Category: Climate chaos

“It is an encouraging sign that emissions decreased in 2006 in some major developed economies,” Michael Raupach, leader of the Earth Observation Centre in Canberra, said.

“However, we have scarcely begun,” he said, adding that the world would need far tougher action to stabilise emissions at levels to avert “dangerous” climate changes of ever more heatwaves, food shortages, floods, droughts and rising seas.

Emissions by the United States, Japan, Germany, Canada, France, Britain, and Italy were all down in 2006 – by between 2.5 per cent for France and just 0.02 per cent for Germany.

Russia’s emissions, which fell sharply after the collapse of the Soviet Union’s smokestack industries, went against the trend with a gain of 3.1 per cent in line with strong economic growth.

Emissions by so many nations in the G8 have not previously fallen together any year since 1990, the UN benchmark for efforts to combat climate change including the Kyoto Protocol.

Overall, emissions by the G8 fell to 14.04 billion tonnes in 2006 from 14.12 billion in 2005, according to a Reuters calculations based on submissions to the UN Climate Change Secretariat.

G8 environment ministers meet in Kobe, Japan, from May 24-26 to prepare a July summit meant to map out future actions to curb warming.

Some experts said the 0.6 per cent decline was not a sign that G8 nations were really getting to grips with the problem.

“One would expect higher oil prices to reduce demand for oil … and a relatively mild winter would reduce power consumption and hence emissions from power stations,” said Knut Alfsen, research director of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

“Unfortunately, it is difficult to discover policy actions in any of these countries that would explain the reduced emissions,” he said.

“I’m fairly pessimistic with regard to whether the countries are ‘starting to get to grips’ with the climate change challenge.”

He said it would be interesting to see if heightened awareness among many people about climate change in 2007, linked to factors such as a movie by former US Vice President Al Gore and reports by the UN Climate Panel, would curb emissions.

Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, looks at scientific evidence on the causes and likely impact of a warming world.

“It’s hard to generalise across all the economies,”  Jennifer Morgan, a director of the E3G think-tank in London, said.

“In the United States it doesn’t have a lot to do with climate factors, it has more to do with other factors such as the winter weather.”

The United States is outside the Kyoto Protocol, embraced by all other G8 nations.

Still, the fall in emissions came despite 2006 economic growth of an average of 3.0 per cent for advanced economies, estimated by the International Monetary Fund. That may mark progress at least in decoupling emissions from growth.

Mr Sartor confirmed that he was challenging a judgment in the Land and Environment Court which found he was under an obligation to consider climate change flood risks when he approved the $150 million Sandon Point development.

The plan called for hundreds of new houses on open land between Thirroul and Bulli in Wollongong.

Mr Sartor told the Herald that Justice Biscoe, erred in finding that the minister had a mandatory obligation to consider whether climate change would lead to an increased flood risk.

“The Sandon Point approval was overturned on a technicality,” he said. “If that interpretation of the law stands it would mean that future approvals would be less certain because you can’t foresee all the things that you might have to consider in the future.”

The case is going to the NSW Court of Appeal in July.

The sea level report, released this month as part of the state’s climate change plan, says rising waters and increased storms will affect “virtually all aspects of occupation on low-lying coastal areas”. Low-lying coastal areas could suffer from the “Venice effect”, in which more frequent high tides could inundate suburbs.

The first phase of aerial laser mapping covered 1400 square kilometres of the Hunter and Central Coast and found the homes, plus other buildings, 73 kilometres of roads and 164 square kilometres of residentially zoned land were less than one metre above current sea level.

It suggested mid-term responses such as building sea walls along urban beaches and longer-term strategies involving “managed retreat” from the water’s edge. Coastal development is expected to “exacerbate risks from sea-level rise and increases in the severity and frequency of storms and coastal flooding by as early as 2050”, the report said. It notes that climate change planning is essential to the NSW coastal development policy “to ensure future urban development is not located in areas of high risk from natural hazards including sea level rise, coastal recession, rising water tables and flooding”.

A NSW Opposition MP, Michael Richardson, accused Mr Sartor of avoiding his responsibilities as planning minister. “Frank Sartor says the impact of sea level rise on coastlines is an issue for Climate Change Minister Verity Firth,”he said. “If that’s the case, why did the planning department produce this document?”

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson has unveiled draft legislation to establish the world’s first framework for carbon dioxide capture and geological storage (CCS).

Mr Ferguson said it involved capturing greenhouse gas emissions, predominantly from coal-fired power stations, before they reached the atmosphere. The gas is then injected and stored deep underground in geological formations similar to those which have stored oil and gas for millions of years, he said.

“With 83 per cent of Australia’s electricity generated from coal, no serious response to climate change can ignore the need to clean up coal and the Government’s establishment of a CCS framework represents a major step towards making clean coal a reality,” he said in a statement.

“CCS is essential for the long-term sustainability of coal-fired power generation and the potential of new industries such as coal-to-liquids, which could improve Australia’s liquid transport fuel security.”

Mr Ferguson said the draft legislation had been referred to the House of Representatives Primary Industries and Resources Committee to conduct comprehensive review before the bill was introduced to Parliament later this year.

The legislation establishes access and property rights for injection and storage of greenhouse gases into a stable sub-surface geological reservoir in commonwealth waters more than three nautical miles offshore.

Mr Ferguson said the legislation provided for appropriate consultation and multiple use rights with other marine users, including fishing and petroleum industries. It ensures pre-existing property and use rights are properly preserved.

“Australia has the capacity to inject and store a significant amount of its carbon emissions in these reservoirs and my Department, through Geoscience Australia, is assessing numerous sites for geological storage,” he said.

Mr Ferguson said the work of Geoscience Australia, plus government support of CCS research through the CO2 Cooperative Research Centre, placed Australia at the forefront of this pioneering technology.

The Rudd Labor government last week introduced a means test for the government rebate toward the cost of rooftop solar panels for domestic use. THe implication of the rebate is that households earning more than $100,000 each year will not get any financial assistance if they want to go solar. The move has infuriated climate change activists, enviromentalists and the solar industry. The Greens leader, Bob Brown, described the move as “an exocet missile into an industry at the forefront of fighting climate change.” In the same media conference he described Brendan Nelson’s move to subsidise petrol consumption as “perverse”. 

Other budget items that attracted widespread criticism include the funding of major roadworks and a slow response to the return of water from irrigators to the Murray Darling. It is projected that the nation’s transport will be forced to move increasingly to rail because of spiralling oil prices. France has announced it will commit no new money to roads and infrastructure development will be primarily rail.

“Reduced oxygen levels may have dramatic consequences for ecosystems and coastal economies,” according to the scientists writing in the journal Science.

The north of the Indian Ocean, along with the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, is also oxygen-low but the available data showed no substantial change in the size of the oxygen-minimum zone in recent decades.

Lothar Stramma, lead author at IFM-GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany, said there were signs the oxygen-low bands between 300 and 700 metres depths were getting wider and moving into shallower coastal waters.

“The expansion of the oxygen-minimum zones is reaching more to the continental shelf areas,” he said. “It’s not just the open ocean.”

That could disrupt ever more fisheries.

Problems of lower oxygen supply add to woes for the oceans led by over-fishing as the world struggles to feed an expanding population. A UN conference in 2002 set a goal of trying to reverse declines in fish stocks by 2015.

The scientists said levels of dissolved oxygen in the oceans had varied widely in the past and more study was needed.

“We are far from knowing exactly what will happen,” Mr Stramma said.

In the most extreme case, at the end of the Permian period about 250 million years ago, there were mass extinctions on land and at sea linked to high levels of carbon dioxide and extremely low oxygen levels in the waters.

The UN Climate Panel said last year that global warming, stoked by human use of fossil fuels, would push up temperatures and bring more droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels. More and more species would be at risk of extinction.

Today’s study showed that a swathe of the eastern Pacific from Chile to the United States and a smaller part of the eastern Atlantic, centred off Angola, were low in oxygen.

Mr Stramma said the oxygen-poor regions were away from major ocean currents that help absorb oxygen from the air. And warmer water is less dense and so floats more easily – that makes it less prone to mix with the deeper levels of the ocean.