Climate & Climate Change

There was a big conference in Melbourne this week titled Greenhouse 2005: Action on Climate Change . I didn’t see much coverage in the national media but The Age ran a feature every day on the perils of climate change to coincide with the event, click here, here and here (and there was more!).

A reader of this web-log was carefully following the dire predictions and sent in the following summary:

2005 may go down in the record books as the warmest year on the global record. What a perfect backdrop for the international Greenhouse 2005 conference held in Melbourne over the last week. 350 delegates from science, industry and government attended for a review of climate change science, likely impacts and strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The conference saw the who’s who of climate change in Australia pouring over the facts and figures and making impassioned speeches on future needs.

The conference was opened by the Governor-General, Michael Jeffrey, who as a “concerned layman” called for action on climate change. General Jeffrey lists melting peat bogs in Russia, storm surges in Florida, and loss of the Antarctic ice sheet as concerns.

The Age reported the GG as “passionate” about the climate change issue. He listed a raft of alternative energy options to be explored – with interestingly nuclear power being one of those options. Setting the tone for the conference the GG said “As a concerned layman, I would suggest the Australian public, to become fully energised on global warming, needs to have a general idea on the answers to the following questions:
* what is the broad global picture in respect to global warming now, and say in 50 years time under projected rates of energy use?;
* what is generally agreed about the warming situation in Australia now and in 50 years time, including its likely impact on our agriculture, weather patterns and general living?;
* What might be the solutions; the way ahead, globally, nationally, and individually?”

The Bureau of Meteorology was strong on message that a climate trend was definitely on in Australia: “Australia has experienced its warmest start to a year on record (since 1950), with the January-to-October temperature averaging 1.03 degrees Celsius above the 30-year average (1961-1990). As the year nears an end, a record-breaking year is looking likely – another indicator of climate change. Annual mean temperatures have generally increased throughout Australia since 1910, particularly since the 1950s,” says Mike Coughlan, head of the National Climate Centre within the Bureau of Meteorology. As the average temperature has risen, we have also seen an increase in the incidence of hot days and hot nights, and a reduction in the number of cold days and nights. This warming is mirrored in the oceans around Australia.

Warming is not the only sign of change we are observing in Australia’s climate. Other changes include a marked decline in rainfall in the south-west and parts of south-east Australia, and recent reductions in rainfall through the eastern states. At the same time, rainfall in the arid interior and north-west has increased dramatically, in some places nearly doubling during the past 50 years.”

CSIRO have produced the most precise record of greenhouse gas fluctuations in the Southern Hemisphere over the past 2000 years. They add that the greatest increase in greenhouse gas growth has occurred since the 1980s, with carbon dioxide showing accelerating growth. Other CSIRO researchers such as Penny Whetton warned of changes to extreme weather – more heatwaves, floods, droughts and more intense tropical cyclones. CSIRO are also investigating how climate change interacts with natural short, medium and longer term cycles.

The Australian National University’s Dr Will Steffen warned of surprises in the climate system where abrupt climate change may occur in just a few years. Such surprises appear to already exist in the paleo-climate records.

The Age newspaper ran a series of daily feature articles during the week following the conference. Some excerpts are:
The scenario for the Murray River already beset by droughts and ecological concern for its aquatic health suffers a double whammy blow of reduced rainfall and higher evaporation. CSIRO’s computer projections have winter rain systems sliding towards Antarctica – a shift that have already started in the last eight years. Droughts become more intense and longer, summer storms are more intense, and heatwaves more common. Environmental flows already provided by river managers may be further eroded as reduced water availability hits home. The Age cites dead and dying riparian vegetation, algal blooms and loss of vertebrate biodiversity. Naturally concerns of irrigators and the environment are on a collision course. CSIRO economist Mike Young says farmers will have to become more adaptive and more climate savvy to swing with increased seasonal variation. As it gets hotter some crops will require more water, crops requiring winter chilling like almonds, apples and cherries may have yield reductions from warmer winter temperatures.

At the opposite end of the nation in the iconic Kakadu Park creeping salinsation into the freshwater wetlands has occurred over the last 50 years. While the current cause is not likely to be attributable to climate change further rises in sea level and changes in rainfall pattern will increase and accelerate the trend. The park’s paperbark vegetation is thickening up considerably – a combination of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, changed fire and rainfall regimes are all possibilities. If the system transforms into a salt environment the wetland flora and fauna will go – replaced by mangroves. Some 60 species of water birds are also at stake. The debate about building a barrage to hold back the sea incursion and the salt is on in earnest.
Across on the Queensland coast the Bellenden Kerr range is an ecological island – a refuge of a species assemblage from a cooler and moister Australia of 20 million years ago. A two degree rise would see the wet tropics ecosystem start to disappear with animals needing move upslope to beat the heat. With a 3.5 degree rise 65 species unique to the area would vanish into extinction. If you live at or reach the top of the mountain there is nowhere to go. These is debate about past warm periods but these may have been wetter than today so providing some relief. Can animals genetically adapt to their new environments? Unfortunately it appears that breeding cycles are too long. Some species don’t even breed every year and only have a few offspring. The other combinative effect is a change in the cloud forest with the cloud base rising each year. This may not affect water supply to the forest but also affect the water supplies in the Cairns regions.

The great Australian icon – the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem has long been feared to be a target of global warming. Certainly even now El Nino events can bleach the corals in the Barrier Reef as well as round the world. When water temperatures become too high coral expel their symbiotic zooxanthellae and die – taking on a white ghostly appearance. Certainly water temperature increases in the lower reef around Heron Island are causing impacts already as the frequency of increased water temperatures increases. In a double whammy the water chemistry of the reef may become more acidic from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. This threatens the coral’s ability to secrete exoskeletons and grow. Can coral’s learn to adapt to these new conditions? Certainly experience on other reef systems suggests that coral can expel heat sensitive algae and replace them with heat tolerant strains. But how many species can do this is unknown. Unfortunately a certain amount of warming of the oceans may already be locked in and there will be a steady increase in temperature of the oceans over the next few decades. Certainly there is a lot at stake from an ecological and economic viewpoint.

The other great tourism business in Australia is the skiing industry. The industry is steadily investing in snow making equipment. Maybe it really needs to. Global warming creates a range of basic problems for Australia’s 11,500 square kilometre alpine region, a tiny 0.15 per cent of the continent. The most obvious effect of rising temperatures is snow that melts more quickly, is spread thinner, and a snow line that moves higher up the mountain. A complication is rainfall. Under climate change, the winter rain systems are expected to lessen so the chance of snow – even if it is cold enough – drops off. There may be some solace as storms increase, bearing the chance of a big snow dump.

Modelling for 2020 and 2050 shows that the resort with the most remaining snow will be Perisher, in NSW, followed in order by Falls Creek, Mount Hotham, Thredbo and Mount Buller. The smaller resorts of Mount Buffalo, Mount Baw Baw and Lake Mountain become marginal for skiing at 2020, even in the most optimistic scenarios. A report for the Australian Greenhouse Office says further global warming will reduce biodiversity and seriously decrease populations of endemic species. The loss, the report says, will be very significant at a regional, national and international scientific level.

Henrik Wahren, one of Australia’s leading alpine ecologists, says the alpine environment could disappear by 2050: “We won’t have an alpine area. It will be gone.” Once a plant species is lost, he says, there’s a cascading effect that flows to insects, birds and animals.
The region clearly has to adapt – selling itself as an alternative to crowded beach resorts may be one such option. Tree change instead of sea change.

End of summary.

I would have thought there might be some winners as well as losers out of climate change – that it is not universally all bad. Indeed I have previously commented that warm weather favors coral reefs but not polar bears, click here. But it seems the conference and The Age had a single message: “We’ll all be rooned”.

…………………….

Many thanks to the reader who sent in the long summary – who wishes to remain anonymous.

I would be keen to post a piece that outlined the potential upside of global warming. Any offers?

It was apparently without even consulting James Hansen, or others at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), that Washington Post journalist Juliet Eilperin ran the prediction on October 13th, that 2005 would be the warmest year on record, click here for more detail.

It was Hansen’s prediction much earlier in the year, that 2005 would be very warm, click here to download a file with notes from Hanson in response to the article.

Luckily for Eilperin, Hanson stands by his February prediction, that 2005 will be very warm.

He wrote on 3rd November with reference to the data and graphs in the attached file:

“For the first nine months of the year, 2005 is 0.02C cooler than 1998 in our land-ocean temperature index, and is tied with 2002 as the second warmest year in the period of instrumental data. The graph in the lower right shows that 1998 and 2002 were relatively cool in the last three months of the year, by more than the typical variation of the global temperature anomaly (Figure 3).

Therefore, there is a better than 50% chance that 2005 will move up in the rankings by the end of the year.

Considering also the continuing effect of the current planetary energy imbalance, we conclude that there is no reason to change the statements that we made in February and April (see above). It is now clear that 2005 surely will have been an abnormally warm year, comparable to the warmest year on record (1998), despite not being pushed, as in 1998, by a large El Nino. It is noteworthy that September 2005 was the warmest September in the 125 years of data.

Of course, it will be interesting to see how 2005 ranks compared to 1998 at the end of the year. However, for scientific purposes, the important result (already clear) will be that the trend of global temperatures toward global warming is now so steep that in just seven years the global warming trend has taken temperatures to approximately the level of the abnormally warm year of 1998. The steep global warming trend that began in the late 1970s (Figure 1) is continuing.”

It is good luck, if not good science, when the February prediction is still good in November!

All of this does ‘throw a spanner in the works’ for John McLean and some others who have claimed it is not getting warmer – because recent years have been cooler than 1998.

……..

Thanks to David Jones for sending me the Hanson notes in response to the Washington Post article.

SimonC has just posted a comment at The Cost of Kyoto stating:

I think the anti-Kyoto people are the ones who are scare mongering with their cries of ‘we’ll all be ruined’. …According to Howard we’ll meet our Kyoto targets (despite not ratifying it). So why hasn’t Australia fallen into economic free fall?

I understood that the reason Australia is going to meet its Kyoto targets (even though it hasn’t signed up to Kyoto) is because the Australian government has done a fiddle with the tree clearing figures particularly in Queensland.

Indeed, the Federal government report, Tracking the Kyoto Target 2004, published late last year indicated Australia was on target. But what the Minister did not acknowledge was this was mostly a consequence of restricting and redefining ‘tree clearing’.

The report says vegetation management legislation recently introduced into Queensland and NSW will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 24.4 million tonnes. By comparison, the energy sector increased emissions by 85 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent during the period 1990 to 2002.

The total reduction attributed to ‘land use change’, which includes reduced tree clearing, is 78 million tonnes for the same period. So the increase in emissions from the energy sector has been offset by clearing fewer trees – at tremendous cost to individual landholders in Queensland and New South Wales, yet the Minister made no mention of this.

This is how it works:

What is known as the “Australia Clause” (Article 3.7) in the Kyoto Protocol allows countries for which land use change and forestry was a net source of emissions in 1990 to include the emissions from land use change in their 1990 baseline.

It has been claimed that the Australian national greenhouse office consequently exaggerated the extent of the clearing in 1990 to give an inflated baseline value and at the same time not recorded carbon sinks resulting from forest growth and woodland thickening.

This made it easier to achieve the Kyoto target for 2008-2012.

Ecologist, Bill Burrows, writing in the journal Global Change Biology in 2002 explained how Australia’s often quoted total net greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 25 per cent if we included the sinks resulting from woodland thickening in our National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

But this would also affect our 1990 baseline and make it harder for the ‘accountants’ to suggest we are on target, and even more difficult to justify the vegetation management laws.

Burrows calculates the annual carbon sink in about 60 million hectares of grazed woodland in Queensland alone is about 35 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.

So we have a Federal Government pretending to meet its obligations to an agreement it hasn’t signed up to using accounting practices that deny the phenomenon of vegetation thickening.

………….
Some months ago Bill Burrows sent me a copy of a speech he gave earlier this year, Download file. It is a detailed critic of the recent politics of vegetation thickening in Queensland from the persepective of a retired government scientist.

Patrick Michaels, author of Meltdown, is yet another global warming skeptic. How can Ian Lowe, President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, in his new book, A Big Fix, claim there are only five global warming skeptics in the whole world! 😉

Michael Duffy interviewed Michaels on ABC Radio National last night on climate change issues, click here for the transcript. The interview will be replayed tonight at about 9pm.

I was interested in Michaels comments on sealevel change and also snow and ice at the Arctic and Antarctic:

Michael Duffy: Patrick, let’s turn now to some of the alleged effects of global warming: are the ice caps melting?

Patrick Michaels: The North Pole ice, at the end of summer, is definitely on its way down. Remember though, when the sun goes down on the first day of fall at the North Pole it starts to refreeze very, very quickly. It’s really kind of misleading to say the polar ice caps are melting. What you really need to say is that there’s a big degradation of ice at the brief end of Polish summer… this is the North Pole. Having said that, remember that there is a raft of scientific literature that shows that from about 4,000 years before present, on back to at least 8000 and some of them go back to about 11,000 years before present, the northern Arctic was warmer than it is today by a couple of degrees.

Antarctica is a different story. For all the news stories you hear about the warming of Antarctica, every story that says Antarctica is warming is wrong. There is a small area in Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, that little land that juts out towards South America that shows warming. But if you average across Antarctica

I’ve just received a few useful links.

The first email reads:

“Well, easy to see why Blair has done a U-turn on Kyoto if you read the following:

http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=157608

and this, too, is a good summary:

http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CAE28.htm

But what still just astonishes me is that reality is only setting in NOW, in 2005. Sensible, balanced commentators were predicting all these costs at least 5 years ago, but the Kyoto juggernaut just rolled on nevertheless.”

And I have previously posted on the cost to New Zealand here, https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000674.html .

Then I received something from a member of generation Y. The following link, also with future projections, is good fun if you don’t mind advertisements and some coarse language: http://www.funnyjunk.com/pages/world.htm .

Earlier in the week British Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed a conference which took place under the climate change agreement reached at the recent meeting of the G8* in Gleneagles, Scotland. This weeks meeting included energy and environment ministers from the G8 and also Australia, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa and senior official from United Nations organizations including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Tony Blair, once a champion of the Kyoto Protocol, seems to be increasingly acknowledging that the future lies less with the target-based approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and more with promoting economic growth and encouraging the private sector to develop low carbon technologies.

Amongst other things, the conference delegates discussed:
1. The need to promote wider access to cleaner energy technologies and accelerate deployment,
2. That there is no shortage of appropriate technologies… the challenge is to create the incentives for private sector investment, and
3. The need for appropriate frameworks to provide incentives in R&D for the next generation of clean energy technologies, and to overcome the “valley of death” in which promising new technologies fail to achieve their commercial potential.

The Guardian has suggested this “undermines more than 15 years of climate change negotiations” and the same newspaper quotes Tony Juniper from Friends of the Earth commenting that “His [Tony Blair] role is pivotal. He’s the only leader who’s pushing climate change as an issue that has to be dealt with. So what he says is going to carry particular weight and he’s basically just rewritten the history of climate change politics.”

Australia and the US have refused to ratify Kyoto on the basis it will be very damaging economically while achieving very little in terms of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels – China and India have ratified but are exempt.

Blair and the conference delegates appear to have really just built on the policy change articulated at the Gleneagles meeting held in Scotland early in July.

Interestingly this approach mirrors that proposed by the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate which was announced in Laos in late July at the Association of South East Asian Nations regional summit.

This group, comprising Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States – which together account for nearly half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – propose to:
1. Develop, deploy and transfer existing and emerging clean technology,
2. Explore technologies such as clean coal, nuclear power and carbon capture,
3. Involve the private sector.

The Clean Development Partnership group was to meet in Adelaide this month but the meeting has been postponed.

While the US and Australia have been ostracized for not signing Kyoto, it seems we may have been right all along to not go down that blind alley which is perhaps Kyoto.

…………

*The G8 has its roots in the 1973 oil crisis and subsequent global recession. In 1975, the French invited the heads of state of six major industralized democracies to a summit. The participants agreed to an annual meeting organized under a rotating presidency, forming what was dubbed the Group of Six (G6) consisting of France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. At the subsequent annual summit in Puerto Rico, it became the Group of Seven (G7) when Canada joined. In 1991, following the end of the Cold War, the USSR (now Russia) began meeting with the G7 after the main summit – making 8. (adapted from Wikipedia)