The Environment In 2050: Flooded Cities, Forced Migration – And The Amazon Turning To Savannah

The Guardian - Jonathan Watts

Unless we focus on shared solutions, violent storms and devastating blazes could be the least of the world’s troubles. Civilisation itself will be at risk

What the world will look like in 2050 if we continue to burn oil, gas, coal and forests at the current rate? Composite: Guardian Design; Filippo Monteforte/AFP; Patra Kongsirimongkolchai/Getty Images/EyeEm; Alex Board/BBC NHU; deepblue4you/Getty Images/iStockphoto; NOAA/AFP/Getty Images; Mike Eliason/Santa Barbara County Fire Depart/AFP; Will Oliver/EPA 

"Good morning. Here is the shipping forecast for midday, 21 June, 2050. Seas will be rough, with violent storms and visibility ranging from poor to very poor for the next 24 hours. The outlook for tomorrow is less fair."

All being well, this could be a weather bulletin released by the Met Office and broadcast by the BBC in the middle of this century. Destructive gales may not sound like good news, but they will be among the least of the world’s problems in the coming era of peak climate turbulence. With social collapse a very real threat in the next 30 years, it will be an achievement in 2050 if there are still institutions to make weather predictions, radio transmitters to share them and seafarers willing to listen to the archaic content.
I write this imaginary forecast with an apology to Tim Radford, the former Guardian science editor, who used the same device in 2004 to open a remarkably prescient prediction on the likely impacts of global warming on the world in 2020.
Journalists generally hate to go on record about the future. We are trained to report on the very recent past, not gaze into crystal balls. On those occasions when we have to venture ahead of the present, most of us play it safe by avoiding dates that could prove us wrong, or quoting others.
Radford allowed himself no such safe distance or equivocation in 2004, which we should remember as a horribly happy year for climate deniers. George W Bush was in the White House, the Kyoto protocol had been recently zombified by the US Congress, the world was distracted by the Iraq war and fossil fuel companies and oil tycoons were pumping millions of dollars into misleading ads and dubious research that aimed to sow doubt about science.
Radford looked forward to a point when global warming was no longer so easy to ignore. Applying his expert knowledge of the best science available at the time, he predicted 2020 would be the year when the planet started to feel the heat as something real and urgent.
“We’re still waiting for the Earth to start simmering,” he wrote back in that climate-comfortable summer of 2004. “But by 2020 the bubbles will be appearing.”
The heat of the climate movement is certainly less latent. In the past year, the world has seen Greta Thunberg’s solo school strikes morph into a global movement of more than six million demonstrators; Extinction Rebellion activists have seized bridges and blocked roads in capital cities; the world has heard ever more alarming warnings from UN scientists, David Attenborough and the UN envoy for climate action, Mark Carney; dozens of national parliaments and city councils have declared climate emergencies; and the issue has risen further to the fore in the current UK general election than any before it. With only weeks to go until 2020, the bubbles of climate anxiety are massing near the surface.
Radford’s most precise predictions relate to the science. Writing after the record-breaking UK heat of 2003, he warned such scorching temperatures would become the norm. “Expect summer 2020 to be every bit as oppressive.” How right he was. Since then, the world has sweltered through the 10 hottest years in history. The UK registered a new high of 38.7C this July, which was the planet’s warmest month since measurements began.

Hostile world: tackling forest fires in China. Photograph: Costfoto/Barcroft Media

He also correctly anticipated how much more hostile this would make the climate – with increasingly ferocious storms (for the first time on record, there have been category 5 hurricanes, such as Dorian and Harvey, for four years in a row), intensifying forest fires (consider the devastating blazes in Siberia and the Amazon this year, or California and Lapland in 2018) and massive bleaching of coral reefs (which is happening with growing frequency across most of the world). All of this has come to pass, as have Radford’s specific predictions of worsening floods in Bangladesh, desperate droughts in southern Africa, food shortages in the Sahel and the opening up of the northwest passage due to shrinking sea ice (the huge cruise liner, Crystal Serenity, is among the many ships that have sailed through the Bering Strait in recent years – a route that was once deemed impossible by even the most intrepid explorers).
A couple of his predictions were slightly premature (the snows on Kilimanjaro and Mt Kenya have not yet disappeared, though a recent study said they will be gone before future generations get a chance to see them), but overall, Radford’s vision of the world in 2020 was remarkably accurate, which is important because it confirms climate science was reliable even in 2004. It is even more precise today, which is good news in terms of anticipating the risks, but deeply alarming when we consider just how nasty scientists expect the climate to become in our lifetime. Unless emissions are slashed over the next decade, a swarm of wicked problems are heading our way.
How wicked? Well, following Radford’s example, let us consider what the world will look like in 2050 if humanity continues to burn oil, gas, coal and forests at the current rate.
The difference will be visible from space. By the middle of the 21st century, the globe has changed markedly from the blue marble that humanity first saw in wondrous colour in 1972. The white northern ice-cap vanishes completely each summer, while the southern pole will shrink beyond recognition. The lush green rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and Papua New Guinea are smaller and quite possibly enveloped in smoke. From the subtropics to the mid-latitudes, a grimy-white band of deserts has formed a thickening ring around the northern hemisphere.
Coastlines are being reshaped by rising sea levels. Just over 30cm at this stage – well short of the 2 metres that could hit in 2100 – but still enough to swamp unprotected stretches of land from Miami and Guangdong to Lincolnshire and Alexandria. High tides and storm surges periodically blur the boundaries between land and sea, making the roads of megacities resemble the canals of Venice with increasing frequency.
On the ground, rising temperatures are changing the world in ways that can no longer be explained only by physics and chemistry. The increasingly hostile weather is straining social relations and disrupting economics, politics and mental health.
Generation Greta is middle aged. Their teenage fears of the complete extinction of the human race have not yet come to pass, but the risk of a breakdown of civilisation is higher than at any previous time in history – and rising steadily. They live with a level of anxiety their grandparents could have barely imagined.

The climate activist Greta Thunberg leads a school strike outside of the Swedish Parliament in 2018. Photograph: Michael Campanella/The Guardian 

The world in 2050 is more hostile and less fertile, more crowded and less diverse. Compared with 2019, there are more trees, but fewer forests, more concrete, but less stability. The rich have retreated into air-conditioned sanctums behind ever higher walls. The poor – and what is left of other species – is left exposed to the ever harsher elements. Everyone is affected by rising prices, conflict, stress and depression.
This is a doorway into peak climate turbulence. Global heating passed the 1.5C mark a couple of years earlier and is now accelerating towards 3C, or possibly even 4C, by the end of the century. It feels as if the dial on a cooker has been turned from nine o’clock to midnight. Los Angeles, Sydney, Madrid, Lisbon and possibly even Paris endure new highs in excess of 50C. London’s climate resembles Barcelona’s 30 years earlier. Across the world, droughts intensify and extreme heat becomes a fact of life for 1.6bn city dwellers, eight times more than in 2019. For a while, marathons, World Cups and Olympics were moved to the winter to avoid the furnace-like heat in many cities. Now they are not held at all. It is impossible to justify the emissions and the world is no longer in the mood for games.
Extreme weather is the overriding concern of all but a tiny elite. It wreaks havoc everywhere, but the greatest misery is felt in poorer countries. Dhaka, Dar es Salaam and other coastal cities are hit almost every year by storm surges and other extreme sea-level incidents that used to occur only once a century. Following the lead set by Jakarta, several capitals have relocated to less-exposed regions. But floods, heatwaves, droughts and fires are increasingly catastrophic. Healthcare systems are struggling to cope. The economic costs cripple poorly prepared financial institutions. Insurance companies refuse to provide cover for natural disasters. Insecurity and desperation sweep through populations. Governments struggle to cope.
“By 2050, if we fail to act, many of the most damaging, extreme weather events we have seen in recent years will become commonplace,” warns Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. “In a world where we see continual weather disasters day after day (which is what we’ll have in the absence of concerted action), our societal infrastructure may well fail … We won’t see the extinction of our species, but we could well see societal collapse.”

Huge waves at Porthcawl, Wales: there will be more extreme storms and longer droughts. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA 

Adding to the anxiety is the erratic temperature of the planet. Instead of rising smoothly it jolts upwards, because tipping points – once the stuff of scientific nightmares – are reached one after another: methane release from permafrost; a die-off of the tiny marine organisms that sequestered billions of tonnes of carbon; the dessication of tropical forests. People have come to realise how interconnected the world’s natural life-support systems are. As one falls, another is triggered – like dominos or the old board game, Mouse Trap. In some cases, they amplify one another. More heat means more forest fires, which dries out more trees, which burn more easily, which releases more carbon, which pushes global temperatures higher, which melts more ice, which exposes more of the Earth to sunlight, which warms the poles, which lowers the temperature gradient with the equator, which slows ocean currents and weather systems, which results in more extreme storms and longer droughts. It is also now clear that positive climate feedbacks are not limited to physics, but stretch to economics, politics and psychology. The Amazon is turning into a savannah because the loss of forest is weakening rainfall, which makes harvests lower, which gives farmers an economic motivation to clear more land to make up for lost production, which means more fires and less rain.
On our current course, carbon concentrations in the atmosphere will pass 550 parts per million by midcentury, up from around 400ppm today. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, explains how this stacks the odds in favour of disaster.
“By 2050, we’d be seeing events that are far more frequent and/or far stronger than we humans have ever experienced before, are occurring both simultaneously and in sequence.”
Her greatest concern is that food production and water supply systems could buckle under the strain, with dire humanitarian consequences in areas that are already vulnerable.

Generation Greta live with a level of anxiety their grandparents could barely have imagined

Hunger will rise, perhaps calamitously. The United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change expects food production to decline by 2% to 6% in each of the coming decades because of land-degradation, droughts, floods and sea-level rise. The timing could not be worse. By 2050, the global population is projected to rise to 9.7 billion, which is more than two billion more people to feed than today.
When crops fail and starvation threatens, people are forced to fight or flee. Between 50 and 700 million people will be driven from their homes by midcentury as a result of soil degradation alone, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimated last year. Fires, floods and droughts will prompt many others to migrate within and across borders. So will the decline of mountain ice, which is a source of meltwater for a quarter of the world’s population. The poorest will be worst affected, though they have the least responsibility for the climate crisis. For the US author and environmentalist, Bill McKibben, this injustice will make the greatest impact in 2050.
“Forcing people to move from their homes by the hundreds of millions may do the most to disrupt the world. And, of course, it’s a deep tragedy, because these are precisely the people who have done the least to cause the problem,” he says.
In 2050, climate apartheid goes hand-in-hand with increasingly authoritarian politics. Three decades earlier, worried electorates voted in a generation of populist “strongmen” in the hope they could turn back the clock to a more stable world. Instead, their nationalism made a global solution even harder to achieve. They preferred to focus on the immigration consequences of global heating rather than the carbon-capital causes. When voters realised their mistake, it was too late. The thugocracy refused to give up power. They no longer deny the climate crisis; they use it to justify ever-more repressive measures and ever-wilder efforts to find a technological fix. In the past 20 years, nations have tried volcano mimicking, cloud brightening, albedo modification and carbon dioxide removal. Most were expensive and ineffective. Some made weather circulation even less reliable. Powerful countries now threaten rivals not just with nuclear weapons, but with geo-engineering threats to block sunlight or disrupt rainfall patterns.
This is not an inevitable future. Unlike Radford’s prediction for 2020, this vision of 2050 factors in human behaviour, which is more volatile and less predictable than the laws of thermodynamics. Many of the horrors above are already baked into the climate, but our response to them – and each other – is not predetermined. When it comes to the science, the dangers can be substantially reduced if humanity shifts decisively away from business-as-usual behaviour over the next decade. When it comes to the psychology and politics, we can make our situation better immediately if we focus on hope in shared solutions, rather than fears of what we will lose as individuals.
That means putting faith in institutions, warning one another about risks, and treasuring shared eccentricities and traditions – a bit like the shipping forecast.
A storm is certainly brewing. The science is clear on that. The question now is how we face it.

Links

• So long, 2010s: the decade in review
• Streets on fire: how a decade of protest shaped the world
• Climate crisis topping UK election agenda is 'unprecedented' change
• Finally, the public wants action on the climate crisis. Now politics must catch up
• Science can help us adapt to climate change, but first we have to admit it is happening
• The drowned world
• Climate crisis: 6 million people join latest wave of global protests
• We are seeing the very worst of our scientific predictions come to pass in these bushfires
• Australia, your country is burning – dangerous climate change is here with you now
• Australia is the only country using carryover climate credits, officials admit

(AU) Dirty Power: An Australian Political Investigation

Greenpeace

The coal industry has infiltrated Australia's federal government through a secretive network of ties, working to influence Australia’s political decisions at the highest level: right up to the office of the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison


 Dirty Power: Big Coal's network of influence over the coalition government

We’ve uncovered the web of connections between the world’s biggest coal giants, industry groups, lobbyists and powerful media organisations that serves to halt action on climate change and stall the transition to clean energy.

Why is this so horrifying?
Coal is the number one cause of climate damage. It causes more frequent and intense natural disasters like bushfires while also polluting our water and air.
By pandering to the interests of the coal industry, the Coalition Government is putting dirty profits ahead of the health and wellbeing of Australians who want our nation to run on clean energy.
From furthering the fossil-fuelled agenda of current Prime Minister Scott Morrison, to helping to bring about the swift downfall of former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: the coal industry has infiltrated the Australian Government at the highest level.
This report is based on interviews with dozens of political operatives, current and former staffers, executives of external lobby firms, and resources sector analysts; previously hidden details about the identity and background of federal ministers’ parliamentary staff; and publicly available information about listed companies and their operatives.
We worked with experienced investigative journalist, Michael West, to expose the web of ties between the coal industry and federal government via industry groups, lobbyists and media.

See the connections between some of australia's

most powerful politicians and the coal industry

Links

• Watch the documentary
• View the full network map
• Download the report
• What can we do now?

(AU) A Vision Of Hell

(AU) Australia’s Angry Summer: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

Scientific American - Nerilie Abram

The catastrophic fires raging across the southern half of the continent are largely the result of rising temperatures

Credit: David Gray Getty Images

Nerilie Abram Nerilie Abram is an investigator at the ARC Center of Excellence for Climate Extremes and an associate professor at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University.

Summer in Australia use to be something we yearned for: long, lazy days spent by the beach or pool, backyard barbecues, and games of cricket with family and friends.
But recent summers have become a time of fear: Schools and workplaces are closed because of catastrophic fire danger, while we shelter in air-conditioned spaces to avoid dangerous heat waves and hazardous levels of smoke in the air. Campgrounds have been closed for the summer, and entire towns have been urged to evacuate ahead of “Code Red” fire weather. Welcome to our new climate.
Of course, unusually hot summers have happened in the past; so have bad bushfire seasons. But the link between the current extremes and anthropogenic climate change is scientifically undisputable.
The fires raging across the southern half of the Australian continent this year have so far burned through more than 5 million hectares. To put that in context, the catastrophic 2018 fire season in California saw nearly 740,000 hectares burned. The Australian fire season began this year in late August (before the end of our winter). Fires have so far claimed nine lives, including two firefighters, and destroyed around 1,000 homes. It is too early to tell what the toll on our wildlife has been, but early estimates suggest that around 500 million animals have died so far, including 30 percent of the koala population in their main habitat. And this is all before we have even reached January and February, when the fire season typically peaks in Australia.
Australia is the most fire prone of all of Earth’s continents. But what has made its latest fire season so extreme? Wildfires need four ingredients: available fuel, dryness of that fuel, weather conditions that aid the rapid spread of fire and an ignition. Climate change is making Australian wildfires larger and more frequent because of its effects on dryness and fire weather.
Australia’s climate has warmed by more than one degree Celsius over the past century, and this change has caused an increase in the frequency and intensity of heat waves. I am 42, and I have lived through only six years with average temperatures below the 1961–1990 climatological average. My children have experienced none, and in all likelihood, they never will.
Increasing temperatures cause increased evaporation that dries the soil and fuel load. More than a decade ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that ongoing anthropogenic climate change was virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency of fires in Australia. This assessment of the science evidence has been been repeated in countless reports, including the IPCC’s Climate Change and Land report, released in August 2019.
The effects of rising temperature on drying out the environment can be countered by rainfall or by the growth of vegetation that increases humidity locally. But in the southern half of Australia, where rain falls mostly in the winter, there has been a substantial decline in precipitation. In the southwest of the country, rainfall has declined by around 20 percent since the 1970s, and in the southeast, around 11 percent of rainfall has been lost since the 1990s.
One of the factors driving this long-term loss of winter rainfall is the positive trend in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). This change is causing the westerly winds that circle the Southern Ocean to shift southward toward Antarctica, causing rain-bearing winter cold fronts to pass south of the Australian continent. The role of anthropogenic climate change in driving this trend in the SAM is also clear in the science.



Climate variability acts on top of these long-term trends that are pushing the Australian climate toward a more fire-prone state. And that variability is an important part of the story of why the 2019–2020 summer has been so extreme.
Southeastern Australia has been in drought since 2017. Rainfall here is normally highly variable from year to year, but there have now been three winters in a row where the winter rains failed. This is a situation that has never been seen before in the historical record of Australia’s rainfall, even during infamous decade-long droughts such as the Millennium Drought. The severity of the current drought has caused large swathes of vegetation to die. It has even dried out wet rain forests, allowing fierce fires to take hold in places that would not normally burn.
The current summer has presented the perfect storm for wildfire. Long-term climate warming, combined with years of drought, colliding with a set of climate patterns that deliver severe fire weather.
In the tropical Indian Ocean, one of the most severe positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) events on record played out this year. The unusually cold sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Indian Ocean cut off one of Australia’s critical moisture sources, adding to the ongoing drought in southern parts of the country. Australia’s worst fire seasons typically follow positive IOD events, much more so than the influence of El Niño events in the Pacific. Again, climate change is part of the story, because anthropogenic warming is causing positive IOD events to become stronger and more frequent.



At the same time, this year, a rare sudden stratospheric warming event developed over the Antarctic in late winter. Weakening of the polar vortex over Antarctica in spring increases the forest fire danger index across eastern Australia. This is because a northward shift in the Southern Hemisphere westerlies (i.e., a negative SAM) at this time of year causes very hot and dry westerly winds to be drawn across the continent.
The angry summer playing out in Australia right now was predictable. The scientific evidence is well known for how anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are causing long-term climate change and altering climate variability in ways that increase our fire risk. The role of climate change in the unprecedented fires gripping Australia is also well understood by our emergency services. Sadly, though, this summer has occurred against a backdrop in which the Australian government has argued, on the world stage, to scale back our greenhouse-gas-emissions-reduction targets. Our leaders are literally fiddling while the country burns.
In many parts of Australia, there will be no traditional fireworks shows to welcome in the new year. The risk is simply too great, and celebration is not warranted while our communities continue to be under threat from this angry summer.

Links

• Yes, Australia has always had bushfires: but 2019 is like nothing we've seen before
• How bad is this drought and is it caused by climate change?
• Australia's climate stance sparks anger at U.N. summit
• Scott Morrison should listen when top fire chiefs call him out on climate change
• A biogeographic model of fire regimes in Australia: current and future implications
• State of the Climate 2018
• Signatures of the Antarctic ozone hole in Southern Hemisphere surface climate change

(AU) Australia, Your Country Is Burning – Dangerous Climate Change Is Here With You Now

The Guardian - Michael Mann

I am a climate scientist on holiday in the Blue Mountains, watching climate change in action

‘In Australia, beds are burning. So are entire towns, irreplaceable forests and endangered and precious animal species such as the koala.’ Photograph: State Government Of Victoria Handout/EPA

Michael E Mann Michael E Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book, with Tom Toles, is The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (Columbia University Press, 2016).

After years studying the climate, my work has brought me to Sydney where I’m studying the linkages between climate change and extreme weather events.

Prior to beginning my sabbatical stay in Sydney, I took the opportunity this holiday season to vacation in Australia with my family. We went to see the Great Barrier Reef – one of the great wonders of this planet – while we still can. Subject to the twin assaults of warming-caused bleaching and ocean acidification, it will be gone in a matter of decades in the absence of a dramatic reduction in global carbon emissions.
We also travelled to the Blue Mountains, another of Australia’s natural wonders, known for its lush temperate rainforests, majestic cliffs and rock formations and panoramic vistas that challenge any the world has to offer. It too is now threatened by climate change.

I witnessed this firsthand.
I did not see vast expanses of rainforest framed by distant blue-tinged mountain ranges. Instead I looked out into smoke-filled valleys, with only the faintest ghosts of distant ridges and peaks in the background. The iconic blue tint (which derives from a haze formed from “terpenes” emitted by the Eucalyptus trees that are so plentiful here) was replaced by a brown haze. The blue sky, too, had been replaced by that brown haze.
The locals, whom I found to be friendly and outgoing, would volunteer that they have never seen anything like this before. Some even uttered the words “climate change” without any prompting.
The songs of Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil I first enjoyed decades ago have taken on a whole new meaning for me now. They seem disturbingly prescient in light of what we are witnessing unfold in Australia.
The brown skies I observed in the Blue Mountains this week are a product of human-caused climate change. Take record heat, combine it with unprecedented drought in already dry regions and you get unprecedented bushfires like the ones engulfing the Blue Mountains and spreading across the continent. It’s not complicated.

The smoke is so thick in Katoomba tourists are opting for photos with billboards, rather than the Three Sisters themselves. @abcsydney pic.twitter.com/MOWvH8UBgs

— Tom Lowrey (@tomlowrey) December 30, 2019

The warming of our planet – and the changes in climate associated with it – are due to the fossil fuels we’re burning: oil, whether at midnight or any other hour of the day, natural gas, and the biggest culprit of all, coal. That’s not complicated either.
When we mine for coal, like the controversial planned Adani coalmine, which would more than double Australia’s coal-based carbon emissions, we are literally mining away at our blue skies. The Adani coalmine could rightly be renamed the Blue Sky mine.
In Australia, beds are burning. So are entire towns, irreplaceable forests and endangered and precious animal species such as the koala (arguably the world’s only living plush toy) are perishing in massive numbers due to the unprecedented bushfires.
The continent of Australia is figuratively – and in some sense literally – on fire.
Yet the prime minister, Scott Morrison, appears remarkably indifferent to the climate emergency Australia is suffering through, having chosen to vacation in Hawaii as Australians are left to contend with unprecedented heat and bushfires.
Morrison has shown himself to be beholden to coal interests and his administration is considered to have conspired with a small number of petrostates to sabotage the recent UN climate conference in Madrid (“COP25”), seen as a last ditch effort to keep planetary warming below a level (1.5C) considered by many to constitute “dangerous” planetary warming.
But Australians need only wake up in the morning, turn on the television, read the newspaper or look out the window to see what is increasingly obvious to many – for Australia, dangerous climate change is already here. It’s simply a matter of how much worse we’re willing to allow it to get.
Australia is experiencing a climate emergency. It is literally burning. It needs leadership that is able to recognise that and act. And it needs voters to hold politicians accountable at the ballot box.
Australians must vote out fossil-fuelled politicians who have chosen to be part of the problem and vote in climate champions who are willing to solve it.

Illustration: Henny Beaumont

Links

• Australia records its hottest day ever – one day after previous record
• 'It's dire': farmers battle their worst drought in 100 years – photo essay
• Australia’s Angry Summer: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like
• Australia's environment minister says up to 30% of koalas killed in NSW mid-north coast fires
• It’s not rocket science: Climate change was behind this summer’s extreme weather
• Why Adani's planned Carmichael coalmine matters to Australia – and the world
• Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this?

(AU) Fact Checking Angus Taylor: Does Australia Have A Climate Change Record To Be Proud Of?

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

On a day of extraordinary bushfires the energy minister argued that the country has ‘strong targets, clear plans and an enviable track record’ on reducing emissions. Is he right?

Angus Taylor speaks at the COP25 climate summit in Madrid. The energy minister says Australia has an enviable record on climate change – the Guardian fact checks his claims. Photograph: Reuters

Australians should be proud of the country’s achievements on climate change, energy minister Angus Taylor has argued in a newspaper column that claims “quiet Australians” don’t accept the “shrill cries” of the government’s climate critics.
The column, published in The Australian, makes a series of claims about Australia’s emissions and how they compare to other countries, as well as highlighting exports such as LNG that are “dramatically reducing emissions” in other countries.
So is Australia really a paragon of climate virtue – cutting emissions at home while helping the world to cut emissions?
As is always the case when it comes to climate and energy policy, there is much to check and understand in Taylor’s article.
Prof Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate and Energy Policy at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, told Guardian Australia: “I would characterise [Taylor’s article] as a selective use of statistics that make Australia’s emissions trajectory look good, when in reality it does not look good at all.”

Tiny footprint?
Taylor writes that Australia is “responsible for only 1.3 per cent of global emissions, so we can’t single-handedly have a meaningful impact without the co-operation of the largest emitters such as China and the US.”
In the context of global emissions, there is much that Australia can, and does, do that has a meaningful impact.
The 1.3% figure does not account for Australia’s contribution to global emissions from the fossil fuels we dig up and export.
If this exported coal and gas was accounted for, one analysis suggests Australia would be responsible for almost 5% of the global carbon footprint from fossil fuel burning.
When countries report their emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, they only report emissions occurring inside their borders, so it could be argued that using this larger number is unfair.
But the problem is that elsewhere in Taylor’s article, he says Australia’s exporting of LNG is helping countries cut emissions.
Jotzo says: “If we are going to talk about impacts on global emissions of Australia’s energy exports, then we need to consider all fuels, including coal. Any exporting of coal will result in higher global emissions because it increases the availability and lowers the price of coal, and encourages the use of coal.”

It is not clear that the availability of Australian LNG decreases emissions internationally.
Frank Jotzo

While Taylor admits that LNG processing in Australia has pushed domestic emissions higher, he claims that “our LNG exports are dramatically reducing emissions in customer countries such as Japan, South Korea and China — the equivalent of up to 30 per cent of our emissions each year”.
But Jotzo says this claim depends heavily on what the LNG displaces.
He says the “lion’s share” of the exports will actually replace gas from other sources, rather than displacing coal generation. There is also a risk, he says, that increasing LNG exports also encourages countries to build more gas infrastructure, making it harder to move away from the fossil fuel.
He adds: “It is not clear that the availability of Australian LNG decreases emissions internationally.”

Easy target
“Australia meets and beats its emission-reductions targets, every time,” writes Taylor. “We beat our first Kyoto targets by 128 million tonnes. We ­expect to beat our 2020 targets by 411 million tonnes.”

The key reason why Australia has easily beaten its targets, is that they were very low to begin with.

The key reason why Australia has easily beaten its targets, is that they were very low to begin with.
Australia’s first Kyoto target allowed it to increase emissions by 8% between 1990 and 2010. The second target period required a 5% cut below 2000 levels by 2020.
Much of Australia’s cuts to emissions in recent decades, says Jotzo, has been achieved through drops in land clearing, rather than reductions in other parts of the economy the government could have influence over.
Australia wants to use some 411 million tonnes of CO2 “credits” amassed over the Kyoto periods against future targets under the separate Paris agreement, even though it admits it is probably the only country looking to use these “carryover credits”.
Using carryover credits would cut the amount of emissions reductions Australia would need to find to meet its Paris target by about a half.
At the latest UN climate talks in Madrid, Australia came under harsh criticism from more than 100 countries for its desire to use the credits, which some analysts say is a proposal with no legal basis.
Australia was accused of “cheating” at the talks, but refused to back down on the carryover issue, leaving it unresolved.

Better than Canada and New Zealand
In his article, Taylor says “when you compare Australia’s emission-reduction track record with nations such as Canada and New Zealand”, Australia comes out on top.
While Australia’s emissions have dropped 12.9% since 2005, writes Taylor, New Zealand’s have risen by 4% and Canada’s have dropped only 2%.
Jotzo says the 12.9% figure Taylor is using includes changes to land use, such as land clearing, which are not major issues for other developed countries.
As an example, Australia’s reporting to the UN shows that in 2005, emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry (known as LULUCF) were +88mt. In 2017, LULUCF emissions were -19mt. That’s a net drop of 107mt.
Using the same periods for New Zealand, the difference is a net increase of 4.8mt.
A fairer global comparison, says Jotzo, is to use figures that remove these LULUCF emissions.
This, he says, turns Australia’s 12.9% drop between 2005 and 2018 into a 6% rise.

Clean hydrogen
In his article, Taylor repeats a point that he made during his official speech to the Madrid climate talks that technological innovation would be a key to fighting climate change.
In the article, Taylor points to the new national hydrogen strategy as an example of innovations with “enormous potential” for cutting future emissions.
Jotzo says there is potential for an Australian hydrogen export industry to have a positive impact on global emissions.
However, he says this comes with large caveats. Hydrogen can be produced using renewable energy, but also by using fossil fuels.
If Australia was to use coal or gas, it would need to be able to capture most of the waste CO2 to claim the fuel as green.
But analysis by Jotzo and colleagues shows that while rates of up to 95% carbon capture might be “technically possible” they have not yet been achieved.
Only two plants – in Canada and the UK – currently capture CO2 when producing hydrogen from fossil fuels. The best capture rate is 80%.
If the carbon capture rates were at 60%, then Jotzo says the net greenhouse gas footprint of hydrogen would be the same as just burning gas.

Proud and quiet Aussies?
According to Taylor, “Australia has strong targets, clear plans, an enviable track record” on climate change, and Australians should be proud of it.
But when overseas groups look at Australia’s record compared to the rest of the world, the assessments come out differently.

The most recent analysis ranked Australia as the sixth worst country on climate change overall.

An analysis by Climate Action Tracker says Australia’s Paris targets are “insufficient” and inconsistent with the Paris goal of keeping global warming well below 2C.
Australia has been placed consistently towards the bottom in the annual Climate Change Policy Index analysis of the world’s top 57 emitting nations.
The most recent analysis ranked Australia as the sixth worst country on climate change overall.
Jotzo, who attended the Madrid climate talks as an observer, said: “Australia was highly regarded at the talks for its technical competence, and it always has. But Australia is not highly regarded at all for its policies or for its efforts to water down effective ambition of the Paris agreement.”
He said speaking with observers from other countries, Australia’s position was seen “with quite some bewilderment” especially with the backdrop of the current devastating fire season.
Jotzo adds: “They are flabbergasted that Australia is digging in to its stance of getting an easier deal when it would so obviously be in its national interest to encourage strong global action.”

Links

• Australia fires live: two dead in Cobargo as NSW and Victoria face bushfires threat – latest updates
• Sydney lord mayor says climate change is the issue, not New Year's Eve fireworks
• These bushfires are a historic event. Here is what we should learn from them
• Australia bushfires: towns devastated and lives lost as blazes turn the sky red
• Mallacoota fire: images of 'mayhem' and 'armageddon' as bushfires rage
• Australia fires live: two dead in Cobargo as NSW and Victoria face bushfires threat – latest updates
• Darkness at noon: Australia's bushfire day of terror
• 'No better place to raise kids': Scott Morrison's new year message to a burning Australia
• 'We've lost our beautiful town': Mogo residents flee as bushfire rages up NSW south coast
• How big are the fires burning in eastern Australia? Interactive map
• Climate patterns behind Australia's bushfires, heat and drought set to improve
• Firefighters battle to save NSW and Victorian coastal towns – in pictures

In 2020, Here's How You Can Help Address The Climate Crisis

Gizmodo - Brian Kahn

Photo: Getty

This is the time of year when we talk about nice things. Hopeful things.
But honestly, I can’t get excited about hope when it comes to the climate crisis. It’s a monstrous mess. Multinational corporations worth billions of dollars have caused it while lying about their role in doing so. And people in the halls of power have aided and abetted them. The world’s emissions have continued to rise to the point that we now need to cut them a staggering 78 per cent over the next decade to limit the damage to bad as opposed to catastrophic.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” is emblazoned on the gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, but it may as well have been written about climate change.
I get that hope is a thing we’re all looking for amidst the worsening climate carnage, but I firmly believe hope isn’t the most useful thing to steer us away from a worst-case scenario. And I’m not alone. In a—and I can’t believe I’m about to write these words—viral Twitter thread, climate essayist, activist, and Hot Take podcast host Mary Heglar laid out the case against hope better than I could, noting it’s “stale AF and ending shit on a high note has fuelled a lot of inertia.”
Her solution was to stop asking what gives climate activists hope and start asking “how can I help?” Which at the end of the day is the exact question we should be asking. The climate crisis will be only be solved through sustained, collective action over the coming decade. We’ve seen what the start of a public pressure campaign can look like globally with the climate strike movement, but it’s a start, not the end. And it’s hardly the only way into the fight for a future we can be proud of.
Earther reached out to a handful of activists to ask “how can I help?” Their answers are below, lightly edited for brevity.
Fuck hope. Long live action.

***

Bill McKibben, founder 350.org and author
“I think that some of the tasks for the year are, for obvious reasons, political, and that others involve taking on the financial industry that bankrolls gas, oil and coal. I seem to be concentrating on the latter tasks for the moment.”

***

Margaret Klein Solomon, founder of the Climate Mobilisation
“Break the silence: Start talking about the climate emergency and the need for WWII scale climate mobilisation — in a realistic, blunt, emergency-focused way, in your family, social circles, and beyond.
“Join the Climate Emergency Movement. There are a lot of organisations that have burst forth this year that are championing a climate emergency message and solution— Sunrise, Extinction Rebellion, Youth Climate Strikes, The Climate Mobilisation, and more. Join us, support us, help us build power!”

***

Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, policy coordinator at the Climate Justice Alliance
“One of the literary treasures of our time, Rebecca Solnit, offered us in her book, Hope in the Dark, ‘Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.’ I would never presume to speak for Sister Solnit, but what I get from this quote is that Hope without action is like expecting a rock to float on water because you meditate.
“Sister Heglar was absolutely correct to take umbrage with questions like, ‘what gives you hope?’ If that question is not followed by, ‘how does your hope catalyze your drive to act,’ it’s not at all helpful and perambulates what is really called for at this moment, it fosters torpidity through an illusion of action. The people of Haiti have hope, the people of Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador have hope, the people in Hong Kong and France have hope, but they seem to realise that hope alone does not bring about transformational and structural change. Being hopeful can be risky, being hopeful without action is even riskier, and the biggest risk is the one not taken.”

***

Sydney Azari, steering committee member for the National DSA Ecosocialist Working Group
“I think people are going to want to hear there is a quick, simple thing they can do: recycle, go to a march, talk about the science, etc. Those are good things, but it would be dishonest of me to say that’s enough. In order to ‘help’ we must address the actual problem, which is a growth-dependent, fossil-fuelled economic system that has stratified power in favour of an elite few who put profit above people and the planet. The way ordinary people can and have overcome the injustice of our economic system and the 1% is through the Labour Movement and our power as workers to strike and halt the economy in its tracks. So, my unconventional answer is that you can help by organising your workplace to address the Climate Emergency through ‘green’ collective bargaining agreements, advocating for a Green New Deal, endorsing ‘climate’ candidates, and building community alliances through strikes for the planetary good.
“The fight for our future must be an all-hands-on-deck effort, and another way you can help is by utilising your social networks to bring more people into the climate movement. Organise your sports team, church, university, professional association, etc. to leverage its power to fight for climate action and a Green New Deal.”

***

Elizabeth Sawin, co-director of Climate Interactive
“When people ask me about the ‘best’ action they might take to address climate change, I talk about the things we all need to do together and the things we can each uniquely do. Together, there’s voting and otherwise supporting strong climate candidates at all levels and supporting, with your dollars or your two feet or both, the grassroots organising movements that push politicians to do better. This opens up systems change opportunities, and ensures you have compatriots when the going gets tough.
“But don’t forget to also look for the things that you uniquely can do, the conversation only you can have with your uncle because he trusts you, the art that only you can make that might inspire someone else to act, the community conversation you can convene so beautifully because you know so many different types of folks. Also, you uniquely can leverage your expertise in healthcare, or museums, or teaching, or farming towards climate protection. Because climate touches everything, you don’t need to drop everything to work on climate, you just need to figure out what it means to do what you do in way that also reduces emissions or builds resiliency.”

Links

• Climate Action 100+
• Flood forecasting science informing relief efforts
• Climate emergency declarations in 1,261 jurisdictions and local governments cover 798 million citizens
• How teen Greta Thunberg shifted world's gaze to climate change
• Climate scientists say Greta Thunberg's efforts are building real momentum
• Fridays for Future school strikers march to demand action on climate
• Millions take to the streets as climate strike protests hit cities across Asia, Europe
• 'Climate emergency' is Oxford Dictionaries' 2019 word of the year