Adani coal mine poses 'alarming' risk to sacred wetlands, traditional owners say

Traditional owners who are fighting the Adani mine in central Queensland say they welcome scientists' concerns about impacts on the Doongmabulla Springs but do not trust any government to ensure the miner protects their sacred wetlands.

Little Moses springs and its surrounds is
about 7 kilometres from the mine site.

The ABC this week became the first media organisation to visit the remote springs complex — one of the world's last unspoiled desert oases — which are at the centre of a controversial Morrison Government decision that thrust Adani forward as a federal election issue.

The trip to the nationally important wetlands was at the invitation of a determined group of mine opponents within the Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) people, who have vowed to take their fight all the way to The Hague.

Read the ABC News story by Josh Robertson - “Adani coal mine poses 'alarming' risk to sacred wetlands, traditional owners say.”

(Asked at the April gathering of Shepparton’s Beneath the Wisteria about, Nicholls candidate and Murray electorate incumbent, Damian Drum, said the Adani mine had the support of Australia’s indigenous people, but obviously he was handling the truth rather loosely - Robert McLean)

Climate change: Global impacts 'accelerating' - WMO

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the physical and financial impacts of global warming are accelerating.

Global impacts of climate change are accelerating.

Record greenhouse gas levels are driving temperatures to "increasingly dangerous levels", it says.

Their report comes in the same week as the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported a surge in CO2 in 2018.

However, new data from the UK suggests Britain is bucking the trend with emissions down by 3%.

Read the story from the BBC - “Climate change: Global impacts 'accelerating' - WMO.”

Tracking the climate threat to Australia’s unique ecosystems

How do we monitor the impacts of climate change on Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems?

The beaks and body sizes of some Australian birds
are changing in response to climate change.

It’s a complex issue. This is mainly because of how variable the climate can be on land, as well as the unpredictability of extreme events like drought, fire and flooding, which typically reoccur at decade scales. These extreme events are expected to have the largest impacts on our terrestrial biodiversity.

As a result, detecting any climate-driven changes in the frequency and intensity of these extreme events needs sets of data that only come from decades of long-term monitoring. While this long-term monitoring is critical for ensuring the endurance of species and communities into the future, there are challenges.

The story from the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit - “Tracking the climate threat to Australia’s unique ecosystems.”

If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef

Ecoanxiety is an emerging condition. Named in 2011, the American Psychological Association recently described it as the dread and helplessness that come with “watching the slow and seemingly irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, children, and later generations.”

Soybeans in a silo at a cattle feed in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

It’s not a formal diagnosis. Anxiety is traditionally defined by an outsized stress response to a given stimulus. In this case, the stimulus is real, as are the deleterious effects of stress on the body.

This sort of disposition toward ecological-based distress does not pair well with a president who has denied the reality of the basis for this anxiety. Donald Trump has called climate change a fabrication on the part of “the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” He has also led the United States to become the only G20 country that will not honor the Paris Climate Accord, and who has appointed fossil-fuel advocates to lead the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency.

Read the story from The Atlantic by James Hamblin  - “If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef.”

Heat on over climate change

More than 140 million people in Africa, Latin America and South Asia could move to another part of their country by 2050 to escape the worsening impacts of climate change, unless urgent action is taken to curb global warming and help people adapt, the World Bank says.

Moving: Venezuelans cross the International Simon
Bolivar bridge into Cucuta, Colombia, as rising numbers
 of Venezuelans flee in a burgeoning refugee crisis.

Globally, the numbers of people forced to leave home because of water shortages, crop failures, sea-level rise, storm surges and other climate threats was likely to be much higher, researchers said.

But if global warming is effectively kept to limits set in the Paris Agreement on climate change, and people are helped to adapt, then the numbers migrating in the three regions will drop to about 40 million people, the study predicted.

‘‘We have a small window now, before the effects of climate change deepen, to prepare the ground for this new reality,’’ World Bank head Kristalina Georgieva said.

That preparation needs to include making economies less vulnerable to climate change, helping farmers adapt their growing techniques, and making city infrastructure more resilient to storms, rising sea levels, f loods or drought, the study noted. Cities also need to create enough jobs, and boost health and education services, to meet the needs of the growing number of people migrating to urban areas.

Without that preparation, cities could face serious repercussions, said Kanta Kumari Rigaud, who led the creation of the World Bank report.

‘‘We could see increased tensions and conflict . . . but that doesn’t have to be the future,’’ the environmental specialist said. ‘‘It won’t be a crisis if we plan for it now.’’

In the worst-case scenario, more than 85 million people could leave home by 2050 in sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, and 17 million in Latin America, the report noted.

And the number of climate migrants could accelerate after 2050, unless there is urgent action to hold global warming to below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, the report noted.

The most vulnerable people, however, will be unable to move and will remain trapped in increasingly unviable areas, it predicted.

Many more people are migrating within their own countries than across borders, doing so for economic, social, political and environmental reasons, the World Bank report said.

In 2016, storms, floods and other weather-related disasters — not all of them driven by climate change — forced 23 million people to move within their countries, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

‘‘Although cross-border movement is much more attention-grabbing and can appear more dramatic, right now the internal movement of people forms the bulk of what’s going on,’’ United Kingdom-based Climate and Migration Coalition coordinator Alex Randall said.

Migration was not necessarily a bad thing, he said, and could be a good way to adapt to climate change and improve people’s lives.

‘‘It can be a positive, empowering experience. But it comes with risks as well. The emphasis should be on how we make migration safe,’’ he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Although much migration is likely to take place from the countryside to urban areas, cities themselves will grapple with climate impacts as well.

For example, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and storm surges. Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, by comparison, could see slower population growth as it relies on increasingly unpredictable rainfall, the World Bank study noted.

Regions and cities that are likely to attract large numbers of climate migrants include Nairobi, the southern Indian highlands between Bangalore and Chennai, and the central plateau areas around Mexico City and Guatemala City.

But lack of clear data about how a particular area will be impacted by climate change, and when, makes it difficult for cities, governments and communities to plan.

Nonetheless, ‘‘(it’s) important to help people make good decisions about whether to stay where they are, or move to new locations where they are less vulnerable,’’ Ms Georgieva said.

Story in today’s Shepparton News by Alex Whiting (Reuters) - “Heat on over climate change.”

Looking to religion rather than science

The thoughts of Phil Torres, writing in “Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks”, need to be thought about by those of us concerned about the impacts of climate change:

“Further complicating the situation, environmental degradation could positively reinforce the eschatological beliefs of religious people around the world. This is because many world religions prophesy natural disasters (as well as wars, disease, famines, and so on) to be harbingers of the apocalypse. Consequently, as the effects of climate change become more pronounced, a sizable portion of the 8 billion religious people projected to exist by 2050 may look to religion, rather than science, to make sense of the global crises around them.214 Indeed, such crises could even increase the number of religious adherents. This has happened many times before: e.g., the third-century Plague of Cyprian may have catalyzed the early rise of Christianity, since members of the young religion chose to “martyr” themselves rather than perish from the disease, making Christianity appear to be worth dying for.

Why 2 degrees Celsius more warming limit so important

If you read or listen to almost any article about climate change, it’s likely the story refers in some way to the “2 degrees Celsius limit.” The story often mentions greatly increased risks if the climate exceeds 2 degrees C and even “catastrophic” impacts to our world if we warm more than the target.

Recently a series of scientific papers have come out and stated that we have a 5 percent chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees C, and only one chance in a hundred of keeping man-made global warming to 1.5 degrees C, the aspirational goal of the 2015 Paris United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference. Additionally, recent research shows that we may have already locked in 1.5 degrees C of warming even if we magically reduced our carbon footprint to zero today.

And there’s an additional wrinkle: What is the correct baseline we should use? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) frequently references temperature increases relative to the second half of the 19th century, but the Paris Agreement states the temperature increases should be measured from “preindustrial” levels, or before 1850. Scientists have shown such a baseline effectively pushes us another 0.2 degrees C closer to the upper limits.

That’s a lot of numbers and data – so much that it could make even the most climate-literate head spin. How did the climate, and climate policy community, come to agree that 2 degrees C is the safe limit? What does it mean? And if we can’t meet that target, should we even try and limit climate change?

Read the story by David Titley on Yale Climate Connections - “Why 2 degrees Celsius more warming limit so important.”

We can no longer tolerate climate change denial

The United States Weather Service, normally not an agency prone to colourful language, issued an extraordinary statement on Sunday regarding hurricane Harvey, saying, "This event is unprecedented and all impacts are unknown beyond anything experienced". It is now predicted the storm could eventually drop over 150 centimetres of rain in some areas, more than any other in the region's history.

America's efforts to combat climate change have
 been battered by President Donald Trump. 

Far from over, it is already clear that Harvey's impact is catastrophic. Six people are confirmed dead and that number is expected to increase. Cost estimates range up to $US100 billion.

Meanwhile flooding in Bangladesh, India and Nepal during the region's worst monsoon season in a decade has killed an estimated 1200 people.

Climate scientists are reluctant to attribute any particular weather event to global warming, though in this case the signs are that human behaviour contributed to the formation and severity of the storm and its impact.

Read the Editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald - “We can no longer tolerate climate change denial.”

Report helps scientists communicate how global warming is worsening natural disasters

Fire fighters monitor a back burn near Mount
 Victoria in the Blue Mountains on October 21,
2013. The intense Australian summer heat
 was made five times more likely by
human-caused global warming.

Climate scientists have done a great job winning the scientific arguments about climate change. To be clear about what I mean, we have done a very good job investigating whether or not the Earth’s climate is changing (it is), what is causing the change (humans), how much will it change in the future, and what will be the impacts.

There are no longer any reputable scientists who disagree with the principle view of that human emissions will cause climate change that will lead to societal and human losses (they already are). So, I use the term “win” here not to indicate it was a battle of “us” versus “them”. Rather, I mean “win” in that we have faithfully followed the scientific method, explored alternative hypotheses, checked and rechecked our work, and have come to a truth that is unassailable. We’ve done our job.

In the past, that is where our job ended. I mean maybe we would help with a press release on a breaking study, do an interview. But only rarely.

Read John Abraham’s story on The Guardian - “Report helps scientists communicate how global warming is worsening natural disasters.”

CSIRO helps us understand how we should adapt to climate change

R

esearch by the CSIRO is ensuring that Australia is positioned to deal effectively with the impacts of climate change by providing the scientific knowledge needed to improve our ability to adapt.

It says, “We equip policy makers, industries and communities with practical and effective adaptation options to climate change and variability.”

Details about what the CSIRO is doing are in the story - “Strengthening Australia’s resilience to climate change”.