Methane, Climate Change, and Our Uncertain Future

The greenhouse gas, methane, is produced by both natural processes and human activities. While there has been much attention paid to curbing anthropogenic emissions, a changing climate will likely increase the production of natural methane. In an open access article recently published in Reviews of Geophysics, Dean et al. [2018] describe the ways in which biological, geochemical, and physical systems influence methane concentrations and explore how methane levels in natural systems may alter in a warming climate. Here the authors answer some questions about the sources and significance of methane, and indicate some future research directions.

Flooded permafrost tundra in northeast Siberia.
Hydrology is a key control on methane emissions
in wetland and permafrost ecosystems.
Credit: Joshua Dean

How does methane effect the Earth’s climate?

Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that is much stronger than carbon dioxide (CO2), 34 times stronger if compared over a 100-year period. While concentrations of methane in the atmosphere are about 200 times lower than carbon dioxide, methane was responsible for 60% of the equivalent radiative forcing caused by carbon dioxide since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Methane’s presence in the atmosphere can also affect the abundance of other greenhouse gases, such as ozone (O3), water vapor (H2O), and carbon dioxide.

Read the story from Earth and Space Science News by Joshua Dean - “Methane, Climate Change, and Our Uncertain Future.”

Gas boom fuels Australia's third straight year of rising emissions

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar, increasing for the third consecutive year according to new data published by the Department of Environment and Energy.

Greenhouse gas emissions were driven by an
 increase of 17.6% in natural gas production.

The Turnbull government published new quarterly emissions data late on Friday which reveals Australia’s climate pollution increased by 1.5% in the year to December 2017.

The expansion in LNG exports and production is identified as the major contributor to the increase, but the data shows a jump in emissions across all sectors – including waste, agriculture and transport – except for electricity, the one area that recorded a decrease in emissions.

Read the story bye Lisa Cox from The Guardian -  “Gas boom fuels Australia's third straight year of rising emissions.”

Clean & Reliable Power: Roadmap to a Renewable Future

The Climate Council has released a roadmap outlining how Australia can cut its rising greenhouse gas pollution levels, while continuing the transition to clean, affordable and reliable renewable energy and storage technology.

The ‘Clean & Reliable Power: Roadmap To A Renewable Future’ report features 12 key policy principles for any national energy and climate policy framework, including calls for the rollout of a minimum 50-70% renewable energy target across Australia by 2030.

The ‘Roadmap To A Renewable Future’ framework recommends Australia continues to transition away from its ageing, polluting and inefficient coal and gas fleet and encourage investment in a new clean power supply. The report calls for pollution targets which can be ratcheted up along with transparent tracking and reporting of carbon pollution levels.

Read the Climate Council story by Andrew Stock - “Clean & Reliable Power: Roadmap to a Renewable Future.”

The Nationals should support carbon farming, not coal

National Party MP George Christensen has invited other Nationals to join the recently formed pro-coal “Monash Forum”. But is coal in the best interests of their rural constituents, particularly farmers?

The carbon farming initiative gives pig farmers the opportunity to earn
carbon credits for reducing methane emissions from manure. The
proposed change to this government policy may stall, or even end, this market. 

Farmers stand to lose from any weakening of the government’s climate change policies. That is why farmers and their political representatives should be concerned about a current review of the government’s greenhouse gas reduction policy.

What is at stake here is the strange-sounding idea of carbon farming. To explain this idea takes several steps, so bear with me.

Read the piece from The Conversation  by the Emeritus Professor of Sociology from the Australian National University, Andrew Hopkins - “The Nationals should support carbon farming, not coal."

‘Harder and riskier': Carbon removal needed if Paris goals don't rise

Greenhouse gas emission cuts must be at least 20 per cent deeper than pledged under the Paris climate accord or the world will have to begin the costly direct removal of atmospheric carbon to avoid dangerous climate change, a new study argues.

Emissions impossible? Delays in cutting emissions make it
 more likely that carbon will have to be directly captured
if dangerous climate change is to be avoided.

The Germany-based researchers examined the action needed if nations failed to deliver greater carbon curbs by 2030 but still kept global warming to under 2 degrees, compared with pre-industrial levels.

"Each tonne of CO2 we don't emit, we don't have to remove from the atmosphere afterwards in an expensive and strenuous way," said Jessica Strefler from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the lead author of the paper published on Thursday in Environmental Research Letters.

Read Peter Hannam’s story from The Age - “‘Harder and riskier': Carbon removal needed if Paris goals don't rise.”

Victorian power bills soar after Hazelwood coal plant closure

Power bills for Victorians have soared one year on from the abrupt closure of the ailing Hazelwood power station but the state has managed to dodge large-scale blackouts and greenhouse gas emissions have dived.

Hazelwood was the biggest coal-fired power station to close in 20 years.

With fewer than six months to prepare for the demise of the brown coal-fired plant in the Latrobe Valley,  authorities had to scramble to minimise the blow from the loss of one-fifth of the state's generation capacity.

Read Cole Latimer’s story from The Age - “Victorian power bills soar after Hazelwood coal plant closure.”

Climate Change Heightens Risk of Mosquito-Borne Disease Outbreaks

Rising global average temperatures due mainly to greenhouse gas emissions will contribute to increases in the distribution areas of four mosquito-borne viruses: Oropouche (OROV), Mayaro (MAYV), Rocio (ROCV), and St Louis encephalitis (SLEV).

Scientists use mathematical models to predict distribution
 areas by 2100 of four arboviruses: Oropouche, Mayaro, Rocio,
 and St Louis encephalitis. 

This finding is from a study published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The research was conducted at Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, during Camila Lorenz’s PhD with support from FAPESP and supervision by Lincoln Suesdek, a professor in the Parasitology Department at the University of São Paulo’s Biomedical Science Institute (ICB–USP). Flávia Virginio, Thiago Salomão, Breno Aguiar and Francisco Chiaravalloti-Neto, researchers in the same university’s Public Health Department (FSP-USP), also took part.

Read the Science and Technology Research News story - "Climate Change Heightens Risk of Mosquito-Borne Disease Outbreaks.”

Vaunted plan to cut power emissions will have 'negligible impact’

New analysis has found the Turnbull government’s plan to tackle climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions from power generators is superfluous because the pollution cuts would be achieved regardless, largely due to state policies.

The national energy guarantee aims to cut pollution from the electricity sector..

It means the government’s much-heralded national energy guarantee will force an administratively complex overhaul of the national electricity market without applying targets ambitious enough to tackle global warming beyond action already being taken.

But Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg says the analysis does not consider the need to make electricity supplies more reliable, which is an aim of its proposed policy, along with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Read Nicole Hasham’s story from The Age - “Vaunted plan to cut power emissions will have 'negligible impact’.”

NT’s largest land-clearing permit faces Supreme Court challenge over climate change

The decision to grant NT's largest single permit for land clearing is being challenged in the Supreme Court out of concern the clearing will ramp up greenhouse gas emissions.

The decision to issue Maryfield Station a permit to clear
 native bushland has been challenged in the Supreme Court.

The case is the first of its kind in the NT and will test the way courts respond to issues around climate change — given the predicted rise in cases that require courts to consider it.

In November last year a permit was approved to clear more than 20,000 hectares of native vegetation at Maryfield Station, 550 kilometres south-west of Darwin.

But the Environment Centre NT questioned the validity of the decision-making process used by the Pastoral Lands Board when it approved the permit — as it was never required to consider the impact on climate change.

Read the ABC News story by Phoebe Hosler and Daniel Fitzgerald - “NT’s largest land-clearing permit faces Supreme Court challenge over climate change.”

Biggest polluters get clear path to hike emissions under plan

Australia’s biggest polluting companies would more easily jack up their greenhouse gas emissions under a Turnbull government proposal that critics say undermines multi-billion dollar efforts to tackle climate change.

The government has proposed loosening the safeguard mechanism,
which limits greenhouse gas emissions from big polluters.

The proposed change was prompted by feedback from businesses, including the petroleum industry, which said emissions rules did not adequately allow their businesses to grow.

The Department of the Environment and Energy last week released a consultation paper outlining planned changes to the "safeguard mechanism", which is supposed to ensure pollution reductions bought through the government’s $2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund are not offset by emissions increases elsewhere in the economy.

Read Nicole Hasham’s story in today’s Age - “Biggest polluters get clear path to hike emissions under plan.”

Emissions increases approved by regulator may wipe out $260m of Direct Action cuts

Nearly 60 Australian industrial sites have been given the green light to increase greenhouse gas pollution, potentially cancelling out hundreds of millions of dollars of public spending on emissions cuts under the Coalition’s Direct Action climate policy.

Citic Pacific’s Sino Iron project in the Pilbara is
among the industrial sites that have been allowed
to increase emissions under the safeguard mechanism.

The increases have been quietly approved under the “safeguard mechanism”, which was introduced as part of Direct Action to ensure cuts paid for using the main part of the policy – the emission reduction fund – were not undone by emissions increasing in other parts of the economy.

Under the safeguard mechanism, government agency the Clean Energy Regulator sets an emissions limit for each large industrial site based on its highest level of emissions over the previous five years. But companies can apply to have the limit recalculated.

Read Adam Morton’s story on The Guardian - “Emissions increases approved by regulator may wipe out $260m of Direct Action cuts.”

Buried at sea: State hunts for underground home for carbon emissions

A search has begun off the coast of Gippsland’s Ninety Mile Beach for a place to bury millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide beneath the seabed as a way to cut Victoria’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The Minerals Council of Australia said carbon capture and 

storage could play a long-term role in reducing emissions

 from coal-fired power stations in Gippsland.

Researchers hope to find porous rock formations deep beneath the ocean, into which the state will inject gas piped from fossil-fuel based industries such as the Latrobe Valley’s coal-fired power stations.

The Andrews and Turnbull governments are spending $150 million to try to kickstart the carbon capture and storage project in Gippsland, but say it will only go ahead if the fossil fuels industry backs the technology with a significant financial investment of its own.

Critics argue more than $1 billion has already been spent on carbon capture and storage trials and pilot projects in Australia, with very little to show for it.

Read Adam Carey’s story in The Age - “Buried at sea: State hunts for underground home for carbon emissions.”

(Just a few years ago a leading climate scientist said, in answer to a question of carbon capture a storage that it was a yet to be proved technology, noting that had succeeded in a few small trial sites, but no one was really sure how the process could be scaled up, successfully. I'm far from sure that there has been much success in firming up the process and the Minerals Council would certainly endorse this move as it does little more than forestalls the adoption of a zero carbon way of life, a change that would see the demise of large parts of its industry - Robert McLean)

What would happen if the world suddenly went vegetarian?

People become vegetarians for a variety of reasons. Some do it to alleviate animal suffering, others because they want to pursue a healthier lifestyle. Still others are fans of sustainability or wish to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Eliminating meat from our diets would bring a bounty
 of benefits to both our own health and the planet’s
 – but it could also harm millions of people.

No matter how much their carnivorous friends might deny it, vegetarians have a point: cutting out meat delivers multiple benefits. And the more who make the switch, the more those perks would manifest on a global scale.

But if everyone became a committed vegetarian, there would be serious drawbacks for millions, if not billions, of people.

“It’s a tale of two worlds, really,” says Andrew Jarvis of Colombia’s International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. “In developed countries, vegetarianism would bring all sorts of environmental and health benefits. But in developing countries there would be negative effects in terms of poverty.”

Read Rachel Nuwer’s BBC story - “What would happen if the world suddenly went vegetarian?”

The Most Powerful Evidence Climate Scientists Have of Global Warming

Earth's temperature is rising, and it isn't just in the air around us. More than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed into the oceans that cover two-thirds of the planet's surface. Their temperature is rising, too, and it tells a story of how humans are changing the planet.

This accrued heat is "really the memory of past climate change," said Kevin Trenberth, the head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and co-author of a new paper on ocean warming.

It's not just the amount of warming that is significant—it's also the pace.

The rate at which the oceans are heating up has nearly doubled since 1992, and that heat is reaching ever deeper waters, according to a recent study. At the same time, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been rising.

The charts that follow show how the oceans are changing and what they're telling us as a thermometer of global warming.

Read the Inside Climate News story by Sabrina Shankman and Paul Horn - “The Most Powerful Evidence Climate Scientists Have of Global Warming.”

States Dare to Think Big on Climate Change

The one bright spot amid the generally gloomy news about climate change, and the Trump administration’s resistance to doing anything about it, is the determination of a number of state governments to take action on their own.

California, as usual, has commanded the headlines on this score, having just strengthened its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Now the nine Northeastern states that form the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have done much the same, in a further rebuke to the know-littles and do-nothings like Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who are now calling the shots on climate policy in Washington.

The nine states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, last week agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants an additional 30 percent by 2030, on top of the 40 percent cut they have already achieved since the program began in 2009. R.G.G.I., as the initiative is known, was the nation’s first multistate greenhouse gas initiative. From the beginning (and despite the defection of New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie), it has had the backing of governors from both parties. More important, it has quietly achieved substantial emissions reductions at little cost to the states’ economies or to their consumers.

Read opinion piece in The New York Times - “States Dare to Think Big on Climate Change.”

Extreme weather deaths in Europe 'could increase 50-fold by next century’

Deaths from weather disasters could increase 50-fold in Europe by the start of the next century if no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or protect citizens, researchers have warned.

Wildfires in Portugal killed 64 people in June; the recent study
 explores how often and where similar weather-related
disasters are likely to occur in the coming years. 

A new study estimates a toll of 152,000 deaths a year between 2071 and 2100 as a direct result of hazards relating to extreme weather, with those living in southern Europe likely to be the hardest hit.

“Governments and policies should be focused more on designing suitable adaptation measures,” said Giovanni Forzieri, a co-author of the study from the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy. “If no adaptation measures [are] taken, these estimates are really alarming.”

Writing in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, Forzieri and colleagues describe how they used state-of-the art predictions to explore how often and where seven types of weather disasters – including heatwaves, wildfires and floods – are likely to occur across Europe in the coming years if no action on global warming is taken.

The analysis also used large datasets from disasters in recent years to calculate a fixed value of human vulnerability for different weather events, and incorporated projections on how populations were likely to change.

Read The Guardian story bye Nicola Davis - “Extreme weather deaths in Europe 'could increase 50-fold by next century’.”

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions soar in latest figures

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising to the highest figures seen in years, according to official government figures, rising 1.6% in the last quarter and 1% in the past year.

The Bayswater coal-powered thermal power station
near Muswellbrook in New South Wales. Australia’s
emissions have increased to the highest level in years.

The country’s emissions in the year to March 2017 are the highest on record at 550.3m tonnes of CO2 equivalent when emissions from land use change are excluded – a sector where the government says its figures have a high degree of uncertainty.

The country’s emissions rose by 1.6m tonnes in the quarter to March 2017, or by 1.1% – a figure that is the same whether estimations of land use emissions are taken into account or not.

Read Michael Slezak’s story on The Guardian - “Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions soar in latest figures.”

Extreme El Nino events to double in number even with 1.5-degree warming: study

Extreme El Nino events will more than double in frequency, even with the most ambitious goals to curtail global warming, exposing large regions to severe droughts and placing coral reefs in peril, a team of scientists including Australians say.

In 2015, almost 200 nations signed the Paris Climate accord, agreeing to curb greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global temperatures warming more than 1.5-2 degrees compared with pre-industrial times. National pledges so far point to warming of closer to 3 degrees.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Extreme El Nino events to double in number even with 1.5-degree warming: study.”

Talking Point: The bell already tolls for our future

THE devastation caused by Cyclone Debbie will soon turbo-boost arguments about the need to act on climate change, already running hot after eight out of the top 10 temperature records for NSW were set in February.

Flash flooding caused extensive damage
to much of Lismore in NSW. 

And no wonder. Debbie’s damage stretches from north of Bowen to south of Lismore, a distance almost as great as from London to Rome, or New York to Miami.

Scientists will say this shows we must cut our greenhouse gas emissions as fast as we can.

Politicians will say Australia has always been a land of droughts and flooding rains.

For those of us with grandchildren, who we hope will one day be grandparents themselves, it’s time for some serious thinking.

Read Michael Rowan’s story in the Mercury - “Talking Point: The bell already tolls for our future.”

Trump Repeal of Climate Rules Means U.S. Paris Target Now Out of Reach

Whether the U.S. meets its emissions-reduction commitments under the Paris climate accord is pivotal to the success of the global agreement, but the Trump administration's policies have all but ensured the U.S. will fall far short. One recent analysis says the country will miss its target by more than 1 billion metric tons.

President Trump may not have waved goodbye formally
 to the Paris agreement, but his policies are keeping
the U.S. from meeting its goals. 

Under President Barack Obama, the United States pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. That means emissions must be cut about 1.7 billion metric tons, according to figures from the Environmental Protection Agency's latest greenhouse gas inventory. The nation is a third of the way to that target, but the rest was to be achieved via an array of regulations, especially the Clean Power Plan, that are now targeted for elimination by President Donald Trump. Not only was the goal dependent on those rules, it would have also required even more rigorous policies from Obama's successor because reductions from those rules would not have been enough, numerous studies have found.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Trump Repeal of Climate Rules Means U.S. Paris Target Now Out of Reach.”