(USA NPR) The Exact Link Between Tornadoes And Climate Change Is Hard To Draw. Here's Why

NPR - Rachel Treisman

Mayfield, Ky., is among the places hit by devastating tornadoes over the weekend. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Dozens of tornadoes — including one massive storm that tore through more than 200 miles — struck Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois, Missouri and Mississippi on Friday and Saturday, killing at least 14 people in four states and dozens more in Kentucky alone.

People following the devastating news out of the region may be wondering: (How) was the storm related to climate change?

After all, most of the extreme weather events that have dominated headlines recently — from wildfires in the U.S. to historic flooding in Western Europe — have had a clear connection to high temperatures, record rainfall and other effects of a warming planet.

The same can't exactly be said for tornadoes, however.

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Scientists know that warm weather is a key ingredient in tornadoes and that climate change is altering the environment in which these kinds of storms form.

But they can't directly connect those dots, as the research into the link between climate and tornadoes still lags behind that of other extreme weather events such as hurricanes and wildfire.

That's at least in part due to a lack of data — even though the U.S. leads the world in tornadoes, averaging about 1,200 a year.

Less than 10% of severe thunderstorms produce tornadoes, which makes it tricky to draw firm conclusions about the processes leading up to them and how they might be influenced by climate change, Harold Brooks, a tornado scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, told The Associated Press.

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Other factors that make that climate change attribution difficult include the quality of the observational record and the ability of models to simulate certain weather events.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that's the case with tornadoes.

"The observational record is not consistent and relatively short, the models remain inconclusive as to replicating tornado activity, and our understanding of how global warming and climate change will influence the different atmospheric processes that produce tornadoes (wind shear, for example) is more limited," reads a page on its website.

While scientists may not be able to conclusively connect tornado frequency or intensity to human-caused climate change, they say there are signs pointing in that direction.

Here's what they do know:

What tornadoes are and when they occur NOAA defines tornadoes as narrow, violently rotating columns of air that extend from a thunderstorm to the ground (while the wind part is invisible, tornadoes can form condensation funnels of water droplets, dust and debris).

They can be among the most violent of natural disasters, ripping homes apart, tearing through infrastructure and sending debris flying.

Tornadoes can occur in any part of the U.S. at any time of year.

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They have historically been associated with the Great Plains, though experts say the idea of a so-called "Tornado Alley" can be misleading since the tornado threat is a bit of a moving target.

 It shifts from the Southeast in the cooler months of the year, toward the southern and central Plains in May and June, and the northern Plains and Midwest during early summer.

When people talk about "tornado season," they are usually referring to the time of year when the U.S. sees the most tornadoes — which peaks in May and June in the southern Plains and later in the northern Plains and upper Midwest.

This weekend's tornadoes were well outside of typical tornado season, but experts say that in itself isn't rare.

What kind of conditions caused this weekend's storm Meteorologists are pointing to two contributing factors: warm temperatures and strong winds.

Thunderstorms happen when denser, drier cold air is pushed over warmer, humid air, as the AP explains, and an updraft is created when the warm air rises. Changes in the wind's speed and/or direction (known as "wind shear") can cause the updraft to spin, laying the groundwork for a tornado.

There's not usually a lot of wind instability in the winter because the air is typically not that warm or humid — but that wasn't the case over the weekend.

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States across the Midwest and South were experiencing springlike temperatures on Friday. Memphis, Tenn., saw a record high of nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit, for example.

"The atmosphere didn't know it was December — temperatures in the 70s and 80s," tweeted Mississippi-based meteorologist Craig Ceecee.

That could be a product of many things, from the La Niña climate pattern bringing warmer-than-average conditions to the Southern U.S., to the above-average water temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico, to the warm winter weather that is increasingly common as the planet heats up.

In any case, those high temperatures lent themselves to the warm, moist air that helped form thunderstorms.

And once the storm formed, experts believe a strong wind shear (which is typical in the winter) prolonged the duration of its tornadoes.

Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University, told AP that while tornadoes typically lose energy within minutes, this weekend's tornadoes lasted for hours.

The U.S. will likely see more tornadoes beyond their typical time and place Experts say climate change is impacting the conditions in which tornadoes form and could lead to changes in when and where the U.S. sees them.

John T. Allen, a professor of meteorology at Central Michigan University, wrote in a USA Today opinion column that while ties to climate change are still uncertain, there appears to have been an "eastward shift in tornado frequency" and increasing frequency of tornadoes in outbreaks over the past few decades.

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"Climate projections for the late 21st century have suggested that the conditions favorable to the development of the severe storms that produce tornadoes will increase over North America, and the impact could be greatest in the winter and fall," he added.

Brooks, of NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory, said the U.S. is likely to see more tornadoes in the winter (and fewer in the summer) as national temperatures rise above the long-term average.

And Gensini told Axios that projections show an increase in major outbreaks in the mid-South and Southeast.

He also compared tornado-climate change attribution to the steroids era of baseball, as Axios put it: "Pinning an individual home run on steroid use is difficult, he said, but in the aggregate the trends are evident."

Photos: Before and after satellite images reveal the extent of tornadoes' destruction

Links

• US tornadoes: Is climate change to blame? - BBC News
• Climate change: How the crisis is affecting tornadoes - CNN
• December tornadoes are part of 'new normal' caused by climate
• A warming world could add more fuel to tornadoes, scientists say
• Tornadoes and climate change: What a warming world means for deadly twisters and the type of storms that spawn them
• Biden wants to investigate the link between tornadoes and climate change

(AU The Guardian) Doubts Over Coalition’s Net Zero Target As Report Finds Soil Carbon Emissions May Increase As Climate Warms

The Guardian - Peter Hannam

Exclusive: Rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns expected to increase losses and make it more difficult to identify net carbon emissions

More carbon is stored in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined, so what happens to that carbon can make a big difference. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Fresh doubts have emerged over whether Australia can rely on boosting soil carbon to achieve its net zero emissions goals with a new New South Wales government report predicting the land sector will become a significant source of emissions in a warmer climate.

The concerns are raised in a report on soil health trends in NSW forests, published recently without fanfare by the state’s Natural Resources Commission. It examined soil organic carbon (SOC) levels in eastern NSW forests and how they may be affected by projected rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns.

They found major losses could be expected, particularly for southern forests, suggesting “forest managers will have to implement appropriate soil carbon-enhancing strategies even to just maintain current SOC levels”.

“This also has implications for identifying ongoing net carbon emissions from NSW lands, with respect to aiming for Net Zero Emissions and mitigating climate change,” it said.

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In a separate government report detailing the modelling – known as NARCliM – used, scientists found the problem of soils releasing more carbon as conditions became warmer and drier would be statewide and would accelerate with further heating.

“From the average of the 12 models, in the upper depth interval (0 to 30cm of soil), there is a statewide average 2.5 tonnes of carbon per hectare decrease to the near-future change period [to 2040] and 5.1tC/ha to the far-future change period,” the second report said.

The models ranged from as much as 1.6tC/ha additional carbon taken up on average to losses of as much as 12tC/ha.

Scientists have long known the carbon content in soil can vary considerably based on temperatures, moisture content and soil type, among other factors. For instance, rising temperatures tend to boost microbial activity that results in more of the carbon humus in the soil digested, and extra carbon dioxide emitted.

As the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering noted in a recent explainer, more carbon is stored in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined so what happens to that carbon can make a big difference. However, measuring carbon isn’t cheap, costing about $30 a hectare a year.

Even so, governments including Australia’s commonwealth and some states are increasingly looking to soil to do much of the work to meet their emissions reduction targets.

The Morrison government’s recently released 2050 net zero plan, relies on as much as 17m tonnes of CO2 a year be sequestered in soil carbon projects for carbon neutrality to be achieved.

“Until we have better scientific evidence, we need to be cautious about relying on soil carbon to be our saviour in our net zero plans,” said Beverley Henry, an adjunct associate professor at Queensland University of Technology.

One priority should be making it cheaper to measure what carbon is contained in the soil, how it fluctuates with weather conditions, and how it can be expected to change in the future. Also, a better understanding of how human intervention can make a difference is needed since farmers can expect millions of dollars in payments for trapping more carbon.

“We need to get better, less costly soil measuring techniques,” Henry said, adding many more surveys are needed to shore-up results generated in laboratories.

“If you have more droughts, it is more difficult to consistently increase soil carbon,” she said. “The increased variability of the climate makes it harder to build soil carbon but more importantly to keep it there.”

Australia’s climate is tending to dry out, particularly in the south, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have found. Rain-bearing storm tracks are shifting southwards, with more of the moisture missing the continent.

The NSW government reports echo findings by scientists such as former CSIRO researcher Jeff Baldock. He identified a decade ago a positive feedback loop may exist if warming temperatures led to more carbon being released, in turn triggering more warming.

Baldock said rainfall is typically the “principal dictator” of how much carbon is in the soil. Modelling, such as that cited by the Natural Resources Commission, would particularly be driven by rainfall predictions. In Australia, climate science still has only broad-based projections of future shifts.

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Farmers had an interest in improving the carbon content of their soils as it typically improves productivity, he said. Planting legumes, for instance, can bolster carbon levels but landholders would have to consider the trade-offs.

“Can farming businesses still be viable when the system is trying to put carbon into the ground?” Baldock said.

Guardian Australia approached Angus Taylor, the federal emissions reduction minister, and Matt Kean, the NSW treasurer and environment minister, for comment.

Chris Bowen, Labor’s federal climate spokesman, said “transparency and accountability are not things generally associated with the Morrison government”.

A Labor government would “commission a short and sharp review” of the Australian Carbon Credit Unit framework, including how they applied to farms, he said.

His NSW Labor counterpart Jihad Dib said the Natural Resources Commission report underscored the need to “listen to the science” if the land sector is to play an important role in lowering emissions.

“The only way to guarantee emissions reduction is to legislate the emissions reduction and have a clear and transparent plan to deliver it,” Dib said.

Labor’s net zero emissions bill would create a Net Zero Commission to develop and monitor emissions cuts in NSW. “This bill has passed the upper house, the NSW government should support it in the parliament in the new year,” he said.

Links

• Scott Morrison refuses to commit to net zero emissions target by 2050
• ‘No purpose’ to Coalition’s climate policy after big polluters increase emissions by 1.6m tonnes
• Essential poll: a majority of Coalition voters support a net zero emissions target for 2050
• Australian government granted BHP repeated approval to increase carbon emissions
• Trent Zimmerman backs net zero emissions target but foresees more Coalition infighting
• Q&A recap: business council calls for legislated target of net zero emissions by 2050
• Climate crisis: Australian businesses back net zero carbon emissions by 2050
• Atlassian billionaire to announce net zero emissions target at UN climate summit

(AU SMH) Tenants And Apartment Owners To Benefit From New Solar Power Scheme

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

The third of Australian households now locked out of solar power because they are renters or lack suitable roof-space for solar cells could soon save money and cut greenhouse gas emissions under a shared solar power ownership model.

A “solar garden” being installed on the rooftop of North Coast Community Housing in 2019.

In Lismore an alliance of community groups raised money to have 35.5 kilowatts of solar cells installed on the roof of the offices of North Coast Community Housing, with the extra cash from excess power generated being returned to tenants and community groups such as Brunswick Marine Rescue.

Each of the households who were part of the scheme received a credit of about $580 on their annual power bill last year.

That relatively small so-called “solar garden” will be dwarfed by a second project soon to built on farmland at Grong Grong, in the Riverina, where people will be able to purchase “plots” in a 1 megawatt solar garden, an installation large enough to supply power to about 333 homes.

Those who buy plots in what will be known as the Haystacks solar garden can expect to pay between $4000 and $4200 for a 3KW virtual plot, a price that is likely to be slightly cheaper than installing a similar-sized unit on their own roof.

Felicity Stening, managing director of Enova Community Energy, the energy retailer linked to the two solar gardens, says a similar model has worked well in the United States but has not yet taken off in Australia, in part due to regulations that have not kept up with new ownership models.

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“It took a number of years just to have the ATO recognise that the credit on the solar power bills should be GST free,” she said.

But she added that while Australia has the world’s largest uptake of domestic solar power, about 30 per cent of the nation’s households don’t have ready access to suitable roof space for their own solar panels.

Some live in apartments, others are tenants. Kristy Walters of Community Power Agency said some people want access to solar but do not want to cut trees down that shade and cool their homes.

A survey published on Tuesday by Energy Consumers Australia shows interest is high in new models of community ownership of solar power systems.

The survey, which has been assessing public sentiment over consumer energy issues twice a year for six years, found 55 per cent of all consumers said they were interested in buying power from a local community solar garden, and 71 per cent of family households expressed interest in doing so.

Labor’s energy plan, released earlier this month, includes a commitment to co-invest $100 million to support the creation of 85 solar banks, which would operate akin to the solar gardens.

Labor says the policy could allow more than 25,000 households to share in the benefits of solar power through a co-operative ownership model.

The Energy Consumers Australia survey, conducted by Essential Research, found that as energy prices stabilised over the past year, general satisfaction with energy services improved.

It found 82 per cent of household and small business electricity consumers were satisfied with their service, up 4 per cent from December 2020, and 67 per cent of households said they were satisfied with the value for money offered by their electricity service, up 31 per cent since the survey’s low point of December 2017.

“We’ve seen consumer confidence and positivity around energy rising steadily since 2017 and that has continued in the past year,” Energy Consumers Australia chief executive Lynne Gallagher said.

She said the influx of renewable energy into our system, paired with greater monitoring and enforcement powers for the ACCC, had brought down prices and consumers had noticed the improvement.

But she added that the survey showed consumers wanted more options and more creative thinking about how they and their neighbours might generate and store energy as a net-zero future approaches.

Links

• (AU SMH) NSW’s New England Renewable Energy Zone Sparks Flurry Of Interest
• (AU ABC) Study Finds Green Roofs Make Solar Panels More Efficient
• (AU The Guardian) Solar Power In Australia Outstrips Coal-Fired Electricity For First Time
• (New Yorker) Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap
• (Carbon Tracker) The Sky’s The Limit: Solar And Wind Energy Potential Is 100 Times As Much As Global Energy Demand
• New Report Hails The Decade Of Renewables As 2020 Hits Capacity Record
• 8 Reasons Why The Political Argument Against Climate Action Is Wrong

Alan Kohler: Politicians Are Failing Us On Climate Change. They Must Do This Instead

New Daily - Alan Kohler

Governments must prepare the country for the effects of climate change, writes Alan Kohler. Photo: TND

Author Alan Kohler writes twice a week for The New Daily. He is also editor in chief of Eureka Report and finance presenter on ABC News.

The only worthwhile 2030 political emissions reduction target is the Greens’ 75 per cent, which is more or less impossible.

So the main task of government from here should be to prepare the country for the effects of global warming.

Doing something to try to prevent it is important, but secondary.

In 2009, the then Department of Climate Change prepared a “first pass” assessment of the risks to Australia’s coasts, which was the only thing the government has ever produced about climate change risks.

It needs to be updated and extended to all risks, so we all know what we’re going to be in for.

Whenever the Greens’ target is mentioned, it’s dismissed as “extreme” and “radical”, and when lined up against the LNP’s 26 to 28 per cent, Labor’s 43 per cent and everybody else’s 50 per cent, it does look to be both of those things.

The trouble is that these political targets have nothing to do with science, and it’s clear that politics – both democratic and autocratic – is incapable of dealing effectively with climate change.

As Labor climate change spokesman Chris Bowen put it at the National Press Club: “Our target of 43 per cent emissions reductions over the years to 2030 is ambitious and achievable.”

By which he means it looks relatively ambitious and is politically achievable. Why 43? Because it sounds better than 26 to 28, a bit less ambitious than their previous 45, and more achievable than 50 or, God forbid, 75.

The problem with all of these numbers is that greenhouse gases, both carbon dioxide and methane, stay in the atmosphere, so the best way to look at emissions is cumulative, not year by year, since they accumulate.

Led by Adam Bandt, the Greens have an emissions reduction target of 75 per cent by 2030. Photo: AAP

Our carbon budget

The annual emissions targets everybody is arguing about are just a way of achieving a cumulative number that might be consistent with preserving our way of life.

So far, 1.6 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide have been put into the atmosphere since 1751, which has warmed the planet by an average of about 1 degree centigrade above the average temperature of 1850 to 1900. It’s all still there.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has produced a range of possible budgets to keep further warming to 1.5 and 2 degrees from here.

For a 50 per cent chance of 2 degrees, it’s 1350 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of carbon dioxide; for 67 per cent it’s 1150 GtCO2; and for 83 per cent it’s 900 GtCO2.

For a 50 per cent chance of 1.5 degrees, it’s 500GtCO2; for 67 per cent it’s 400; and for an 83 per cent chance it’s 300.

It’s a wide range with a variety of probabilities for us to choose from, but to keep it simple for policymakers they came up with a “net zero by 2050” target to aim at after the Paris meeting in 2015, in line with the 67 per cent probability of 2 degrees of warming.

By the way, an outfit called the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change has a fairly frightening clock ticking down for both 2 degrees and 1.5 degrees, showing 1071 and 321 GtCO2 to go, respectively.

Catastrophic warming

In Glasgow this year, the thinking shifted from 2 degrees to 1.5 degrees because it’s felt that 2 degrees would still be catastrophic.

The current 1 degree of warming is bad enough, and the frequency of extreme weather is not a linear progression with the increase in temperature: The difference between 1 and 1.5 degrees is greater than 50 per cent.

The general 2050 net-zero target was unchanged in Glasgow, but the focus shifted to 2030 so that the task in the next 20 years wouldn’t be too great.

So everybody agreed to come back next year with a more ambitious target for 2030; the Australia government signed that, but then said it wouldn’t deliver a higher target.

It’s also likely that the focus will now shift to carbon budgets rather than annual emissions.

The last official government estimate of Australia’s share of the global budget was published by the Climate Change Authority (CCA) in 2014 – before the Clean Energy Act was repealed in July that year and any further calculations were shut down (while keeping the CCA barely alive).

According to the CCA then, Australia’s carbon emissions budget for 2 degrees of warming for the period 2013 to 2050 was 10.1 million tonnes. It’s probably a bit more now.

The way we’re going, it will be spent by 2033, not 2050.

This year a group called the Climate Targets Panel, brought together by former Liberal Party leader John Hewson, updated Australia’s budget for 1.5 degrees of warming, from 2021.

It’s 3.5 billion tonnes, and will be spent by 2028 at the current rate of 498.9 million tonnes per year (reported by the Department of Industry’s in its latest National Greenhouse Gas Inventory for June 2021).

To keep global warming to 1.5 degrees, and therefore a budget of 3.5 million tonnes, Australia’s emissions would have to be cut by about 75 per cent by 2030, or to 125 million tonnes, which is the reason for the Greens’ target.

But is that even possible?

Basically, it would require all coal-fired electricity generation to be shut down over the next two or three years and replaced with solar, wind and batteries and most transport and household heating and cooking to switch to electricity, away from gas, very quickly indeed.

It may be theoretically possible, but would cost the government a multiple of Labor’s $24 billion Powering Australia plan for a 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030.

That means the real problem for Australia in combating climate change is that the budget deficit to be revealed next week is about $100 billion and government debt is more than $850 billion because of the pandemic.

The latest IPCC report said bushfires would become more intense and frequent. Photo: AAP

When politics fails

The spending and sacrifice required for 1.5 degrees is politically impossible, and 2 degrees is close to impossible.

Something similar applies globally.

Governments everywhere are mired in debt while pledging to cut emissions to net zero by between 2030 and 2060, mostly 2050.

Some, like Europe, are using emissions trading schemes to force the private sector to pay for it, while others, like Australia, are planning to use taxpayers’ money.

But the average global carbon price of about $4.50 per tonne is way too low to have any serious impact, and most government spending proposals are hopelessly inadequate for the simple reason that the pandemic has emptied the coffers (unless governments around the world have an unlikely conversion to Modern Monetary Theory).

Ross Garnaut devoted a chapter of his 2008 Climate Change Review to adaptation, starting with these words: “Mitigation will come too late to avoid substantial damage from climate change.

“Some may expect that government can, and should, protect the community from climate change by implementing the right strategy, program or initiative to allow Australians to maintain established lifestyles. This is not a realistic expectation …”

I remember thinking at the time that this was a big statement.

Since then, there has been nothing from government about what to expect, apart from that “first pass” on the coastal impact from the Department of Climate Change and endless optimism about how we’re meeting and beating our targets and everything will therefore be OK.

As Garnaut wrote 13 years ago: This is not a realistic expectation.

Links

• (AU New Daily) Alan Kohler: We Must Not Let Scott Morrison Get Away With Do-Nothing Climate Plan 
• (AU New Daily) Alan Kohler: Politicians Must Stop Lying About The Cost Of Climate Change
• (AU New Daily) Alan Kohler: The Climate Change Panic Button Is Coming 
• (AU New Daily) Alan Kohler: The Coalition’s Climate Change Argument Is Really Just About Freeloading 
• (AU) Alan Kohler: The Climate Spin Can’t Go On Forever. Net Zero Must Be Our Aim
• Alan Kohler: Morrison has made Australia a nation of technology freeloaders
• Alan Kohler: The alarming consequences of Canberra’s climate capers
• Alan Kohler: Australia’s net-zero target must include legislation
• Alan Kohler: The alarming consequences of Canberra’s climate capers
• VIDEO: Alan Kohler explains what's driving demand for electric vehicles

(Kenya CBC) Domino Effect

CBC News - Margaret Evans

Climate change is tilting the balance of nature for Kenya’s Lake Nakuru, setting off a whole house of cards in a place that once had a reputation of unparalleled beauty.

Jean-François Bisson/CBC

There is a strange new world taking shape in a community called Mwariki on the shores of Lake Nakuru, just a few hours’ drive north of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

Shirtless young men can be glimpsed through a forest of dead trees, wading through chest-deep water with fishing nets trailing behind them.

Squadrons of pelicans float along what used to be streets in a slow-motion display of synchronized swimming, dipping their heads under water as one to scoop up dinner in their pouches.

And cormorants perch on the walls of gutted houses half underwater.

Lake Nakuru is one of a string of lakes in the Great Rift Valley where climate change is blamed for unprecedented rainfall over the past decade and flooding that has displaced thousands.

“When I came here I was very happy,” 51-year-old Jane Wanjiru said as she was seated in the front of a boat taking us from the new shoreline to the home she lost to rising water in the spring of 2020.

“Because it was mine,” she said. “I opened my own gate. My children were playing in my own compound.

“We thought [then] after six months or three months the water will go back.”

But it stayed, sinking her dreams.

Jane Wanjiru, left, and her friend, Peninah Muthoni, are still waiting for government help more than a year after their homes were submerged in floods that affected hundreds of families near Lake Nakuru, Kenya. (Margaret Evans/CBC)

For Wanjiru, a single mother, the house represented her climb out of a slum in nearby Nakuru Town and the single room she shared there with her two daughters.

She was able to afford it by joining a savings group supported by an NGO called Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Federation of Slum Dwellers). It helps make loans more accessible to the urban poor.

Wanjiru is devastated by what’s happened.

“When you come from very low and then you get something that you feel you are proud of it, and then a disaster like this comes, you feel very bad. Very bad.”

Especially when there’s little, if any, hope of compensation in sight. If government money does arrive, it will likely go toward repairing infrastructure such as downed power lines and a sewage treatment plant also under water.

How flooding and rising water levels have displaced wildlife and affected tourism at Lake Nakuru. 59sec

In the same part of Mwariki, 173 households lost their properties, most like Wanjiru having saved for years, pooling their resources in order to buy a plot of land they would divide between them.

“We are facing a lot of problems,” Joseph Oyawa, assistant chief for the area affected by the flooding, said as he was sitting in a small hut with a tin roof and rain pounding down on it.

“We don’t have houses for them to stay. It’s a problem of housing,” he said. “Most of them were not employed. They were just casual labourers.”

Joseph Oyawa, assistant chief of Mwariki Parkview, says the area is facing a lot of problems. (Jean-François Bisson/CBC)

The influx of young men from other parts of Kenya who are looking for a livelihood and hoping to fish has brought its own set of social problems, he said, adding to housing problems.

Oyawa remembers the days when Lake Nakuru almost ran dry in the early 1970s.

Locals say over the past decade, it’s grown from about 40 square kilometres to 70. And it’s not just humans suffering.

“The [wildlife] reserve to the south, they’re complaining there’s not space enough for the habitat of the animals there because of the swelling of the lake,” said Oyawa.

Young men have felt emboldened to try fishing in the expanded Lake Nakuru but some studies indicate the fish they’re catching have elevated levels of heavy metals. (Margaret Evans/CBC)

The top of an electric fence that once kept lions and hippos and rhinos away from the community can be seen peeking above the water opposite Wanjiru’s submerged house.

Lake Nakuru National Park, recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site in 2011 for its biodiversity, used to encompass the entire lake. But it’s now expanded beyond the park’s borders.

It’s one reason so many young men feel emboldened to try their hand at fishing. The lines about where legal fishing is allowed have blurred. In the past, the Kenyan Wildlife Service limited it within the park.

“Those youth have absolutely zero source of livelihood,” said local ecologist Jackson Raini. Three new species of fish have appeared in the lake in recent years, one theory being that they’d been swept in from nearby pond fisheries.

“But some studies we’ve conducted indicate that the fish have a fairly elevated concentration of heavy metals especially chromium and lead, which are above the World Health Organization standards,” he said.

Local ecologist Jackson Raini says what’s happening at Lake Nakuru is an example of the kind of chain reaction climate change can set off. (Jean-François Bisson/CBC)

The high levels of metal used in tannery industries in Nakuru Town find their way to the lake even when treated properly, according to Raini.

And hippos and flamingos have been drawn to the damaged sewage treatment plant, and so closer to human settlements, by algae growing in the sewer line.

Raini said what’s happening in and around Lake Nakuru is an example of the kind of chain reaction climate change can set off.

Why don’t the flamingos come to Lake Nakuru the way they used to? 1min

He started working at the lake in the early 1990s and stayed because of all it had to offer. It is recognized by an international treaty signed in the 1970s as a wetland of international importance.

“Just bursting [with] life. Millions of flamingos, you know, flying. Pelicans, cormorants, the kind of variety that was simply inspiring,” said Raini.

But the flooding has changed the ecology of the lake, with runoff and rains diluting its salinity and affecting the algae flamingos like to feed on.

“This algae disappeared almost completely,” he said. “And that really interfered with the basic food chain. So the flamingos have reduced in numbers from the millions that we used to see earlier to now where you just see a few hundred.”

Massive deforestation caused by industry upstream has contributed, he said, and a shifting of the tectonic plates in the Rift Valley is thought to be possibly impacting groundwater levels.

But like many scientists, Raini said climate change is the amplifier, changing destinies.

The Nakuru Lake National Park is the second most important in terms of tourism dollars in Kenya, but it’s also having to adapt to a new reality.

Safari roads around the lake have been washed out and available habitat for wild animals like lions, baboons, giraffes and rhinos has shrunk.

Raini said projections suggest that the next 10 years in this part of Kenya are set to get even wetter.

“We have seen that the groundwater levels have risen by eight to 10 metres. So that means that the catchment area is super saturated, that any more additional water we get from the effects of climate change is not likely to percolate. It’s actually likely to spread further and cause more damage, especially at local communities.”

Safari roads around Lake Nakuru have been washed out and available habitat for wild animals like baboons, water buffalo and giraffes has shrunk. (Jean-François Bisson/CBC)

Extreme weather events are already displacing around 20 million people a year, according to the United Nations, more than those being displaced by violence or conflict.

Help responding and adapting to the changing climate has been one of the main demands from developing countries including Kenya at successive UN climate conferences like the one in Glasgow in November.

The connection is not lost on those in Mwariki still hoping someone somewhere might care about what they’ve lost.

“This thing is happening all across the world,” said David Kahoro Kiragu, a local elder who lost his small subsistence farm in the flooding last year.

“But we are blaming people because they have interfered with the environment, especially even the other [Western or developed] countries because of industries and all of this.”

Sixty-year-old Kiragu and his family were initially housed by a church in a classroom. But when school started, they had to move and they’re now accepting charity from a friend of the family.

“We are actually internally displaced and we are suffering in one way or another,” said Kiragu.

Both Kiragu and Wanjiru say they’ve been ignored by their own government at the county and federal levels, and both say they feel too old to start over again in such harsh conditions.

“No one talks to us,” said Wanjiru. “Now we have become hopeless.”

'We are blaming people because they have interfered with the environment,' says local elder David Kahoro Kiragu, front, referring in particular to developed countries and industry. (Margaret Evans/CBC)

One local official at Nakuru County’s government offices in Nakuru Town said they would like the national government to buy the flooded properties to compensate those who’ve lost everything and then to hand that land over to the Lake Nakuru National Park.

But there is no suggestion that is likely to happen any time soon.

Storks perch atop the roof of a home submerged by flooding near Lake Nakuru. (Margaret Evans/CBC)

“There’s a challenge because there’s no money,” assistant chief Oyawa said, sitting in his small hut. “So the government must sit down so that they can get that money to buy that.” But he, too, is looking to the outside world and the countries making promises about helping poorer countries already being buffeted by climate change.

“They need to be told that there are some people on the ground suffering.”

Links

• A Nairobi slum vulnerable to flooding is engineering its own climate solutions and not waiting for the West
• Kenya floods have killed nearly 200, displaced thousands
• Climate change in Kenya - Wikipedia
• USAID Kenya Climate Change Fact Sheet
• Kenya Climate Change Country Profile
• Climate Risk Profile: Kenya
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions Factsheet: Kenya

(AU The Conversation) The End Of Coal Is Coming 3 Times Faster Than Expected. Governments Must Accept It And Urgently Support A ‘Just Transition’

The Conversation - Tim Nelson | Joel Gilmore

Shutterstock

Authors Tim Nelson is Associate Professor of Economics, Griffith University Joel Gilmore is Associate Professor, Griffith University

Coal is likely to be completely gone from Victoria’s electricity system by 2032 with most other parts of Australia not far behind, a report from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) declared last week.

The report, called the 2022 Integrated System Plan, confirmed what many of us in energy policy have long known: the end of coal is coming, and the pace may take some industries and governments by surprise.

The Integrated System Plan (ISP) is effectively the planning “blueprint” the market operator publishes to help industry and policy makers assess how Australia’s electricity system might evolve. It’s an incredibly important document for guiding where and when investment is needed to unlock new renewable resources to meet demand.

Given ISP’s prediction for the rapid closure of coal-fired power stations, it’s critical governments don’t stick their heads in the sand. Continuing to deny the impending end of coal-fired generation is simply not in the interest of coal workers and their communities, who urgently need support.

What is AEMO predicting?

The most important aspect of the ISP is that what used to be called the “step change” has now become the “central scenario”. For the first time, this central scenario is consistent with Australia’s commitment under the Paris Agreement and limiting global temperature rise to under 2℃.

The ISP is forecasting that huge volumes of coal will be retired in the next ten years, including all brown coal and two-thirds of black coal, and significant investments in new renewables and “firming technologies” (such as batteries, gas, and pumped hydro) will take their place.

‘Firming’ technologies like pumped hydro are critical to ensure Australians have electricity when wind and solar aren’t available. Shutterstock

Around 14 gigawatts (GW) of coal is now assumed to be exiting the National Electricity Market this decade – more than three times the amount of coal retirements the industry has announced.

Effectively, AEMO is saying (yet again) that the incumbent industry is likely to be caught by surprise by the speed of the transition.

It’s not just an explosion of renewables investment that AEMO predicts. Around 9GW of gas-fired generation and an extra 620GW hours of storage (provided by batteries or pumped hydro) will be required to provide backup generation capacity when solar and wind are unavailable.

Electricity demand is expected to surge out to 2050 and will double to at least 350 terrawatt hours. This includes from electric vehicles uptake, converting natural gas heating and hot water to electric in homes, and electrifying many industrial processes such as low-emissions steel and aluminium.

All these developments will require a major overhaul of the grid. The ISP states around A$12.5 billion in transmission spending needs to occur to unlock $29 billion in investment benefits.

Why is coal being left behind?

There are two main drivers for this significant substitution of coal for new technologies.

First, the cost of these technologies continues to fall rapidly and consumers are voting with their feet. Some of Australia’s largest and most iconic businesses are increasingly buying 100% of their energy from renewable resources, including Woolworths, BHP and Coles.

Second, state governments have filled the void left by the lack of a nationally consistent energy and climate policy, and are now implementing ambitious policies to drive the uptake of renewable energy and firming.

The most ambitious of these policies is the NSW government’s 12GW energy roadmap, which effectively prepares for the retirement of ageing coal-fired power stations by facilitating investment in new capacity.

Electricity demand is expected to surge out to 2050. Shutterstock

So what should governments be doing?

It is critical governments focus on a “just transition” to these new technologies, and provide support to communities and workers most impacted, such as those in the Hunter and Latrobe Valleys.

Structural adjustment policies such as job placements, relocation assistance, or financial support to transition local economies are vital to secure opportunities for these regions. Retraining ahead of closures will help workers transition to new or related industries.

Everyone who uses energy must be afforded access to the clean energy transition. At present, the biggest barrier to participating in the solar and battery revolution is owning your own home.

Governments have been absent from this important policy debate. Australian low-income and rental households should be prioritised in any future policies that support adoption of solar and battery storage.

Rental homes have been left out of policy debates on renewables. Shutterstock

Governments must also ensure the private sector (rather than consumers) wear the risk of poor investments. Governments are increasingly taking on very significant risk (on behalf of consumers) through underwriting renewable energy and firming investments of large multi-national energy businesses.

Some economists (including us) have been providing alternative models for governments to achieve the same objectives, but with greater focus on reducing risks to consumers.

Given the surge in households and businesses voluntarily buying renewable energy, it’s important consumers know what they’re getting. The Clean Energy Regulator is doing some interesting work in this space by developing an emissions and renewable energy transparency register as part of the national greenhouse and energy reporting framework.

If governments really wanted to help, they could introduce a carbon price. Such a policy is considered political poison, but a carbon price would result in us reaching this future in a much less costly and more orderly way.

The end of the coal age

The ISP is forecasting a better and cleaner future. Australia has great opportunities from moving beyond the coal age and into the age of efficient renewable energy, as we’re blessed with some of the best renewable resources on the planet

With global leaders increasingly focused on rapidly reducing emissions, we have a lot to gain through new industries, such as green hydrogen and mineral processing. Both major political parties at the national level have targets that don’t really push beyond what AEMO now thinks is the status quo.

The stone age didn’t end because of a lack of stones. And the coal age is ending despite an abundance of it – whether governments believe it or not.

Links

• Coal plants are closing faster than expected. Governments can keep the exit orderly
• Solar curtailment is emerging as a new challenge to overcome as Australia dashes for rooftop solar
• Economists back carbon price, say benefits of net-zero outweigh costs
• Labor’s 2030 climate target betters the Morrison government, but Australia must go much further, much faster
• Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) Draft 2022 Integrated System Plan December 2021 For the National Electricity Market (pdf)
• AGL hit by huge losses as it scrambles to catch up with switch from baseload
• Renewables still the cheapest new-build power in Australia
• Business Renewables Centre Australia State of the Market Report 2020