(AU) Australia Asks UN To Dismiss Torres Strait Islanders' Claim Climate Change Affects Their Human Rights

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

Complaint argues Morrison government has failed to take adequate action on emissions or adaptation measures

Dauan Island in the Torres Strait. Low-lying islands such as Masig and Boigu are likely to be at the forefront of forced displacement. Photograph: Lloyd Jones/AAP

The Morrison government has asked the human rights committee of the United Nations to dismiss a landmark claim by a group of Torres Strait Islanders from low-lying islands off the northern coast of Australia that climate change is having an impact on their human rights, according to lawyers for the complainants.

The complaint, lodged just over 12 months ago, argued the Morrison government had failed to take adequate action to reduce emissions or pursue proper adaptation measures on the islands and, as a consequence, had failed fundamental human rights obligations to Torres Strait Islander people.

But the lead lawyer for the case, Sophie Marjanac, says the Coalition has rejected arguments from the islanders, telling the UN the case should be dismissed “because it concerns future risks, rather than impacts being felt now, and is therefore inadmissible”.

Marjanac said lawyers for the commonwealth had told the committee because Australia is not the main or only contributor to global warming, climate change action is not its legal responsibility under human rights law.

“The government’s lawyers also rejected arguments that climate impacts were being felt today, and that effects constituting a human rights violation are yet to be suffered”.

A spokesman for the attorney general, Christian Porter, said submissions to the human rights committee were not publicly available. He said once made, the UN transmits the government’s submission to the complainants. “It is now for the committee to consider the submissions and reach a decision,” the spokesman said.

The UN Human Rights Committee is a body of 18 legal experts that sits in Geneva. The committee monitors compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Guardian Australia has not seen the commonwealth’s submission, because that would be a breach of UN processes.

The complainants are alleging that Australia has violated article 27, the right to culture; article 17, the right to be free from arbitrary interference with privacy, family and home; and article 6, the right to life. Decisions in these processes can take up to two years.

Lawyers for the islanders have alleged that the catastrophic nature of the predicted future impacts of climate change on the Torres Strait Islands, including the total submergence of ancestral homelands, is a sufficiently severe impact as to constitute a violation of the rights to culture, family and life.

The challenges associated with sea level rise in the Torres Strait have been well documented. A report from the Climate Council on the risks associated with coastal flooding notes that Torres Strait Island communities are extremely low-lying and are thus among the most vulnerable in Australia to the impacts of climate change.

The report concludes the shallowness of the strait “exacerbates storm surges and when such surges coincide with very high tides, extreme sea levels result”. It cites sea level data collected by satellite from one location in the Torres Strait between 1993 and 2010 that indicated a rise of 6 mm per annum, “more than twice the global average”,

Although the report notes this was a single dataset, low-lying islands in the Pacific – and Torres Strait islands such as Masig and Boigu – are likely to be at the forefront of forced displacement. Some forecasts have predicted up to 150 million people could be forcibly displaced by climate change by 2040 – larger than the record number of people already forced from their homes globally.

The non-profit group ClientEarth is supporting the complaint. A spokesman for the group said: “It is shameful that Indigenous communities on Australia’s climate frontline are being told that the risk of climate change to their human rights is merely a future hypothetical issue, when scientists are clear these impacts will happen in coming decades”.

“Climate change risk is foreseeable and only preventable through immediate action in the present. States like Australia have legal duties to protect the human rights of their citizens”.

Links

• Torres Strait Islanders take climate change complaint to the United Nations
• 'We're sinking here': climate change laps at front door of Torres Strait Islands
• Torres Strait doctors issue call to arms over climate change impact on Indigenous health
• Torres Strait islanders invite Scott Morrison to see climate crisis first hand
• 'It’s our right to be here': the Torres Strait Islanders fighting to save their homes from a rising sea
• Chart topper Jeremy Marou says it's time for him to speak up on climate impacts in Torres Strait
• 'I won’t be the lone voice': Vonda Malone wants Torres Strait Islanders to be heard
• The disappearing sands: one man’s battle against climate change in the Torres Strait – video
• Torres Strait Islanders on ‘the trauma of climate change in the land of our ancestors’ – video

Climate Change: Warming World Will Be 'Devastating' For Frozen Peatlands

BBC - Matt McGrath

Melting permafrost in Alaska and other northern regions could unleash large amounts of warming gases from peatlands. Getty Images

The world's peatlands will become a large source of greenhouse gases as temperatures rise this century, say scientists.

Right now, huge amounts of carbon are stored in boggy, often frozen regions stretching across northern parts of the world.

But much of the permanently frozen land will thaw this century, say experts.

This will release warming gases at a rate that could be 30-50% greater than previous estimates.

Stretching across vast regions of the northern half of the world, peatlands play an important role in the global climate system.

Over thousands of years, they have accumulated large amounts of carbon and nitrogen, which has helped keep the Earth cool.

The eroding edge of a permafrost peat plateau in the western Russian Arctic. Gustaf Hugelius

Scientists, though, are keenly aware that peatlands - including the nearly half that are permanently frozen - are very vulnerable to rising temperatures.

But, until now, a lack of accurate maps has made it difficult to fully estimate the impact of climate on peat.

Using data compiled from more than 7,000 field observations, the authors of this new study were able to generate the most accurate maps to date of the peatlands, their depth and the amount of warming gases they contain.

They show that the boggy terrain covers 3.7 million sq kilometres (1.42 million sq miles).

A degrading permafrost peat mound in Sweden. Gustaf Hugelius

The researchers say the northern peatlands store around 415 gigatonnes of carbon. That's roughly equivalent to 46 years of current global CO2 emissions.

In their study, the authors projected that the peatlands would become a major source of CO2 as the world warms up.

One key question is when this will happen.

"Unfortunately, we cannot put exact times to these numbers so far, the models are not that advanced yet," said lead author Gustaf Hugelius from Stockholm University, Sweden.

"But my best estimate is that this shift will occur in the second half of this century."

So what would be the likely impact of this thawing?

The report authors say that their new estimate of the carbon emitted through thawing, and from losses of peat into rivers and streams, is 30-50% greater than in previous projections of carbon losses from permafrost thawing.

An aerial view of peatland in Siberia. Gustaf Hugelius

If this new peatland estimate is included with all the estimates for permafrost melting, it is projected to equal the annual emissions of the EU and UK by 2100.

"The only way to limit the permafrost carbon feedback is to reduce global warming," said Dr Hugelius.

"Because the Arctic warms twice as fast as the rest of the globe, the higher warming pathways that we are on now are devastating for the permanently frozen parts of the globe."

While the future for peatlands frozen or otherwise, in a warmer world is undeniably difficult. it is not without hope.

Experts say that with the right investment to protect and restore non-frozen peatlands, the bogs can continue to soak up and store large amounts of CO2.

Similarly, as frozen peat thaws out it starts to become capable of growing plants and storing warming gases.

While the new study says it might take a couple of centuries for peatlands to start absorbing large amounts of CO2, others believe it might happen much sooner.,

"If the climate warms and the conditions are better for the vegetation, vegetation can respond in a matter of decades," said Clifton Bain, who is the director of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme.

"We've seen in the UK when you destroy a peatland and rip away the surface vegetation and drain it, if you re-wet it and there's a source of sphagnum moss there, they will re grow within a matter of decades. So, it is possible in the right conditions for the bulk vegetation to recover very quickly."

The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Links

• UK peat emissions could cancel forest benefits
• Widespread drying of European peatlands
• Lockdown has 'negligible' impact on temperatures
• Significant jump in Emperor penguins numbers
• Large stocks of peatland carbon and nitrogen are vulnerable to permafrost thaw
• Peatlands and climate change
• Weatherwatch: restore peat bogs to fight climate change 
• Brief review on climate change and tropical peatlands

Trump Eliminates Major Methane Rule, Even As Leaks Are Worsening

New York Times - Coral Davenport

The weakening of Obama-era efforts to fight climate change amounts to a gift to many oil companies. Researchers warn that the decision ignores science.

The rollback marks the last major Obama-era climate-change regulation to be weakened by the administration. Credit...Jessica Lutz for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration formally weakened a major climate-change regulation on Thursday — effectively freeing oil and gas companies from the need to detect and repair methane leaks — even as new research shows that far more of the potent greenhouse gas is seeping into the atmosphere than previously known.

The rollback of the last major Obama-era climate rule is a gift to many beleaguered oil and gas companies, which have seen profits collapse from the Covid-19 pandemic. But it comes as scientists say that the need to rein in methane leaks at fossil fuel wells nationwide has become far more urgent, and new studies indicate that the scale of methane pollution could be driving the planet toward a climate crisis faster than expected.

Andrew Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced at an event in Pittsburgh on Thursday that he had completed the legal process of lifting the methane regulation. He was speaking in a city at the heart of the nation’s natural-gas boom, and in a state that will be critical to winning this fall’s presidential election.

“E.P.A. has been working hard to fulfill President Trump’s promise to cut burdensome and ineffective regulations for our domestic energy industry,” he said. “Regulatory burdens put into place by the Obama-Biden administration fell heavily on small and medium-sized energy businesses.”

The E.P.A. estimates that the rule changes will yield economic benefits of roughly $100 million a year through 2030, while leading to the release of about 850,000 tons of planet-warming methane into the atmosphere over the same period.

Mr. Wheeler has justified the move by citing E.P.A. data showing that leaks from domestic oil and gas wells have remained steady over the past decade, even as oil and gas production boomed.

However, numerous recent studies show the opposite: that methane emissions from drilling sites in the United States are far more extensive than the E.P.A.’s official numbers. Overall, methane levels are in fact climbing steadily nationwide, according to the research, and have reached record highs globally in part because of leaks from fossil fuel production.

“Over the past few years there has been an explosion of new research on this, and the literature has coalesced — 80 percent of papers show that methane from oil and gas leaks is two to three times higher than the E.P.A.’s estimates,” said Robert Howarth, an earth systems scientist at Cornell University, who last year published a study estimating that North American gas production was responsible for about a third of the global increase in methane emissions over the past decade.

“It’s crazy to roll back this rule,” said Dr. Howarth. “Twenty-five percent of the human-caused warming over the past 20 years is due to methane. Methane is going up. We need it to go down.”

Scientists say that the new data on soaring levels of methane means that, even if the world’s governments were somehow able to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement — in which every nation agreed to lower their carbon dioxide pollution — those achievements could be wiped out by the heat-trapping power of all the previously uncounted methane in the atmosphere.

Already, the effectiveness of the Paris pact is imperiled, since Mr. Trump has withdrawn the United States from it. But environmentalists are hopeful that it could be restored if Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidential election this fall and the United States rejoins the agreement.

E.P.A. administrator Andrew Wheeler has argued that his agency’s data shows leaks haven’t increased. That claim is contradicted by numerous scientific studies. Credit...Pool photo by Al Drago

“The Paris Agreement was not taking into account the new increase in concentrations of methane,” said Peter Raymond, an ecologist at Yale who co-authored a study published in July concluding that global levels of methane have surged to record heights.

“Because methane is so powerful, this rise could offset a lot of the goals in the Paris agreement,” he said. That could intensify many of the already baked-in near-term effects of a warming planet, such as extended droughts, deadly heat waves, stronger hurricanes and more devastating coastal flooding.

Methane comes from various sources in addition to energy production, including animal digestive tracts and landfills, and it lingers in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, which comes from burning fossil fuels. But methane has 80 times the heat-trapping power in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.

In recent years, the United States has cemented its place as one of the world’s biggest producers of oil and natural gas, a result of the fracking boom. However, a shortage of pipelines, combined with low prices for natural gas caused by the abundant supply, has meant there’s less of a financial incentive to prevent leaks at drill sites.

During his administration, President Barack Obama sought to use executive power to fight climate change with a suite of E.P.A. regulations that targeted three major sources of planet-warming pollution: carbon dioxide emissions from cars and from coal-burning power plants, and methane leaks from wells.

At the time, the methane rule was seen as slightly less consequential than the other two rules, addressing cars and coal plants, in part because data showed significantly lower levels of methane in the atmosphere than of carbon dioxide.

President Trump last year rolled back the rule on coal-plant pollution, and this spring he significantly weakened the rule on auto pollution.

But now, as Mr. Trump rounds the final turn of his unraveling of Mr. Obama’s climate legacy, scientists say that the importance of reining in methane has become far greater as the data has piled up indicating the scale of the leaks.

According to the E.P.A.’s annual inventory of United States greenhouse emissions, oil and gas wells emitted about 7 million tons of the heat-trapping gas annually between 2014 and 2018. The more recent studies, however, show the real number could be up to twice that.

A scientific study published last month found that the United States fossil fuel industry in 2017 emitted about 13 million tons of methane, the heat-trapping equivalent of a year’s worth of carbon dioxide pollution from all the nation’s coal-fired power plants.

A 2018 study in the journal Science also concluded that, in 2015, the United States oil and gas industry was leaking about 13 million tons of methane annually.

“In many oil and gas fields, we’re finding emissions to be considerably higher than what E.P.A. says they are,” said Rob Jackson, an earth scientist at Stanford University who co-authored the July study. Methane emissions, he said, are “not stabilizing. They’re certainly not going down.”

Several scientists said that the key reason for the discrepancy between their studies and the E.P.A.’s numbers was the thoroughness of the methods used to detect methane. To compile its annual inventory of methane emissions, the E.P.A. relies on a mix of self-reported data from companies themselves, and some on-site testing of drilling wells, pipes and other equipment.

The scientists said such testing is not comprehensive. In recent years, academic scientists have started using new technologies and techniques to more completely account for methane leaks from drilling sites and pipelines, such as airplanes and vehicles fitted with atmospheric monitors and infrared cameras, as well as satellites.

“There are blind spots in the E.P.A.’s testing — they were missing all these sources of the leaks,” said Ramón Alvarez, a lead author of the 2018 paper and an atmospheric chemist at the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group.

An E.P.A. spokesman, James Hewitt, contested that assertion. “E.P.A.’s final methane rule is based on the most accurate and comprehensive accounting of our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions profile, which is performed by agency scientists based on data from a variety of sources, including the agency’s greenhouse gas inventory, the greenhouse gas reporting program, new studies, and comments received on the proposal. We stand by our numbers and analysis,” he said.

A pipeline operator in Damascus, Ark., with a methane leak detector. Credit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The oil and gas industry itself is divided on the rollback of the methane regulations.

Major companies like Exxon, Shell and BP had urged the Trump administration to keep the controls in place.

Those companies have invested millions of dollars to promote natural gas as a cleaner option than coal in the nation’s power plants, because natural gas produces about half as much carbon dioxide when burned. They fear that unrestricted leaks of methane could undermine that marketing message and hurt demand.

But smaller, independent oil companies supported the rule as a measure of relief when many are struggling to stay afloat. Those companies also point out that existing E.P.A. regulations still require them to regulate a separate but related category of gases, volatile organic compounds, and that those curbs have the side benefit of averting some methane emissions.

“This doesn’t shift the regulatory burden — we’re still going to have the same requirements” for any new wells that are drilled in the future, said Lee Fuller, a vice president at the Independent Petroleum Producers of America, which represents smaller oil and gas companies.

But lifting the methane rule does avert a far more stringent future obligation on small oil and gas companies: If the rule had stayed in place, it eventually could have required companies to repair and retrofit thousands of older existing wells — a far costlier undertaking.

It is that requirement that terrifies small oil and gas drillers, said Mr. Fuller. “To compel it to apply to existing wells is too expensive. It would drive them out of business.”

That may be true, said some scientists. But they also say that many of those small, older wells could be likely sources of the vast quantities of harmful emissions.

“This rule helps smaller oil and gas companies, the ones operating on the edge of financial viability,” said Dr. Jackson, the Stanford scientist. “But it’s also saying that science doesn’t matter. It’s prioritizing very short-term economic gain over longer-term economic health and human health.”

Links

• E.P.A. to Lift Obama-Era Controls on Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas
• The Trump Administration Is Reversing 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List.
• Here's What Extreme Heat Looks Like: Profoundly Unequal
• With the Biden-Harris Ticket, Environmental Justice Is a Focus
• Global Warming Could Unlock Carbon From Tropical Soil
• Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change
• A Satellite Lets Scientists See Antarctica’s Melting Like Never Before
• See How the World’s Most Polluted Air Compares With Your City’s
• Daimler to Settle U.S. Emissions Charges for $2.2 Billion
• Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions.

(AU) Investors Are Trying To Shut Down Fossil Fuel Companies From The Inside — This Is What They're Doing

ABC News - Michael Slezak

Market Forces argues coal operations will become "worthless assets". (REUTERS/Daniel Munoz)

More than 100 investors in Whitehaven Coal have filed a resolution asking the company to plan its own closure — the first in an ambitious play by an activist shareholder group to push fossil fuel companies to act on climate change.

The resolution, organised by the activist shareholder group Market Forces, comes ahead of this year's company annual reporting season.

The group — which is aligned with conservation organisation Friends of the Earth — plans to file similar resolutions with three other Australian companies: New Hope Group, Beach Energy and Cooper Energy.

New Hope is predominantly a coal miner, while Beach Energy and Cooper Energy are both focused on oil and gas.

In a move analysts say may move other investors to question the long term viability of pure-play fossil fuel companies, Market Forces's latest resolution argues any investment in the company's coal operations will become worthless "stranded assets" as the world shifts away from coal.

It calls for a plan to return all remaining capital in the company to investors.

Whitehaven's operations have been long been the target of protestors. (AAP)

"Whitehaven's current plans threaten to waste investor capital on projects that are incompatible with a Paris-aligned energy transition, and unrealistic in light of market shifts already underway," the official documents lodged with Whitehaven said.

Market Forces executive director Julien Vincent said the group was pushing the resolution to make the company "sensibly manage" its decline as it "inevitably goes out of business".

"[That way] capital gets returned to investors instead of wasted, and workers can be retrained, re-skilled and supported to find new employment instead of suffering the shock of an economy racing to keep a lid on global warming," he said.

A Whitehaven Coal spokesperson said based on its analysis the likelihood of any of its assets becoming stranded was "low".

It said aspects of the pace and scale of the global transition towards a lower-carbon world were subject to "considerable uncertainty".

"High-quality coal can contribute to meaningful carbon reductions today, and we will continue to meet the strong and growing demand for higher quality coal that exists in nearby export markets."

Coal a bad investment?

Before COVID-19, thermal coal was a hot commodity.

It was fetching a high price and Australia's exports were rising.

Since the pandemic, export volumes have remained steady, but the price has plummeted, forcing some mines to reduce output, and put expansion plans on ice.

The Department of Industry's latest figures project the price will stay depressed for the next few years, and export volumes are likely to dip.

Some analysts have said coal needs to be phased out globally by 2040 to stop warming at 1.5C.

As a result, Market Forces argues Whitehaven Coal will produce 500 million tonnes of coal between 2030 and 2050 that can't be sold.

The ABC approached several super funds still invested in Whitehaven, but all declined an interview.It was fetching a high price and Australia's exports were rising.

Australian bosses have started
caring about climate change

Australian company directors nominate climate change as the number one issue they want the government to address in the long-term, in a survey of more than 1,200 business leaders. Read more

Is solar thermal power the way forward?

As the world looks to Germany as a shining example of how to shift away from coal power, a nuclear expert in Queensland is advocating for solar thermal power. Read more

First State Super, Australia's third largest super fund, announced this year it would dump investments in companies that derived more than 10 per cent of their revenue from thermal coal.

Following that announcement, the super fund divested from Whitehaven Coal, and therefore won't be voting on this resolution if it's presented to the next Annual General Meeting.

"So I guess... the resolution would be aligned to our thinking, i.e., we want you to close down because we actually think it's a stranded asset," First State Super head of responsible investments Liza McDonald.

Support growing at company AGMs

Shareholder resolutions on climate change started in Australia about 2011, with a resolution against Perth-based oil and gas company Woodside.

It got less than 6 per cent support.

But since then, the number of resolutions filed each year, and the support those resolutions have got, has grown.

At least 15 shareholder resolutions on climate change were voted on at AGMs in 2019.

And so far in 2020, four resolutions have received more than 40 per cent support.

One against Woodside this year asked it to align its strategy with the aims of the Paris Agreement received more than 50 per cent.

It was a first for any shareholder resolution on climate change in Australia.

Support for climate-related shareholder resolutions

Chart: Michael Slezak

Mr Vincent said the difference between Market Forces's latest moves and previous resolutions was the degree of tolerance for a company "pretending that it can just go on with business as usual".

He said there was no "particular number" of votes they aimed to achieve and it would not be binding on the company — even if it had majority support.

"We've seen previously resolutions that have only resulted in 10 or 15 per cent of the vote result in the company actually going about the changes called for in the first place," Mr Vincent said.

'Not a stunt'

Martijn Wilder is a leading climate law expert, and now heads Pollination, a specialist climate advisory and investment firm.

He advises investors on how to vote on these resolutions, as well as some companies targeted by them.

"The resolution itself may not get up, but it will definitely be the focus of a dialogue about what is the future for a company like this," he said.

"This is not a stunt at all.

"This is a serious shareholder resolution about the core value of the company and its long-term viability in a marketplace where investors are moving away from fossil fuels and from coal," Mr Wilder said.

He said how much support the resolution gets is not the most important question.

"It is drawing attention to the issue, which many of the investors themselves are entirely focused on at the moment," Mr Wilder said.

A radical new push

Other activist groups are also mulling more ambitious demands in the next phase of shareholder resolutions.

The Australian Centre for Corporate Responsibility organised most of the recent similar resolutions in Australia.

"The first resolutions we filed were really around disclosure and I guess they're what you'd call the most supportable because you're just asking the company to provide more information," Australian Centre for Corporate Responsibility representative Dan Gocher said.

The next phase, he said, was asking the companies to take some action — which has already begun. After that, they would look to hold directors accountable.

"Companies like Santos and Woodside — we would expect some shift from them in the next six to 12 months and if that doesn't happen we'll start to look at the board," he said.

Links

• (AU) Top Super Funds Increasingly Vote Down Climate Resolutions
• (AU) No More Room For Excuses On Climate
• What Kenneth Hayne Says About Climate Change - Transcript
• (AU) Hayne Rebukes Directors On Climate Risk Failure
• The Economic Theory That Could Fuel A Climate Change Revolution
• (AU) Federal Government Releases Emissions Technology Investment Roadmap, Backing Gas And A Shift Towards Renewables
• BCA Rejects Climate Change Campaign
• Climate Policy Vacuum Boosting Investor Focus On Low-Carbon Assets
• Australia's Biggest Companies Failing To Plan For Climate Change Risks: Report
• Investors Managing $32 Trillion In Assets Call For Action On Climate Change
• Is Corporate Australia Facing A 'Tipping Point' On Climate Change?

Last Decade Was Earth's Hottest On Record As Climate Crisis Accelerates

The Guardian - Oliver Milman

• 2019 was second or third hottest year ever recorded
• Average global temperature up 0.39C in 10 years

Mountains nearly devoid of snow stand behind a road and a polar bear warning sign during a summer heatwave on Svalbard archipelago in July near Longyearbyen, Norway. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The past decade was the hottest ever recorded globally, with 2019 either the second or third warmest year on record, as the climate crisis accelerated temperatures upwards worldwide, scientists have confirmed.

Every decade since 1980 has been warmer than the preceding decade, with the period between 2010 and 2019 the hottest yet since worldwide temperature records began in the 19th century. The increase in average global temperature is rapidly gathering pace, with the last decade up to 0.39C warmer than the long-term average, compared with a 0.07C average increase per decade stretching back to 1880.

The past six years, 2014 to 2019, have been the warmest since global records began, a period that has included enormous heatwaves in the US, Europe and India, freakishly hot temperatures in the Arctic, and deadly wildfires from Australia to California to Greece.

Last year was either the second hottest year ever recorded, according to Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the third hottest year, as recorded by the UK Met Office. Overall, the world has heated up by about 1C on average since the pre-industrial era.

“As this latest assessment comprehensively confirms, we have just witnessed the warmest decade on record,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University. “As other recent reports confirm, we must act dramatically over this next decade, bringing emissions down by a factor of two, if we are to limit warming below catastrophic levels of 1.5C that will commit us to ever-more dangerous climate change impacts.

“This is something every American should think about as they vote in the upcoming presidential election.”

The report, compiled by 520 scientists from more than 60 countries and published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, outlines the myriad ways that rising temperatures are altering the planet and human life, including:

• Sea-surface temperatures were the second warmest on record last year, surpassed only by 2016. The heating up of the ocean and melting of glaciers caused global sea levels to hit a new high point of 3.4 inches above what they were, on average, 30 years ago.


• Greenhouse gas levels hit their highest level ever recorded in 2019. Concentrations of these planet-warming gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, are now higher than any period measured by modern instruments or ice cores dating back 800,000 years.


• The polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctic experienced their second hottest year on record. The loss of ice from the poles is helping push sea levels upwards, imperiling coastal cities around the world.


• The consequences of the climate crisis are being felt around the world, including recent widespread flooding across east Africa and wildfires in Australia, the Amazon and Siberia.

Robert Dunn, a climate scientist at the UK Met Office, said that the start of this millennium has been warmer than any comparable period since the industrial revolution.

“A number of extreme events, such as wildfires, heatwaves and droughts, have at least part of their root linked to the rise in global temperature,” he said “The view for 2019 is that climate indicators and observations show that the global climate is continuing to change rapidly.”

Links

• 'Nowhere To Hide': South Pole Warms Up With Climate Change A Factor
• Global Warming Is Melting Our Sense of Time
• NASA Images Show Extreme Heat And Fires Raging Across Siberia
• Arctic Circle Sees 'Highest-Ever' Recorded Temperatures
• Earth Just Had Its Warmest May On Record Amid Startling Siberian Heat Wave
• Unsuitable For 'Human Life To Flourish': Up To 3B Will Live In Extreme Heat By 2070, Study Warns
• Climate Change Has Already Made Parts Of The World Too Hot For Humans
• Meteorologists Say 2020 On Course To Be Hottest Year Since Records Began
• Killer heat: US racial injustices will worsen as climate crisis escalates

False Alarm By Bjorn Lomborg; Apocalypse Never By Michael Shellenberger – Review

The Guardian - Bob Ward

Two prominent ‘lukewarmers’ take climate science denial to another level, offering tepid manifestos at best

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice lead a walk-out at the company’s HQ in Seattle. Photograph: Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty 

Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics

It is no longer credible to deny that the average temperature around the world is rising and that other phenomena, such as extreme weather events, are also shifting. People can now see with their own eyes that the climate is changing around them.

Nor is it tenable to deny that the Earth’s warming is driven by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting from human activities, such as the production and burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Such denial is only now promoted by cranks and conspiracy theorists who also think, for instance, that the Covid-19 pandemic is linked to the development of the 5G network.

False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg is published by Basic Books. Apocalpyse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger is published by HarperCollins.

So instead, a different form of climate change denial is emerging from the polemical columns of rightwing newspapers. They paint a Panglossian picture of manmade climate crisis that will never be catastrophic as long as the world grows rich by using fossil fuels. The “lukewarmers” are on the march and coming to a bookshop near you.

Two prominent lukewarmers are now launching new manifestos: False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg, and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger.

Although they are aimed primarily at American audiences, they will appeal to anyone who, like the authors, proclaims themselves to be an environmentalist, but despises environmental campaigners.

Both books contain many pages of endnotes and references to academic publications, conveying the initial impression that their arguments are supported by reason and evidence. But the well-informed reader will recognise that they rely on sources that are outdated, cherry-picked or just wrong.

Shellenberger claims that windfarms might be responsible for an alarming decline in insect populations in Germany

The content of False Alarm will be familiar to those who have read Lomborg’s previous books, The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. New findings and evidence are twisted and forced into the same haranguing narrative for his new contribution. Shellenberger’s book is far easier to read, at least near the beginning, but gradually descends into a bitter rant against environmentalists, the media and politicians who do not share his fervour for nuclear power.

Not everything that Lomborg and Shellenberger write is wrong. They are both correct in saying that the world should be investing far more in making populations, particularly in poor countries, more resilient to our changing climate. Even if the world is successful in its implementation of the Paris Agreement and limits global warming to well below 2C by the end of the century, the impacts will continue to grow over the coming decades, threatening lives and livelihoods across the globe.

But their argument that adaptation to climate crisis impacts is easier and cheaper than emissions cuts is undermined by their admission that the economic costs of extreme weather are rising because ever-more-vulnerable businesses and homes are being built in high-risk areas.

Lomborg is also right that the world should be spending far more on green innovation to develop technologies to help us to tackle climate breakdown. But he is pinning all his hopes on the breakthrough discovery of a magical new energy source that will be both zero-carbon and cheaper than fossil fuels.

This is wrong-headed for at least two reasons. The first is that most innovation occurs through the incremental improvement of existing technologies and we will probably need several different sources of affordable and clean energy. The second is that climate crisis results from the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that is already happening, so we cannot afford to delay the deployment of today’s alternatives to fossil fuels.

I also have some sympathy for Shellenberger’s argument that nuclear power has a role to play in creating a zero-carbon energy system. However, instead of calmly explaining its advantages over fossil fuels, he attempts to promote it by trash-talking about new renewable technologies, particularly wind and solar.

Walney Extension, the world’s largest offshore windfarm, on the Cumbrian coast. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

He is right that we cannot yet store energy affordably on the scale needed to power an entire electricity grid with intermittent renewables. But he also claims that windfarms might be responsible for an alarming decline in insect populations in Germany, which entomologists have blamed on agricultural practices. And he complains that the turbines “are almost invariably loud and disturb the peace and quiet”, although he stops short of repeating Donald Trump’s ridiculous falsehood that the noise causes cancer.

Both Lomborg and Shellenberger also make some legitimate criticisms of “alarmism” by environmentalists. One of the most difficult problems in making the case for action on climate crisis is that the elevated levels of greenhouse gases we create over the next few decades will have consequences not fully realised until the next century and beyond. Some campaigners deal with this communications challenge by wrongly warning of imminent catastrophe.

However, many scientists do suspect that we are approaching, or have already passed, thresholds beyond which very severe consequences, such as destabilisation of the land-based polar ice caps and associated sea level rise of several metres, become unstoppable, irreversible or accelerate. Lomborg and Shellenberger both downplay these huge risks because they fatally undermine the fundamental basis for their lukewarmer ideology.

Lomborg’s book relies heavily on the creative use of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (Dice). William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2018 for his pioneering work on climate change, created the Dice model, but it has been strongly criticised for omitting the biggest risks.

A graph in Lomborg’s book shows that he has used Dice to predict that 4.1C of global warming by the end of the century would only reduce global economic output, or GDP, by about 4%. He also finds that even more extreme warming of 7C would lead to a loss of GDP of just 15%. These are hard to reconcile with the scientific evidence that such temperature changes would utterly transform the world.

We cannot afford to delay the deployment of today’s alternatives to fossil fuels

Lomborg also exaggerates the costs of action by automatically doubling researchers’ estimates for reducing emissions. He justifies this by referring to an obscure study in 2009 that concluded it may prove twice as costly as the European commission expected for the member states to cut their collective emissions by 20% by 2020. But the European Union reached its target ahead of schedule in 2018, with the price of emissions permits over the previous decade usually at less than half of the level anticipated by the commission.

Nevertheless, Lomborg doubles Nordhaus’s estimates of the costs of global action and concludes that the “optimal” level of global warming, balancing both damages and emissions cuts, would be 3.75C by 2100.

This calculation made me laugh out loud because modern humans have no evolutionary experience of the climate that would be created by such a temperature rise. The last time the Earth was more than 2C warmer than pre-industrial times was during the Pliocene epoch, three million years ago, when the polar ice caps were much smaller and global sea level was 10 to 20 metres higher than today. Only lukewarmers would claim that modern humans are best suited to a prehistoric climate!

In short, these new books truly deserve their place on the bookshelf among other classic examples of political propaganda.

Links

• Book Review: Are We Overreacting On Climate Change?
• Five Must-Read Novels On The Environment And Climate Crisis
• Footprints By David Farrier Review – Fossils Of The Anthropocene
• Book Reviews: The End Of The World Is Coming, And You Are Responsible
• A Glacier’s Pace: A Haunting Meditation On Climate Change In Iceland
• 7 Climate Change Novels That Imagine Our Possible Futures
• Facing The Climate Change Crisis, Three Books Offer Some Ambitious Proposals
• Everyone, Everywhere: The Global Challenge Of Climate Change
• Gift Guide: 12 Books On Climate Change And The Environment

(AU) Fight For Planet A: The Team Behind War On Waste Want To Put Climate Crisis Back On The Agenda

The Guardian - Brigid Delaney

Host Craig Reucassel uses balloons to give Australia’s emissions a visual representation and we’re left in no doubt there are too many of them

Craig Reucassel in Fight for Planet A. ‘We need a population that is knowledgeable and engaged.’ Photograph: Eren Sener/ABC TV

Fight For Planet A: Our Climate Challenge Tuesdays 8.30pm on ABC + iview Craig Reucassel tackles one of our planet's biggest challenges: climate change, exploring where our energy comes from, health effects of transport and travel emissions plus the carbon footprint of what we eat. Episode 1 iview

There’s a scene in Fight for Planet A that is both absurd and thrilling.

The host, Craig Reucassel, has tracked down the prime minister, Scott Morrison, at an event at a Sydney beach.

A pile of black balloons representing Australia’s carbon emissions have been attached to the back of his shirt and as he runs down the beach chasing Morrison, one really does wonder if he’ll just lift off and float away.

The prime minister’s minders stop Reucassel before he can tackle the prime minister who, in bare feet and boardshorts, is walking away as quick as you can in soft sand.

But the metaphor is obvious: Morrison does not want to engage with Australia’s outsized emissions problem.

Over three episodes, the team that made the ABC’s highly successful War on Waste delve into the more abstract but urgent issue of carbon emissions, and with it a vital question: how do you convince Australians that something they cannot see represents their greatest existential threat?

Fight for Planet A uses balloons to give Australia’s emissions a visual representation, and right from the first episode, we’re left in no doubt that there are too many of them. But what to do about it? And do we have the bandwidth to deal with the climate crisis now given everything else that’s going on in the world?

Fight for Planet A: Our Climate Challenge explores how we can all reduce our individual and collective carbon emissions. This three-part documentary aims to empower and motivate Australians to take action on climate change. 

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic initially meant the air date for the show, which was filmed last year, was pushed back from June to August. Stephen Oliver, manager of documentaries at the ABC, thinks that now is the time to get the climate back on the agenda.

“No one knew how long the pandemic would last, how serious it would be, how it would change people’s psychology. It’s still bad, but to some extent, with the exception of the situation in Melbourne, we have come to terms with it,” he says.

And although global lockdowns have caused emissions to plummet, it is long-term behaviour and policy change that will make a difference in the long term. So how do we make that happen?

Fight for Planet A is a solutions-based show that aims to empower viewers to cut their own emissions at home and in their communities.

By way of example, five Australian households were chosen to take on the show’s “climate challenge” to reduce the carbon emissions generated by the energy they used, their modes of transport and their food production.

Can the wealthy family with underfloor heating and a massive TV for their pets cut their electricity bill? Can the share house of five blokes use less hot water and skateboard to uni instead of driving an old banger?

Those strategies for individuals wanting to reduce their carbon footprint include everything from changing showerheads so less water is used, to ditching the car, to switching to solar panels. There’s a good segment on how easy it is to cut emissions in schools by turning off power points at the end of the day.

Craig Reucassel with members of the community of Oatlands public school. Photograph: ABC TV

Other solutions are more expensive and thus more difficult – such as trading in your old fossil-fuel-guzzling car for an electric vehicle (the cheapest in Australia starts at around $50,000).

When asked if a lot of the individual environmental fixes are geared towards the rich, Reucassel told Guardian Australia: “People who are wealthier – say, in the top 50% of income – have a larger carbon footprint. They travel more, their houses are bigger, they use more energy. We need to call on the rich people first – we shouldn’t be putting more of the burden on poorer people.”

But does all this community and individual empowerment let the government and big business off the hook?

Reucassel says: “I wouldn’t have done this show if it had only been about individual change. But people becoming involved and interested in an issue changes the political debate and more strongly influences the business debate. We can underestimate the role that the public can take in leading.”

Councils too have proven to be proactive when it comes to grassroots climate action, says Reucassel, “much more so than leadership at a federal level, which tends to be really depressing”.

“Unlike coronavirus, we know the solutions to climate change,” says Oliver. “We can actually do something about climate change, whereas with the pandemic we’re sitting there waiting for the experts to find a vaccine. We wear a mask and stay distant but we’re not actually solving the problem, we’re waiting for experts to solve the problem.

“But we can all solve the problem of climate change. This is empowering. We can give people solutions rather than just bunker down waiting for more horror to hit us.”

“The hardest part is getting people to visualise emissions,” says Reucassel. But knowledge is power. “In Australia, change is up against far more vested interests – that’s why we need a population that is knowledgeable and engaged.”

Oliver agrees. “It’s about getting people to be more engaged in the issue instead of feeling a bit angry and hopeless. If you only focus on the big corporations and the government you can get angry, frustrated and just kind of retreat from the conversation.”

Links

• Climate Change TV
• Representing climate change on public service television: A case study
• We Tried to Write a Blog About TV Shows Tackling Climate Change. Here’s What Happened
• TV’s climate change problem
• Broadcast news networks paid more attention to climate change in 2019
• Children's educational TV falls short on climate change
• Climate Communicators