Climate battle line: Community mobilisation or Canberra lobby?

by David Spratt

Rally against carbon pricing, Canberra, 23 March 2011

How should climate activist and climate campaigning organisations respond to the new Abbott government, and its goal of knocking out most of Australia's climate programmes and trashing environmental regulation in the service of the fossil fuel and mining industries?

• Should the methods utilised for the Labor and Labor–Greens coalition governments, of applying pressure and trying to negotiate better outcomes, be used?
• Or should we set out to deliberately get the Abbott government out of office?

The Abbott Liberal–National Party government celebrated its victory by abolishing Australia's Climate Commission, the first baby steps in a culture war on climate programmes, the renewable energy industry and environmental regulation and protection.

IPCC summary report at a glance, in their own words

via Climate News Network

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Observed changes in average surface temperature 1901-2012

Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report

A note from the Climate News Network editors: we have prepared this very abbreviated version of the first instalment of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) to serve as an objective guide to some of the headline issues it covers. It is in no sense an evaluation of what the Summary says: the wording is that of the IPCC authors themselves, except for a few cases where we have added headings. The AR5 uses a different basis as input to models from that used in its 2007 predecessor, AR4: instead of emissions scenarios, it speaks of RCPs, representative concentration pathways. So it is not possible everywhere to make a direct comparison between AR4 and AR5, though the text does so in some cases, and at the end we provide a very short list of the two reports' conclusions on several key issues. The language of science can be complex. What follows is the IPCC scientists' language. In the following days and weeks we will be reporting in more detail on some of their findings.

Is climate change already dangerous (5): Climate safety and an unavoidably radical future

by David Spratt

Fifth and last in a series

Climate safety

The research evidence and expert elicitations demonstrate that climate conditions are “dangerous” now – according to the generally accepted “safe boundary”, “five concerns” and “tipping point” metrics.

• The 350 ppm “safe boundary” for atmospheric CO2 has already been exceeded by 50 ppm.
• In 2007, at around +0.76ºC warming (equivalent to ~335 ppm CO2 at equilibrium), Arctic sea-ice passed its tipping point. The Greenland Ice Sheet may not be far behind, as the Arctic moves to sea-ice-free conditions in summer, triggering further tipping elements.
• Around +1.5ºC warming may be the tipping point for the Greenland Ice Sheet and for the large-scale release of Arctic carbon permafrost stores. At +1.5ºC, coral reefs would be reduced to remnant systems.
• The paleo-climate record shows that the current level of atmospheric CO2 at 400 ppm is enough to produce sea-level rises of 20–40 metres; is around the tipping point for large-scale release of Arctic carbon permafrost; and is sufficient to trigger powerful amplifying polar feedbacks.

Is climate change already dangerous? (4): Tipping points and climate modelling

by David Spratt

Fourth in a series

A tipping point may be understood as a step change, or passing of a critical threshold, in a major earth-climate system component, where a small perturbation (a small push or change) unleashes a bigger change in the component.  Potsdam Institute Director, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, says that tipping points “identify the most vulnerable components (tipping elements) of the Earth System, the critical warming thresholds where the respective Earth System elements flip into a qualitatively new state”.  These elements include ecosystems, major ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns, the polar ice sheets, and the land- and ocean-based carbon stores.

This process is often tied to positive feedbacks, where a change in a component leads to other changes that eventually “feed back” onto the original change to amplify it.  The classic case in global warming (or, in reverse, cooling) is the ice-albedo feedback, where decreases (increases) in the ice cover area change surface reflectivity (albedo), trapping more (less) heat and producing further ice loss (gain).

Is climate change already dangerous? (3) Consequences from current greenhouse gas levels

by David Spratt

Third in a series

Danger from implied temperature increase

The current level of atmospheric CO2 only is sufficient to increase the global temperature at equilibrium by +1.5°C, based on the standard assumption of near-term climate sensitivity of 3°C for doubled CO2.

If all current greenhouse gases are taken into account, then:

The observed increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) since the pre-industrial era has most likely committed the world to a warming of 2.4°C (within a range of +1.4°C to +4.3°C) above the pre-industrial surface temperatures. (Ramanthan and Feng)

And the 2007 IPCC Synthesis report (Table 5.1 on emission scenarios) also shows that for levels of greenhouse gases that have already been achieved (CO2 in the range of 350–400 ppm, CO2e in the range 445–490 ppm) and peaking by 2015, the likely temperature rise is in the range of 2–2.4°C.

Is global warming in a hiatus? Not if you measure global heat content

by Prof. Andy Pitman, via The Conversation

Prof. Andy Pitman, Univ. of NSW

On September 27 2013 the 5th Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be released.

One part of this report will address the so-called “warming hiatus”. This is the argument that warming has stopped, with the further assertion in some quarters that we therefore have nothing to worry about in the future.

It is a fact, based on observations of air temperature, that the rate of global warming measured as surface air temperature has slowed over the past 15 years. The last decade is still the warmest in the past 150 years.

Is climate change already dangerous (2): The Arctic

by David Spratt

Second in a series

Arctic sea ice

 

Download full report

On 16 September 2012, Arctic sea-ice reached its minimum extent for the 2012 northern summer of 3.41 million square kilometres, the lowest seasonal minimum extent in the satellite record since 1979, and just half of the average area for the 1979–2000 period.  There was a loss of 11.83 million square kilometres of ice from the maximum extent on 20 March 2012.  This was the largest summer ice extent loss in the satellite record, more than one million square kilometres greater than in any previous year.

Two-thirds of the loss of sea-ice extent has happened in the 12 years since 2000, and the process appears to be accelerating.  From 1979 to 1983 in the Arctic, the sea ice summer minimum covered an average of just over 51 per cent of the ocean.  It fell to just 24 per cent of the Arctic ocean surface in 2012.

Climate case overwhelming, say scientists

Eleven days before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes its latest report, a group of eminent scientists says there is massive evidence of human responsibility.

By Alex Kirby, Climate News Network, 16 September 2013, London

With the IPCC report not yet published, there is already heated debate about what it will say, and about the implications of its findings for human development.

The scientists' statement is unequivocal, and is not based on whatever the IPCC may publish. They  say: "The body of evidence indicating that our civilisation has already caused significant global warming is overwhelming."

The statement comes from 12 members of the recently established Earth League, which describes itself as "a voluntary alliance of leading scientists and institutions dealing with planetary processes and sustainability issues".

Is climate change already dangerous? (1)

by David Spratt

First in a series

Download full report

… the (climate) disruption and its impacts are now growing much more rapidly than almost anybody expected even a few years ago. The result of that, in my view, is that the world is already experiencing ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system’… The question now is whether we can avoid catastrophic human interference in the climate system.
— John Holdren, senior advisor to President Barack Obama 
on science and technology issues, 2008

The stated purpose of international climate negotiations is to avoid “dangerous” climate change or, more formally, to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. Most of the climate action movement and most NGOs identify with this goal.

"Model in crisis" of many big green groups, says Naomi Klein

Introduction: Australia has a new climate-change-denialist Liberal–National Party (LNP) government led by Tony Abbott, who says the science of climate change is "crap".  His government has a clear majority in Australia's lower house, and similarly will enjoy majority rule in the upper house (with the support of conservative,and often climate denialist, small parties) when new Senators take their places on 1 July 2014.
    The Senate results mean the LNP will very likely enjoy that majority for at least two terms (six years), and there is only one occasions in which an elected government in Australia has lasted only one term. So a government which for all practical purposes denies climate change and has the mission of destroying Australia's carbon price and most renewable energy initiatives will likely run the place for at least six years. For those large climate and environment NGOs who have made working inside the Canberra beltway a priority, their models faces a crisis.
     And in a different way so do we all, in working out the way to get the climate emergency approach, which does not downplay now grim scientific realities that global warming is already dangerous in favour of political convenience and incrementalism, onto the agenda.
     At this moment, with the triumph of climate-denialist politics in Australia, Naomi Klein's recent interview is particularly pertinent. – David

by Naomi Klein, interviewed by Jason Mark


First published  Earth Island Journal, 5 September 2013 (extracts)

JM: In the wake of Hurricane Sandy you wrote about the potential of a “people’s shock.” Do you see that it’s happening, a global grassroots response to some of the extreme weather we’re experiencing?

The astounding global warming impact on our oceans that will reduce cloud cover and bring tears to your eyes

Ocean acidification will just not kill significant ocean ecosystems, but add even more to global warming

by David Spratt

Another significant global warming positive feedback that will add even more to future temperature rises has been identified by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. End result: Perhaps another half a degree of warming this century.

New research just published in Nature Climate by Katharine Six and her colleagues shows that as oceans become more acidic (by absorbing increasing volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to form carbonic acid),  the amount of a compound called dimethylsulphide (DMS) in the ocean decreases.

Record heat hits rapidly melting Arctic as boreal forest burns at an unprecedented rate

by David Spratt

This image from North Pole Environmental Observatory's live cam has gone viral. The meltwater lake started forming July 13, following two weeks of warm weather in the high Arctic.

It's one of many arresting images and disturbing reports tumbling out of a rapidly melting Arctic this northern summer as researchers warn that the region’s mighty boreal forests have been burning at rates unprecedented in the past 10,000 years, and that Greenland is at risk of more rapid disintegration, pushing a quicker sea level rise.

Tony Abbott's hot air on soil carbon plan : reliance on soil carbon to "offset" greenhouse emissions "scientifically flawed"

by David Spratt

One-sided reliance on soil carbon policies –  which are at the heart of the Liberal-National Party's "direct action" climate plan to reducing Australia's greenhouse emissions – is "scientifically flawed" according to a group of seven Australian and UK climate researchers including Climate Commissioner Prof. Will Steffen, writing in Nature Climate Change.

The scientists say that while the land carbon buffer can provide "a valuable, cost-effective, short-term service in helping to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide", in the bigger picture – including the environmental limits to soil carbon and the huge quantity of new emissions each year – considering carbon storage on land "as a means to 'offset' CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels… is scientifically flawed."

Arctic melt hits food security in bitter taste of life on a hotter planet

by David Spratt, first published in RenewEconomy

Arctic melt has pushed the Jet Stream into
a more meandering, S-shape pattern, dragging
down and stalling cold and wet conditions
over Europe

iIn the UK and Ireland,  wet summer and autumn followed by a cold winter and spring have hit wheat yields, potato production and cattle feed, a foretaste of how climate change can affect food security, even in the developed economies.

And the culprit in this drama is rapid Arctic melting, which has destabilised the Jet Stream and brought extreme weather – unusual cold, heavy snowfall, record rain and hot spells — to much of northern Europe and North America, and record heat to the Arctic. Following Superstorm Sandy’s battering of the US north-east coast in 2012, flooding in June across central Europe was the worst in 400 years.

Rapid Arctic melting – sea-ice volume in September 2012 was down by four-fifths compared to the summer average 30 years ago – has helped change the Jet Stream, the river of high altitude air that works to separates Arctic weather from that of northern Europe, Russia and Canada, and which governs much northern hemisphere weather.

Pine Island glacier loss must force another look at sea-level forecasts as giant iceberg is spawned

A crack has opened across the full width of the
PIG ice shelf, spawning a new berg

Update 10 July 2013: Pine Island spawns giant new iceberg as fissure extends full width of glacier

BBC New reports that, as anticipated for two years (story below), "Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, has spawned a huge iceberg... The block measures about 720 square kilometres in area, roughly eight times the size of Manhattan Island in New York."

     Confirmation that a fissure had spread across the full width of the glacier was confirmed on 8 July with images obtained from the German TerraSAR-X satellite (pictured at right).  The fissure was first observed in October 2011 (image below).

Tony Abbott's climate policy is a deniers' figleaf

Abbott's direct inaction policy would condemn Australia to even worse heatwaves, extreme floods and bushfires 

by Alexander White

Tony Abbott. Photograph: Stefan Postles/Getty Images

Tony Abbott is the alternative prime minister of Australia, and later this year he will face an election presenting a climate change policy that is frankly insulting and potentially dangerous.

The Coalition's climate change policy amounts to a bullet point in a pamphlet – the "Real Solutions for Australians" plan – number 10 of 12 such bullet points. It reads:

"We will take direct action to reduce carbon emissions inside Australia, not overseas – and also establish a 15,000-strong Green Army to clean up the environment."

Stop tailoring global warming scenarios to make them “politically palatable” says leading climate scientist

Note from CCR: Readers of this blog will be familiar with the work of Prof. Kevin Anderson, one of the world's most forthright climate scientists, including in 4 degrees hotter: an adaptation trap?, Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous, and Scientists call for war on climate change, but who on earth is listening?  Anderson's approach is reflected in the framing of the forthcoming Radical Emission Reduction Conference in December 2013. The conference rationale sums up our dilemma neatly: "Today, in 2013, we face an unavoidably radical future. We either continue with rising emissions and reap the radical repercussions of severe climate change, or we acknowledge that we have a choice and pursue radical emission reductions: No longer is there a non-radical option (emphasis added). Moreover, low-carbon supply technologies cannot deliver the necessary rate of emission reductions – they need to be complemented with rapid, deep and early reductions in energy consumption – the rationale for this conference."  The following interview with Anderson was first published at People and Nature. 

The reality about the greenhouse gas emissions cuts needed to avoid dangerous global warming is obscured in UK government scenarios, according to Prof. Kevin Anderson. Anderson told a Campaign Against Climate Change conference in London on 8 June that the most important measurements, of total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, are pushed into the background and scientists are pressured to tailor their arguments to fit “politically palatable” scenarios.

“Critical decade” or “lost decade”? (3) Is the future unspeakable?

The Australian Labor government’s climate policy steps were slow in coming and incremental, when they needed to be transformative, and a likely Abbott government will be worse, so what’s important now?

by David Spratt | Third in a series | Part one | Part two

Published at ReNewEconomy on 10 April 2013 

Photo courtesy Greenpeace

As the federal Labor government and a significant period in climate policy-making in Australia very likely come to a close this year, there is an opportunity for the climate action and advocacy movement to reflect and plan together. One important chance is from 18-20 May in Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley of NSW, where community activists from around Australia will gather for three days of discussion under the banner Our Land, Our Water, Our Future: Beyond Coal and Gas.

“Critical decade” or “lost decade”? (2) Inside the beltway

With a victory for Tony Abbott and the Liberal–National Party coalition at Australia's federal election in September, and conservative domination of Australian parliamentary politics for the remainder of this decade both likely, what will the major parties do on climate action?

by David Spratt | Second in a series | Part one | Part three

Published at ReNewEconomy on 9 April 2013

Increasing heat content in the oceans (blue) show the
claims that global warmed has "stopped" to be fallacious.
Courtesy Skeptical Science.

LIBERAL–NATIONAL PARTY COALITION (LNP): The federal LNP’s plans are clear: up to $70 billion cuts in government spending, public sectors austerity and up to 35,000 public sector job losses. Think David Cameron in the UK or Campbell Newman in Queensland. Big business will get a free run, the mining profits tax will go, and wealth will be transferred to the top end of town. All in the name of reducing the size of government and reducing regulation to expand the private sector because more, bigger and more profitable markets are our saviour.

“Critical decade” or “lost decade”? (1) The conservative tide

Political parties which vacillate between denial and delay on climate action are set to dominate Australian politics for the remainder of this decade, so how should we respond?

by David Spratt | First in a series | Part two | Part three

Published at ReNewEconomy on 8 April 2013 

The global average temperature is now higher than
at any time during the Holocene, the period of
human civilisation

Australian Climate Commission reports in recent months (here and here) emphasise that this is “the critical decade”. Yet the bookies say there is an 85-90% probability that the Gillard Labor government will lose this year’s federal election – and by a big margin – heralding an era of conservative domination of Australian politics at national and State levels.

Just before Easter, ALP stalwart and former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty wrote that: "The politics of the next few months is no longer about the result of the next election" (emphasis added). Everybody knows Labor is lost, baring Kevin Rudd rising from the dead and at least giving the conservatives a shake.