Category: Climate chaos

In Victoria, Premier John Brumby has alerted the state for the ‘worst fire day in history’ on Saturday, with temperatures again reaching into the mid 40s, plus strong northerly winds.

In the far south of NSW, growers are already predicting up to 80pc of their harvest has been destroyed by the heat, equating to losses of $100 million across the national wine industry.

Widespread industry job cuts are now expected as fewer grapes mean less work for pickers.

Murray Valley viticulturalist, Matt Partridge, of Rutherglen Estates, Rutherglen, Victoria, said harvesting had been brought forward, with his team of nine starting earlier this week, at 3am.

Sugar levels needed to be closely monitored, as they could skyrocket in the heat.

“We (vignerons) now face a balancing act, where we need to give grapes time to reach optimal flavour without allowing them to spoil in the heat,” he said.

“Some growers were harvesting in January for the first time, so it’s uncharted territory.”

The ABC on Thursday night’s 7:30 Report also ran a story on the extreme sunburn toll in the southern horticultural industries, especially in Victoria and SA.

In Victoria, Victorian Farmer Federation horticultural division president, Peter Cochrane, estimated the cost to the state ‘at many millions’.

Individual growers have lost fruit worth $200,000, and more.

Yarra Valley fruit grower, Terry Burgi, for instance, said he had lost a quarter of his apple crop – it’s worthless burnt fruit, even ‘stewed fruit’, in part of the crop.

This follows six days above 40 degrees in SA and in Victoria the heatwave is rebuilding today, after a brief ‘respite’ with temperatures in the high 30 degree range instead of in the 40s.

It will be even hotter into the weekend, with temperatures again reaching into the 40s on Saturday.

Extreme fire danger forecasts have already being issued for the state for the weekend.

Damage from the heatwave in Victoria has already exceeded an estimated $100m.

As a nation, Australia is facing two weather extremes at this time, the northern flood damage in Queensland has already far exceeded the $100m mark, too.

“As the climate heats up through this century, they are going to become much more common.

“The good news is that the end (of the heatwave) is approaching but it is expected to get worse before it gets better.”

“We’ve already seen a step up in the frequency of those days and that is expected to continue,” he says, adding that the effect of climate change are most noticeable on days of extreme weather.

“Where previously we saw 40 degrees, that will now be 42 degrees.

“Where we had a day of 42 degrees, that will be 44, and so on.”

With the current heatwave still affecting parts of south-eastern Australia, Jones says that temperate conditions will continue to provide relief for those living in Melbourne and other parts of southern Victoria.

But the news is not so good for those living the state’s north, in South Australia and southern NSW.

Mildura is on track to record 13 consecutive days of temperatures in excess of 40 degrees, which Jones says is nearly double the previous record.

Gippsland residents today have been warned to stay alert to the bushfire danger presented by the heat.

“Following the recent heat, the state is tinder-dry,” Mr Jones says.

“With temperatures expected to rise into the weekend, those living in areas affected by bushfires need to remain alert to the danger.”

According to a special climate statement released by the Bureau of Meteorology, the most exceptional heat, compared with historic experience, occurred in northern and eastern Tasmania.

“The previous state record of 40.8 degrees, set at Hobart on 4 January 1976, was broken on January 29 (2008) when it reached 41.5 degrees – a record that lasted only one day,” the statement said.

“On January 30, temperatures peaked at 42.2 degrees on the east coast town of Scamander. Four other sites broke the (1976) record that day.

“A notable record for prolonged heat was also set at Launceston airport, where there were three consecutive days above 37 degrees in a location which had never previously experienced consecutive days above 35 degrees.”

Melbourne recorded its second highest-ever temperature last week – 45.1 degrees – falling just short of the record – 45.6 – degrees on Black Friday, 13 January 1939.

The bureau says a stagnant weather pattern was to blame for the extended heatwave.

Victoria is not expected to get widespread rain as the heat subsides.

The UN’s top official said that climate change was a “common and shared” responsibility and that the time for arguments about who caused and contributed to global warming was over.

“We should not argue who is more responsible, who is less responsible, who should do more… This is a common, shared responsibility,” Ban said.

There appears a global consensus over the impact of global warming. Wheat yields are down, water is becoming scarcer and the frequency and severity of floods and droughts are increasing. Ban’s clarion call in Delhi comes in a year which will end with a deadline to negotiate a global treaty to combat climate change. The current phase of the Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012.

But talks have run aground as industrialised countries have refused to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions unless emerging economies such as China and India commit to an emissions cap.

Both India and China, which have per capita emissions that are a fraction of the west, have pointed out the Kyoto protocol was supposed to mean emission reduction targets of 5% by 2012 but between 1990 and 2005, emissions had increased. In fact, US emissions have increased 20% during that period.

Earlier this week Chinese prime minister Wen Jiaobao said in an interview that it was “difficult for China to take quantified emission reduction quotas at the Copenhagen conference, because this country is still at an early stage of development… Europe started its industrialisation several hundred years ago, but for China, it has only been dozens of years.”

India has also signalled its strong opposition to binding limits on emissions. The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has said that India would be willing to undertake to keep its per capita emissions below those of industrialised countries, thus giving the latter a strong incentive to reduce their emissions as quickly as possible.

The Centre for Science and Environment, an influential thinktank based in Delhi, has also pointed out that “the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was built up over centuries in the process of creating nations’ wealth. This is the natural debt of nations, and they must pay up.”

Others criticised the United Nations for foisting an “ineffectual” Clean Development Mechanism on the developing world, which aims to allow rich nations claim credit for emissions reductions they fund in poorer nations. Himanshu Thakkar, co-ordinator at the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People, said that India needed “no lectures from the west which has been polluting (for decades). We have also looked at the UN and seen the CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) as completely inefficient. We have seen no new technology being used in India and no benefit to anyone but big companies.”

However, the United Nation’s top climate change official Yvo de Boer told reporters that to get developing countries to sign up for emission limits public money from the wealthy world would be needed to fund climate change action programmes.

In December the UN said said $86bn £59bn a year will be needed by 2015 for poor countries to adapt to global warming but admitted that it was struggling to raise even the fund’s administration costs of $4m.

The Indian prime minister’s advisers on climate change told the Guardian that countries such as Britain were “pushing hard” for India to adopt experimental technologies and using cash as an incentive. “They have been pushing Carbon Capture and Storage. But these are not proven technologies. What happens if the gas leaks out and causes deaths?”

Market experts blame the decline on profit taking and a collapse in manufacturing, which has reached its lowest levels since 1981 in Britain.

Power generators and industrial firms are selling their credits to raise cash during the credit crunch but also because they are confident they will not need as many pollution permits at a time of falling demand for their products.

The decline in emissions is good for global warming. But it also means reductions are being made in “offset” projects, where western companies can invest in green schemes in places such as China to counter the impact of their carbon production at home.

The slump in the price of credits under the ETS will revive criticisms that the cap and trade scheme has just turned carbon into another volatile market commodity used by speculators to make money.

Vincent de Rivaz, the chief executive of EDF Energy, told the Guardian last week that the operations of the ETS needed to be reviewed by Brussels before carbon was turned into a “sub-prime tool” by unscrupulous companies, instead of doing the job it was set up for: reducing CO2 emissions as a way of tackling global warming.

EDF, the power company 85% owned by the French state, admitted it had sold some of its own carbon credits on the market – in very small numbers – with the rest being transferred for use around the group’s other overseas businesses.

A research paper published by the environmental group WWF in collaboration with the Point Carbon consultancy last spring claimed windfall profits of up to $70bn could be made by the power groups in the course of phase two of the ETS, which runs from 2008 to 2012. They pointed out that there would have to be a high carbon price to achieve those particular financial gains.

Sanjeev Kumar, the emissions trading scheme coordinator at the WWF, said: “The way the national allocations plans are set up is a disaster. Handing free permits to power companies is like handing them a cash bonus. Cheap profits for doing nothing is scandalous.”

Deutsche Bank and others predict carbon prices will rise again as industrial production picks up and the EU tightens the regulation on allowances, especially for phase three of the scheme, which will run until 2020.

But analysts have been consistently wrong about the direction of carbon prices; 12 months ago they predicted they would double from €22 per tonne to more than €40.

The new US administration of Barack Obama is considering whether or not to set up its own federal carbon emissions trading scheme. Such a move would help push the world towards a global trading scheme, but critics say all these projects should be halted.