01/03/2022

(UN The Guardian) IPCC Issues ‘Bleakest Warning Yet’ On Impacts Of Climate Breakdown

The Guardian - 

Report says human actions are causing dangerous disruption, and window to secure a liveable future is closing
Wildfires tearing through a forest in the Chefchaouen region of northern Morocco. Photograph: Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images

Summary
  • Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.
  • About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change.
  • Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.
  • Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.
  • 1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a “critical level” beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.
  • Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.
  • Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
  • Some countries have agreed to conserve 30% of the Earth’s land, but conserving half may be necessary to restore the ability of natural ecosystems to cope with the damage wreaked on them.
Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.
Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes of the natural world and rendering many areas unliveable, according to the landmark report published on Monday.

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a co-chair of working group 2 of the IPCC.

“Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

Droughts, floods, heatwaves

In what some scientists termed “the bleakest warning yet”, the summary report from the global authority on climate science says droughts, floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather are accelerating and wreaking increasing damage.

Allowing global temperatures to increase by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as looks likely on current trends in greenhouse gas emissions, would result in some “irreversible” impacts.

These include the melting of ice caps and glaciers, and a cascading effect whereby wildfires, the die-off of trees, the drying of peatlands and the thawing of permafrost release additional carbon emissions, amplifying the warming further.

‘Atlas of human suffering’

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said: “I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this. Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”

John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, said the report “paints a dire picture of the impacts already occurring because of a warmer world and the terrible risks to our planet if we continue to ignore science.

"We have seen the increase in climate-fuelled extreme events, and the damage that is left behind – lives lost and livelihoods ruined. The question at this point is not whether we can altogether avoid the crisis – it is whether we can avoid the worst consequences.”

Chance to avoid the worst

This is the second part of the IPCC’s latest assessment report, an updated, comprehensive review of global knowledge of the climate, which has been seven years in the making and draws on the peer-reviewed work of thousands of scientists.

The assessment report is the sixth since the IPCC was first convened by the UN in 1988, and may be the last to be published while there is still some chance of avoiding the worst.

 A first instalment, by the IPCC’s working group 1, published last August, on the physical science of climate change, said the climate crisis was “unequivocally” caused by human actions, resulting in changes that were “unprecedented”, with some becoming “irreversible”.

This second part, by working group 2, deals with the impacts of climate breakdown, sets out areas where the world is most vulnerable, and details how we can try to adapt and protect against some of the impacts.

A third section, due in April, will cover ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and the final part, in October, will summarise these lessons for governments meeting in Egypt for the UN Cop27 climate summit.

‘Cataclysmic’ for small islands

Small islands will be among those worst affected. Walton Webson, an ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda and the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, called the findings “cataclysmic”.

He urged the UN to convene a special session to consider action. “We are continuing to head for a precipice – we say our eyes are open to the risks, but when you look at global emissions, if anything we are accelerating towards the cliff edge.

"We are not seeing the action from the big emitters that is required to get emissions down in this critical decade – this means halving emissions by 2030 at the latest. It is clear that time is slipping away from us.”

Governments in other parts of the world could help their people to adapt to some of the impacts of the climate crisis, the report says, by building flood defences, helping farmers to grow different crops, or building more resilient infrastructure.

But the authors say the capacity of the world to adapt to the impacts will diminish rapidly the further temperatures rise, quickly reaching “hard” limits beyond which adaptation would be impossible.

‘Global dominoes’

 The climate crisis also has the power to worsen problems such as hunger, ill-health and poverty, the report makes clear.

Dave Reay, the director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Like taking a wrecking ball to a set of global dominoes, climate change in the 21st century threatens to destroy the foundations of food and water security, smash onwards through the fragile structures of human and ecosystem health, and ultimately shake the very pillars of human civilisation.”

The report plays down fears of conflicts arising from the climate crisis, finding that “displacement” and “involuntary migration” of people would ensue but that “non-climatic factors are the dominant drivers of existing intrastate violent conflicts”.

But Jeffrey Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in the US, said: “The current warfare activity in eastern Europe, though not attributable to climate change, is a further caution about how human tensions and international relations and geopolitics could become inflamed as climate change impacts hit nations in ways that they are ill-prepared to handle.” 

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

This climate crisis report asks:
what is at stake? In short, everything

Environment editor

Major IPCC report, approved by 195 countries,
lays bare devastating harm caused by unchecked global heating

Africa faces severe drought and famine unless global heating is kept to no more than 1.5C. Photograph: World Food Programme/Reuters
“A liveable and sustainable future for all”.

It is the very last words of the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that spell out what is at stake. In short, it is everything.

The damage from global heating is already hitting hard. The comprehensive IPCC assessment, which is based on 34,000 studies, documents “widespread and pervasive” impacts on people and the natural world from increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms and floods. Some impacts are now irreversible.

Heat is killing more people, drought is killing more trees and warming oceans are killing more coral reefs, the nurseries of the oceans. But without action, worse is coming, the report said, and faster than scientists had thought.

The new report analyses the impacts of the climate crisis and how humanity can adapt, in addition to slashing emissions. The good news is that a liveable future remains within grasp – just.

But the window of opportunity for action is “brief and rapidly closing”. The response from UN secretary-general António Guterres was stark: “Delay is death.”

But tackling climate impacts alone will not work. The IPCC sets out in the strongest terms to date that the climate crisis is inseparable from the biodiversity crisis and the poverty and inequality suffered by billions of people.

Given this scope, and with a liveable future on the line, the assessment could be seen as one of the most important in human history. It was produced by more than 1,000 physical and social scientists and unanimously approved by the governments of 195 nations.

“I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this,” said Guterres. Laurence Tubiana, at the European Climate Foundation and one of the architects of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, said the report was “brutal” and “there can be no more excuses” for inaction.

Already, 3.5 billion people are highly vulnerable to climate impacts and half the world’s population suffers severe water shortages at some point each year, the report said. One in three people are exposed to deadly heat stress, and this is projected to increase to 50% to 75% by the end of the century.

Half a million more people are at risk of serious flooding every year, and a billion living on coasts will be exposed by 2050, the report said. Rising temperatures and rainfall are increasing the spread of diseases in people, such as dengue fever, and in crops, livestock and wildlife.

Even if the world keeps heating below 1.6C by 2100 – and we are already at 1.1C – then 8% of today’s farmland will become climatically unsuitable, just after the global population has peaked above 9 billion.

Severe stunting could affect 1 million children in Africa alone. If global heating continues and little adaptation is put in place, 183 million more people are projected to go hungry by 2050.

The ability to produce food relies on the water, soils and pollination provided by a healthy natural world, and the report said protection of wild places and wildlife is fundamental to coping with the climate crisis.

But animals and plants are being exposed to climatic conditions not experienced for tens of thousands of years. Half of the studied species have already been forced to move and many face extinction.

Maintaining the resilience of nature at a global scale depends on the conservation of 30% to 50% of Earth’s land, freshwater and oceans, the IPCC report said. Today, less than 15% of land, 21% of freshwater and 8% of oceans are protected areas, and some regions, like the Amazon, have switched from storing carbon to emitting it.

The IPCC report is also crystal clear that adapting to the climate crisis is as much a social problem as a scientific one. The best way to give effective and lasting protection from climate chaos is through action that addresses “inequities such as those based on gender, ethnicity, disability, age, location and income”.

“Targeting a climate resilient, sustainable world involves fundamental changes to how society functions, including changes to underlying values, world-views, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems, and power relationships,” the report’s authors said in an accompanying document. 

“This may feel overwhelming at first, but the world is changing anyway – climate-resilient development offers us ways to drive change to improve wellbeing for all.”

The report warned that climate “losses and damages” are “strongly concentrated among the poorest vulnerable populations”, who have done least to cause the problem.

That is a significant phrase, echoing the “loss and damage” for which low-income nations are demanding compensation from rich nations, and which will be a key issue at the next UN climate summit in Egypt in November.

Madeleine Diouf Sarr, the chair of the Least Developed Countries at the UN climate talks, said: “I read this report with a great deal of fear and sadness, but not surprise. It’s very clear to us that no amount of adaptation can compensate for failing to limit warming to 1.5C.”

However, the regional analysis in the IPCC report demonstrates that the climate crisis affects everyone. In North America, it warns of increasing deaths and physical and mental illness due to greater extreme weather, from storms to wildfires. In Europe, “substantive agricultural production losses are projected for most areas over the 21st century”.

Australia faces “increases in heat-related mortality and morbidity for people and wildlife”, while “destruction” lies in wait for small island settlements.

In central and south America, “severe health effects due to increasing epidemics” are anticipated, particularly from diseases spread by insects and other animals.

Among the most populous continents, one of Asia’s greatest risks is flooding, and Africa is haunted by hunger as climate impacts hit farmers.

The IPCC message that hope remains is measured: “Near-term actions that limit global warming to close to 1.5°C would substantially reduce projected losses and damages related to climate change in human systems and ecosystems, but cannot eliminate them all.” Some low-lying areas appear doomed already.

The report also noted that “losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming”, meaning every action to cut emissions or adapt matters. Adaptation is heavily underfunded, the IPCC said, but investment now is far cheaper than acting later.

Among the adaptation measures the IPCC cites are restoring wetlands to protect against flooding, greening the world’s fast-growing cities to cool them, and using trees to shade crops and livestock.

The IPCC scientists said the end of the century is less than a lifetime away, with a child born today being 78 years old in 2100: “Actions taken now will have a profound effect on the quality of our children’s lives.”

The future is in the decisions we make today, said Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief and now at the Global Optimism group: “We can prevent and protect ourselves from extreme weather, famines, health problems and more by cutting emissions and investing in adaptation strategies.

"The science and the solutions are clear. It’s up to us how we shape the future.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , ,

(AU The Conversation) New IPCC Report Shows Australia Is At Real Risk From Climate Change, With Impacts Worsening, Future Risks High, And Wide-Ranging Adaptation Needed

The Conversation -  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | 

Getty Images
Authors
  •  is Director of the Griffith Climate Change Response Program, Griffith University
  •  is Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO
  •  is Professor, ARC Future Fellow & Editor in Chief (Reviews in Fish Biology & Fisheries), University of Tasmania
  •  is Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, CSIRO
  •  is Professor, RMIT University
  •  is Director, ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Australian National University
  •  is Professor, Monash University
  •  is Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, The University of Queensland
  •  is Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO
Climatic trends, extreme conditions and sea level rise are already hitting many of Australia’s ecosystems, industries and cities hard.

As climate change intensifies, we are now seeing cascading and compounding impacts and risks, including where extreme events coincide.

These are placing even greater pressure on our ability to respond.

While the work of adaptation has begun, we have found the progress is uneven and insufficient, given the risks we face.

These findings are from our work as co-authors of the new Australia and New Zealand chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment Report on Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation, released today.

What does the report mean for Australia?

This new report represents the efforts of over 270 climate change experts to review and synthesise the latest information.
These authors collectively examined over 34,000 peer reviewed publications about how climate change is affecting ecosystems and societies, future risks, adaptation enablers and limits, and links to climate resilient development.

Climate change is bringing hotter temperatures, more dangerous fire weather, more droughts and floods, higher sea levels, and drier winter and spring months to southern and eastern Australia, amongst other changes.

These changes are increasing the pressure on our natural environment, settlements, infrastructure and economic sectors including agriculture, finance and tourism.

Boats rescue Lismore residents from their homes during the town’s worst recorded floods on February 28th, 2022. Jason O'Brien/AAP
In low-lying areas along our coasts, where so many Australians live, homes, infrastructure and ecosystems will be lost to the rising sea if mitigation and adaptation are inadequate.

For our farmers and the agrifood sector, climate change brings unwelcome stresses and disruptions, making it more challenging to produce food profitably and sustainably. Intensified heat and drought will place yet more stress on our rural communities, particularly in Australia’s south-west, south and east.

Australians will experience more deaths and ill health from heatwaves, as will our wildlife.

Lyle Stewart looks through burned debris at his burned out house at Nerrigundah, Australia on Jan. 13, 2020, after a bushfire raced through the town. Rick Rycroft
The threat of cascading impacts

Unfortunately, that’s not all we have to contend with. We have identified two new types of climate-related risk.

The first are the cascading, compounding and aggregate impacts on our cities and towns, roads, supply-chains and services, emerging from the interaction of disasters like wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and sea-level rise.

Think of the rolling impacts from the Black Summer bushfires, which killed people and wildlife, destroyed homes and resulted in major economic losses for tourism, farming and forestry. Or think of the ongoing floods in New South Wales and Queensland.

The second is the slow speed at which governments and institutions are moving to deal with these changing risks, undermining the system-wide adaptation needed. What does this mean in practice? That the scale and scope of what we can expect to see happen may overwhelm our capacity to respond to these impacts – unless we address these risks quickly and strategically.

Climate impacts are powerfully and unevenly amplified by existing stresses affecting our environment and people. For instance, Australia’s coral reefs already face threats from pollution and invasive species. Climate change acts as a threat multiplier.

Climate change will pose more of a threat to vulnerable Australians, such as those with inadequate health care, poor quality housing and unstable employment.

We examined how much the projected damage could be reduced through better adaptation such as changes in policy, more effective planning and technical solutions.

Our ecosystems most at risk are our world-famous coral reefs and the huge biodiversity and ecosystem services they provide. Steadily warming oceans and sudden marine heatwaves have already pushed many areas to the edge.

The Great Barrier Reef is already at a very high risk of crossing a critical threshold where further warming may cause irreversible damage. Between 2016 and 2020, three marine heatwaves struck the Great Barrier Reef, causing major coral bleaching and death. Once the coral is gone, many of the fish and invertebrates do not survive.

In typical conditions, it takes a minimum of a decade for the fastest growing corals to recover from a single bleaching event. We are no longer in typical conditions. Warming beyond 1.5℃ would see marine heatwaves strike more often. Bleaching will go well beyond the reef’s natural ability to regenerate.

Coral reefs have limits to their resilience. Getty Images
What does adaptation look like?

If we fail to address underlying vulnerabilities in our society and fail to reduce climate-related risks, we will make climate change impacts even worse and undermine our capacity to adapt, well into the future.

But if we step up adaptation now, we will see benefits both in the near- and long-term. This includes practicalities like making sure all strategic planning, land use planning and infrastructure developments take complex climate change risks into account – in a systematic, rather than siloed, narrowly focused, way.

On the positive side, Australia’s adaptation efforts have increased in ambition, scope and implementation across governments, non-government organisations, businesses and communities since the last IPCC assessment in 2014.

In recent years, Australia has created a government agency for recovery and resilience, a disaster risk reduction framework, and national adaptation guidance.

States and territories have introduced climate adaptation strategies, with some evidence of implementation. Local governments, regions, communities and associated alliances are becoming more active in adaptation. In the private sector, there is some rapid work underway to address climate risk and disclosure.

Tree planting as part of an effort to reforest 1500 hectares of Mongo Valley in northern New South Wales, July 2018. Aussie Ark
A Laudable though this progress is, we found that progress on adaptation is distinctly uneven. That’s due to implementation barriers as well as limits to adaptive capacity. Barriers we found include competing objectives, divergent risk perceptions and values, knowledge constraints, inconsistent information, fear of litigation, up-front costs, and lack of engagement, trust and resources.

If we are to get better at adaptation, we have to shift from reactive to anticipatory planning, to better plan for and reduce climate-related risks. Systemic risks demand systemic adaptation.

We found there was a great deal to be gained from better integration and coordination between levels of government and sectors through more effective policy alignment and more inclusive and collaborative institutional arrangements.

Australia would benefit from a national risk assessment and a national climate adaptation implementation plan. Other ways to enable more effective adaptation include serious and stable funding and finance mechanisms, and nationally consistent and accessible information and decision-support tools.

The way we go about adaptation is also important. Climate planning that promotes inclusive governance, collective action and mutual support can make the process of change easier, fairer and more effective.

Supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their institutions, knowledge, values and self-determination is especially important. The knowledge, skills and experience held by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is relevant to climate change adaptation across society.

The best time to act is now

If we delay introducing effective adaptation methods and significant global emission reduction, the damage caused will be more expensive and require far greater change. We need robust, timely adaptation, and deep cuts to emissions.

That’s to have our best chance of keeping global warming to 1.5-2℃ and reduce the challenges of adaptation.

Although the climate impacts and risks we face are increasingly severe, it is by no means too late to avert the worst outcomes.

It is still possible to move to a pathway of “climate resilient development” in which we work together to rapidly contain global warming, adapt effectively and help secure a better future for all.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , , , ,

(UN The Conversation) Transformational Change Is Coming To How People Live On Earth, UN Climate Adaptation Report Warns: Which Path Will Humanity Choose?

The Conversation - 

Weather and climate extremes are already here, and communities will have to adapt. Michael Hall via Getty Images
Author
Edward R. Carr is Professor and Director, International Development, Community, and Environment, Clark University, Massachusetts, USA.
He is a lead author for Working Group II of the current Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Governments have delayed action on climate change for too long, and incremental changes in energy and food production will no longer be enough to create a climate-resilient future, a new analysis from scientists around the world warns.

The world is already seeing harmful impacts from climate change, including extreme storms, heat waves and other changes that have pushed some natural and human systems to the limits of their ability to adapt.

As temperatures continue to rise, transformational change is coming to how people live on Earth. Countries can either plan their transformations, or they can face the destructive, often chaotic transformations that will be imposed by the changing climate.

I’m one of the authors of the climate impacts and adaptation report, released Feb. 28, 2022, as part of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report.

The increasing alarm in these reports, which review the latest research every six or seven years, echoes what I’ve seen over years of work in international development and climate change.

Climate change is having damaging effects today

Global temperatures have risen 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 F) since 1890. This warming has already produced substantial environmental changes.

Heat waves and extreme downpours have become more severe in many areas. These impacts have already contributed to water scarcity and complex food price spikes, and they can exacerbate health risks for vulnerable populations, such as low-income communities that can’t afford cooling when temperatures rise.

Climate models show these effects will worsen in a warming future as people continue releasing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use, agriculture and other activities, compromising humanity’s ability to adapt.

Where people cannot adapt, lives will be transformed in reactive, expensive ways. For example, research shows that if warming increases beyond 1.5 C (2.7 F) compared to preindustrial times, some small island states will lose much of their area to rising seas.

Climate change will transform where their residents live, what they do for a living and indeed the very way they live.

Climate change is already contributing to humanitarian disasters, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new report explains. On the island nation of Kiribati, which is at high risk from sea level rise, the village of Tebunginako had to be relocated. Justin McManus/The AGE/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

Rising temperatures and increasingly frequent droughts in the breadbaskets of the global food system, such as the American Midwest or Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, will compromise harvests.

In our tightly interconnected global food system, such events create radiating shortages and price spikes across different crops and places.

In the United States, these spikes are generally limited, but can resemble price increases under current inflation.

For the most vulnerable Americans, such increases can strain their food security and increase pressure on social safety nets. In less wealthy parts of the world, these spikes can induce profound food crises, social unrest and political instability.

The impacts of a warming future will compromise the achievement of societal goals like ending poverty and malnutrition, in the United States and abroad.

People, companies and governments can cut risks

The world is not helpless in the face of these risks.

If countries, communities and individuals recognize the need for transformation, they can identify what they want to transform and what they want to preserve. They can ask who will be most affected by such transformations, and then plan for and manage these impacts, bringing as many people as possible into a climate resilient future.

This does more than secure material safety. It changes people’s relationship with each other and the environment.

As global temperatures rise, many crops face risks from weather and climate extremes. Thomas Kienzle/AFP via Getty Images

There are emerging examples of transformational adaptation to climate change that show what is possible.

In Australia, farmers who adopted regenerative agriculture practices, which help to store more carbon in the soil, found that the health of their soil increased. This allowed the farmers to buffer their fields against drought and floods.

They also became more collaborative and ecologically aware, and they articulated more holistic goals for their farming that went beyond income to well-being and conservation.

Preservation vs. transformation: A false choice

The slow global response so far makes it clear that addressing climate change is fundamentally a problem of people and their motivations.

Some politicians and others promote false choices between expensive adaptation and the status quo. But arguments that mitigating climate change is too expensive obscure the fact that people pay for this losing battle against the transformative impacts of climate change all the time.

Levels of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas that is released by burning fossil fuels and drives global warming, have risen quickly in the atmosphere over the past 70 years. NOAA

The IPCC report notes that in East Africa, the economic impact of climate change on a single crop, maize, has been estimated at US$1 billion each year. This is far more than these countries or the international community spends on agricultural aid and other support for these farmers.

Their production is part of the same global food system that shapes food prices everywhere. It’s one example of how humanity is already paying for adaptation, often in indirect ways.

Focusing on the status quo also sidesteps the thorny politics of deciding what aspects of our current lives, societies and economies should be preserved and what can and should be transformed.

Shifting from cars to public transportation can improve access jobs and amenities for lower-income populations.

At the same time, housing near transportation can be priced out of reach. Building a seawall might protect properties along one part of the coast while shifting erosion to communities with fewer resources.

What countries and communities decide to transform, and how, will depend greatly on who gets to participate in these decisions. Their outcomes, in turn, will have significant implications for justice and equity.

Reactive approach hides the accumulating costs

But the status quo isn’t cheap in the long run, and studies show that the harm from more drastic warming would be extensive.

The Urban Climate Change Research Network, an international consortium of scientists, estimates that the current cost of adaptation for urban areas alone is between $64 billion and $80 billion each year.

The same assessment found the annual costs of inaction are likely to be 10 times as large by midcentury. The longer countries wait to mitigate climate change, the fewer transformational options they will have.

The choice is not between expensive transformation and no-cost status quo. The difference lies in how people will pay, how much they pay, and how often they pay. If we do not choose the transformations we want, environmentally imposed transformations lurk very near for some, and eventually for all.

The IPCC assessment offers a stark choice: Does humanity accept this disastrous status quo and the uncertain, unpleasant future it is leading toward, or does it grab the reins and choose a better future?

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , , ,

28/02/2022

(USA NYT) Will The Supreme Court Frustrate Efforts To Slow Climate Change?

New York Times - Jody Freeman

Sophia Deng




Author
Professor Jody Freeman teaches environmental and administrative law at Harvard University.
She was counselor for energy and climate change in the Obama White House in 2009 and 2010 and advised the Biden transition team.
Professor Freeman is an independent director on the board of ConocoPhillips, a producer of oil and natural gas.
With Congress doing little on climate change, President Biden must use his executive authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across the U.S. economy.

The Supreme Court appears determined to thwart him.

In a case to be argued on Feb. 28, the court seems poised to restrict the Environmental Protection Agency’s legal authority to limit carbon pollution from power plants and, by doing so, frustrate the country’s efforts to slow the pace of climate change.

The justices went out of their way to take the case brought by coal companies and Republican-led states even though no federal rule in effect regulates greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and no company or state is required to take any action to control those emissions.

No power company petitioned the court for its review, and in fact, several of the nation’s biggest power companies opposed the justices’ adding the case to their docket.

The Biden administration argues that the court should wait until the E.P.A. issues a rule, as it plans to do; otherwise, any decision would be an advisory opinion based on a hypothetical, which the court has said repeatedly the Constitution does not allow.

But the State of West Virginia and its fellow petitioners, including 17 other states and coal and mining companies, argue that any agency rule to cut carbon from the electric power sector will have such enormous consequences that the court should act now to curtail the agency’s authority.

In a brief to the court, those states warned in alarmist language against empowering the agency “to reorganize American industry.” The plaintiffs want a sweeping ruling to neutralize the E.P.A.’s power to set any meaningful emissions standards.

Just by accepting the case, the court has suggested where it is headed — which is toward curbing the E.P.A’.s flexibility. The court’s conservative majority has been deeply skeptical of federal regulatory authority unless Congress has been extremely explicit in its instructions on what agencies can do.

But Congress cannot anticipate every possible situation and for good reasons often delegates broad authority to agencies, letting them make expert judgments in technical domains.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the Clean Air Act authorizes the E.P.A. to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, including those from power plants. Congress told the E.P.A. to choose the best system to reduce emissions.

Yet the court might be so eager to restrict climate regulation under the Clean Air Act that it may be willing to overrule its own precedents, disregard foundational constitutional principles requiring plaintiffs to show concrete harm and ignore the business needs of the affected industry.

In doing so, the court may inadvertently harm the power sector more than it helps it, by ruling out practical, inexpensive or flexible strategies that the industry and many states support to reduce emissions.

Burning fossil fuels to generate electricity is responsible for about 25 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, behind only transportation. Substantial reductions in power plant emissions are critical if the United States is to meet its pledge in the Paris Agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions economywide by 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Mr. Biden has set a goal of eliminating those emissions from electricity generation by 2035.

The case is complicated but the question underlying it boils down to this: Is the E.P.A.’s regulatory authority over power plant emissions narrowly limited to requiring only negligible improvements at each source, which would produce minimal if any emission reductions? That is what the coal companies and the states bringing this case want.

Or can the agency use a broader approach based on other things power plants can do to cut emissions, for example, by combining coal with other, less-polluting fuels like natural gas, biogas and hydrogen; integrating renewables; using technology that captures the emissions before they leave the smokestack; and by allowing companies to trade emissions credits or average emissions reductions across a company’s fleet?

That is what the E.P.A. and many power companies want. They also want the states to be free to consider such measures when deciding how best to achieve federal emissions limits.

The legal saga leading to this point goes back to the Obama administration, when the E.P.A. adopted what was known as the Clean Power Plan. This rule required power plants to cut emissions 32 percent from their 2005 levels by 2030.

But the Supreme Court temporarily blocked it, and the Trump administration later repealed it, substituting a much weaker rule. Then, before Mr. Trump left office, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the Trump rule, saying its cramped view of what the E.P.A. could do under the Clean Air Act was wrong.

The court also ordered, and all parties agreed, that no power plant regulation would take effect until the E.P.A. issued a new rule.

Normally, the case would have ended there. The Biden administration is now developing its own power plant standards with input from industry and others with a stake in the outcome.

The Supreme Court typically does not review a hypothetical or proposed regulation until it is final, and for good reason.

Without the benefit of an agency’s thinking and a detailed administrative record of how it reached its decision, the court runs the risk that its abstract ruling will have unintended consequences, including harming the affected industry.

The court has a way out. It can dismiss the case because, with no rule in place, no one is suffering any legal harm — a requirement known as standing, which is necessary for the court to assert jurisdiction. That would preserve everyone’s right to litigate in the future while allowing the E.P.A. to develop a new rule.

It is sensible to wait. Economic conditions and technology have evolved considerably in the past decade. The court should allow the E.P.A. to conduct a fresh assessment of what power plants can reasonably do to cut carbon emissions using available technologies at an acceptable cost.

Many in the electricity industry support this approach. Ten power companies, with operations in virtually every state, sided with the Biden administration. The trade association representing all U.S. investor-owned electric companies filed a brief urging the court to retain the E.P.A.’s authority.

These companies need stable, predictable federal rules to make economic decisions and plan investments.

The coal industry likes to argue that without the court’s intervention and direction, the E.P.A. will run amok. But the record shows that if anything, the agency tends to underestimate what business can do to control pollution.

The power sector exceeded the targets in the Clean Power Plan years ahead of time, even without a rule in place, showing that those standards were neither too costly nor transformative.

The justices should restrain themselves and let the regulatory process play out.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,

(AU The Conversation) Like Rivers In The Sky: The Weather System Bringing Floods To Queensland Will Become More Likely Under Climate Change

The Conversation - |

Flooding in Gympie, Queensland, February 26, 2022. AAP Image/Supplied by Brett's Drone Photography

Authors
  •  is a PhD Researcher in Atmospheric Science, The University of Melbourne
  •  is Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne
The severe floods in southeast Queensland this week have forced hundreds of residents to flee the town of Gympie and have cut off major roads, after intense rain battered the state for several days. The rain is expected to continue today, and travel south into New South Wales.

We research a weather system called “atmospheric rivers”, which is causing this inundation. Indeed, atmospheric rivers triggered many of the world’s floods in 2021, including the devastating floods across eastern Australia in March which killed two people and saw 24,000 evacuate.

Our recently published research was the first to quantify the impacts these weather systems have in Australia, and another study we published in November looked closely at the floods in March last year

We found while atmospheric rivers bring much-needed rainfall to the agriculturally significant Murray-Darling Basin, their potential to bring devastating floods will become more likely in a warmer world under climate change. What are atmospheric rivers?

 Atmospheric rivers are like highways of water vapour between the tropics and poles, located in the first one to three kilometres of the atmosphere. They are responsible for about 90% of the water vapour moving from north to south of the planet, despite covering only 10% of the globe.

When atmospheric rivers crash into mountain ranges or interact with cold fronts, they rain out this water with potentially disastrous impacts. Mountains and fronts lift the water vapour up in the atmosphere where it cools and condenses into giant, liquid-forming bands of clouds. Intense thunderstorms can also form within atmospheric rivers.

A snapshot of water vapour in the atmosphere. Atmospheric rivers are the narrow streamers branching off the equator. Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Three atmospheric rivers last year were particularly devastating.

In January, California was hit with a strong atmospheric river that caused record-breaking rainfall and blizzards. It also triggered a landslide on California’s iconic Highway 1.

In November, British Columbia, Canada was battered with record breaking rainfall that left Vancouver isolated from the rest of the country.

And in March, Eastern Australia copped a drenching that led to widespread flooding and A$652 million worth of damage. All mainland states and territories except WA faced simultaneous weather warnings. What we found

Our recently published research provides the first quantitative summary of atmospheric rivers over Australia. It’s not all bad news – most of the time, atmospheric rivers bring beneficial rainfall to Australia. About 30% of southeast Australia’s rainfall comes from atmospheric rivers, including in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Rainfall is vital to this region. The Murray-Darling Basin supports over 500 species of birds, reptiles and fish, and around 30,000 wetlands. Agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin contributes A$24 billion to the Australian economy.

However, we also found that 30-40% of the heaviest rainfall days in the Northern Murray-Darling Basin, where towns such as Tamworth, Dubbo and Orange are located, were associated with atmospheric rivers.

A heavy downpour in Australia’s bread basket might lead to happier farmers during a dry period, but following a wet summer – such as from La Niña – these days are less welcome.

Queensland residents are facing one of the most severe weather systems in a decade. AAP Image/Jono Searle

La Niña saturates soil

La Niña can play a big role in flooding, as it exacerbates damage wrought by atmospheric rivers.

A La Niña was declared in spring in 2020 and fizzled out by March in 2021. A second La Niña arrived in the summer of 2021 and 2022.

During a La Niña, winds that blow from east to west near the equator strengthen. This leads to cold, deep ocean water rising up to the surface in the East Pacific, near South America, and warm ocean waters to build near Australia.

Warm sea surface temperatures promote rainfall, which is why La Niña is associated with rainier weather over much of Australia.

Soil is like a kitchen sponge. It absorbs water, but once it becomes saturated it can no longer soak up any more. This is what happened to eastern Australia in the months before the March floods – and when the record-breaking rain fell, the ground flooded.

On March 23, 2021, 800kg of water vapour flowed over Sydney every second. Shutterstock

Our recent research found that in March 17-24 last year, NSW experienced an almost constant stream of high water vapour in the atmosphere above from both an atmospheric river that originated in the Indian Ocean and a high pressure system in the Tasman Sea.

On March 23, over 800kg of water vapour passed over Sydney every second - that’s 9.6 Sydney Harbours of water in one day.

Likewise, soil moisture in south-east Queensland has been above average since October last year. Last November was Australia’s wettest November on record with south-east Queensland receiving very-much-above average rainfall.

This meant the ground was already sodden. So when the heavy rain fell this week, Queensland flooded.

The soil in Queensland was already saturated due to higher than average rainfall since October last year. AAP Image/Jono Searle
What’s the role of climate change?

We also calculated the likelihood of future atmospheric rivers as big as the one in March 2021 flowing over Sydney using the latest generation of climate models.

Earth is currently on track for 2.7℃ warming by the end of the century. Under this scenario, we found the chance of a similar weather event to the March floods will become 80% more likely. This means we are on track for more extreme rainfall and flooding in Sydney.

We also know climate change will increase the occurrence of atmospheric rivers over the planet, but more research is needed to determine just how often we can expect these damaging events to happen, including in southeast Queensland.

However, this path is not final. There is still time to change the outcome if we urgently reduce emissions to stop global warming beyond 1.5℃ this century. Every little bit we do to limit carbon emissions might mean one less flood and one less person who has to rebuild.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative