(AU) Australia Emits 1.2 Per Cent Of The World's Greenhouse Gases. So Who Must Act To Cut Emissions?

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

What is our part in solving a problem that is, by its nature, global?

Energy and Emissions Reductions Minister Angus Taylor has defended Australia's policies.

Australia's policies to address climate change have been among the most contentious political issues of the past quarter-century.
The standard refrain from the Morrison government is that Australia is performing well on a global stage when it comes to reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases that are cooking the planet.
And, the refrain continues, Australia's emissions are just a fraction of the world's total and if we didn't export all that coal and gas, someone else would. In a global context, so this story goes, the main culprits are nations such as China, the United States and the fastest-growing emitter, India.
It's true Australia is responsible for about 1.2 per cent of global emissions. It's also true that we contribute a quarter of exports that make up the world's coal trade and just became the biggest gas exporter.
So what effect does the action we take on climate change within Australia have on cutting emissions? What is our part in solving a problem that is, by its nature, global?

Source: Department of the Environment and Energy

First, is Australia on track with its emission cuts?
According to the Australian government's latest data,annual emissions were little changed – down just 0.1 per cent – in the year to June 30, 2019.
As it happens, the choice of the base year comparison can alone alter the impression about how well Australia is doing. Compared with 2000, for instance, annual emissions in the latest year were down 0.8 per cent, suggesting the country has not done very much over the past two decades. But compared with a base year of 2005 – a neat shift the Abbott government made when it approved the Paris climate goal – the reduction suddenly swells to a more impressive 12.9 per cent.
Aside from recent reductions in emissions from the electricity sector as renewable energy's share has increased, the only sector that has contributed a drop has been land use. Australia has consistently booked emissions reductions from reduced land clearing even during the years that governments in Queensland – the biggest deforesting state – and NSW have loosened restrictions on farmers.
Excluding the grandly named Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) change, Australia's emissions have been rising since 2014, according to Climate Action Tracker. That's also the year the Abbott government scrapped a price on carbon.
From the government's own projections out to 2030, total emissions don't look like falling much at all, with even LULUCF reductions not helping much.
Incidentally, emissions from bushfires don't add to Australia's ledger because – perhaps optimistically – the vegetation is expected to all grow back. For now, though, the UK Met Office is predicting the fires will make a sizeable contribution to what is expected to be a jump in atmospheric levels of CO2 in 2020.


So where do Australian emissions cuts rank in the world?
While there are different ways to count emissions, Australia's share amounts to about 1.2 per cent of global pollution.
According to The Australia Institute – using data from Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) – that tally ranks Australia as 14th-largest emitter.
That doesn't sound like a lot but, as the Australia Institute's Tom Swann notes, if all the countries polluting less than Australia were taken together, they would account for 30 per cent of global emissions, or more than China's 27 per cent share. China, the US, the EU and India emit about 60 per cent of the world's total – and they all need to take action to cut back – but the emissions of the rest also matter.
"There is no solution to climate change without all countries taking strong action," Swann adds.
When it comes to what's a fair level of action for nations to be taking, things get murky quickly.
For instance, the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Accord largely avoid tallying historical emissions, even though rich countries got wealthy, in part, because their economies were powered by relatively cheap fossil fuels.
Instead, the wealthier nations were supposed to lead the way in reducing the pollution, with poorer nations expected to do less. Net-zero emissions is also the goal in the second half of this century if the world is to keep warming to less than 2 degrees. As it happens, all of Australia's states and the ACT have at least nominal carbon neutrality targets by 2050.


But, of course, it is not just total emissions that count. Australia makes up just 0.3 per cent of the world's population, so - on a per person basis - we pump out more greenhouse gases than most nations, according to the PIK.
By another measure, Australia has also not been doing its fair share. The Abbott government choice of 2005 as the base for Australia's Paris climate pledge gave it a relatively high-emissions year. The proposal to cut pollution 26-28 per cent by 2030 would have been more like 17-19 per cent if 2000 emissions were the starting point.
However, even since 2005, Australia has been a relative laggard among OECD nations.



What part do our coal exports play?
Global accounting rules focus on what is emitted within a particular country. China, the biggest emitter and the world's manufacturing hub, has often pointed out a lot of its emissions are "embedded" in the steel, ships and other goods it exports.
Australia has an export role of its own that the government would rather not highlight.
The country is the world's largest exporter of coking coal used to make steel, the second-largest exporter of thermal coal burnt in power stations and, since last year, the biggest gas exporter. These fuels are burned in other countries and the greenhouse gases from them counted against others' ledgers – not that the atmosphere cares.
Australia's fossil fuel exports accounted for 3.6 per cent of global emissions in 2017, with the country's coal exports alone accounting for more than a quarter of total coal trade, according to a report last year for the Australian Conservation Foundation by Climate Analytics. By exports, only Russia and Saudia Arabia contributed more.
A common line from both the Coalition and Laboris that Australia must support its $70-billion-a-year coal export industry as importers elsewhere would merely buy the coal or gas from other suppliers if we stopped. In fact, emissions would rise because Australian coal is "cleaner" than coal from other sources, so the argument goes.
"If you stopped exporting coal [from Australia] immediately then that would not reduce global emissions," Anthony Albanese, Labor's leader, told reporters in January. "There is enough displacement from other coal-exporting countries to take up that position, and that coal will produce higher emissions rather than less."
That latter point is debatable. Major customers for Australia, such as Japan and South Korea, are cutting back on new coal plants. As such, future coal demand may be on the skids, so substitution won't be the issue.
And opponents of Adani's proposal to open up the giant Galilee coal province in Queensland argue that region's coal will likely have a higher "dirty" ash and lower energy content than major alternative sources. Burning that coal won't push down emissions, they say.
How business behaves, rather than governments, will be key. If recent indications are any guide, such as $10-trillion asset manager BlackRock's move to ditch thermal coal, fossil-fuel exporting nations had better start diversifying their economies.
US-based BlackRock made news because of its monster clout in markets but Tim Buckley, a director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, says the firm was actually a laggard. All but one of the main Japanese trading houses, for instance, has signalled they are getting out of coal, and major US banks will likely come under greater pressure to follow BlackRock.
"If Chase, Citi and Wells Fargo [match BlackRock], that's virtually game over" for thermal coal, he says.
True, India's fast-rising demand for energy will give coal exporters some hope but even there it will depend on state subsidies to keep the coal-fired power plants expanding. Wind and solar are already cheaper than new coal plants in India, Buckley says.
The Reserve Bank of Australia takes a cautious approach.
"In the long run, there is considerable uncertainty around the outlook for coal consumption. Demand will depend on many factors that are difficult to forecast, including the pace of economic growth in developing economies, changes in the cost and capabilities of different technologies (particularly for renewable energy and steel production) and changes to government policies," the RBA said in a September 2019 outlook report on Australian coal.

How do our efforts count on the world stage?
Australia's climate policies are not just assessed by the home audience of voters but the country's international trading partners too.
Australia was one of only three nations – along with Norway and Iceland – to win concessions allowing it to increase emissions under the Kyoto Protocol period that ran from 2008 to 2020. It is this relatively weak goal that the Morrison government (and its predecessors) hails as "meeting and beating".
By the agreed formulas of carbon budgets, Australia claims to have "over-achieved" its Kyoto goal, allowing it to claim a 411-million tonne "credit" it hopes to "carry over" into the Paris period, from 2021 to 2030.
As Stephen Howes, an Australian National University professor who worked on the Garnaut report into Australia's emissions, notes in a recent report, taking 2020's expected emissions total, the record is not one of "overachievement" at all.
Angus Taylor, the Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister, defends Australia's stance, saying all targets under the Kyoto Protocol are assessed using so-called emissions budgets. It's from these budgets that Australia is planning to count Kyoto "carryover" credits against its Paris goals.
Such credits effectively cut Australia's emissions effort for the 2021-30 Paris period by about half – an accounting shortcut that has not gone unnoticed among Australia's counterparts.
In the Madrid climate summit in late 2019, Australia's Kyoto credit scheme drew special attention, including an effort to ban the use of such credits.
The fact that much of eastern Australia was starting to burn even as the meeting took place only served to reinforce interest in how one of the most exposed nations to climate change would be tackling the issue.
Germany, Britain, Sweden and New Zealand have all ruled out using such credits as against the spirit of the Paris accord, and the issue is not going to go away.
With pressure likely to mount on all nations to lift their Paris goals by the next climate summit – scheduled for late this year in Glasgow – the Morrison government has begun to signal that its international stance might also be starting to "evolve".
"Australia will use its over-achievement from previous targets only to the extent necessary to reach the 2030 emissions reduction target," Mr Taylor said in mid-January.

Links

• Climate Action Tracker - Australia
• Australia’s emissions projections 2019 (pdf)
• Australia's bushfires to push global emissions to new high: Met Office
• Evaluating the significance of Australia’s global fossil fuel carbon footprint (pdf)
• Adani coal would not cut emissions – IEA expert
• The big money leaves coal for dust
• The Changing Global Market for Australian Coal
• What is 'real' action on climate change?
• Thousands of kilometres of Australia's beaches at risk from rising seas
• Summers are starting earlier, finishing later and winter is in retreat

(AU) Ancient Australian Trees Face Uncertain Future Under Climate Change, Study Finds

Phys.org -  Portland State University

Dead Billy King pines in Tasmania's ancient temperate rainforest. Credit: Photo by Cameron Naficy

Tasmania's ancient rainforest faces a grim future as a warming climate and the way people used the land have brought significant changes to the island state off mainland Australia's southeastern coast, according to a new Portland State University study.

The study holds lessons not only for Australia—whose wildfires have been dominating headlines in recent months—but for other areas of the world that are seeing drying conditions and increased risk of wildfires.

Andrés Holz, the study's lead author and associate professor of geography at PSU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, studied the population decline of King Billy pine trees (Athrotaxis selaginoides), a coniferous species native to Tasmania that dates back to when Australia was part of a supercontinent called Gondwana.

This paleoendemic tree species occupies large tracks of the UNESCO World Heritage Area in Tasmania and is considered a vulnerable species by the World Conservation Union.

The study found that increasingly frequent fires caused by regional dry and warming trends and increased ignitions—by humans during the early arrival of Europeans to Tasmania and more recently due to increases in lightning—are breaching fire refugia. Refugia are protected areas that don't burn or, if they do, are areas where trees survive most wildfires.

"The areas that have survived are in these very protected refugia," Holz said. "The refugia can be a bit of a buffer, but how long is that going to last? We might be witnesses of a whole lineage of a very ancient plant species that is going to go extinct."

Holz said that the changes in how wildfires function, due to both management and climate change, are driving analogous ecosystem transformations not only in Australia, but also western North America and South America's Patagonia region.

Untangling the complex relationships between landscape, fire disturbance, human fire usage, climate variability and anthropogenic climate change is key to understanding the rapid population declines of King Billy pines.

The study found that the trees regenerated continuously before 1800 AD under indigenous land management, but population declines followed European colonization as they cleared land for logging and mining. This coincided with a period of more fire-prone climate and weather conditions.

"Fires co-occur with dry, warm periods and those periods are more and more frequent now," Holz said, adding that the Billy King pines need wet and cool conditions to thrive. "We're moving away, climatically speaking, from the drivers that help the species."

Holz and the research team also found few seedlings or saplings in the study area, meaning that recovery of the original forest is unlikely. Instead, the replacement forest has become a tall-shrubland ecosystem with lower species diversity that in turn are more flammable and recover more quickly following fire.

"The next time there are the same climate conditions and there's a spark, a lightning strike or an accidental fire, the plants themselves are now more dense in space and more flammable than before and have a higher change of burning again," Holz said. "It becomes a vicious cycle that is hard to break."

The study said that as these critical climate-fire associations increase in strength, the survival of King Billy pines may require increasingly targeted fire management, including rapid attack of uncontrolled fires.

Links

• Yes, the Australian bush is recovering from bushfires—but it may never be the same
• Population collapse and retreat to fire refugia of the Tasmanian endemic conifer Athrotaxis selaginoides following the transition from Aboriginal to European fire management 
• Tasmania fires may 'wipe out' ancient species
• Study illustrates the combined effects of climate change and forest fires
• How do we protect our unique biodiversity from megafires?
• Research in ancient forests show link between climate change and wildfire
• Flash droughts present challenge for warning system
• Half of world's beaches could vanish by 2100

Birth Control And Books Can Slow Down Climate Change

The Verge - Justine Calma

They’re near the top of the list in a ranking of climate solutions

A board explaining contraceptive methods at a clinic in Caracas, Venezuela. Photo by YURI CORTEZ/AFP via Getty Images

 
Improving girls’ access to education and reproductive health care is one of the most promising ways to stop human-caused global warming, according to a report published today that ranks solutions to addressing the threat.

Addressing health and education ranks second among 76 solutions, sandwiched between reducing food waste and eating more plant-rich diets, that, together, can limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

The report, “The Drawdown Review,” is a follow-up to the 2017 New York Times bestselling book Drawdown. Promoting girls’ education contributed about as much to a sustainable future as the gains from rooftop solar and solar farms combined, that book found. So did family planning.

"it’s like taking nearly 22,000 coal-fired power plants offline"

Securing a quality education and reproductive health care access, particularly for women and girls, can prevent more than 85 gigatons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from heating up the planet between 2020 and 2050, the new report says. That’s like taking nearly 22,000 coal-fired power plants offline.

The report was produced by scientists and advocates at the nonprofit Project Drawdown, which was created by Drawdown editor and environmentalist Paul Hawken.

There’s a chain reaction when education levels rise: women gain political and economic power. They also have more resources available to help them choose when and how to start a family. When that happens, fertility rates usually drop, the report points out. People tend to marry and have children a little later and have fewer children when they do.

Researchers who put the report together estimated the fall in per capita emissions when fewer people in the world are using up energy for housing, food, waste, and transportation (taking into account differences between wealthier and less affluent nations).

To be clear, “in no way are we talking about population control,” Crystal Chissell, a vice president at Project Drawdown, says. Trying to control who gets to have children and who doesn’t is part of a violent racist and xenophobic history, including the forced sterilization of Latinas in the US. Chissell makes clear that her new report is talking about access to reproductive health care for women who want it.

“In no way are we talking about population control.”

There are 214 million women globally who want to avoid pregnancy but don’t have modern contraception, Chissell points out. (She cites data from the reproductive health advocacy and research group Guttmacher Institute.) Women who’ve been historically marginalized often also face bigger barriers to getting an education and birth control when they want it — whether that’s because of cost, stigma, or policies.

That last barrier has posed more hurdles for advocates over the past several years. President Donald Trump is responsible for dozens upon dozens of environmental policy rollbacks — including moves that limit women’s access to reproductive health care.

He has pulled US funding from the United Nations’ sexual and reproductive health agency, the biggest provider of contraception worldwide, for three years in a row. Domestically, the Trump administration has also attempted to give employers greater ability to deny insurance coverage for birth control.

“We’re not saying that the burden is solely on women to advance the solution [to climate change],” Chissell cautions. But the report makes clear that the status of women and girls globally will be crucial to how we shape the world that’s to come.>

"the status of women and girls globally will be crucial to how we shape the world that’s to come"

Gender also plays a role when it comes to who faces the first and worst ravages of climate change. Women make up a majority of the world’s poor, which can make them disproportionately vulnerable. In the wake of disasters made worse by climate change, like hurricanes, women also face an increased risk of sexual violence.

 Anything that might help women gain some ground — like, say, having the power and resources to make healthy and informed decisions about their bodies, lives, and families — will be crucial to surviving on a planet that’s in crisis.

Links

• Project Drawdown
• Drawdown Review 202
• Project Drawdown: Health and Education
• As Earth’s Population Heads To 10 Billion, Does Anything Australians Do On Climate Change Matter?
• Climate Explained: How Growth In Population And Consumption Drives Planetary Change
• Climate Change Is Likely To Devastate The Global Food Supply. But There's Still Reason To Be Hopeful
• A More Resilient World: The Role Of Population And Family Planning In Sustainable Development
• Population Control, The Environmental Fix No One Wants To Talk About
• Food For Thought: Food Security, Population Growth & Over-Farming

(AU) Thousands Of Kilometres Of Australia's Beaches At Risk From Rising Seas

Sydney Morning Herald -  Peter Hannam

More than 12,000 kilometres of Australia's sandy beaches are threatened by coastal erosion by the end of the century, with greater losses predicted if greenhouse gas emissions remain high.
The projections, made by European researchers and published in Nature Climate Change on Tuesday, used satellite data that tracked shoreline change from 1984 to 2015. They found a "substantial proportion" of the world's sandy coastline is already eroded, a trend that could worsen as climate change pushes up sea levels.

Australia's coastline has already seen significant areas of retreat in recent years, such as at Inverloch, in Victoria. Credit: Google News Lab

Under a "moderate" effort to curb emissions - with carbon pollution peaking at 2040 and then declining - at least 12,324 kilometres of Australia's sandy coast will be threatened with erosion by 2100. That tally is the most of any nation, and would amount to about 40 per cent of the country's sandy beaches.
Should greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise through the century - the so-called 8.5 Representative Concentration Pathway - Australia's sandy coastline at risk increases to 15,439 kilometres, the paper said.
"You have a long coastline and part of the coast is very mildly sloping" and is therefore susceptible to erosion, said Michalis Vousdoukas, a coastal oceanographer at the European Commission and the paper's lead author.
"Melbourne is worse than Sydney," Dr Vousdoukas told the Herald and The Age, adding Brisbane and Adelaide's beaches fell between the two in terms of vulnerability to erosion.
The researchers said global sea levels had been increasing "at an accelerated rate during the past 25 years and will continue to do so with climate change".
So far, most of the increase had come from the thermal expansion of warmer water but, by mid-century or so, the increase in sea levels would likely come more from melting ice sheets, Dr Vousdoukas said.
Following the lower emissions pathway would prevent about 22 per cent of the projected coastal retreat by 2050 and 40 per cent of it by 2100. "This corresponds to a global average of around 42 metres of preserved sandy beach width by the end of the century," the paper said.


After the Sydney area experienced its wettest weekend in more than 20 years, beach erosion and massive amounts of sea foam can be seen at Collaroy on the Northern Beaches.

Some nations would be harder hit on a relative basis than Australia, with Suriname, Pakistan, El Salvador and Guinea-Bissau among those countries facing the loss of more than 80 per cent of their sandy coasts.

Stockton, near Newcastle on the NSW coast, is another area where the beach is in retreat. Credit: Google News Lab

Carribean states, for instance, could see beach retreats of more than 300 metres, with "substantial implications" for economies dependent on tourism, the paper found.
Kathleen McInnes, head of CSIRO's coastal extremes group, said the paper was "useful at a macro level", and noted its own limitations such as an exclusion of "backshore" infrastructure such as sea walls that would limit beach retreat in built-up areas.
The paper's assessment, though, that the impacts of big storms would tend to be a "second-order effect" compared with the background effect of remorselessly rising sea levels "was a very plausible finding" and in line with CSIRO's own research, Dr McInnes said.
Still, major storms - which climate scientists predict will become more intense as the atmosphere warms - can be important.

Narrabeen on Sydney's northern beaches is among the most vulnerable near the Harbour City.

LEFT September 2003                                           RIGHT April 2019

Credit: Google News Lab

"Storm erosion is typically followed by beach recovery but some events may leave a footprint that takes decades to recover [from], if at all, while the additional shoreline retreat renders the backshore more vulnerable to episodic coastal flooding and its consequences," the paper said.

Links

• The new dread of Australia's once-loved long, hot summer
• Summers are starting earlier, finishing later and winter is in retreat
• The early warning system being developed to shore up Australia's beache
• Sandy coastlines under threat of erosion
• Sea level rise will see 40pc of Australia's beaches lost, predicts new study
• Half of world’s sandy beaches could disappear due to sea level rise by 2100
• Rising Sea Levels, Coastal Erosion: New Report Says Half the World's Sandy Beaches at Risk From Climate Change By 2100

Want People To Care About Climate Change? Skip The Jargon.

Grist - Kate Yoder

Grist

If you’re confused what the “circular economy” is, or what it means for a company to go “net-zero,” you’re far from alone. There’s a big mismatch between what scientists, journalists, and activists are saying and what the public understands. This is hardly a new problem, but it’s yet another obstacle to getting people to care about climate change: Obscure words in articles about rising sea levels and supercharged weather could discourage people from wanting to learn more about a planetary crisis.

The solution is to put jargon and buzzwords into simple language that anyone can understand. It takes some effort, of course. A good example is “Up Goer Five,” a diagram by Randall Monroe, the cartoonist behind the website xkcd. It explains how a rocket works using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language. Simplifying lingo related to climate change requires a similar process. Take a cold, clinical word like “biodiversity” and turn it into the more evocative “wildlife.” A real head-scratcher like “climate mitigation” becomes “reducing emissions.”

Forget “dumbing down.” Using more common language is “smartening up,” said Susan Joy Hassol, director of the nonprofit science outreach group Climate Communication in North Carolina, who coaches scientists and journalists to write and speak more conversationally. “The only thing that’s dumb,” Hassol said, “is speaking to people in language that they don’t understand.”

Jargon is good way to kill someone’s interest in a particular topic, according to research published this month in PLOS ONE, a science and medicine journal. Readers take it as a sign that the material isn’t for them. For the study at Ohio State University, 650 people read paragraphs about self-driving cars, surgical robots, and 3D bioprinting online. Half of them read paragraphs filled with cringe-worthy phrases (like “AI integration”), while the other half read phrases translated into plain English (make that “programming”). After they were finished, those subjected to obscure words said they felt less interested in science — even when those words were defined.

When something is easy to read, people find they want to learn more about the subject, said Hillary Shulman, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State. Her research has shown that people are more receptive to information written in plain old print instead of cursive, just because it’s easier to process. Avoiding jargon matters, she said, for anyone who wants to get their message to a broad audience.

“If you limit your work to the people who really work hard to read it, you’re probably missing out on the audience you actually need to be reading the work,” Shulman said. “You don’t need the people who are already bought in.”

Jargon doesn’t just leave people feeling disengaged — it can also fuel a head-in-the-sand response, according to one of Shulman’s previous studies. Encountering new things often feels difficult and risky, she said, and many people naturally respond by coming up with counterarguments.

Research shows that the best way to communicate about science might just be … to talk like a normal human being. One study published last week found that when scientists showed their human side and told personal stories, their audience was more receptive to what they were saying. Linguistics has shown something similar: You were probably taught to cut all filler words like uh, um, and like, but they can serve an important role in communication, helping listeners process complex information. And despite common wisdom that baby-talk is useless — just talk to them like adults, am I right? — recent studies suggest that over-enunciating words and using a sing-song voice actually helps babies acquire language. Good communication isn’t necessarily about sounding smart.

So how could scientists and journalists talk more like the average person? Hassol has assembled a list of about 150 terms that mean one thing to scientists and another to the general public. To most people, “positive feedback” means praise, but when scientists say the same phrase, they’re talking about a vicious cycle. Similarly, “aerosols” are not just cans of hair spray and sunscreen, but also tiny particles in the atmosphere.

Scientists use all this specialized terminology because for them, it’s efficient — one word gets across a complex concept. But then scientists pass these same esoteric words on to journalists, who then turn them on an unsuspecting public. And it’s not just academics complicating the climate lexicon: Politicians, companies, and activists use buzzwords that most people don’t understand, too.

I begged people on Twitter to tell me what words tripped them up the most while reading climate change articles, then asked Hassol to help me break down some of the most insidious terms. Here’s a short list of the jargon and buzzwords that came up, along with some plain-English translations to help make sense of them.

• Carbon footprint: How much carbon-dioxide emissions can you attribute to a country, company, or maybe your neighbor? The answer is their carbon footprint.
• Circular economy: A system where nothing really gets thrown away. In other words, your old smartphone gets broken up into its different parts and recycled — or more likely, you’re repairing it.
• Climate adaptation: Improving our ability to cope with climate change. Think building sea walls, breeding crops that can tolerate droughts, and restoring the natural course of rivers. (See “resilience” below.)
• Environmental justice: A phrase underscoring the broad idea that the people who did the least to cause climate change and pollution are the often the most at risk from the consequences.
• Just transition: Shifting to an economy that runs on solar and wind energy without killing jobs.
• Geoengineering: Using technology to try to counteract some of the warming caused by burning coal, oil, and gas. Like spraying tiny particles in the air to reflect the sunlight back into space so it doesn’t heat up the planet.
• Net-zero: Canceling out the carbon dioxide we emit by making sure that the same amount gets sucked up by trees, plants, machines, or other things. (See: Offset.)
• Offset: Something you buy that promises to cancel some or all of the carbon dioxide produced by, say, your next cross-country flight.
• Resilience: Our ability to deal with climate change’s effects. Simply put, a more resilient New York City will be better able to withstand another Superstorm Sandy.
• Sustainable: Using a resource in a way that won’t deplete it. Example: Making sure a forest has a bunch of new trees growing before you cut down an old one.

As they get picked up by companies and politicians, slippery buzzwords like “sustainability” and “resilience” are starting to lose their meaning. Deploying them now might even backfire. During testimony in the Senate last year, Frank Luntz — a messaging strategist who advises Republicans and advocates for climate action — said that “sustainability” rings of the “status quo.” He explained: “What American people really want is something that is cleaner, safer, healthier. What they’re asking for is improvement, not the status quo.”

Acronyms also get in the way of making sense. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences considered how to transform society to take action on climate change. In the paper, scientists coined the phrase “social tipping interventions,” which they went on to call STIs. That means something, uh, totally different to the rest of the population.

Hassol, who was the senior science writer on three U.S. National Climate Assessments, remembers one instance in which some scientists wanted to abbreviate the spruce bark beetle that’s destroying forests across the American West as “SBB.” Hassol thought that was nuts. Why not just use its full name once, she suggested, and then refer to it as “the beetle” after that? She also thinks it’s better to call the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, where oil companies have been angling to drill for decades, by its full name — not ANWR, pronounced an-whar. The acronym doesn’t exactly make caribou or indigenous culture spring to mind.

“When you put an acronym on something, it loses its power,” Hassol said.

Links

• Revealed: Quarter Of All Tweets About Climate Crisis Produced By Bots
• (AU) Media ‘Impartiality’ On Climate Change Is Ethically Misguided And Downright Dangerous
• A Better Way To Talk About The Climate Crisis
• Climate Change Splits The Public Into Six Groups. Understanding Them Is Key To Future Action
• Telling Stories To Battle Climate Change, With A Little Humor Thrown In
• Drop The Doom And Gloom: Climate Journalism Is About Empowerment
• Communicating Climate Change, For A Change
• How To Talk Effectively About Climate Change
• Want To Do Something About Global Warming? Talk About It With Your Family And Friends

Australia's Summer Of 2019-20 Country's Second-Hottest On Record

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn | Adam Morton

Country is heating more rapidly than the global average, with a rise of 4C expected by 2100, Bureau of Meteorology says

The summer of 2019-20 was the second hottest summer on record in Australia after last year. December 2019 delivered the worst bushfire conditions since 1950. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP

The summer just finished was Australia’s second-hottest on record, with the temperature 1.88C above average, the Bureau of Meteorology says.

The only hotter summer on record was the previous year, which was 2.14C above average. Temperatures this summer were above average across almost the entire country.
Dr Blair Trewin, a senior climatologist with the bureau, said the hot summer, which was marked by the unprecedented bushfire crisis that devastated communities and wildlife in much of the country, was part of a long-term warming trend that had seen the country warm by 1.4C since 1910. Most of that warming has come since 1950.
Trewin said: “That tells us the baseline is higher, and with that you have a higher risk of high extremes like we have seen in the past two summers. Our baseline expectation now is for warmer than average summers, and other seasons more generally.”
The heat records are relative to the long-term average for the years between 1961 and 1990.

The bureau’s summer report came as its officials told a Senate estimates hearing in Canberra that Australia is heating more rapidly than the global average.
Karl Braganza, the head of climate monitoring, was asked how much Australia was projected to warm, given a scientific analysis involving the World Meteorological Organisation last year found average global temperatures were expected to rise between 2.9C and 3.4C by 2100 under commitments put forward by national governments as part of the Paris agreement.
Braganza said the increase in Australia would be expected to be “closer to 4C” heating than the global average under that scenario, assuming countries did not do more than promised in Paris.
Adam Bandt, the Greens leader, said the government was undertaking no planning for the possibility of 4C warming in Australia. “Australia saw this horrific bushfire season with just over one degree of warming. We’re hurtling towards 4C and it’s only going to get worse from here,” he said.

This summer saw many more heat records broken than cool records. The bureau data shows 43 sites in NSW broke high temperature records but only five sites saw record lows. In Queensland, there were 10 heat records broken across different monitoring stations, but only one record for cool weather.
The 2018-19 summer also saw below average rainfall across the country, with western NSW, south-western Queensland and the Top End particularly dry. Some areas, including Western Australia’s west coast, and parts of the east coast, saw above average rainfall.
The second hottest summer comes after the bureau declared 2019 the hottest and driest year on record.

Annual mean temperature anomaly, Australia
Temperature anomaly is the difference between the average temperature
from 1961–1990 and the average temperature in a given year

Data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology shows 2019 was the hottest year on record.
Guardian graphic | Source: Bureau of Meterology

Trewin said the summer could be characterised as a season “of two halves”.
“We had December and the first few days of January, which was extremely hot almost nationwide, and extremely dry. Those heat extremes in December and early January were quite exceptional,” he said.
That exceptional heat included 17 and 18 December, when on two consecutive days Australia recorded its hottest day on record. The national average temperature on 18 December was 41.9C – one whole degree hotter than the previous day.
December 2019 also delivered the worst conditions for bushfires on a record going back to 1950.
Several records were broken for warmest summer nights in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. On 1 February, nighttime temperatures in the rural area of Condobolin, west of Dubbo, NSW, did not drop below 34.7C.
Aside from climate change, there were natural drivers of the heat in the early part of the summer. Trewin said in December and early January, the weather patterns were influenced by a strong Indian Ocean Dipole that had dragged moisture away from the continent and a “strongly negative Southern Annular Mode”.
But as both these systems moved into a neutral phase, the rest of January and February was less extreme.
Rainfall for January and February was slightly above average, Trewin said, but the extreme dry of December meant that across the three months rainfall was below average.
But 10 February still delivered record rainfall for some parts of NSW. At Taralga, 100km west of Wollongong, the town had its wettest summer day on record with 197mm beating the previous record of 130mm, set in 1885.
While the bureau’s report does not cover ocean temperatures, the hot summer has also seen the build-up of heat stress on the Great Barrier Reef, with scientists fearing a third mass coral bleaching event in the past five years if temperatures don’t fall in the next few days.

Links

• Australia records worst December fire conditions after its hottest, driest year
• 2019 was Australia's hottest year on record – 1.5C above average temperature
• Australia records its hottest day ever – one day after previous record
• Australia endures its driest and second-hottest spring on record
• March was Australia's hottest on record, with temperatures 2C above average
• Climate change set to disrupt Australia's summer sports calendar
• January was Australia's hottest month since records began
• Australia's summer outlook: soaring temperatures and bushfire risk
• Australia's record-breaking winter beats average highs by 2C, Climate Council says

How You Can Take Your Government To Court For Not Acting On The Climate Crisis

Greenpeace - Kristin Casper | Richard Harvey

Kristin Casper and Richard Harvey are climate justice lawyers with Greenpeace International.

Governments made promises to act on the climate crisis as part of the Paris Agreement, but most are failing. So thousands of us are taking to the courts to seek justice where decision-makers fail to protect our communities and our planet. The legal profession is responding to the demands of millions of us, mobilizing to address the climate emergency.

Attendees of the Peoples’ Summit on Climate, Rights and Human Survival at New York University © Tracie Williams / Greenpeace

The International Bar Association has just released a model statute that provides a pathway for people to access the courts to challenge the governments failing to live up to their climate commitments. This new model statute can go a long way to remove the obstacles for people to demand protection of the right to a clean and healthy environment – now, and for future generations.
Courts and the law have become essential for those of us trying to find solutions to the climate emergency. International legal experts are joining this struggle to help the millions who are doing their best, day in and day out, to address the climate crisis before it gets even worse.

How courts can hold governments to account 
More than 600 legal cases have been filed by individuals and NGOs to assert the fundamental rights of communities suffering from the climate crisis. That number is rapidly increasing. No single legal victory will solve the climate emergency, but each case contributes to getting us there faster.
For example, a Dutch environmental group called the Urgenda Foundation, together with 886 citizens sued the state of The Netherlands over its insufficient actions to prevent dangerous climate change. The Dutch Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking decision in December 2019, demonstrating how the judiciary can play a significant role in holding a national government to account for its lack of climate action. Climate change is a human rights crisis and it’s important that our legal systems respond effectively.

Celebrating after Urgenda’s decision ©Urgenda / Chantal Bekker

Over 1,200 senior women charged Switzerland with inadequate action on climate change in the Klimaseniorinnen case. A Federal Administrative Court refused to consider overwhelming evidence, effectively denying human rights protection for a group particularly vulnerable to climate change. The case is now on appeal before the Swiss Supreme Court.
In Norway, young people and civil society are asserting their constitutional rights to a stable climate. The Court of Appeals upheld that right, but decided the national government – by granting more oil drilling permits in the Arctic – was not violating that right. That case is now heading to Norway’s Supreme Court.
Worldwide, more than 400 human rights, development and environmental groups have pledged to, “demand effective and adequate access to justice for individuals and communities whose rights are impacted by the climate crisis or lack of climate action” according to the Declaration of the Peoples’ Summit on Climate, Rights and Human Survival.
This declaration represents a growing consensus among human rights, development, labor, and environmental groups, holding governments and corporations to account for the consequences of the actions that contribute to the climate crisis.

The Swiss association “senior women for climate protection” (KlimaSeniorinnen) © Greenpeace / Piero Good

Governments are only one factor. The law is also being used to hold companies liable for pollution, environmental damage and climate change, and not just in the courtroom. The Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines recently announced that corporations like Exxon, Chevron and BP et al. could be legally, as well as morally, liable for the climate impacts of their business models.

So what can you and I do?
We believe that judges around the world need help in deciding what evidence is reliable in climate cases, how to assess risk, understanding key international law rules and enforcing the legal rights of individuals or organisations to challenge their governments.
The IBA Model helps lawyers and judges deliver justice to those most impacted by climate change and support their demands to a dignified life. That means that you too can use the law to help your community to hold governments and corporations to account for the climate crisis.
Greenpeace Southeast Asia has published a guide for people like you and me to hold our governments accountable for the climate catastrophe. Let’s join the students striking for our future, the workers demanding a just transition out of toxic industries, the Indigenous Peoples defending their lands, and take climate change to court.

Links

• (AU) Can Legal Action Force Governments And Businesses To Respond To Climate Change?
• Climate Change Litigation Update
• (AU) Bushfire Survivors Join Claim Against ANZ For Financing Climate Crisis
• (AU) Could A Lawsuit Tip The Scales On Climate Policy?
• Landmark Ruling That Holland Must Cut Emissions To Protect Citizens From Climate Change Upheld By Supreme Court
• (UK) A Legal Approach To Fighting Climate Change
• Young Canadians Sue Government For Failing To Act On Climate Change
• Company Directors May Be Headed For Litigation Over Climate Change
• ASIC Issues Updated Guidance For Directors Seeking To Avoid Climate Lawsuits
• Oil industry giants like BP will push the planet’s climate way past 1.5ºC of global heating