Climate Emergency could be the best thing in our lifetime.

Climate Emergency could be the best thing that will happen in our lifetimes, says Mik Aidt

“What if I told you the climate emergency will not only be the biggest and most disruptive, but also potentially the best thing that will ever happen in your lifetime?”

These are the words of Mik Aidt, the climate change activist who was influential in Greta Thunberg’s rise to prominence through his weekly podcast, ‘The Sustainable Hour’.

Mik, an Australian citizen with Danish heritage, is speaking at Recreation Conference in Hamilton/Kirikiriroa and says that the climate emergency has the capacity to bring richness, goodness, value and excitement to our lives.

Read the story from Scoop - “Climate Emergency could be the best thing in our lifetime."

Are parts of India becoming too hot for humans?

(CNN) Intense heat waves have killed more than 100 people in India this summer and are predicted to worsen in coming years, creating a possible humanitarian crisis as large parts of the country potentially become too hot to be inhabitable.

Heat waves in India usually take place between March and July and abate once the monsoon rains arrive. But in recent years these hot spells have become more intense, more frequent and longer.

India is among the countries expected to be worst affected by the impacts of climate crisis, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say that even if the world succeeds in cutting carbon emissions, limiting the predicted rise in average global temperatures, parts of India will become so hot they will test the limits of human survivability.

Read the CNN story by Shekhar Chandra - “Are parts of India becoming too hot for humans?”

‘Dangerous' cyclones to soak and batter Australia's north

Twin severe tropical cyclones will hammer northern Australia over the weekend, smashing ecosystems and potentially leaving a hefty repair bill from damaging winds, storm surges and flooding.

Cyclone Veronica, off the Pilbara coast, and Cyclone Trevor
in the Gulf of Carpentaria are likely to batter large areas of
northern Australia over the weekend.

Both Cyclone Trevor in the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cyclone Veronica off north-western Western Australia are likely to generate wind gusts reaching 275km/h as they near the coast, said Dean Sgarbossa, a senior meteorologist with the Bureau of Meteorology's extreme weather desk.

Read the story from The Sydney Morning Herald by Peter Hannam - “‘Dangerous' cyclones to soak and batter Australia's north.”

How to understand 1.5°C climate science

Questions of the IPCC 1.5°C report.

What will the much awaited IPCC 1.5 degree report reveal and what analysis is critical for its release? 

With 1.5 degrees of warming potentially only a decade away, and dangerous climate already reached, there is no carbon budget left.

Read the Breakthrough's story and download their short guides - “How to understand 1.5°C climate science.”

Impending blight: how Statoil's plans threaten the Great Australian Bight

The cold and violent waters of the Great Australian Bight are home to one of the country’s most biodiverse and important marine ecosystems, the heart of its fishing industry, a growing tourism hotspot – and potentially its newest oil field.

The mouth of the Murray river, where it flows into the Great Australian Bight.

Of the species in the bight, 85% are found nowhere else on the planet. It is a breeding ground for the endangered southern right whale and a feeding zone for Australian sea lions, great white sharks, migratory sperm whales and short-tailed shearwaters. 

It’s also an untapped resource, the economic benefits of which could be “enormous”, say oil and gas groups. Environmentalists, scientists and members of the communities that ring the bight worry the damage too could be enormous.

Read Helen Davidson’s story from The Guardian - “Impending blight: how Statoil's plans threaten the Great Australian Bight.”

NSW government's power plan reveals huge renewable energy resources

The Berejiklian government has identified three priority renewable energy zones in NSW that potentially have seven times the capacity of the state's coal-fired power plants.

A wind turbine at Crookwell in NSW: there's
 huge untapped potential in the state.

In a submission to the Australian Energy Markets Operation, the government said the zones, in New England, the central-west and the south-west of NSW "could unlock 77,000 megawatts of new generation capacity”.

Read Peter Hannam’s story from The Sydney Morning Herald - “NSW government's power plan reveals huge renewable energy resources.”

Emphasizing the need for urgency in addressing climate change

A small part of the preamble of the Paris Accord on climate change action signed by 195 countries in December 2015 says: “Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and thus requires the widest possible cooperation by all countries, and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, with a view to accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions, Also recognizing that deep reduction in global emissions will be required in order to achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention and emphasizing the need for urgency in addressing climate change…”

Taken from “Unprecedented Crime: Climate Change Denial and Game Changers for Survival” by Dr Peter Carter, and Elizabeth Woodworth.

Lobbying by MPs forced government to back off on land-clearing enforcement

Attempts by the federal government to stop potentially unlawful clearing in Queensland were reversed after political intervention, with a highly unusual apology letter sent to every landholder suspected of planning unlawful clearing at the direct request of the minister, documents obtained by the Guardian under FOI laws reveal.

 The abrupt line between pristine protected rainforest and land
cleared by early settlers for dairy pasture in north Queensland.

In December 2015 and January 2016, the federal department of environment took the exceptional step of asking 51 landholders with approval from the Queensland government to clear their land, to explain why the clearing wasn’t unlawful under federal environmental law.

But within two months, the department issued the unusual apology letter to every recipient of the initial letter, Guardian Australia can reveal.

Read Michael Slezak’s story from The Guardian - “Lobbying by MPs forced government to back off on land-clearing enforcement.”

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.”

As climate risks increase, will geoengineering become a safer alternative?

With fires, storms, record-breaking temperatures and changes in the natural environment, there is growing evidence that our earth’s systems are becoming increasingly unstable. This has potentially catastrophic consequences.

New technologies may one day pull the greenhouse
gases from the atmosphere. But at what cost?

Public debate often places climate risks in the context of "this century" or "by 2100". But scientists are increasingly highlighting the risks of devastating and irreversible impacts in just 20 or 30 years. This is within our lifetimes, and certainly within our children’s.

These risks include:

Loss of nearly all corals, which support 25% of all ocean life (as documented in the recent film Chasing Coral)

Collapsing ice sheets, which will raise sea-levels, devastating coastal cities and low-lying countries

Warming oceans, which energize storms (to category 6 and higher), with damage that includes breaches of coastal nuclear reactors

Warming of the planet, caused by the greenhouse effect, is the primary stressor of many of these environmental challenges. Carbon dioxide and other pollutants present further complications, such as increasing ocean acidification.

Read the World Economic Forum story - “As climate risks increase, will geoengineering become a safer alternative?”

Study narrows range of Earth's warming response as greenhouse gases rise

New research has sharply narrowed the likely estimate of how much the Earth will warm with a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, potentially honing estimates that have stood for a quarter century.

Estimating how much the planet will warm as we lift
greenhouse gas levels has been an active area of research.

The long-standing estimate for the so-called equilibrium climate sensitivity used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been that surface temperatures would rise between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees for each doubling of CO2 or equivalent greenhouse gases.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Study narrows range of Earth's warming response as greenhouse gases rise.”

Climate Change Might Give Your Grandfather a Heart Attack: Changing Public Perception to Drive Action

Mikaela Bradbury.

I recently heard Dan Costa, the national program director for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Air, Climate, and Energy Research Program, refer to the word "climate change" as being like the word "stuff": it's an all-encompassing, somewhat opaque term that can potentially leave you feeling overwhelmed and misplaced in how to tackle it. He was speaking at the 2017 Yale Environmental Sustainability Summit as part of a panel about the impacts of climate change on public health, and I had the opportunity to meet with him earlier as part of a private lunch offered to student associates of Yale's Climate Change and Health Initiative.

In this more intimate setting, Costa alluded to some of the linguistic tactics he employs in communicating and deploying his research on the adverse effects of air pollution on human health, some of which includes looking at the shared causes and compounding effects of climate change. In equating "climate change" with the word "stuff," he was suggesting that it would be more effective to break up the issue into its various facets, such as air pollution, and target it more discretely, both as a way to rouse public awareness and engagement and avoid the political charge of the term. In other words, not only is "climate change" like a pile of stuff that we don’t know how to approach, it has become like a pile of toxic waste, politically and in some places socially. Therefore, Costa introduced the term "environmental futures" as another type of designator for man-made weather changes. While "environmental futures" may inoculate against some of the political radioactivity of the word "climate change," it certainly doesn’t solve the problem of obfuscation. Thankfully, he merely used it as an entry point into a more targeted discussion.

Read Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs story by  Mikaela Bradbury -  “Climate Change Might Give Your Grandfather a Heart Attack: Changing Public Perception to Drive Action.”

Toxic waste could endanger drinking water if Santos CSG project goes ahead – report

Up to 130 spills of toxic waste could occur if the Santos Narrabri coal seam gas project goes ahead, potentially endangering high-quality drinking and irrigation water, according to a leading academic.

An area of bushland being rejuvenated after a spill at
 Santos’ Bibblewindi water treatment facility which is
part of Santos’s Narrabri gas project. 

In a damning report obtained by Guardian Australia, RMIT hydrologist Matthew Currell said he found basic scientific gaps in the 7,000-page Narrabri gas project environmental impact statement (EIS).

Currell, a senior lecturer in environmental engineering, said the EIS was missing analysis of waste water from existing gas wells and contains conflicting information on whether the project area was part of the recharge zone for the Great Artesian Basin.

He said neither Santos nor the New South Wales government had enough monitoring wells to ensure groundwater was properly monitored.

Read Gabrielle Chan’s story on The Guardian - “Toxic waste could endanger drinking water if Santos CSG project goes ahead – report.”