22/04/2017

Climate Change Will Fuel Terrorism Recruitment, Report For German Foreign Office Says

The Guardian - 

Report by Adelphi thinktank warns terrorist groups will exploit natural disasters and water and food shortages
One of the biggest camps for people displaced by Islamic extremists in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Drought-hit areas are ideal recruiting grounds for groups like Boko Haram, according to the Adelphi report. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP
Climate change will fuel acts of terrorism and strengthen recruiting efforts by terrorist groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram, a report commissioned by the German foreign office has found.
Terrorist groups will exploit the natural disasters and water and food shortages expected to result from climate change and allow them to recruit more easily, operate more freely and control civilian populations, argues the report by Berlin thinktank Adelphi.
“Terrorist groups are increasingly using natural resources – such as water – as a weapon of war, controlling access to it, and further compounding, and exacerbating resource scarcities,” Lukas Rüttinger writes in the report, titled Insurgency, Terrorism and Organised Crime in a Warming World.
“The scarcer resources become, the more power is given to those who control them, especially in regions where people are particularly reliant on natural resources for their livelihoods.
“As climate change affects food security and the availability of water and land, affected people will become more vulnerable not only to negative climate impacts but also to recruitment by terrorist groups offering alternative livelihoods and economic incentives.”
The Adelphi report cites several examples where the impacts of climate change are already spurring or exacerbating terrorism.
In the drought-ravaged region around Lake Chad in central Africa, food and water shortages, near-economic collapse, and weak governments are providing a ripe recruiting ground for Islamist fundamentalist group Boko Haram.
“In north-eastern Nigeria, the region closest to Lake Chad and where Boko Haram is strongest, 71.5% of the population live in poverty and more than 50% are malnourished … This kind of economic deprivation provides an ideal breeding ground for recruitment by Boko Haram.”
In Syria, the now six-year civil war and rise of Isis was, not caused, but exacerbated by one of the worst and widest droughts in the country’s history, which drove hundreds of thousands from the land, and sent millions into extreme poverty and food insecurity.
Isis is using water as a weapon of war, the report argues, controlling dams to harm enemies and expand its own territory.
“In 2015, Islamic State closed the gates of the Ramadi dam to more easily attack regime forces further downstream. Weaponisation of water can also take the form of using it as a source of funding by taxing it, as Isis did in Raqqa. In other instances, Isis did not cut the supply, but rather used water to flood land in order to expel people from their homes.”
And in Afghanistan, a country riven by internecine conflicts and acutely vulnerable to climate change, more than half of local conflicts are over land and water. Diminishing rainfall and advancing desertification are likely to spark further violent clashes between nomads and pastoralists over access to pastures and water and food.
Rüttinger told the Guardian climate change alone did not cause terrorism, but “creates an environment where terrorism can thrive” and exacerbates existing tensions and conflicts.
Former US deputy undersecretary of defence Sherri Goodman told the Guardian this month that climate change was a “threat multiplier” for unstable regions around the world, but that its impacts would be felt globally, and by countries distant from the source conflict.
“Climate is a threat multiplier because it aggravates others tensions and conflicts that already exist.”
Militaries around the world, across the Americas, UK, Europe, and the Asia Pacific, have highlighted the “threat multiplier” impact of climate change and extreme weather events.
The Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change has warned the impact of global warming will drive massive refugee movements of an “unimaginable scale”, and that climate represents “the greatest security threat of the 21st century”.
The US secretary of defence, James Matthis, told his confirmation hearing in January climate change posed a real and current security threat to American troops.
“Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today. It is appropriate for the combatant commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.”
In March, the United Nations, in passing a resolution on the Lake Chad crisis, emphasised the “interconnectedness” of the climate and security challenges in the region, emphasising “the adverse effects of climate change and ecological changes among other factors on the stability of the region”.

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Renewables Roadshow: How The People Of Newtown Got Behind Solar-Powered Beer

The Guardian - 

A hipster brewery in a Sydney suburb has created beer with an environmental message


Renewables roadshow – Newtown: 'What could be better than solar-powered beer?'

 Newtown – Sydney’s grungy inner-city suburb where a seemingly endless string of Thai restaurants is interrupted by body-piercing shops, clothes stores and a growing number of small bars.
It’s a suburb known for its beer-fuelled nightlife and alternative cultural tastes. It’s also one of the most progressive areas in Australia: at the last New South Wales election, the Greens got more than 45% of the primary vote (and almost 60% after preferences) in the seat of Newtown.
It makes sense, then, that beer and progressive environmental politics would come together in this suburb and, right in the middle of Newtown, a community-owned solar array is powering a local brewery.
“Solar-powered beer tastes better,” says Oscar McMahon with a laugh. He is the cofounder of Young Henrys, a small local beer company whose brewery is now home to the solar array, which is owned by members of the Newtown community.
NSW has become one of the worst states for driving the transition to renewable energy, so Newtown locals have taken matters into their own hands.
The groups involved in the project – the brewery owners, the local investors, supporters in the NSW state parliament and the community energy provider Pingala – each have their own overlapping reasons to buy-in.
McMahon is the epitome of the Newtown variety of hipster. Standing among the fermenters, he has an impressive amount of tattoos protruding from his black sleeveless shirt and a full long beard that would make any biker jealous.
He and Richard Adamson began their business in a small warehouse space in Newtown in 2012. “We had a brewery that could produce 1200 litres at the time and we were generally selling about 5-10 kegs a week at the beginning,” McMahon says.
“Five years later, we’ve got a much more efficient, bigger brewery. We now have five warehouses. We have sales people all over the country and we are selling nationally to about 300 different venues.”
The idea for the business came out of a beer appreciation club they both attended. McMahon says the pair wanted to “create a brewery that is as in contact with the people that drink the beer as beer club is”. They have maintained that ethos by having a small restaurant or bar at each of their brewing locations and hand-picking the venues that sell their beer.
They see the community solar project on their roof as another way to be in close contact with the community around them. “We are buying our power from people that have invested in an idea and infrastructure within our business,” he says. “The benefits are that you open yourself up to other people that believe in your company to actually buy in.”
Adamson, McMahon’s business partner, thinks much of the local enthusiasm springs from the living situations of those who live there.
“A lot of people who live in Newtown either rent or they live in apartments. They don’t really have the opportunity to access solar energy,” Adamson says. “This way they get to participate and know that at least some of the electricity being used in the area is being generated by solar.”
Local state member Jenny Leong has been a supporter of the Pingala Young Henrys project from the start. So much so that hers was one of the 54 names drawn out of a hat with 300 names in it, allowing her to invest money personally in the project.
“What we see here is the community stepping in and filling the gap that is completely left open by the fact that we have no leadership from our national or state governments when it comes to really addressing the issue of pollution and really moving us away from polluting fossil fuel industries,” she says.
Indeed federal energy policy has been left in tatters after a decade of inaction on climate change. Investment in new electricity generation has stalled while many of the country’s old coal-powered generators are poised to close.
Consequently official government projections show greenhouse gas emissions are rising and will continue to do so to 2030. This means there is no hope of achieving the cuts in emissions Australia promised to make when they signed up to the Paris agreement in 2015.

Australia's projected emissions v emissions targets
Projected emissions have an upper and lower estimate, which could range from 571 MtCO2-e to 616 by 2030


Meanwhile, the lack of certainty for energy businesses has meant investment in energy generation has frozen, directly causing prices to jump and adding more than the cost of a $50 per tonne carbon price to wholesale energy prices.
The ACT, Victoria and South Australia have moved ahead in this area but NSW has been slow to build their own renewable energy policy. In 2016 they announced a goal of having zero net emissions by 2050, which would require a lot of renewable energy generation, yet how that would be achieved has not been clearly spelled out.
Leong says a project like this shows the community taking action, and moving forward without the politicians.
“Newtown is an electorate that is made up of some of the most wonderfully progressive people in the country, who want to see a real shift towards genuine protection of our planet and our environment from pollution.”
Pingala installed the brewery’s solar array and organised the ownership structure. The 29.9kW array is owned by 54 locals (including Leong), who will get 5%-8% return on their investment each year. The brewery sources a big chunk of its electricity from a totally renewable source, while paying about the same for its electricity.
At the end of 10 years, the locals will have made a profit on their investment and the solar array will be gifted to the brewery, who will continue to use it to generate free energy for another decade or longer.
The Young Henry’s installation is the first project that Pingala has organised but they expect it to be the first of many. “We spent a long time developing our business models and building a community base,” says April Crawford-Smith, a convenor of the four-year-old community energy organisation.
Their next step is to replicate the installation at other locations around Sydney. “We have amazing plans for the future, doing a similar project again on other breweries as well as looking at apartments and schools. And we have also looked at remote Aboriginal communities and energy affordability and solar as well,” Crawford-Smith says. “So we have a pretty broad remit.
“It’s very ambitious but at the very heart of it is community and them driving forward solutions for our environment and our society.”
For some at Pingala, the project of building community renewable energy is also about social justice. Pingala coordinator Tom Nockolds wants the public to own the sources of their own energy, taking it away from big business, and putting the profits and other benefits into the hands of the public.
“Community ownership of renewable energy is so important because we are in the midst of an amazing energy transition. It’s no longer a question of if it’s going to happen, it’s happening all around us,” Nockolds says. “The real question is are we going to take advantage of the opportunity to build fairer systems in the way our energy systems are structured?”
Leong believes her electorate of Newtown is the ideal place for the transition to begin.
“The wonderful local feeling that is appreciated by so many in Newtown is to have a locally brewed beer powered by solar energy and linked to an incredible community initiative and a cooperative structure,” she says. “What could be better than solar powered beer?.”

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We Need To Get Rid Of Carbon In The Atmosphere, Not Just Reduce Emissions

The Conversation - 

Humans have burned 420 billion tonnes of carbon since the start of the industrial revolution. Half of it is still in the atmosphere. Reuters/Stringer 
Getting climate change under control is a formidable, multifaceted challenge. Analysis by my colleagues and me suggests that staying within safe warming levels now requires removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The technology to do this is in its infancy and will take years, even decades, to develop, but our analysis suggests that this must be a priority. If pushed, operational large-scale systems should be available by 2050.
We created a simple climate model and looked at the implications of different levels of carbon in the ocean and the atmosphere. This lets us make projections about greenhouse warming, and see what we need to do to limit global warming to within 1.5℃ of pre-industrial temperatures – one of the ambitions of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
To put the problem in perspective, here are some of the key numbers.
Humans have emitted 1,540 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide gas since the industrial revolution. To put it another way, that’s equivalent to burning enough coal to form a square tower 22 metres wide that reaches from Earth to the Moon.
Half of these emissions have remained in the atmosphere, causing a rise of CO₂ levels that is at least 10 times faster than any known natural increase during Earth’s long history. Most of the other half has dissolved into the ocean, causing acidification with its own detrimental impacts.
Although nature does remove CO₂, for example through growth and burial of plants and algae, we emit it at least 100 times faster than it’s eliminated. We can’t rely on natural mechanisms to handle this problem: people will need to help as well.

What’s the goal?
The Paris climate agreement aims to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and ideally no higher than 1.5℃. (Others say that 1℃ is what we should be really aiming for, although the world is already reaching and breaching this milestone.)
In our research, we considered 1℃ a better safe warming limit because any more would take us into the territory of the Eemian period, 125,000 years ago. For natural reasons, during this era the Earth warmed by a little more than 1℃. Looking back, we can see the catastrophic consequences of global temperatures staying this high over an extended period.
Sea levels during the Eemian period were up to 10 metres higher than present levels. Today, the zone within 10m of sea level is home to 10% of the world’s population, and even a 2m sea-level rise today would displace almost 200 million people.
Clearly, pushing towards an Eemian-like climate is not safe. In fact, with 2016 having been 1.2℃ warmer than the pre-industrial average, and extra warming locked in thanks to heat storage in the oceans, we may already have crossed the 1℃ average threshold. To keep warming below the 1.5℃ goal of the Paris agreement, it’s vital that we remove CO₂ from the atmosphere as well as limiting the amount we put in.
So how much CO₂ do we need to remove to prevent global disaster?

Are you a pessimist or an optimist?
Currently, humanity’s net emissions amount to roughly 37 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year, which represents 10 gigatonnes of carbon burned (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes). We need to reduce this drastically. But even with strong emissions reductions, enough carbon will remain in the atmosphere to cause unsafe warming.
Using these facts, we identified two rough scenarios for the future.
The first scenario is pessimistic. It has CO₂ emissions remaining stable after 2020. To keep warming within safe limits, we then need to remove almost 700 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere and ocean, which freely exchange CO₂. To start, reforestation and improved land use can lock up to 100 gigatonnes away into trees and soils. This leaves a further 600 gigatonnes to be extracted via technological means by 2100.
Technological extraction currently costs at least US$150 per tonne. At this price, over the rest of the century, the cost would add up to US$90 trillion. This is similar in scale to current global military spending, which – if it holds steady at around US$1.6 trillion a year – will add up to roughly US$132 trillion over the same period.
The second scenario is optimistic. It assumes that we reduce emissions by 6% each year starting in 2020. We then still need to remove about 150 gigatonnes of carbon.
As before, reforestation and improved land use can account for 100 gigatonnes, leaving 50 gigatonnes to be technologically extracted by 2100. The cost for that would be US$7.5 trillion by 2100 – only 6% of the global military spend.
Of course, these numbers are a rough guide. But they do illustrate the crossroads at which we find ourselves.

The job to be done
Right now is the time to choose: without action, we’ll be locked into the pessimistic scenario within a decade. Nothing can justify burdening future generations with this enormous cost.
For success in either scenario, we need to do more than develop new technology. We also need new international legal, policy, and ethical frameworks to deal with its widespread use, including the inevitable environmental impacts.
Releasing large amounts of iron or mineral dust into the oceans could remove CO₂ by changing environmental chemistry and ecology. But doing so requires revision of international legal structures that currently forbid such activities.
Similarly, certain minerals can help remove CO₂ by increasing the weathering of rocks and enriching soils. But large-scale mining for such minerals will impact on landscapes and communities, which also requires legal and regulatory revisions.
And finally, direct CO₂ capture from the air relies on industrial-scale installations, with their own environmental and social repercussions.
Without new legal, policy, and ethical frameworks, no significant advances will be possible, no matter how great the technological developments. Progressive nations may forge ahead toward delivering the combined package.
The costs of this are high. But countries that take the lead stand to gain technology, jobs, energy independence, better health, and international gravitas.

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21/04/2017

Climate Change: How Do We Know?

NASA

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.) Find out more about ice cores (external site).
The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth's orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.
Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia.1
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.
The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.2 Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many instruments flown by NASA. There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.
Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth's climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.3

The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:
 Sea level rise
Image: Republic of Maldives: Vulnerable to sea level rise

 Global sea level rose about 8 inches in the last century. The rate in the last two decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century.4

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 Global temperature rise
The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.5 Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with 16 of the 17 warmest years on record occurring since 2001. Not only was 2016 the warmest year on record, but eight of the 12 months that make up the year — from January through September, with the exception of June — were the warmest on record for those respective months.6

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Warming oceans
The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.7

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Shrinking ice sheets
Image: Flowing meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet

 The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

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Declining Arctic sea ice
Image: Visualization of the 2007 Arctic sea ice minimum

 Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades.8

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Glacial retreat
Image: The disappearing snowcap of Mount Kilimanjaro, from space.

 Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.9

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Extreme events
The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.10

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Ocean acidification
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent.11, 12 This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.13, 14

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Decreased snow cover
Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and that the snow is melting earlier.15

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References
  1. IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers
    B.D. Santer et.al., "A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere," Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46
    Gabriele C. Hegerl, "Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method," Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306
    V. Ramaswamy et.al., "Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling," Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141
    B.D. Santer et.al., "Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes," Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.
  2. In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
  3. National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
    http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php
  4. https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf
    Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.
    The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded from the CSIRO website.
  5. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/
    http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature
    http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp
  6. https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20170118/)  
  7. Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).
  8. L. Polyak, et.al., "History of Sea Ice in the Arctic," in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7
    R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, "Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008," Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009
    http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html
  9. National Snow and Ice Data Center
    World Glacier Monitoring Service
  10. "Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change," National Academies Press, 2016
    https://www.nap.edu/read/21852/chapter/1
    Kunkel, K. et al, "Probable maximum precipitation and climate change," Geophysical Research Letters, (12 April 2013) DOI: 10.1002/grl.50334
    Kunkel, K. et al, "Monitoring and Understanding Trends in Extreme Storms: State of the Knowledge," Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2012.
    http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei.html
  11. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F
  12. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification
  13. C. L. Sabine et.al., "The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2," Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371
  14. Copenhagen Diagnosis, p. 36.
  15. National Snow and Ice Data Center
    C. Derksen and R. Brown, "Spring snow cover extent reductions in the 2008-2012 period exceeding climate model projections," GRL, 39:L19504
    http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/snow_extent.html
    Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, Data History Accessed August 29, 2011.
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Adani Is Not Just Another Coalmine, It Is A Turning Point For The Nation

The Guardian - 

If the government approves this monstrous mine it will be committing environmental treason against every Australian who values our farmers, our coasts, our bush and our way of life
Protesters in Canberra hold banners and signs during a 12 April demonstration against Indian company Adani Enterprises building one of the world’s biggest coal mines in Australia. Photograph: Reuters
In an almost unbroken line from Monkey Mia, down across the Bight and then all the way up the other side to Mackay, the Australian coast is etched in various shades of brown. This is the historical precipitation map. Annual rainfall has dropped, it shows, across this enormous stretch of coastline, by as much as 100 millilitres since 1951.
In another map, concentric rings of increasingly angry red emanate from the centre of the continent. This one shows that, assuming we keep going as we are, the temperature in our country will increase by as much as 5C by the end of the century. Eight, if we’re unlucky.
This, by the way, is not the marketing material of some lefty environmental organisation. This is the product of thousands of the world’s top climate scientists, using some of the most sophisticated computer models ever built, to generate projections so fine-grained they simulate even the amount of moisture in every parcel of soil on the planet, and in the poles, the thickness of every chunk of sea ice.
These models give a glimpse of the Australia we are creating. They show the nation’s wheatbelts, from Esperance to the Wimmera, dried to a crisp. They show the Queensland coast being thrashed more relentlessly by fiercer storms. They show a rash of summer bushfires that make Black Saturday look like candles on a cake. But they do not show the reef. By the end of the century, we will have boiled it to death.
This is the Australia we are creating. Even more, it is the Australia we will have to accept if the Adani mine is approved.
Research published last year by four Oxford economists and scientists concluded that to keep climate change to below 2C, no new coal plants can be built after 2017 unless they have zero emissions. That means perfectly efficient carbon capture and storage would have to be deployed on every coal plant in the world – an absurd fantasy.
The paper also finds we already have in place sufficient “capital stock” – the global network of mines and electricity generators – to push us over 2C. At the same time, global coal demand has already peaked and is now falling, China and India have frozen construction on over 100 coal plants, and the economics of energy are pointing only in one direction: renewables.
This points to a stark lose-lose equation for potential new mines like Adani’s: either we burn their coal and induce dangerous climate change, or we don’t and waste billions of dollars.
Unless, of course, we take the third option: don’t build the thing. This is not, then, just another coalmine. It is a turning point. If we build Adani, we commit to irreparably harming Australia’s precious environment. If we don’t, we might still have a chance to save it. This is where we as a nation decide if we will be Asia’s rockpit for another 50 years, or a prosperous nation for the next 500.
Research just released shows that to avoid dangerous climate change, we need anthropogenic emissions to halve every decade. Building the biggest coalmine in history, when there is already a global glut and sufficient investment to tip us over the edge, is not what responsible conservative governments should be doing. They should be conserving all that is precious to us. Serving us. Instead, they are preparing to betray us.
If the world in 2077 is still burning as much coal as we are today, and the financial model of the Adani assumes it will, Australia as we know it – our wheatbelts, our reefs, our cities, and our lifestyles – will cease to exist.
Our government, sworn to protect the nation, should be doing everything it can to avert this looming crisis, not be falling over themselves to pay for the executioner’s bullet. If the government approves this monstrous mine, and the banks fund it, it will be committing environmental treason against every Australian who values our farmers, our coasts, our bush, and our way of life. We are about to choose Adani or Australia.
The argument against Adani achieves that rare distinction of finding purchase among all parts of society: patriots and cosmopolitans, environmentalists and economists, parochialists and internationalists, the job-hungry regions and the growth-hungry cities. We must all stop this affront to our nation. We must choose Australia.

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How High Will Global Sea Levels Rise?

Cosmos - James Mitchell Crow

Predicting the rate of Antarctica's ice melt is tricky business as the rise in global sea levels depends on the state of the ice cap. New research suggests it may be worse than we thought, writes James Mitchell Crow.
In the low-lying Netherlands, floating houses such as these in Ijberg, a suburb of Amsterdam, are ready for higher sea levels. Whether housing in other places should be built this way depends largely on what happens with Antarctica. Ashley Cooper / Getty Images
Estimates of global sea level rise by 2100 have fluctuated wildly in recent decades – from more than two metres to as little as 31 centimetres.
The rubbery figures have been a source of ammunition for climate change sceptics and consternation for policy makers – undermining their ability to plan ahead. Most of the blame can be levelled at Antarctica. Its 30 million km3 ice sheet holds 90 per cent of the world's fresh water. If it all melted, sea levels would rise 60 metres. By contrast, a melt of the Greenland ice sheet, the world's second largest, would contribute six metres.
Predicting the rate of ice melt in Greenland is relatively straightforward; Antarctica's melt is anything but.
The stability of Antarctica's ice sheet depends on the floating ice shelves at its fringes. They act as plugs halting the movement of the ice sheet. It is the dynamics of that interaction that have been hard to fathom.
The most recent IPCC report (published in 2013) estimated Antarctic ice would contribute just 4 centimetres to global sea levels by the end of the century, leading to an overall rise of 70 centimetres by the end of the century under "business as usual" emissions scenarios.
That estimate, according to Nick Golledge, an Antarctic ice sheet modeller at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, was extremely conservative, because the report's authors "just didn't know enough about fast dynamics in ice sheets". Scientific understanding has moved on since then, confirming Antarctica will contribute way more than 4 centimetres by 2100. "The latest research is converging on a figure more like half a metre," Golledge says.
Researchers discovered how unpredictable ice sheet dynamics could be in 2002 when a 3,500 km2 chunk of the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated. Located on the Antarctic Peninsula, the continent's most northerly and warmest point, it had appeared perfectly stable.
While the melting of Larsen B didn't make any direct difference to sea levels (just as the melting of an ice block won't raise the level of your drink), it was the canary in the coal mine.
Before the Larsen B event, scientists thought the ice sheet moved in a very steady fashion, says Matt King, who researches Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise at the University of Tasmania. "You could kick it as much as you like and it didn't really do much... Now we have a completely different view."
What led to the collapse of Larson B was the rising summer temperatures in the Antarctic peninsula, with the mercury spending more and more time above zero in the years beforehand. As a result, vast pools of meltwater formed on top of the thinning ice, fracturing it and pouring into cracks that ultimately broke apart the whole chunk.
Summer surface melting is a well-understood process, and the dominant factor in Greenland's melt – making it highly predictable. The process can explain what is happening in the northern tip of Antarctica, but it can't account for the changes seen in the rest of the southern continent, where temperatures perpetually remain well below freezing. Here the peril seems to come from below.
One "hotspot" in East Antarctica is the rapidly thinning ice shelf fringing the large Totten glacier. In a study published in Science Advances in December 2016, a CSIRO-led team confirmed warm water from the deep ocean is slipping up onto the Antarctic continental shelf and reaching Totten via deep canyons in the sea floor.
As the ice warms, thins and cracks, yet another feedback mechanism might come into play, according to modelling.
"If there's one thing ice hates, it's warm water – it's tremendously efficient at melting ice," King says.
That warm water is not just a threat to the floating ice shelves. In West Antarctica the ice sheet sits on bedrock that is below sea-level, raising the risk warmer water could stream in and undercut the ice sheet.
Slip sliding away: Antarctica on the move. Cosmos DATA SOURCE: DeConto & Pollard, Nature, 2016.
As the ice warms, thins and cracks, yet another feedback mechanism might come into play, according to modelling by Robert DeConto at the University of Massachusetts and David Pollard at Pennsylvania State University. Each time a piece of ice shelf breaks off, the remaining "ice cliffs" will be taller. "That's inherently unstable," says Tony Worby, who heads the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart. Sooner or later the cliffs will crumble under their own weight.
Understanding these processes is just the beginning of the ice modellers' work. Predicting when, where and how rapidly they will occur, to forecast how much sea levels will rise, is quite another. So far the estimates of Antarctic contribution to sea level rise by 2100 remain highly variable. A key challenge is the lack of data to feed into the models. Huge sections of East Antarctica's coastal zone remain effectively unmapped. "We don't know where the bedrock is or where the warm water can flow," King says.
In 2019, Australian researchers will take delivery of a new icebreaker able to map the seafloor on Antarctica's fringe. The ship will carry an unmanned underwater vehicle capable of navigating under the ice shelves. "Very quickly we'll start to build a picture of what the seafloor looks like around the continental shelf around Antarctica," King says.
Within a decade, researchers should be more confident in their predictions. "Assuming," King notes, "there's not more unknown aspects of the ice sheet." We've been surprised before.

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20/04/2017

Adani's Coal Will Worsen The Lives Of India's Poorest

Fairfax - Harita Sridhar*

Last week, I told my dad I was going to speak outside the Indian high commission at an anti-Adani rally against the proposed Carmichael mine. Soon after, he called me up and he was not happy.
My parents are Indian migrants and I am a young, second-generation, Indian-Australian woman. My father reminded me that there are 300 million people living without electricity in India, and of the times we ourselves were without power in our ancestral village and our home in the coastal city of Visakhapatnam.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull met India's Adani Group founder and chairman Gautam Adani in Delhi on Monday. Photo: Mick Tsikas
He's right: energy poverty is an obstacle to inclusive development in India, and difficult to empathise with here in Australia, where we generally have the privilege of energy security.
But the coal from Adani's Carmichael mine is not the answer for those living without electricity. It will further pollute the air they breathe and the water they drink. It will cause dangerous climate change and extreme weather that always affects the poorest first. Australia's coal will make their lives harder in the long run.
A Stop Adani protest in Melbourne in December. Photo: Wayne Taylor
That's why I decided to speak out. I believe that, if the Australian government or Adani were genuinely serious about extending our energy security to India, they would be generous with technology transfer, or provide untied funding to help India's renewables sector grow. Instead, we face the potential construction of what would be Australia's largest coal mine, and the prospect of irreversible environmental degradation to our climate, groundwater and the Great Barrier Reef.
Adani's project is a terrible idea. The company has a record of serious environmental and human rights violations in several countries, including India I don't trust it to keep the Australian environment safe.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is offering Adani $1 billion of public money as a subsidised loan for this project, though India doesn't even want our coal! Just last week, India's Energy Minister, Piyush Goyal, said India didn't want to keep buying foreign coal and wanted instead to transition to a renewable-energy economy. This is the safer, cleaner and more sustainable solution to India's energy deficit, and the only one that doesn't harm the global environment.
Closer to home, more than two-thirds of Australians polled say they don't want the mine to be built either. This year alone, more than 140 "Stop Adani" groups have formed, and the national Stop Adani roadshow sold out at every major city along the east coast, gathering about 4000 passionate people (500 in Canberra!) who are concerned about the mine and don't want it to go ahead.
The Carmichael mine is bad for Australia, for India and for the global climate. The rest of the world is getting smarter about climate change and stepping away from coal. Australia shouldn't embarrass itself by taking a huge step backwards.

*Harita Sridhar is a Canberra student.

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