level budget from those eras.
And it turns out that like West Antarctica, East Antarctica features several regions — including Totten — where massive amounts of ice rise above the ocean level, but are grounded deep below it. In the case of Totten glacier, its so-called “grounding line,” which is where the glacier begins to lift off the seafloor and to float, forming an ice shelf with an ocean cavity beneath it, is nearly a mile and a half deep.
Granted, none of this means that Totten is contributing much to sea-level rise — yet. The large loss of ice from the ice shelf doesn’t raise seas because that ice is already afloat. But the weakening of the ice shelf is troubling because the shelf holds back Totten’s more dangerous ice, and when it goes it will allow that ice to flow more easily into the ocean.
For Blankenship, the new study, combined with past aircraft and satellite research on Totten, puts the remaining piece in place and suggests an increasingly clear picture of ocean-driven melt that could lead to growing instability.
“The whole process is here and going on,” he says. “This is the biggest potential contributor in East Antarctica. It needs to be understood.”

Links

• Ocean heat drives rapid basal melt of the Totten Ice Shelf
• ‘Fundamentally unstable’: Scientists confirm their fears about East Antarctica’s biggest glacier
• The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse.

Climate Scientists Fear Trump May Fatally Undermine Their Work

Time - Justin Worland

Scientists say some of the transition team's moves are unprecedented

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wears a coal miner's protective hat while addressing his supporters during a rally at the Charleston Civic Center on May 5, 2016 in Charleston, WV. Ricky Carioti—The Washington Post/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election shocked climate scientists and policymakers after a campaign in which Trump had suggested—falsely—that climate change was a hoax and vowed to largely undo federal and international measures aimed at addressing global warming.
Nonetheless, climate advocates took solace in the days following the election, noting that the market forces largely responsible for the shift away from coal and the incontrovertible science supporting climate regulations would remain true regardless of who was President. But in the six weeks since the election, Trump’s transition team has suggested that the incoming administration will not simply challenge the Obama administration’s policies but will also launch an attempt to undermine the years of science underpinning them. Such an effort could have major implications for the credibility of U.S. government data—and the ability of the world to fight global warming.
“It’s very damaging because it undermines the public confidence in scientists and government,” says Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003, of Trump’s approach to science. “When you start to undermine that public confidence, it can have long-term damaging consequences.”
Trump is still more than a month from taking office, but his team has already sought to undermine basic facts on energy and environmental issues in a number of agencies using a variety of means. Senior Trump adviser Bob Walker said in November that the incoming administration would eliminate NASA’s Earth sciences division, calling its work “politicized.” That department operates satellites to monitor the Earth’s climate and provides data on the changing atmosphere.
The transition team sent a questionnaire to the Department of Energy asking for the names of individuals who worked to calculate the social toll carbon dioxide takes on the atmosphere or attended United Nations climate conferences, stoking fears that career staffers might lose their jobs for working on climate issues. Trump’s choice to lead the agency—former Texas Governor Rick Perry—has described the science of climate change as an open question. The Trump transition team told TIME that the questionnaire was “not authorized” and the sender had been “counseled.” (The transition team did not respond to other questions for this article).
Officials at the non-partisan Energy Information Administration (EIA) were asked if their data had been subject to political influence during the Obama years. That is, Trump’s team asked whether the EIA—a federal agency that tracks and makes forecasts in the energy industry—presented too a rosy view of the growth of renewable energy while discounting coal to encourage renewable investment. This accusation, described as “nonsense” by Rosenberg, was particularly surprising the high regard given to the agency across the aisle and in the energy industry with oil, gas, coal and renewable companies alike.
These steps by Trump’s team represent a dramatic escalation in fights over energy and environmental policy. Many Republicans—think President George W. Bush—have acknowledged the science climate change while arguing that certain demanded by environmentalists would damage the economy. That conclusion is still grounded in a belief and respect for science, no matter how much it might frustrate green advocates.
“People can come to different conclusions about what society should do in light of the evidence in front of them—natural sciences, social sciences, public sentiment and so on,” says Andrew Rosenberg, Director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “People here are saying, ‘we don’t care what that scientific evidence is, we know better’ or they’re trying to directly corrupt the scientific evidence by attacking the scientists.”
But in 2016 disputing the fundamentals of science may be the only way Trump can enact an agenda that disregards climate change. Policymaking—particularly with rules issued by agencies like the EPA—requires troves of evidence from a variety of disciplines to back it up. Reversing the slew of Obama-era policies will require agencies to come up with a scientific justification, something that is increasingly difficult as the science of climate change becomes more clear by the day. But if the Trump administration tosses decades of data and federal research or only seeks advice from industry the policy rationale for reversing regulations becomes legally defensible.
“Just as you have 97% of scientists who say climate change is real and humans have an impact on it, you can find the other 3% who say, ‘no it’s not happening,'” says Whitman, explaining how a Trump administration could enact its agenda. “You can find people who say no and then that’s all you listen to.”
Whitman, who quit the Bush administration because she felt that her agency had been hampered, said that indications from the incoming Trump administration suggest it will be far worse.
One of Trump’s first targets—and one of the most challenging ones—will likely be Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Obama described the measure, which pushes states to shift away from coal-fired power plants, as the most significant step the U.S. has taken to combat climate change. The rule, the product of years of study and litigation, is justified on the basis that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and, therefore, need to be regulated by the EPA. The so-called endangerment finding was upheld in federal court. If Trump were to get rid of the Clean Power Plan, he would need to replace it with something else—unless he gets rid of the endangerment finding. And the only way to do that we be to rethink years of scientific research.
Scientists have responded to Trump’s statements with increasing alarm. Some have begun downloading government data onto independent servers fearing that the incoming administration might remove it from the public domain. Others have begun to reframe crucial research as a matter of jobs rather than environmental concerns.
Of course, it remains early days. Trump is yet to take office and could yet offer a radical shift in direction. Maybe his daughter Ivanka or another meeting with Al Gore will change his mind. Or maybe he will just operate as a replica of Bush. “Anybody who says they know what’s going to happen is reading out of a broken crystal ball,” says Jonathan Levy, who served as deputy chief of staff in the Department of Energy.

Links

• Donald Trump Says He’ll Bring Back Coal. Here’s Why He Can’t
• Donald Trump’s Victory Could Mean Disaster for the Planet
• What to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests

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