(UNEP) 10 Ways You Can Help Fight The Climate Crisis

United Nations Environment Programme

Photo: Shutterstock / 16 Dec 2021

United Nations Environment Programme UNEP is at the front in support of the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the global temperature rise well below 2°C, and aiming - to be safe - for 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels. To do this, UNEP has developed a Six-Sector Solution. The Six Sector Solution is a roadmap to reducing emissions across sectors in line with the Paris Agreement commitments and in pursuit of climate stability. The six sectors identified are Energy; Industry; Agriculture & Food; Forests & Land Use; Transport; and Buildings & Cities.

The evidence is irrefutable: unless we act immediately to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we will not be able to stave off the worst consequences of climate change.

The world is already 1.2°C warmer than pre-industrial times and every fraction of a degree counts. Research shows that with 2°C of global warming we will have more intense droughts and more devastating floods, more wildfires and more storms.

As United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said at the recent UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), “Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread. We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe. It is time to go into emergency mode — or our chance of reaching net-zero will itself be zero.”

The outlook can seem depressing. But the good news is that there is a lot we can still do as individuals to change this narrative.

“The climate emergency demands action from all of us. We need to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and everyone has a role to play,” said Niklas Hagelberg, UNEP’s Climate Change Coordinator. “We, as individuals, must change our consumption habits and pressure those who represent us – our employers, our politicians – to move rapidly to a low-carbon world.”

Here are 10 ways you can be part of the climate solution.

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Photo: Unsplash / Becca Tapert

1. Spread the word

Encourage your friends, family and co-workers to reduce their carbon pollution. Join a global movement like Count Us In, which aims to inspire 1 billion people to take practical steps and challenge their leaders to act more boldly on climate. Organizers of the platform say that if 1 billion people took action, they could reduce as much as 20 per cent of global carbon emissions. Or you could sign up to the UN’s #ActNow campaign on climate change and sustainability and add your voice to this critical global debate.

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Photo: Unsplash / Callum Shaw

2. Keep up the political pressure

The climate emergency demands action from all of us. We need to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and everyone has  a role to play. Niklas Hagelberg, UNEP’s Climate Change Coordinator

Lobby local politicians and businesses to support efforts to cut emissions and reduce carbon pollution. Count Us In has some handy tips for how to do this. Pick an environmental issue you care about, decide on a specific request for change and then try to arrange a meeting with your local representative. It might seem intimidating but your voice deserves to be heard. If humanity is to succeed in tackling the climate emergency, politicians must be part of the solution. It’s up to all of us to keep up with the pressure.

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Photo: Unsplash / Coen van de Broek

3. Transform your transport

Transport accounts for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions and across the world, many governments are implementing policies to decarbonize travel. You can get a head start: leave your car at home and walk or cycle whenever possible. If the distances are too great, choose public transport, preferably electric options. If you must drive, offer to carpool with others so that fewer cars are on the road. Get ahead of the curve and buy an electric car. Reduce the number of long-haul flights you take.

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Photo: Unsplash / Jeremy Bezanger

4. Rein in your power use

If you can, switch to a zero-carbon or renewable energy provider. Install solar panels on your roof. Be more efficient: turn your heating down a degree or two, if possible. Switch off appliances and lights when you are not using them and better yet buy the most efficient products in the first place (hint: this will save you money!). Insulate your loft or roof: you’ll be warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer and save some money too.

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Photo: Unsplash / Jo Sonn

5. Tweak your diet

Eat more plant-based meals – your body and the planet will thank you. Today, around 60 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is used for livestock grazing and people in many countries are consuming more animal-sourced food than is healthy. Plant-rich diets can help reduce chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer.

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Photo: Unsplash / Artur Rutkowski

6. Shop local and buy sustainable

To reduce your food’s carbon footprint, buy local and seasonal foods. You’ll be helping small businesses and farms in your area and reducing fossil fuel emissions associated with transport and cold chain storage. Sustainable agriculture uses up to 56 per cent less energy, creates 64 per cent fewer emissions and allows for greater levels of biodiversity than conventional farming. Go one step further and try growing your own fruit, vegetables and herbs. You can plant them in a garden, on a balcony or even on a window sill. Set up a community garden in your neighbourhood to get others involved.

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Photo: Unsplash / Charles Deluvio

7. Don’t waste food

One-third of all food produced is either lost or wasted. According to UNEP’s Food Waste Index Report 2021, people globally waste 1 billion tonnes of food each year, which accounts for around 8-10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Avoid waste by only buying what you need. Take advantage of every edible part of the foods you purchase. Measure portion sizes of rice and other staples before cooking them, store food correctly (use your freezer if you have one), be creative with leftovers, share extras with your friends and neighbours and contribute to a local food-sharing scheme. Make compost out of inedible remnants and use it to fertilize your garden. Composting is one of the best options for managing organic waste while also reducing environmental impacts.

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Photo: Pexels / Teona Swift

8. Dress (climate) smart

The fashion industry accounts for 8-10 per cent of global carbon emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined – and ‘fast fashion’ has created a throwaway culture that sees clothes quickly end up in landfills. But we can change this. Buy fewer new clothes and wear them longer. Seek out sustainable labels and use rental services for special occasions rather than buying new items that will only be worn once. Recycle pre-loved clothes and repair when necessary.

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Photo: Unsplash / Geran de Klerk

9. Plant trees

Every year approximately 12 million hectares of forest are destroyed and this deforestation, together with agriculture and other land use changes, is responsible for roughly 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. We can all play a part in reversing this trend by planting trees, either individually or as part of a collective. For example, the Plant-for-the-Planet initiative allows people to sponsor tree-planting around the world.

Check out this UNEP guide to see what else you can do as part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a global drive to halt the degradation of land and oceans, protect biodiversity, and rebuild ecosystems.

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Photo: Unsplash / RawFilm 

10. Focus on planet-friendly investments

Individuals can also spur change through their savings and investments by choosing financial institutions that do not invest in carbon-polluting industries. This sends a clear signal to the market and already many financial institutions are offering more ethical investments, allowing you to use your money to support causes you believe in and avoid those you don’t. You can ask your financial institution about their responsible banking policies and find out how they rank in independent research.

Links

• 16 ways to take action on climate
• COP26 ends with agreement but falls short on climate action
• Climate Action Note - data you need to know
• Emissions Gap Report 2021
• Food Waste Index 2021
• Act Now: the UN campaign for individual action
• Count Us In
• COP15 on biodiversity is our chance to get to a world we want
• What does COP26 mean for adaptation?

(AU APS) Public Understandings Of Climate Change

Australian Psychological Society

Psychological research on risk perception explores how people perceive, appraise and understand environmental problems and how concerned people are (or not), and how motivated they are (or not) to take action. This is what we refer to as the ‘public’s understanding of climate change’.

 

The more we know about how people are feeling, thinking and doing in relation to climate change, then the more we are able to help them respond in useful ways – in ways that both reduce the threats of climate change as well as prepare people to adapt to the changes that cannot be avoided.

Key Points

• How people make sense of facts does not simply follow from rational interpretations of scientific evidence, and there are number of psychological ways we try to manage a sense of risk.
  
  
• Humans are prone to exaggerate some risks and minimise others. We tend to exaggerate risks that are spectacular, beyond personal control, much discussed, highly visible, or that affect them personally, and are imposed by a clear enemy.
  
  
• We tend to downplay risks that are common, familiar, invisible, long-term, gradual, natural, affect others not self, and lack any clear ‘bad guy’. Unfortunately, climate change is often described in these terms:
  
  
  • It is caused by commonplace, natural, invisible gases (although excessive amounts of these are emitted by human behaviour, which is the major problem).
  • It is seen as slow moving (although many would actually argue that it is taking place at breakneck speed).
  • It is often described in abstract, scientific terms, which makes it harder for people to engage with.
    
    
• Climate change can often seem distant in space. Most people tend to see the worst environmental problems as being global or far away from them. However, people’s feelings of responsibility for the environment are greatest at the neighbourhood level.
  
  
• People can also see climate change as distant in time. The worst impacts are far off in time so it still feels distant from everyday concerns.
  
  
• Climate change can also feel socially distant and not a problem that individuals can solve. As a global problem that requires global solutions, it is easy to think that world leaders, governments, and multinationals should solve it, not us.
  
  
• The ways people see the risks associated with climate change are significantly influenced by their values, beliefs, worldviews and cultural identity, which gives rise to the confirmation bias. We automatically look for information that confirms what we already think, want or feel, and filter away opposing information. People who are already concerned about climate change, for example, will read more news that confirms it. People who don’t believe in it, or who are heavily invested in a world governed by fossil fuels, might prefer news that questions climate science.
  
  
• System justification is the tendency to be resistant to changes to the ‘system’ we are familiar with, defend the status quo and to see the way things are now as right and just. People engaging in system justification are likely to selectively attend to information about climate change that does not threaten their current way of life.
  
  
• People often experience cognitive dissonance when what they know (e.g. that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change) conflicts with what they do (driving, flying, etc). If it’s hard to change behaviour (because your lifestyle is car dependent), then it’s often easier to change your thinking, and tell yourself things like: ‘Well, compared to China, our emissions in Australia aren’t really that big. What I do won’t make much difference.’ This is faulty thinking, because our huge per capita contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions make an enormous impact on climate change.

Links

• Resources for advocacy on climate change
• Motivating sustainability
• The psychology of climate change denial
• Coping and adapting to climate change
• Climate change and health
• Climate change communication
• Getting involved, taking action
• Environment, psychology and health news
• Climate change empowerment handbook
• Psychology and the climate crisis – Advancing peace, security and justice
• Young people and the climate crisis
• Insights into public perceptions of the science of climate change 
• The hopeful space between denial and despair: Three psychology professors discuss climate change
• Communicating climate change to the Australian public: Avoidance of complexity

(New Yorker) 2021 In Review: The Year In Climate

The New Yorker - Bill McKibben

A summer that really scared scientists.

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

Author Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s newsletter on the environment.

This year, a lot of the things we’ve come to expect with the climate crisis happened: there were heavy rains (New York City beat its rainfall record twice in eleven days); there was a big global conference (this one in Glasgow) with modest results; the price of renewable energy fell some more; and a record amount of solar power and wind power was produced, but not at a pace fast enough to catch up with climate change.

Raging wildfires produced plumes of smoke that spread around the world; President Joe Biden tried to free up a lot of money for climate work and, so far, Senator Joe Manchin has prevented him from doing so.

But some unexpected things happened, too—such as December tornadoes and windstorms, which have devastated parts of the country, and which are increasingly linked to warming.

The most unexpected event by far, though—the thing that was truly off the charts—came in June. Toward the end of the month, torrential rains across China created a lot of atmospheric moisture, which the jet stream sucked out over the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the remnants of a heat wave in the American Southwest moved north. The two weather events met over the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, forming a giant dome of high pressure that diverted moisture to both the north and the south. Gradually, over a period of several days, the core of the high-pressure area freed itself of clouds, allowing the sun’s rays to blast down during the days immediately after the solstice.

The result was the most remarkable heat wave in recorded history. On Sunday, June 27th, Canada broke its all-time heat record, of a hundred and thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, when the temperature reached nearly a hundred and sixteen degrees in Lytton, a community of around two hundred and fifty residents on the Fraser River, in southern British Columbia.

The next day, that record was broken, again in Lytton, when the temperature hit a hundred and eighteen degrees. On Tuesday, it was smashed again, when the temperature in the town soared to a hundred and twenty-one degrees. On Wednesday, Lytton, now parched dry, burned to the ground in a wildfire; only a few buildings were left standing.

Breaking a long-standing record is hard (Canada’s old high-temperature record dated to 1937); surpassing it by eight degrees is, in theory, statistically impossible. It was hotter in Canada that day than on any day ever recorded in Florida, or in Europe, or in South America.

“There has never been a national heat record in a country with an extensive period of record and a multitude of observation sites that was beaten by 7°F to 8°F,” the weather historian Christopher C. Burt said.

Records of almost equally incredible magnitude came in from across the region. Quillayute, Washington, broke its all-time temperature high by eleven degrees, at a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, even though the town is just three miles from the Pacific. It was over a hundred and three at Fort Smith, in the Northwest Territories, beating an eighty-year-old record.

According to Maximiliano Herrera, a weather historian who maintains a Web site devoted to unprecedented temperatures, “the number of all times records beaten by more than 5C in this heat wave is greater than all cases worldwide together” in the past eighty-five years.

Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, meteorologists who blog for a Yale climate Web site, wrote, “Never in the century-plus history of world weather observation have so many all-time heat records fallen by such a large margin.”

The reason, of course, is the climate crisis: within days, researchers had demonstrated—with the modelling techniques of the new attribution science—that global warming had made such a heat wave a hundred and fifty times more likely.

Essentially, this couldn’t have happened on the Earth we used to know. James Hansen, the planet’s most important climatologist, put it this way when I talked to him last month: “We’ve been expecting extreme events. But what happened in Canada was unusually extreme.”

The reason all this is so frightening is that it suggests fundamental parts of the way that the planet works have begun to shift, allowing for physical phenomena we’ve never seen before. It suggests, that is, that the predictions provided by global-climate models—which are frightening enough—may be too optimistic.

The impossible heat in that week seems to be connected with the increasingly unstable operation of the jet stream, which in turn seems to be connected with the rapid melt of the Arctic Ocean—as the temperature difference between the equator and the pole lessens, the jet stream seems to get stuck in odd positions.

Meanwhile, a flood of freshwater from that same melting Arctic seems also to be disrupting the Gulf Stream.

A new study, which was conducted by European scientists and released a few months before the heat dome appeared, strengthened the theory that the immense ocean current—which is a hundred times the flow of the Amazon, and which, like the jet stream, distributes heat poleward—had slowed by roughly fifteen per cent since 1950. We’re breaking really big things.

Scientists have done a good job of calculating how much the world will warm as we increase the amounts of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. They’re pretty confident that, having raised the temperature more than a degree Celsius already, we’re on our way to a planet that will be, on average, three degrees warmer.

That’s if we keep on our current track; the scientists are hopeful that, if we take actions more dramatic than those promised at Glasgow, we might hold that average increase below two degrees.

But researchers are not as confident—especially since the June heat wave—that we really understand how much damage those global averages represent. Scientists are inherently conservative in their predictions.

The world is clearly more fragile than the models have led us to believe. And that’s what was terrifying about 2021.

Links

• (USA National Geographic) Year In Review: 2021's Weather Disasters Brought Home The Reality Of Climate Change
• The Year in Climate | The New Yorker
• Climate change in review: 2021 - YouTube
• 2021 was a remarkable year for Earth's climate
• 2021 in Review: Our Reports on Climate Change
• Articles in 2021 | Nature Climate Change

(The Conversation) How Climate Change And Extreme Weather May Lead To Food Shortages And Escalating Prices

The Conversation - Paul Ekins

The world may soon see more food shortages because of climate change, says an expert. InkDrop/Shutterstock

Author Paul Ekins is Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy, UCL (University College London)

In a world with an increasing human population, climate change may have a serious impact on our ability to grow enough food.

Research from as far back as 2007 found that around 30% of year-to-year fluctuations in tonnes of crops grown per hectare were due to changes in the climate.

It is remarkable under these circumstances that the global agricultural system has managed to remain fairly robust, and that major food shortages have been rare.

On the other hand, food prices in recent decades have become increasingly volatile. While there are many influences on food prices – including crop yield, weather variations, international trade, speculation in food commodity markets, and land management practices – mostly open trading systems have allowed food shortages in some places to be offset by surpluses, and increased production, elsewhere.

Now that the world seems to be moving toward more trade barriers at a time when climate change is intensifying, these stabilising effects may start to fail. Prices could rise sharply, putting pressure on poor countries and on the budgets of poor people in rich countries.

While crop growth per hectare has increased considerably over the last 50 years, recently the rate of this growth has slowed compared to previous decades.

Recent research suggests that up to 30% of the expected increase in growth of European crops has been cancelled out by adverse weather.

But it is worrying that the most pronounced changes tend to be in countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa, that are at high risk of climate impacts on food availability and affordability.

Rising temperatures

This is particularly clear in the case of barley, maize, millet, pulses, rice and wheat. It seems that the countries most at risk of food shortages are also worst affected by rising temperature.

This seems to bear out the finding from the world’s premier climate science advisers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the higher average global temperatures and more extreme weather events associated with climate change will reduce the reliability of food production. The latest IPCC report also supports these conclusions.

Another change noted by the IPCC is how rising heat and rainfall associated with climate change is increasingly degrading land, making soil less productive. This is due to the loss of soil nutrients and organic matter and has negative effects on crop yields.

In addition, accelerating rises in sea levels will compound these negative impacts by increasing saltwater intrusions and permanently flooding crop land.

Cutting the maize crop in South Africa, where climate change poses a high risk to food production. Shutterstock

Recent modelling of soil loss in wheat and maize fields shows large variations between tropical climate regions and regions with a large proportion of flat and dry land, with losses ranging from less than 1 tonne per hectare in central Asia to 100 tonnes per hectare in south-east Asia.

The strong impact of climate and topography on simulated water erosion is clearly shown in the five largest wheat and maize producing countries: in Brazil, China and India, where a large proportion of cropland is in tropical areas, water erosion is relatively high, while in Russia and the United States annual median values are much lower.

However, historically poor management of lands in Europe and the US has been largely remedied through the increased use of chemical fertilisers and irrigation, which has been able to offset a massive amount of soil degradation.

For example, one study has shown that, without fertiliser, US yields of corn over the past 100 years would have fallen from around seven to a little over one tonne per hectare, due to soil quality decreasing. However, fertiliser has enabled yields to be broadly maintained, although at an annual cost to farmers of over half a billion dollars.

Fertiliser and food

These results have worrying implications for poorer parts of the world where soil quality is decreasing, but which do not have the resources to compensate for this with fertilisers. And the results become more worrying still if this is exacerbated by climate change.

Many aspects of land management for food production have changed in recent decades, including growing different crops, or the same crops in different places, in response to increased temperatures.

The overall result of these changes has been greatly increased food yields in many parts of the world, and land managers may be expected to adapt their strategies for changes in the climate.

But if climate change results in simultaneous failure of major crops such as wheat, maize and soybeans in two or more major breadbasket regions (the areas of the world that produce most food) then the risks of price rises making food too expensive in poorer parts of the world could become acute.

Links

• We must adapt quickly to climate change to keep feeding the world
• We throw away a third of the food we grow – here’s what to do about waste
• To what extent does climate change affect food insecurity? What we found in Lesotho
• Why climate change must stay on the news agenda beyond global summits
• Climate explained: how climate change will affect food production and security

Did Climate Change Make That Freak Weather Even Worse?

WIRED - Grace Huckins

When a shocking storm or heat wave happens, attribution scientists are on the case, helping to show the public the real-life effects of global warming.

Photograph: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images

In June 2003, while he was still a graduate student, Noah Diffenbaugh attended a scientific conference with his adviser in Trieste, Italy.

That month, the average daily high temperature there was 88 degrees Fahrenheit; typically, highs in Trieste at that time of year are about 10 degrees cooler.

“People were saying, ‘This is really hot. This is really not what usually happens,’” he recalls.

Diffenbaugh, now a climate scientist at Stanford University, had caught the leading edge of the 2003 heat wave—the hottest European summer since the 16th century. (That record has since been broken multiple times, most recently this past summer.)

It was hard not to link the near-unprecedented temperatures, which are thought to have killed over 70,000 people across Europe, with the inexorable creep of climate change. But back in 2003, no scientist would stand up to make that connection. “‘It’s impossible to ever attribute any particular event to global warming’—that was the predominant public stance at the time,” Diffenbaugh says.

According to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, there were some good reasons for this reticence. Unseasonable weather sometimes happens by chance, and scientists worried that tying weather too closely to climate would allow climate deniers to use cold weather as ammunition.

In 2015, US senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) did just that when he brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in an attempt to disprove climate change.

But, Swain says, the idea that weather and climate can be separated is illusory. “Climate is nothing but weather in aggregate,” he says. The global mean temperature—which, according to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, has already risen by over 1 degree Celsius—is a convenient scientific construct.

Averaging temperature measurements over the entire world helps scientists ignore the random vicissitudes of weather when determining the overall trajectory of climate change.

But it’s not global mean temperature that kills people. People die when floods overwhelm urban infrastructure, or when unheard-of temperatures and humidities persist in specific locations for days on end. “No human, no ecosystem on Earth, will ever experience the global mean temperature,” Swain says.

So in 2004, a group of scientists led by Peter Stott at the United Kingdom’s national weather service decided to quantify the extent to which climate change had contributed to the 2003 heat wave.

“It is an ill-posed question whether the 2003 heat wave was caused, in a simple deterministic sense, by a modification of the external influences on climate,” the group wrote in their subsequent paper, “because almost any such weather event might have occurred by chance in an unmodified climate.”

Instead, they asked a different question: How much more likely had greenhouse gas emissions made the deadly heat wave?

Using climate models, the team simulated what the world would look like with and without those emissions. Essentially, they simulated weather conditions on two alternative Earths—one in which humans had pumped enormous volumes of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, and one in which they hadn’t. And in the world with these emissions—the world we live in—a record-breaking European summer heat wave was, on average, about four times as likely.

The 2004 paper was the first major example of “extreme event attribution” or “attribution science,” which has since burgeoned into an entire subfield. These studies can’t always say why climate change might make extreme events more likely—many of the equations used in climate models are complex and nonlinear, so small changes can have major effects, and it is often difficult to link the two.

But by running models numerous times—seeing how often extreme events occur first when industrial emissions are included, and then when they are removed—scientists can make overall statements about how much more likely human-caused climate change has made a specific type of weather event, even without explaining precisely how that may have happened.

“We know very well how much greenhouse gas has been put into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,” says Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-leader of World Weather Attribution (WWA), which she founded in 2014 with Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate scientist who passed away earlier this year. “We can take it out of the atmospheres of climate models, and so simulate a world that might have been without climate change.”

Today, the results of attribution studies regularly make headlines, such as when scientists at WWA, who work to get their conclusions out in the immediate aftermath of an extreme event, reported that the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave would have been nearly impossible without the influence of climate change.

Their studies have also found that climate change made a whole host of extreme events more likely—like this summer’s flooding in Germany, the devastating 2019-2020 Australian bushfires, and two separate 2019 summer heatwaves in Europe. (Some events, however, remain outside of the scope of extreme event attributions—tornados, for example, remain a “black box,” according to Swain.)

To the people who experienced these events firsthand, such conclusions can provide powerful proof of the urgency—and the catastrophic consequences—of global warming. “It’s critically important to humanizing climate change,” says Swain, who divides his time between research, including attribution studies, and climate communication via his popular Twitter feed and blog.

This intimate connection with the needs and concerns of the general public makes extreme event attribution unusual among the sciences, where public communication often takes a backseat.

“Our motivation for why we do what we do is to provide the public with the information they need to make choices for their future,” says Deepti Singh, a climate scientist at Washington State University Vancouver who studies events like extreme rain in India to understand the on-the-ground effects of climate change.

Today, attribution studies use two main sources of data: climate models, which can predict what weather might look like today had climate change never happened, and historical data, which show what the weather was actually like before it kicked into gear.

Taken together, they can help researchers quantify how often, under each condition, things like daily temperatures would exceed a particular baseline, or monthly rainfall would be below some threshold. As long as an extreme event can be characterized in terms of those kinds of constraints, it can in theory be analyzed with the techniques of extreme event attribution.

But attaining that data can present a formidable challenge: Climate models take an enormous amount of computational power to run, and they have to be fine-grained enough to represent the event that scientists are interested in.

“You don’t only need climate models that have a high enough resolution, but you also need to be able to run them many times, so that you can actually get statistics of not only average climate, but also extreme events,” says Otto. “That used to be prohibitively expensive. But now, computational power is much cheaper.”

Recently, scientists have started using data repositories to share the results of their simulations publicly, which has also made the task easier—researchers aren’t waiting days or weeks for their computers to produce results that may already have been generated in someone else’s lab.

And to make their results as reliable as possible, Otto and others try to use the predictions of many different climate models in their studies—otherwise, their results might just reflect the particularities of a single one.

But the challenges aren’t just technical—sometimes, public communication and scientific culture can be uncomfortable bedfellows. When she cofounded WWA, Otto and her colleagues encountered criticism from the scientific community because they wanted to release their results on such a quick turnaround, without engaging in the peer review process.

The group typically shares their results two weeks after an extreme event; it’s not possible to complete peer review in that time. “When we started doing this, people were saying, ‘You can’t do this. This is not how science works. This is not the scientific method,’” she says.

So WWA did what they considered the next-best thing—they outlined their study protocol in excruciating detail, from how they choose which events to study to their communication strategy, and published it in a peer-reviewed journal to show that their procedures have passed muster with members of the climate science community.

Another tricky area is what’s called “scientific conservatism” (which is not to be confused with political conservatism). Scientists don’t like to depart from established precedent unless there is compelling evidence to do so.

Experimenters usually work from a “null hypothesis,” which often takes the form of a default assumption that there’s no relationship between the things being studied (in these cases, climate change and a particular weather event). They require a high burden of proof to reject that hypothesis. Often, then, scientists will start attribution studies with the assumption that climate change didn’t play a role and look for a reason to change their minds.

Conservatism helps to make academic science slower and more deliberate—if there isn’t enough evidence to make a claim today, perhaps there will be enough a few years from now. In essence, it makes false negative results more likely and false positives less likely.

But for Swain, there are real risks to these false negatives in attribution science. “There is still some reticence to make bold claims about these things, even when I think the evidence does justify it,” he says.

A single study with a negative result, if it reaches a broad audience, could make some people less inclined to take action against global warming.

Still, attribution scientists take numerous measures to avoid overstating how important climate change was to a given event. They look at many kinds of data from multiple sources, and often use mathematical tools that are more likely to underestimate than overestimate the role of climate change.

And that’s for good reason: In a field focused on communicating with the public, trust is an invaluable currency, says Leo Barasi, an expert on public opinion and climate change who works with researchers and campaigners.

Openly communicating negative results can also highlight just how important and striking the positive results really are. “It’s really important to quite publicly, openly, and proudly talk about” negative results, Barasi says.

And while it’s difficult to know for sure how much extreme event attribution has moved the needle of public sentiment on the climate crisis, Barasi thinks it plays an important role. In 2018, people throughout the Northern Hemisphere endured extreme summer heat, and numerous studies found that climate change had made those heat waves more likely.

In Japan, those temperatures would have been almost impossible without the influence of climate change, according to one study. Simultaneously, the public discourse underwent a noticeable shift—in both the US and the UK, polls showed that concern about climate change rose in late 2018.

While this time period also coincides with the emergence of Greta Thunberg on the international stage, Barasi believes that the extreme weather likely also contributed. “That sort of firsthand experience of an extreme weather event, combined with the very widely accepted credible science around it, I think was really important,” he says.

Much of the power of extreme event attribution comes from its ability to address the firsthand experience of people suffering through specific heat waves or floods—their hyperlocality. But this also has its downsides.

Most attribution studies look at events in the Global North, says Roop Singh, a climate risk adviser for the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. “Scientists have, of course, their own interests, and they’re interested in what's happening in their own backyards,” she says.

But extreme weather can have the most dire effects in precisely the areas that receive the least attention. “There are communities around the world that are more dependent directly on natural resources, they’re more exposed to weather and climate conditions,” Deepti Singh says.

These disproportionate effects have inspired Singh to undertake research focused on her home country of India, where poor, rural populations are particularly vulnerable.

Slowing climate change is important in mitigating those effects—but addressing the other factors that contribute to them, like poverty and underdevelopment, is more likely to make the crucial difference in saving lives and livelihoods.

“The fact that heat waves are so deadly, for example, is because we don’t care, as a society, about the poor people in bad housing with underlying health problems,” Otto says. “It’s not because of climate change, per se.”

These effects depend on structural issues, not to mention a host of contingent factors—a heat wave will be more deadly in a retirement community than a college town, for example. So it can be difficult to link climate change to the concrete effects that most matter to people. But scientists have started to make progress.

Recently, for example, Diffenbaugh published a study linking climate change to financial costs from reduced crop yields. Another study out this year concluded that, across the world, 37 percent of heat-related deaths can be attributed to climate change.

“Impacts happen because of the context in which a disaster happens,” Roop Singh says. “Extreme event attribution starts the conversation. But in order for us to really answer those questions, we actually need to do a lot more science.”

Links

• How to Not Melt Down Over Our Warming Planet
• This Is What It Will Take to End Deforestation by 2030
• Think Climate Change Is Messy? Wait Until Geoengineering
• Curb Your Food Tech Enthusiasm
• Hints of New Life in the Shadows of Venezuela's Last Glacier
• How Early Warning Systems Help Us Deal With Extreme Weather
• 6 Essential Numbers to Understand the Glasgow Climate Pact
• The Fashion Industry Could Reduce Emissions—if It Wanted To
• Climate Pledges Fall Dangerously Short of the 1.5 °C Target

(AU BBC) The Teenagers And The Nun Trying To Stop An Australian Coal Mine

BBC News - Kayleen Devlin

When eight teenagers and an elderly nun in Australia teamed up for a climate case, they won, in a historic judgement. Their case has now been appealed by the country's government. If the final verdict swings in their favour, it will have ramifications not just for Australian law but for climate cases world-wide.

Sister Brigid Arthur and Anjali Sharma outside the federal court in Melbourne with their lawyer David Barnden. Image source, L McGregor

In May this year, Anjali Sharma was sitting in her economics class at school in Melbourne when the court in Sydney live-streamed the results of a climate case she had found herself at the centre of. It took a while to sink in.

"To me it all just sounded like jargon. It took a briefing from my legal team to understand the magnitude of what had happened," she says.

At that moment 17-year-old Ms Sharma and the seven other teenagers involved in her case had made history. Alongside 87-year-old Catholic nun Brigid Arthur, who acted as the young people's legal guardian, they'd taken Australia's environment minister, Sussan Ley, to court - and won.

"It felt really rewarding to be able to engage in something so historic for Australia, and needed too," says Ms Sharma.

Their case attempted to stop the expansion of the Vickery coal mine in New South Wales, which is estimated to add an extra 170 million tonnes of fossil fuel emissions to the atmosphere.

The judge in their case, Mordy Bromberg, ruled that the government had a duty to protect young people against future harm related to climate change. It's the first time in the world that a duty of care of this kind has been recognised.

Justice Bromberg did not, however, grant them an injunction to prevent the expansion of the mine. In his view, the court didn't have any evidence that Sussan Ley would actually approve the extension, and any injunction would be pre-emptive.

Yet in September Ms Ley approved the extension of the Vickery coal mine, as well as three others since then. The government is also appealing the decision in the Sharma case - the outcome of which is due soon.

Environment minister Sussan Ley. Image source, Getty Images

The government used a "substitution argument" as one reason to approve Vickery, says the lawyer representing the Sharma case, David Barnden.

"It's the argument that if this particular coal project didn't go ahead, it wouldn't make a difference to the total amount of emissions because effectively the market would fulfill that demand. That's otherwise known as the drug dealer's defence - it's the idea that 'If I don't deal drugs then somebody else will.'"

For Sister Brigid Arthur, the minister's decisions since the success of their case are "quite provocative".

Sister Arthur has spent a lifetime working with young people. For over two decades she has been acting as a litigation guardian - instructing lawyers on behalf of those who can't represent themselves - in cases mostly involving refugees. Before that she was a secondary school teacher. This is her first environmental case.

"It's engaged young people in a way that seems quite extraordinary. It's certainly for me something new," she says.

She was approached by lawyers just over a year ago who asked her to act as the teenagers' litigation guardian. She didn't take much convincing.

"I'm pretty passionate about climate change and while I don't work directly in this area, I'm very conscious of the fact that it's important for people to do what they can.

"Young people are the ones who will inherit whatever we're doing now, so they have every right to be calling people to account."

Ms Sharma says Australia must take urgent climate action. Image source, Supplied

In speaking out, Ms Sharma has made herself a target for attacks.

"I've been messaged a lot of threats," she says.

"Some of the big news sources in Australia have, I guess, quite a right-wing following, so when news sources like that have covered my story I learned really quickly not to read the comments."

A 2019 report which investigated four publications owned by Australia's most powerful media company, News Corp Australia, argued that they promoted climate scepticism. Of over 8,000 articles analysed, 45% of all items either rejected or cast doubt upon consensus scientific findings.

In response, a News Corp Australia spokesman said the year-old report was "imbalanced" and coming from "a political activist group with a history of bias against our company's journalism".

News Corp Australia recently has been viewed as softening its hostility towards climate action by advocating for net zero emissions by 2050.

Despite this, shortly before and during COP26, videos from News Corp-owned Sky News Australia were recycled and found traction on social media amongst climate sceptics.

One Sky News Australia segment in which the host condemns youth climate activists as "selfish, badly educated, virtue-signalling little turds" was shared by the head of the advocacy group the CO2 coalition and received over 45,000 likes and 16,000 retweets.

As the science of climate change has become harder to argue with, a growing and common tactic is often to shoot the messenger instead - often accusing them of hypocrisy.

"Comments like 'Oh, she's wearing jeans and I bet she doesn't know how much water goes into producing a pair of jeans,'" says Ms Sharma. "And you know, they're right. I do own a pair of jeans. But me not owning that pair of jeans is not going to cut Australia's emissions in half by 2030."

Australian Islanders take climate fight to the UN

 When Sister Brigid first met the teenagers, who knew each other through attending climate protests, she was struck by their passion. She describes them as a group of young people "who really believe in this, who feel like they can't stop".

"There are very few greys with young people," she says. "Everything is so black and white."

But for now, all they can do is wait for the result of the appeal to be announced.

Despite widespread recognition of the need to move away from coal, there are different approaches when it comes to putting that knowledge into practice. At the COP26 summit in Glasgow, coal became a point of contention after delegates from China and India requested a last-minute change to the agreement, switching the phrase "phase out" coal with "phase down".

The results of the appeal and their case could be game-changing - not only for Australia but for other parts of the world too.

A success in their case could signal an erosion in support for fossil fuel burning and extraction with more lawsuits of this kind ahead. But if the minister's appeal is successful, it could see courts effectively vacate the climate field.

Only Indonesia exports more coal than Australia. Image source, SAEED KHAN 

Australia is the world's second-largest exporter of coal. Following the Glasgow summit, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the coal industry will be operating in the country for "decades to come". He added that the plan to achieve net zero by 2050 will not come at the cost of rural and regional Australians.

"The world is grappling with this collective action problem of climate change. Every mine has its part to play and every decision counts," says Mr Barnden.

"What the court found was that the emissions from this particular extension project could be the emissions that tip us over the edge to these nonlinear tipping points which would further accelerate climate change."

He hopes that the duty of care ruling - if maintained through the appeal process - can influence other jurisdictions and give hope to young people to be able to participate in the legal process.

"It's a very foundational legal case to approach the problems caused by climate change, and the principles of negligence exist in a whole range of common law countries, from the UK, to New Zealand, Canada and the US as well."

It's too soon to tell whether this case will provide a turning point on climate inaction. But for Ms Sharma and the other teenagers involved in her case, the time for action is now.

"I really hope the federal court realises that Australia is now running behind the rest of the world, and that the duty of care that my case seeks to establish is really, really needed right now."

Links

• Why Australia refuses to give up coal
• How climate politics is bitterly contested
• (AU SMH) Can Court Cases, Boardroom Takeovers And Protests Save The Planet? 
• (AU The Guardian) 'One More Mine Does Make A Difference’: Australian Children Argue For The Climate – And The Law Agrees
• Torres Strait Islanders Ask UN To Hold Australia To Account On Climate ‘Human Rights Abuses’
• (AU ABC) For These Torres Strait Islanders, Climate Change Is Already Here — And They're Urging The Government To Do More
• (AU) Torres Strait Islander Complaint Against Climate Change Inaction Wins Backing Of UN Legal Experts 
• (AU The Guardian) Australian Government To Appeal Ruling That It Must Protect Children From Climate Harm
• (AU The Guardian) Australian Government Must Protect Young People From Climate Crisis Harm, Court Declares
• (AU RenewEconomy) Australia’s Government Feels No Duty Of Care Towards Young People On Climate
• (AU The Australian) Environment Minister Sussan Ley Frosty On Climate Change Ruling
• (AU Legal) Minister Found To Owe Duty Of Care To Consider Climate Change In Decision Making
• (AU The Conversation) Climate Change Will Cost A Young Australian Up To $245,000 Over Their Lifetime, Court Case Reveals
• (AU The Guardian) Australian Court Finds Government Has Duty To Protect Young People From Climate Crisis
• (AU) Passionate Young Voices Demand To Be Heard On Climate Crisis
• (AU) 'A Duty Of Care': Australian Teenagers Take Their Climate Crisis Plea To Court
• (AU) Top Judge Urges Lawyers To Take Stand On Climate Change
• (Al Jazeera) ‘Declaration Of War’: Pacific Islands Blast COP26 Pledges
• Lethal Heating: Doctrine of Public Trust