Daily Wire article misunderstands study on carbon budget

This story at The Daily Wire describes a new study that evaluates the remaining amount of greenhouse gas that we can emit before global temperature rises to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial times. The study suggests that we may have a little more room in the so-called “carbon budget” than previously estimated.

Scientists who reviewed the Daily Wire article found that it greatly misinterpreted the study by saying that it showed that climate projections have overestimated warming. This is incorrect. The study does not conclude that climate models are overly sensitive to warming, or that future warming will be less than projected. Instead, it investigates a discrepancy between the total amount of greenhouse gas emitted since the Industrial Revolution in the models and in the real world. This difference in estimated past emissions affects the study’s calculation of the remaining “carbon budget” for future emissions.

Read the Climate Feedback story - “Daily Wire article misunderstands study on carbon budget (along with Fox News, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Breitbart…).”

'Blown' our chance to curb climate change

We’ve had a chance to curb climate change. But we’ve blown it.

So say researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, who have looked more closely at the pledges made by individual countries at last December’s climate conference in Paris to reduce their carbon emissions. Those pledges, they say, are bound to lead to a global temperature rise of between 2.6°C and 3.1°C by the end of the century. “In fact,” they point out, based on the findings of a new study, “the entire carbon budget for limiting warming to below 2°C might have been emitted by 2030.”

Read the Clean Malaysia story - “We’ve missed the boat on Climate Change.”

'Gloves off' in zero-carbon gas industry fight

The natural gas industry has been advised to prepare for a "gloves-off" fight against coal and other fossil fuels to snare its share of the world's shrinking carbon budget or face its inevitable demise as the world heads towards a zero-carbon future.

If the gas industry wants to continue to grow "the gloves need to come off and fight for what is a limited share of the global carbon budget," said Oxford University professor of environmental economics Cameron Hepburn.

Professor Hepburn said that in the longer-run gas is "dead" without the wide-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage technology or until some other technology is developed that allows fossil fuels to be burnt without releasing carbon emissions.

Read the Angela Macdonald-Smith and Mark Ludlow story in the Melbourne Age - “Gas industry facing death in zero-carbon future, warns expert.”

We must temper our sport obsession to counter climate change

-       Robert McLean

Australia’s obsession with sport, be it surfing or one of many football codes, must be tempered if we are to stand any chance of countering climate change.

Australia is a physically big country and on most days, and particularly on the weekends, thousands of people are travelling, mostly by plane, to all corners of the nation in pursuit of their favoured sport.

Recently a leading U.S. climate scientist encouraged his counterparts to fly less is they were to “walk their talk” as they went about their business of encouraging others to play their part in helping the world reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.

So, here we are at a point where we have almost exhausted the  world’s carbon budget (the amount of carbon we can emit if we are to have any chance of staying two degrees below pre-industrial temperatures) and having already seriously encroached on that number, it seems we have only until early 2035 before we crush the 840 gigatonne budget.

Flying around Australia, and the world, to pursue what is little more than a pastime, is careless, irresponsible, and a blatant example of how we continue to indulge in and prioritize energy-rich private wants ahead of public needs.

In what is just one more example of how we have had our morals, values, and respect for all the species who share our Earth seriously corrupted, the Australian Football League (AFL), with the endorsement of our Prime Minster, Malcolm Turnbull, is planning a football match in China, played for premiership points that, in economic terms alone, will cost a huge amount (a friend suggested $30 million).

That raw economic cost is just the tip of the iceberg and if we were to add the environmental costs (and they can be measured in dollars), it simply becomes indefensible, just as is the case for some many other “travelling” sports, among them the racing of motor vehicles.

Governments have, for centuries, given the masses “circuses and cake” and sport being of the former, and as  serious and intense as it  might well be, it is nothing more than a distraction, causing people to imagine it as the “main game” when the “big dance” is really somewhere else and something else – it is humans waltzing the world into a difficult position; a position from which it will have difficulty in recovering.

The consuming idea that we expand our sports has broad support and yet takes no account of the social, economic, or environmental costs and ignores what will be needed if we are to endure the unfolding catastrophic climate changes.

Rather than spend richly on the extrovert’s view of the expansion and commodifying of sport, we should be taking a more introverted view and turning inward to spend with equal enthusiasm on building up, reinforcing, and creating local, on the ground sporting networks and resources that will strengthen local communities and bind them in a way that will hopefully make them impervious to the certain assaults that will erupt as our climate continues to change.

Study shows we need massive cuts in carbon emissions, now!

Smokestacks billowing into the air are almost
as clichéd at polar bears on a shrinking
 iceberg, but they do, it's imagined, have
some similar purchase on human emotions.

If the world hopes to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, humanity must emit less than half the carbon dioxide than previously thought in the coming years, a new study shows.

In order to keep global warming to no more than 2°C (3.6°F) — the basis for the Paris climate agreement struck last year — scientists have devised a “carbon budget” for how much carbon can be emitted before warming crosses into catastrophic territory.

Their estimates range from about 590 gigatons (1 gigaton is 1 billion metric tons) to 2,390 gigatons. Global carbon dioxide emissions were about 40 gigatons in 2015, which means under the best case scenario, the carbon budget would be exhausted after 60 years and humans would have to completely stop emitting carbon dioxide. 

Read the Climate Central story by Bobby Magill - “Study Calls For Leaner ‘Carbon Budget’ to Slow Warming.”

Where to now for the Australian climate conversation?

Under the Paris climate agreement, Australia has stated that it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.

To limit temperature increases to less than 2°C, concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere need to be limited to 450 parts per million or lower . This would require reductions in global emissions of between 40% and 70% by 2050 and complete decarbonisation of the world economy by 2100.

The Climate Institute has found that under the most “generous” emission reduction methods, Australia’s total carbon budget between now and 2050 would need to be 10 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases or lower.

Read this story on The Conversation - “After Paris: now what for Australia’s climate policy.”

ClimateWorks helps us understand what 'carbon budget' means

T

he Melbourne-based ClimateWorks has produced an easy to read, interpret and understand infographic explaining Australia’s carbon budget.

Explained clearly in the graphic is the daunting fact that Australia’s “fair share” of the global carbon budget is just one per cent and should nothing happen and “business continues as usual”, our quota will be exhausted by 2028 and that is just 12 years away.

Check out the chart here – “The Carbon Budget”.

Professor points out perverse symbolism of coal ships and Great Barrier Reef

T

he spectre of coal ships traversing the Great Barrier Reef couldn’t be more laden with symbolism, according to Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.

Professor Ove
Hoegh-Guldberg - a 'death
sentence for the reef'.

Director, Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland, Prof Hoegh-Guldberg discusses this perverse dichotomy on the weekend edition of The Conversation.

“The coal extracted from the Queensland landscape, if burned along with other fossil fuel reserves, will ensure the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.

“With only 500-800 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left in the global carbon budget, beyond which we will push the climate into a dangerous state, the emissions from even a single mine can play a significant role,” he writes.

Read his story - “Coal and climate change: a death sentence for the Great Barrier Reef”.

Pressure mounts on advisers as Paris draws closer

A

s global negotiations fail on emissions reductions, scientific advisers need to resist pressure to fit the facts to the failure, warns Oliver Geden.

Writing in Nature, Geden says, “Disenchantment has set in well ahead of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris in December.

“Scientists, policy-makers and the public already accept that progress will not be enough to keep global average temperature rise within the 2 °C limit set at the 2010 UN climate summit.

“The negotiations' goal has become what is politically possible, not what is environmentally desirable. Gone is a focus on establishing a global, 'top down' target for stabilizing emissions or a carbon budget that is legally binding.

“The Paris meeting will focus on voluntary, 'bottom up' commitments by individual states to reduce emissions,” he writes.

Read his story - “Climate advisers must maintain integrity”.

'Parallel universe' facts are critical

The late Dr Mick Raupach.

Many things about which people should be critically aware are almost in a parallel universe.

One of those things is the world’s “carbon budget” – something that in the greater scheme of thing is vastly more important than what mostly clogs up our daily news bulletins.

The late Dr Mike Raupach, who died earlier this week after a brief illness, played a critical role in tallying-up the world’s carbon budget.

Most people would quickly change the conversation if it turns to the world’s carbon budget for it is largely something about which they have no knowledge and so consider irrelevant. It’s not!

The Conversation discusses the loss of Dr Mike Raupach, 64, who died peacefully at home with his family in Canberra, in a story headed: “Mike Raupach: the scientist who tallied the world’s carbon budget”.