Connecting the dots to win on climate

by David Spratt

On 20 March I spoke, together with Adam Bandt MP, at a forum in Melbourne on Global warming, Tony Abbott and the need for climate action.

The second half of my presentation was on how to turn the tide, looking at the "middle third" in recent polling and Tony Abbott's and his government's vulnerability on climate, and what they are desperate to not talk about:

• More and more intense extreme weather events (exemplified by their silence on the spring 2013 fires, and record January 2014 heat);  
• A public conversation that "connects the dots" between extreme events and climate change, and which gives immediacy to the perception of climate impacts;   
• Constructing a climate narrative about human climate impacts, rather than electricity prices and taxes;
• Public focus on the responsibility of political leaders to "protect the people" from climate change; and
• Close attention being paid to the efficacy of their "direct action" climate plan.

Arctic sea-ice loss adds 25% to carbon dioxide warming over last 30 years

First posted at robertscribler

What’s the difference between a majestic layer of white sea ice and an ominous dark blue open ocean?

For the Arctic, it means about a 30 to 50 per cent loss in reflectivity (or albedo). And when seasonal sea-ice states are between 30 and 80 per cent below 1979 measures (depending on the method used to gauge remaining sea ice and relative time of year), that means very, very concerning additional heating impacts to an already dangerous human-caused warming.

A dark and mostly ice-free Arctic Ocean beneath a
tempestuous swirl of clouds on September 1, 2012,
a time when sea ice coverage had declined to an
area roughly equal to the land mass of Greenland.
Image source: Lance-Modis/NASA AQUA.

How concerning, however, remained somewhat unclear until recently.

In the past, idealized climate simulations and physical model runs had produced about a two per cent overall loss in Arctic albedo based on observed sea ice losses. This decline, though minor sounding, was enough, on its own, to add a little more than a 10 per cent amplifying feedback to the already powerful human atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) forcing during recent years. Such an addition was already cause for serious concern and with sea ice totals continuing to fall rapidly, speculation abounded that just this single mechanism could severely tip the scales toward a more rapid warming.

Oceans warmed at a rate of 12 Hiroshima bombs per second in 2013 as temperatures spiked

by Lindsay Abrams, via Salon.com 

Think global climate change hasn’t been very noticeable from where you’re standing? Down in the oceans (which is to say, over the majority of Earth’s surface), temperatures spiked last year, as warming proceeding at an incredibly rapid pace.
Skeptical Science calls attention to the oceans’ temperature rise for the final quarter of 2013, which literally was almost off-the-charts:

(via the National Oceanic Data Center)

The why and how of radical emissions reductions (2): Corinne Le Quere

Second in a series | Part 1

On 10-11 December 2013, a Radical Emissions Reduction Conference was held at the Royal Society, London under the auspices of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. In this blog, we look at a presentation by Professor Corinne Le Quere, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia on "The scientific case for radical emissions reductions".

Le Quere framed "radical emission reductions" as reductions consistent with a two-in-three chance of keeping global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (°C), saying that there is no surety that 2°C is a safe threshold, but according to the geological record, there have been periods of up to 2°C warming during the past 800,000 years that did not trigger any "nasty or unexpected" feedbacks, though sea-levels were 5–10 metres higher than today.

No warming "pause" says World Meteorological Organization head

The head of the World Meteorological Organization says there is no standstill in global warming, which is on course to continue for generations to come.
By Alex Kirby, Climate News Network

The planet is continuing to warm, with implications for generations ahead, and temperatures are set to rise far into the future, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports.

Global surface temperatures relative to 1951-1980. The Niño index is based on sea surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 area (5N-5S, 120-170W) in the eastern tropical Pacific for 1951-1980 base period. Green triangles mark times of volcanic eruptions that produced an extensive stratospheric aerosol layer.

It says 2013 was among the ten warmest years since modern records began in 1850, equalling 2007 as the sixth warmest year, with a global land and ocean surface temperature 0.50°C above the 1961–1990 average and 0.03°C higher than the most recent 2001–2010 average.

As Tony Abbott launches all-out war on climate action, what's the plan?

[ Updated 2 February 2014]
NOTE: This blog was originally drafted as notes for a small group discussion in Melbourne. It is in part a situational analysis, covering the need to engage with conservative voters, the fragmentation of our efforts, and the growing gap between what is scientifically necessary and what is considered politically possible, resulting in a cognitive dissonance which is structurally embedded in the climate discourse. At first, I was reluctant to publish these notes because they are pretty blunt, but a number of people thought they were worth an airing, especially because the Abbott government is waging an all-out "shock and awe" war to destroy climate and environment public policy, for which much of our side appears ill-prepared.

• Related Post: A sober assessment of our situation (July 2012)

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by David Spratt

“Honesty about this challenge is essential, otherwise we will never develop realistic solutions. We face nothing less than a global emergency, which must be addressed with a global emergency response, akin to national mobilisations pre-WWII or the Marshall Plan… This is not extremist nonsense, but a call echoed by an increasing numbers of world leaders as the science becomes better understood… In the face of catastrophic risk, emission reduction targets should be based on the latest, considered, science, not on a political view of the art-of-the-possible.”
— Ian Dunlop, formerly senior oil, gas and coal industry executive and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors,  "Global warming is a global emergency", Crikey, 25 February 2009

Australia's climate action movement is diverse: from large, professional national organisations to local volunteer community groups; from issue-specific campaigns focussing on coal, coal seam gas (CSG) and renewables to sector-specific groups; from organisations focused on policy-makers to activists directly confronting the fossil fuel industry. The election of the Abbott government has created a moment of crisis and a chance to review.

Code Red's most popular climate posts

Here's the pick of the crop: our most popular posts over the last three years, starting with the most read.

 A sober assessment of our situation (3 parts)

The state of the Australian climate movement as Labor falters and the conservatives gain ascendancy in mid-2012, some harsh realities and ways forward.

Arctic sea-ice melt record more than broken, it’s being smashed
The extraordinary events of the 2012 northern summer and their consequences.

Brightsiding is a bad strategy (5 parts)
Why all “good news” and no “bad news” is a bad climate action and communications strategy?

What would 3 degrees mean?  
The astounding global impacts of 2, 3 and 4 degrees of warming.

With Arctic freezer door open, frigid air drains into USA and Eurasia, with Arctic unusually mild

by David Spratt

It's a cliche that a picture tells a story better than a thousand words, and it's really true in the case of this extraordinary map of weather modelling of northern hemisphere temperature anomalies (variations from the expected values based on climate records) for 29 January 2014:

The why and how of radical emissions reductions: (1) Kevin Anderson

Prof. Kevin Anderson

First in a series

On 10-11 December 2013, a Radical Emissions Reduction Conference was held at the Royal Society, London under the auspices of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. The conference's purpose was described as:

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. 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.

A climate of denial grips Abbott government's holiday madness

by James Wight

While many of us were distracted in December by seasonal festivities and summer sports, the Abbott government quietly announced a number of actions which will exacerbate the climate problem, in the long-standing tradition of avoiding scrutiny by hiding unpopular announcements in holiday periods.

The government approved Adani’s T0 coal export terminal, and the dredging for two more coal export terminals, at Abbot Point. This will be the world’s biggest coal port and open up mining in the Galilee Basin, whose nine proposed mega-mines would export coal with annual emissions of 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, almost twice Australia’s domestic emissions and greater than the emissions of all but six countries. Four other fossil fuel projects were approved: an Arrow coal seam gas processing facility on Curtis Island, a transmission pipeline to supply it, Clive Palmer’s China First mine, and the Surat Gas Expansion.

Landmark TV series puts people at centre of the climate change story

Introduction: Regular readers of  this blog will know we have argued long and hard that to communicate climate change effectively and to maximise public engagement, people need to be put at the centre of the story, as for example here and here. So unusaly for a climate blog the often focuses on new science, there were smiles all round when this story from Joe Romm was published this week.

Click to watch preview

by Joe Romm, via Climate Progress

This April (2014), Showtime will start airing its ground-breaking climate change TV series on the experiences and personal stories of people whose lives have been touched by climate change. Years Of Living Dangerously is an 8-part series produced by the legendary storytellers and film-makers James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Weintraub -– together with three former 60 Minutes producers who have 18 Emmys between them.

Australia’s hottest year was no freak event: humans caused it

by Sophie Lewis and David Karoly, via The Conversation

Australia saw extreme heat and bushfires in 2013.
Flickr/Rossco ( Image Focus Australia )

The Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that 2013 was the hottest year in Australia since records began in 1910.

Unusual heat was a persistent feature throughout the year. For the continent as a whole, we experienced our hottest day on record on January 7. Then January was the hottest month on record, and the 2012-13 summer was the hottest recorded for the nation.

The nation-wide temperature record set for the month of September exceeded the previous record by more than a degree. This was the largest temperature anomaly for any month yet recorded.

Warming climate may cut cloud cover, push temperatures even higher

One of the great unknowns of climate science is what effect clouds have in accelerating or slowing warming. A new study sheds a disturbing light on their possible impact.

By Tim Radford, via Climate News Network

Australian and French scientists believe they have cracked one of the great puzzles of climate change and arrived at a more accurate prediction of future temperatures.

The news is not good, according to Steven Sherwood of Australia’s Centre for Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. If carbon emissions are not reduced, then by 2100 the world will have warmed by 4°C.

Reigniting the debate: Climate change is fundamentally a human story

A British group says people's interest in global warming has dwindled, and new ways of telling what is essentially a human story should include talking to those who may be sceptical about climate change.

By Kieran Cooke, via Climate News Network

George Marshall is a co founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), an organisation based in Oxford in the UK which specialises in climate change communication.

Whenever he can, Marshall tries to engage people in conversation about global warming: he finds it a tough task.

Naomi Klein: Radical GHG emissions policies need radical social movements to back them

by Gabriel Levy, People and Nature

Naomi Klein

Policies to counter global warming effectively “will only advance if accompanied by radical social movements”, socialist writer and activist Naomi Klein has told the Radical [greenhouse gas] Emissions Reduction conference in London. “Transformative policies…  must be backed by transformative politics.”

Advocates of radical action have to face the fact that pro-market ideology is dominant in mainstream political fora and that “we are the marginal ones”, Klein said yesterday, on a web link from Toronto, Canada.

“It’s not that our ideas [about cutting greenhouse gas emissions] are not popular. But they are not powerful, not dominant. They are not winning.” The movement needs to “turn the popular into the powerful” by creating a “radical, enabling environment in which these policies can flourish”, she said.

Crunch time for Victorian government on coal exports

Right now, the Victorian  Government is charging forward with plans to develop a major new brown coal export industry in the state.

If these plans go ahead, up to 13 billion tonnes of brown coal could be handed over to coal companies to be dug up, hauled across the state, and shipped to China and India for burning.

The devastating impact would stretch from fertile farmland in Gippsland where the coal is buried, to protected marine zones beside Wilsons Promontory or Philip Island where it would be shipped from major new ports.

2 degrees hotter not an acceptable climate target but a disaster, say leading scientists

Countries round the world have pledged to try and limit the average global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial figures. That’s way too high and would threaten major dislocations for civilization say a group of prominent scientists.

Lead author James Hansen

by Tim Radford, Climate News Network

Governments have set the wrong target to limit climate change. The goal at present – to limit global warming to a maximum of 2°C higher than the average for most of human history – “would have consequences that can be described as disastrous”, say 18 scientists in a review paper in the journal PLOS One.

With a 2°C increase, “sea level rise of several meters could be expected,” they say.  Increased climate extremes, already apparent at 0.8°C warming, would be more severe. Coral reefs and associated species, already stressed with current conditions, would be decimated by increased acidification, temperature and sea level rise.

Parts of Australia reaching threshold where it is impossible for normal life to continue because of the heat, says climate impacts researcher

Some parts of Australia, such as Darwin, and some farms and factories, are likely to be  unviable in a 4°C hotter world, according to climate impacts research by Dr. Liz Hanna, from the Australian National University’s National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health.
Paul Brown of Climate News Network reports from the UN climate talks in Warsaw.

UN bodies and health authorities are being advised to prepare for a world temperature rise of 4°C because scientists no longer believe that politicians are capable of holding the temperature rise below the internationally agreed limit, 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College in London, was speaking at a conference here which also heard that some parts of the world were already in danger of becoming too hot for humans to inhabit.

Typhoon Haiyan and climate change: connecting the dots (updated)

UPDATED 15 November


NEW:  Super Typhoon Haiyan's Intensification and Unusually Warm Sub-Surface Waters
A remarkable warming of the sub-surface Pacific waters east of the Philippines in recent decades, due to a shift in atmospheric circulation patterns and ocean currents that began in the early 1990s, could be responsible for the rapid intensification of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Hurricanes are heat engines, which means they take heat energy out of the ocean, and convert it to kinetic energy in the form of wind. It's well-known that tropical cyclones need surface water temperatures of at least 26.5°C (80°F) to maintain themselves, and that the warmer the water, and the deeper the warm water is, the stronger the storm can get.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2579

The Abbott government: climate policy as culture war

by David Spratt, first published at ReNewEconomy

Overnight in London, former prime minister John Howard gave the climate-denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation's annual lecture, telling his audience:

I've always been agnostic about [climate change]… I don't completely dismiss the more dire warnings but I instinctively feel that some of the claims are exaggerated… I don't accept all of the alarmist conclusions… You can never be absolutely certain that all the science is in.

 Agnosticism masking denial has been Howard's trademark. In February 2007, he told Lateline that 4-to-6 degrees Celsius of climate warming "would be less comfortable for some than it is now".  Yes, really!