UN climate change report card: Scientists predict Australia will continue to get hotter

Updated 30 minutes ago

Photo: Scientists believe the world is still on track to become more than two degrees Celsius warmer. (User submitted: Ching-Ling Lim)

Map: Australia

The latest United Nations report card on the impacts of climate change predicts Australia will continue to get hotter.

The ABC has obtained drafts of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Scientists believe the world is still on track to become more than two degrees Celsius warmer – and that potentially means whole ecosystems could be wiped out.

Chapter 25 of the IPCC’s report has identified eight potential risks for Australia:

• The possibility of widespread and permanent damage to coral reef systems – particularly the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo in Western Australia.
• Some native species could be wiped out.
• The chance of more frequent flooding causing damage to key infrastructure.
• In some areas, unprecedented rising sea levels could inundate low-lying areas.
• While in others, bushfires could result in significant economic losses.
• More frequent heatwaves and temperatures may lead to increased morbidity – especially among the elderly.
• And those same rising temperatures could put constraints on water resources.
• Farmers also could face significant drops in agriculture – especially in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Worst-case scenario could see 40 per cent drop in production

The report said the worst-case scenario for the Murray-Darling Basin, south-east and south-west Australia would mean a significant drop in agricultural production.

CSIRO chief research scientist Mark Howden said the latest science predicts production could drop by up to 40 per cent under a severe drying scenario.

“At current rates of emissions, we are likely to go past two degrees,” Dr Howden said.

“There are various analyses that indicate it’s highly unlikely that we’ll stay below two degrees in the absence of major activities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The longer we delay activities to reduce those … emissions, the more likely it is we’re going to go above two degrees.

“Higher degrees of temperature change also carry with them higher degrees of rainfall change, both in terms of their average rainfall and likely increases in rainfall intensity.

“Both of those have implications for agriculture and both of those aren’t necessarily good.”

Despite forecasts of less rain and hotter temperatures, irrigators maintain they have a central role to play in the nation’s future.

“That is why you have irrigation. It evens out those severe weather events such as a drier climate,” National Irrigators Council chief executive officer Tom Chesson said.

“People forget that Australia is so far ahead when it comes to water management. We are the cutting edge of water management in the world.

“It would be a [mistake] to think that we have been sitting on our hands and doing nothing. Necessity is the mother of all invention.”

Concerns about future of coral reefs

The final draft of the Australasia chapter raises serious concerns about the future of the the nation’s coral, finding there is likely to be “significant change in community composition and structure of coral reef systems in Australia”.

University of Queensland marine scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg says there are already concerns about the rate of change.

“We’re seeing changes which haven’t been seen since the dinosaurs,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“If we continue on this pathway, corals continue to plummet and places like the Great Barrier Reef may no longer be great.

“If we keep on doing on what we’re doing – and that’s ramping up local and global stressors – coral reefs will disappear by the middle of this century or be in very low amounts on reefs around the world.”

Ocean temperatures continue to rise

Three years ago during a plenary session in Venice, the member nations of the IPCC resolved for the first time to include a separate chapter on oceans for the Working Group II report.

Oceans cover 71 per cent of the planet’s surface and changes to the ocean’s environment are playing a central role in the management of climate change.

Scientists agree that the ocean’s surface temperatures have continued to increase throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

IPCC drafts indicate the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans have warmed by as much as half a degree, which has profoundly altered marine ecosystems.

Rising water temperatures and some levels of ocean acidification mean species are on the move.

Changed migratory patterns of fish and other catch pose significant risks to commercial fishers and other coastal activities.

Sea urchins once found only as far south as New South Wales have made their way to Tasmania.

The CSIRO’s Elvira Poloczanska said the urchins could destroy kelp forests, which had flow-on effects for rock lobsters.

“Kelp forests, much like forests on land, provide a habitat for a huge number of species,” Dr Poloczanska said.

“So a number of fish, vertebrates – including commercial species such as the rock lobster.

“As the forests disappear, so these species will disappear from the particular area as well.”

But interestingly, scientists do see some benefits and opportunities for some commercial fishing and other aquaculture industries in line with these changing patterns.

Despite progress being made on mitigation and adaptation measures, land management practices including pollution, nutrient run-off and overuse of marine resources also pose risks to marine life.

The report calls for internationally recognised guidelines to assist adaptation strategies already in place.

The report is due to be released on March 31.

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A

IPCC climate change report: Human role in global warming now even clearer

Updated Sat 28 Sep 2013, 3:50pm AEST

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says there is now a 95 per cent probability that humans are responsible for global warming.

The figure, in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, which was released in Stockholm on Friday, is a 5 per cent increase from the panel’s 2007 landmark report.

More than 600 scientists and researchers contributed to the fifth assessment report, which is the result of almost seven years’ work by scientists and policymakers.

It is based on more than 50,000 contributions from around the world, and an exhaustive peer review process.

Government representatives from member nations haggled with the panel’s scientists long into the night over the precise wording of the report.

The report summary says the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 40 per cent since the pre-industrial era.

The report presents a number of different scenarios of how climate change may unfold over the next century.

The majority of the modelling points to a global mean sea-level rise of between 26 and 82 centimetres by 2100.

The worst case scenario is for a sea level rise of 98cm.

The majority of climate models point to a mean temperature rise of around 2 degrees Celsius. The smallest predicted temperature rise is 0.3C and the largest rise is 4.8C.

“Many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia,” IPCC chairperson Rajendra Pachauri said.

“The atmosphere and ocean have warmed. The amounts of snow and ice have diminished.

“The sea level has risen and concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.”

Hunt says Coalition accepts IPCC findings

Federal Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt told Saturday AM that the Coalition accepts the scientific assessment published in the report.

“I’ve spoken, of course, with the scientific advisory group that informs the Australian Government, which is the Bureau of Meteorology, the CSIRO, and the Antarctic Division from within the Environment Department, and they confirm that they are in general agreement with the findings of the IPCC report,” he said.

Mr Hunt says the report outlined a range of scenarios including increasing temperatures and rising sea levels.

“There are a range of scenarios in the report, and the broad range shows that temperatures are likely to change over the coming century from between 0.9 to 5.4 degrees,” he said.

“Now that depends on the extent to which the world reduces emissions, but that’s the range set out.

“What we’ve seen since 1901 is a 19 centimetre rise, and a range again for the coming century of between 0.28 metres – or 28 centimetres – and 98 centimetres.

“What does this mean? It means that we need to do practical things that actually reduce emissions.”

Mr Hunt identified three areas in which practical action needs to be taken to counter climate change.

“One is taking steps to reduce our domestic emissions. Two, making sure that … we have a national plan for adaptation,” he said.

“And the third thing is, at the global level – because this issue can only be resolved at the global level – we want to work with China and the United States, India and the [European Union] on the essence of an international agreement.”

‘The heat is on’, act now, Ban Ki-moon says

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon says the study is a call for governments, many of which have been focused on spurring weak economies rather than fighting climate change, to work to reach a planned UN accord in 2015 to combat global warming.

“The heat is on. Now we must act,” he said.

In a statement, Environment Minister Greg Hunt welcomed the report and reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to meeting Australia’s 2020 emissions reduction target.

US secretary of state John Kerry says the report is a wake-up call.

“Those who deny the science or choose excuses over action are playing with fire,” he said, referring to sceptics who question the need for urgent action.

Professor Andy Pitman from the University of NSW says the report’s seven-year cycle is “incredibly onerous” and probably unprecedented in any scientific field.

“I actually think it’s too slow to respond to emerging issues within climate science,” Professor Pitman said.

The IPCC has shown it can fast track its work: a 2011 report on managing extreme weather and disasters was produced relatively quickly, an approach that Professor Pitman favours.

“That model might be one that we need to interweave with a cycle of IPCC reports,” he said.

“I would be quite happy if they became once-a-decade, interspersed with fast response reports on particular [topics].”

As expected, the fifth IPCC report shows the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by more than 20 per cent since the 1950s.

Global temperatures have risen almost 1C since the pre-industrial era.

The IPCC assessment is considered a relatively conservative estimate of the threat posed by global warming.

The IPCC was established by the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organisation in 1988 in order to review and report on the published climate science.

The IPCC’s previous report six years ago was criticised for a handful of well-publicised mistakes, particularly the claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.

However, Dr Pachauri says the latest findings are solid.

“Of course we’ve learnt from that experience and this time around we’re being very, very careful,” he said.

“Of course this is a human effort but we’re doing everything humanly possible to see that the report is of very high quality, totally credible and robust in every sense of the scientific content.”

Solar activity linked to changes in ocean currents and climate

21 March 2014, by Tamera Jones

The sun and its activity

The findings mean an imminent quiet period in the Sun’s activity predicted by some scientists could lead to severe winters in Britain.

Researchers found that lower solar activity can drastically affect the climate in the North Atlantic, encouraging high pressure blocking systems to develop.

These blocking systems end up changing the course of prevailing westerly winds, stopping warm winds from the tropics getting to Europe. This leads to cold winters setting in, exactly like those of 2010 and 2013.

Researchers have linked low solar activity to the Little Ice Age before. But this is the first time anyone has shown how a drop in the Sun’s energy can lead to changes in the climate around the North Atlantic. The findings are published in Nature Geoscience.

‘Our study concludes that although the temperature changes expected from future solar activity are much smaller than the warming from human carbon dioxide emissions, regional climate variability associated with the effects of solar output on the ocean and atmosphere should be taken into account when making future climate projections,’ says Dr Paola Moffa-Sánchez of Cardiff University, who led the study.

The researchers used a sediment core taken from the ocean floor south of Iceland to investigate how the Gulf Stream differed from today. They did this by analysing the chemical composition of the shells of fossilised microorganism called foraminifera within the core.

Moffa-Sánchez and her colleagues looked in this region because the currents here, which are part of the surface waters of the so-called ocean conveyor belt, are important for the whole of the Earth’s climate.

The conveyor belt is a system of ocean currents, which move heat around in the world’s oceans. In the Atlantic Ocean, warm upper-ocean water travels north, to the high northern latitudes, where it loses heat to the atmosphere. It’s this process that keeps the UK relatively mild in winter compared to other countries at similar latitudes. This water cools then sinks and returns southwards at great depth.

‘We found big and abrupt changes in temperature and salt concentrations in the sediment core, which matched changes in solar activity,’ says Moffa-Sánchez.

‘Our measurements show that when solar activity was low, sea water south of Iceland was colder and fresher, rather than warm and salty. The ocean changes and the atmosphere probably both react to changes in the Sun’s energy output and develop feedbacks between the ocean and atmosphere. If you have a colder ocean current and a high pressure system during solar minima, the heat transport to Europe is going to be reduced leading to the cold spells recorded in Europe,’ she adds.

The researchers tested their results using a computer simulation of the climate and found exactly the same results.

Other scientists have suggested that higher levels of volcanic activity during the Little Ice Age led to colder winters. But Moffa-Sánchez separated the lower solar activity and volcanic activity in the climate model to test this idea.

They found that the Sun’s energy levels had a much bigger part to play in the climate during the last 1000 years than volcanic activity did.

‘When you see an increase in volcanism, this coincides with solar minima, so it’s hard to separate the two and say which contributed most to the ocean changes we record. But when we separated the volcanic activity and changes in the Sun¿s energy ouput in our model, we found that the Sun played a dominant role in the ocean and atmospheric changes over the last 1000 years,’ she explains.

This isn’t the first time scientists have linked the Sun’s energy output to high pressure blocking systems in the North Atlantic. Other studies have shown how solar activity affects UK winter temperatures. A period of low solar activity, called the Maunder Minimum, has been linked to cold temperatures in the so-called Central England Temperature record.

Keywords: Atlantic Ocean, Atmosphere, Climate system, Oceans, UK, Volcanoes, Weather,

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Charlie Wood – 350.org Australia charlie@350.org	10:20 AM (5 minutes ago)
to me

Dear friend,

“The coal price required for many of these projects to be economic, is unlikely to be sustained…” – Caldecott, Tilbury & Ma (2013)*

Next week, this message will be signalled loud and clear, when Oxford University and Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Ben Caldecott kicks off his tour of Australia. Click here to find out more.

While retirees, religious leaders, parents and young people put their bodies on the line to halt dangerous new fossil fuel projects, the financial case for moving beyond fossil fuels is growing by the day.

Come and hear Ben discuss the financial obstacles facing new Australian fossil fuel projects, discover how your money is funding these projects and learn how you can use your dollars and cents to secure a safe climate future. 

Click here to find your nearest event.**

Look forward to seeing you there!

Warm wishes,

Charlie on behalf of the 350.org Australia team

*Stranded Down Under: environment-related factors changing China’s demand for coal and what this means for Australian coal assets’

**Note the new venue if you are attending the Sydney event – this has changed due the original venue booking out within 2 days!

350.org is building a global climate movement.

Topics: Climate, climate forecast, el nino, ENSO, NOAA, oceans, sea surface