Australia’s climate assessment fails on sea-level rise risks and vulnerable communities

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Australia’s first climate risk assessment has the stated purpose of guiding adaptation responses to protect people and property in a  heating climate, but what happens if the reality is worse than some low-ball projections of future risks?

Australia has just released its first-ever National Climate Risk Assessment, and some big numbers drew fairly predictable media coverage: First climate risk assessment finds 1.5m Australians at risk from sea level rise by 2050, No Australian spared and Apocalyptic report a ‘wake-up call’ on climate impacts: PM.

The global heating emergency and preventing 2°C by 2040: What's the plan?

 by David Spratt

We know where we are heading: towards a planet that will be unlivable for most people, as the human systems built up over centuries collapse. This is not news.  Nor is the evidence that we have reached 1.5°C and that, with accelerating warming, the world will hit 2°C around 2040. 

On present indications — with the fossil fuel giants and petrostates on the offensive — emissions will decline only slowly to 2050, as a number of reports on the "production gap" have indicated.  

Yet by 2°C or more, and perhaps even before then, there is the prospect of a "Hothouse Earth" scenario, a threshold in which a cascade of system changes makes warming self-sustaining, leading to conditions hotter than any experienced over the last few hundred thousand years by modern humans.

So cooling the system is must now be a key task, and that is the focus of coming online conference: The global heating emergency and preventing 2°C by 2040: What's The Plan? organised by the The Healthy Planet Action Coalition.