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Author: Neville

  • Greens plan to boost extreme weather preparedness

    Greens plan to boost extreme weather preparedness

    A new plan has been launched by the Australian Greens to better help communities prepare for extreme weather events.

    The plan, announced by Greens Leader Christine Milne, would be funded by a levy on the coal industry.

    “The Greens plan is to save lives and money by substantially increasing spending on preparing for natural disasters from $50 million to around $350 million per year,” Senator Milne said.

    “The coal industry is driving global warming and increasing the intensity of extreme weather events that are hurting communities and costing our economy billions of dollars.

    “It is time the coal industry started contributing to the cost of preparing for extreme weather and adapting to climate change.”

    The Greens propose a $2 per tonne levy on thermal coal exports to pay for the scheme, which would see risk mitigation projects introduced such as flood levees, permanent fire breaks and disaster warning systems.

    A new plan has been launched by the Australian Greens to better help communities prepare for extreme weather events.

    The plan, announced by Greens Leader Christine Milne, would be funded by a levy on the coal industry.

    “The Greens plan is to save lives and money by substantially increasing spending on preparing for natural disasters from $50 million to around $350 million per year,” Senator Milne said.

    “The coal industry is driving global warming and increasing the intensity of extreme weather events that are hurting communities and costing our economy billions of dollars.

    “It is time the coal industry started contributing to the cost of preparing for extreme weather and adapting to climate change.”

    The Greens propose a $2 per tonne levy on thermal coal exports to pay for the scheme, which would see risk mitigation projects introduced such as flood levees, permanent fire breaks and disaster warning systems.

  • Leaving Our Descendants A Whopping Rise in Sea Levels

    Leaving Our Descendants
    A Whopping Rise in Sea Levels

    German scientist Anders Levermann and his colleagues have released research that warns of major sea level increases far into the future. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he raises important questions about how much we really care about the world we will leave to those who come after us.

    by fen montaigne

    Last week, a group of scientists led by Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research released a paper that made a stark forecast: For every 1 degree Celsius of temperature increase, the world will eventually experience a 2.3-meter increase in sea level. That means that should carbon emissions continue to rise at or near current rates, and temperatures soar 4 to 5 degrees C in the next century or two, the world could well experience sea level increases of many meters — dozens of feet — in the centuries and millennia to come.

    Anders Levermann Interview

    Potsdam Institute
    Anders Levermann

    Levermann is a scientist, not an ethicist — he is lead author of the sea level chapter in the upcoming fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — but he is acutely aware of the import of his research for future generations. In an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Levermann discusses how he and his colleagues reached their conclusions, how much disruption such large sea level increases might cause, and why we need to ponder the effect of our actions on future generations. “Society needs to decide about how much damage it wants to do in the future and how much damage future generations can actually cope with,” he says.

    Yale Environment 360: What are the main points that you think readers should take away from this paper?

    Anders Levermann: The real new thing is we have asked the question not how much sea level rise will there be in 2100, but rather how much sea level rise are we already committed to at a certain level of global warming? And these numbers are much higher than the numbers we expect in 2100.

    Sea level is like a big ball — it takes a while until you get it rolling, but once it’s rolling you can’t stop it easily. The projections by 2100 are significantly below 2 meters [6.6 feet] of global sea level rise. But we expect over a period of 2,000 years a sea level rise of 2 meters for each degree Celsius of warming. Now if you look at the projections for temperature by 2100, a business-as-usual scenario in which we increase the CO2 emissions every year like we have done in the past would lead to a warming of about 4 to 5 degrees Celsius [7 to 9 degrees F]. And long-term, 4 to 5 degrees in our study translates to something in the vicinity of 9 meters [29.6 feet] of sea level rise. So it’s less than 2 meters sea level rise projected for 2100, but in the long term it’s 9 meters.

    e360: So you’re saying once this warming is in the atmosphere, it’s going to take a while for the melting of various ice sheets and the thermal expansion of water to catch up to it?

    Levermann: What I’m saying is once you put a certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, you’ll have to live with the corresponding warming for a long time. This is a problem we look into with respect to sea level rise because this long-term warming results in a long-term sea level rise that will not stop in 2100, but will go on and on for a long time.

    e360: Could you discuss your confidence in your findings and what measurements and models you used to make sure that the numbers you came up with represent a pretty reasonable forecast.

    Levermann: What we have done is we take the state of the art physical models for each component that is relevant for sea level rise — the thermal expansion of the ocean, melting of [mountain] glaciers, and melting of the

    What I would say is we simply put expiration dates on certain cultures and societies.’

    Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets — we take these four models and ask the question: How much sea level rise do you get after 2,000 years when you elevate the temperature? Then we add them all together and we get a result for the total sea level contribution for different levels of warming and then we compare this to the paleological data. All of this gives a consistent picture, which says we can expect an increase in sea level of 2.3 meters for each degree of warming.

    e360: Tell me a little bit about the paleo data?

    Levermann: When you go into paleo records you can never use direct measurements because there was obviously no one around taking measurements 10,000 years ago or even longer. So that’s why you use what we call proxy data, where we use certain chemical components or isotopes in order to make statements about, first, the temperature, and then the sea level. Sea level has an additional way we can derive it from, and that’s simply from looking at the sea level that you see in the geological record. In some places around the world, you can simply see where the sea level was at certain times in history.

    e360: Let’s say we continue on the current path of emissions and that by 2100 we are 4-5 degrees Centigrade hotter than we are now. How long after that do you think you could begin to see significant sea level rise as the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets begin to melt at a more rapid rate?

    Levermann: Significant is very much defined here by society. The 20 centimeters [8 inches] that we have observed in the last 100 years are significant for the smaller island states in the Pacific, which are inevitably going to vanish in the future. And also, for example, tropical storm Nargis in Myanmar in 2008 went much farther inland because of this additional 20 centimeters than it would have in pre-industrial times.

    So the question of what is significant is very much dependent on the coastline you look at and what society wants or can adapt to. I would say that a meter in the 21st century would be highly significant for the Netherlands

    People will have to reconsider what’s home and how long you build a home for.’

    and Europe, but also for London and Florida and New York and so on because you always have to add on top the storm surges.

    We picked the 2,000 years date because it is far enough in the future so that the small scale variations and the sea level rise have been averaged out. So we can be quite certain that after 2,000 years this kind of sea level rise will be observed, but it could be well before that.

    e360: If the conclusions of your research are correct, civilization is going to be looking at sea level rise that could well exceed 5 meters [16 feet], or could be 10 meters within the next 2,000 years. These are really massive increases. What do you think your paper says about adaptation and what the world needs to be doing now about adaptation?

    Levermann: What I would say in short is that we simply put expiration dates on certain cultures, on certain societies around the globe. Definitely for some small island states in the Pacific and in the tropics in general, but also for regions that are now low-lying, like the Netherlands and Bangladesh, and also regions in the U.S. And that simply poses the question of what kind of infrastructure we build, what buildings we build — the churches, the power plants, and so on. For what time period do we build them and is there a cultural heritage we have to abandon in the long run?

    e360: Your term “expiration date” is striking. With 5 or 10 meters of sea level rise, you would be looking at an expiration date, if you would, for much of the world’s coastal areas, would you not?

    Levermann: I think it’s culturally very important whether we have an open-ended future or whether we can say there’s a limit to it. If you are living on a Pacific island, and you simply know that in 100 years your home won’t be there anymore, then I would assume you build your society differently, you think differently about your children, about your grandchildren. And with these kinds of numbers we’ll have to do something similar. People will have to reconsider what’s home and how long you build a home for.

    e360: How would you characterize society’s understanding and acceptance of these facts at this point?

    Levermann: There’s one very important aspect to the adaptation problem and that is that people consider this to be a local problem and I would strongly argue against it. We are living a globalized world and our societies are relatively fragile already. Now after Fukushima — the Japanese catastrophe — we had supply failures in Europe in the automobile industry.

    I haven’t decided myself what is the price we are willing to pay for saving the coastline of Florida.’

    The same was true after the great recent Thailand flood — we had a shortage of hard drives in the U.S. and in Europe for months in 2012 and this was really not expected. So we had a remote event which impacted us from afar. Now if we don’t get hard drives for a while that won’t collapse a society obviously. But what happens if we get a whole series of these kinds of impacts like Katrina and Sandy in the same year, and a drought and a heat wave that brings the California electricity sector into collapse or something. Will this stay within the U.S. or will it spread around the world? And this is why we need to consider adaptation as a global problem.

    A lot of transportation routes at the moment depend on harbors or infrastructure that is close to the coastline. If, for example, a storm surge would destroy the harbor of Rotterdam, where a lot of containers go through, you would strongly disrupt the supply chains for a lot of production in different countries. This is why sea level rise and the associated storm surges directly lead into a global adaptation problem because what we have to do is we have to rearrange our supply network in a way that is robust against terror attacks of nature, if you like. That’s in a sense what it is — it’s not intentional, obviously that’s why it is not a terror attack, but it’s a localized disruption by nature on our supply chain, which requires a robust supply network. I believe that this global supply network would adapt by itself, if it was given the information about its vulnerability. We are planning to set-up a Web-platform similar to Wikipedia where such information is gathered and provided. It will be launched at www.zeean.net.

    e360: When we are talking about 500 years, 1,000 years, 2,000 years, that’s really distant in time. In 100 years one can imagine one’s grandchildren for example, but in 2,000 years of course that’s unimaginable. How do you get society to care about potential long-term impacts when they and their grandchildren will be long gone?

    MORE FROM YALE e360

    Too Big to Flood? Megacities
    Face Future of Major Storm Risk

    Too Big to Flood? Megacities Face Future of Major Storm Risk

    As economic activity and populations continue to expand in coastal urban areas, particularly in Asia, hundreds of trillions of dollars of infrastructure, industrial and office buildings, and homes are increasingly at risk from intensifying storms and rising sea levels.
    READ MORE

    Levermann: This is a really difficult problem. It’s not for climate scientists to decide — that should be decided by society. So society needs to decide about its time horizons with respect to its cultural heritage and how much damage it wants to do in the future and how much damage future generations can actually cope with. I haven’t decided for myself what is really worthwhile saving and what is the price we are willing to pay for saving, for example, the coastline of Florida. But this cannot be solved by natural science obviously, so what we do is we put out the information about what is going to happen and then society needs to decide what to do. Do we want to keep the Tower of London, or do we just say this was nice for a few centuries but now it will be flooded in the next few hundred years.

    I personally believe that we cannot adapt to a warming of 4 or 5 degrees [C] because the increase in extreme events and also sea level rise, combined with extreme storm surges, will simply increase the pressure on our complex societies, which might bring them to the verge of collapse. Obviously, we do not know whether this will happen, but I think that such a threshold is out there somewhere — we just do not know where. We do need to adapt to the climate change that cannot be avoided anymore, but we definitely need to mitigate any warming that we cannot adapt to.

    POSTED ON 24 Jul 2013 IN Biodiversity Climate Oceans Oceans Policy & Politics Pollution & Health Europe Europe

  • Rapid Upper Ocean Warming Linked to Declining Aerosols

    Rapid Upper Ocean Warming Linked to Declining Aerosols

    July 23, 2013 — Australian scientists have identified causes of a rapid warming in the upper subtropical oceans of the Southern Hemisphere.

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    They partly attribute the observed warming, and preceding cooling trends to ocean circulation changes induced by global greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols predominantly generated in the Northern Hemisphere from human activity.

    The research, by scientists from CSIRO and the University of NSW, was published today in Scientific Reports.

    Mr Tim Cowan, lead author of the study, says his group was initially interested in the three decade long cooling below the surface of the Southern Hemisphere subtropical oceans from the 1960s and 1990s. “But what really caught our eye was a rapid warming of these subtropical oceans from the mid-1990s, most noticeably in the Indian Ocean between 300 m to 1000 m depth,” said Mr Cowan.

    This had the research team asking whether this rapid warming was partly a response to greenhouse gases overcoming the cooling effect of aerosols that peaked globally in the 1980s due to the introduction of clean air legislation across United States and Europe.

    To test this, the researchers examined more than 40 state-of-the-art climate simulations that included historical changes to greenhouse gases and aerosols over the twentieth century. “What we found was that the models do a good job at simulating the late twentieth century cooling and rapid warming in the subtropical southern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, however they show an around 30-year delay in the warming in the Indian Ocean” said Mr Cowan.

    “This delay in the modelled Indian Ocean warming is likely due to the presence of atmospheric aerosols, generated through transport emissions, biomass burning, and industrial smog, together with natural emissions of sea salt and dust — these were also the main cause of the late twentieth century subtropical Indian Ocean below-surface cooling” said Mr Cowan.

    The researchers found that models with a delayed peak in Northern Hemisphere aerosol levels after the 1980s had a tendency to simulate a delayed rapid Indian Ocean warming until well after 2020, and that the rate of warming related to how quickly the aerosol levels declined after their peak.

    “We know that aerosols in the atmosphere generally cool the Northern Hemisphere by scattering incoming sunlight. This, in turn, increases the movement of heat from the Southern Hemisphere oceans to the Northern Hemisphere oceans via a global oceanic conveyor belt, travelling south from the subtropical Indian Ocean, passing the southern tip of Africa into the south Atlantic and then north along the Gulf Stream” said co-author Dr Wenju Cai.

    “Together with a greenhouse gas-induced southward shift the Indian subtropical ocean gyres towards the Antarctic, these processes delay the Indian Ocean warming in the models,” Dr Cai said.

    “What makes this work fascinating is the fact that human-emitted aerosols have such a large impact on remote ocean temperatures” says Mr Cowan. “For many years aerosols have masked the direct surface warming induced by greenhouse gases in many Northern Hemisphere regions, however in the Southern subtropical Indian Ocean both aerosols and greenhouse gases have historically conspired to produce a net oceanic cooling, and now the reverse of some of these processes is occurring.”

    Mr Cowan said that despite the observed rapid ocean warming, quantifying exactly how much is due to declining aerosols or increasing greenhouse gases remains difficult, but as human-generated air pollution is all-together phased out, this will undoubtedly reveal the full impact of greenhouse gases.

    The research has been supported by the CSIRO Wealth from Oceans National Research Flagship, The Australian Climate Change Science Program and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Climate System Science.

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  • Coastal Antarctic Permafrost Melting Faster Than Expected: Arctic-Like Melt Rates Appearing in Coastal Antarctica

    Coastal Antarctic Permafrost Melting Faster Than Expected: Arctic-Like Melt Rates Appearing in Coastal Antarctica

    July 24, 2013 — For the first time, scientists have documented an acceleration in the melt rate of permafrost, or ground ice, in a section of Antarctica where the ice had been considered stable. The melt rates are comparable with the Arctic, where accelerated melting of permafrost has become a regularly recurring phenomenon, and the change could offer a preview of melting permafrost in other parts of a warming Antarctic continent.

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    Tracking data from Garwood Valley in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica, Joseph Levy, a research associate at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, shows that melt rates accelerated consistently from 2001 to 2012, rising to about 10 times the valley’s historical average for the present geologic epoch, as documented in the July 24 edition of Scientific Reports.

    Scientists had previously considered the region’s ground ice to be in equilibrium, meaning its seasonal melting and refreezing did not, over time, diminish the valley’s overall mass of ground ice.

    Instead, Levy documented through LIDAR and time-lapse photography a rapid retreat of ground ice in Garwood Valley, similar to the lower rates of permafrost melt observed in the coastal Arctic and Tibet.

    “The big tell here is that the ice is vanishing — it’s melting faster each time we measure,” said Levy, who noted that there are no signs in the geologic record that the valley’s ground ice has retreated similarly in the past. “This is a dramatic shift from recent history.”

    Ground ice is more prevalent in the Arctic than in Antarctica, where glaciers and ice sheets dominate the landscape. In contrast to glaciers and ice sheets, which sit on the ground, ground ice sits in the ground, mixed with frozen soil or buried under layers of sediment. Antarctica’s Dry Valleys contain some of the continent’s largest stretches of ground ice, along the coast of the Ross Sea.

    After Levy and colleagues noted visible effects of ground ice retreat in Garwood Valley, they began to monitor the valley, combining time-lapse photography and weather-station data at 15-minute intervals to create a detailed view of the conditions under which the ice, a relict from the last ice age, is being lost.

    Rising temperatures do not account for the increased melting in Garwood Valley. The Dry Valleys overall experienced a well-documented cooling trend from 1986 to 2000, followed by stabilized temperatures to the present.

    Rather, Levy and his co-authors attribute the melting to an increase in radiation from sunlight stemming from changes in weather patterns that have resulted in an increase in the amount of sunlight reaching the ground.

    Sunlight tends to bounce off the white, reflective surfaces of glaciers and ice sheets, but the darker surfaces of dirty ground ice can absorb greater amounts of solar radiation. Thick layers of sediment tend to insulate deeply buried ground ice from sunlight and inhibit melting. But thin sediment layers have the opposite effect, effectively cooking the nearby ice and accelerating melt rates.

    As the ground ice melts, the frozen landscape sinks and buckles, creating what scientists describe as “retrogressive thaw slumps.” An acceleration in the prevalence of such slumps has been well documented in the Arctic and other permafrost regions, but not in Antarctica.

    Levy’s research shows that even under the stable temperature conditions of the Dry Valleys, recent increases in sunlight are leading to Arctic-like slump conditions.

    If Antarctica warms as predicted during the coming century, the melting and slumping could become that much more dramatic as warmer air temperatures combine with sunlight-driven melting to thaw ground ice even more quickly.

    Ground ice is not the major component of Antarctica’s vast reserves of frozen water, but there are major expanses of ground ice in the Dry Valleys, the Antarctic Peninsula and the continent’s ice-free islands.

    Garwood Valley could tell the story of what will happen in these “coastal thaw zones,” says Levy.

    “There’s a lot of buried ice in these low-elevation coastal regions, and it is primed to melt.”

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  • Major China coal plant drains lake, wells: Greenpeace

    (The dangers of fracking and Coal Mining)

    Major China coal plant drains lake, wells: Greenpeace

    AFP Updated July 23, 2013, 5:01 pm

    BEIJING (AFP) – A major Chinese state-owned coal producer has caused “drastic drops” in groundwater near one of its projects, the environmental group Greenpeace said in a report.

    Lakes have shrunk, wells have dried up and sand dunes are spreading near a plant in Inner Mongolia run by coal conglomerate Shenhua Group, the organisation said on Tuesday.

    It called the project a “classic example of the unchecked expansion of coal-reliant industries that is in growing conflict with China’s water resources”.

    China — the world’s biggest energy consumer — relies heavily on coal to power its economy, but is facing popular pressure to balance growth with tackling pollution.

    The plant in Ordos, the capital of Inner Mongolia, a major coal-producing region, is one of an initial handful of projects using coal to make chemicals.

    Greenpeace targeted the Shenhua plant because it might become a model as the water-intensive business expands in China, said campaigner Li Yan.

    “These projects are very important not only for Shenhua but also for the whole industry,” she said.

    Li added that the company — which would receive a copy of the findings on Tuesday — was the first state-owned enterprise that Greenpeace has so directly criticised.

    Such firms often command dominant positions across China’s economy and enjoy close official backing.

    Shenhua Group is not the same company as the firm which owns Didier Drogba’s former football club Shanghai Shenhua.

    Company representatives could not immediately be reached for comment by AFP.

    To enable production the Shenhua plant extracts water from the Haolebaoji area 100 kilometres (60 miles) away, Greenpeace said, citing 11 visits to the area over five months this year.

    A lake called Subeinaoer has dropped in surface area by 62 percent from 2004 to 2011, it said, while farmers and herders have complained of disappearing grazing, and sand dunes have spread as land covered by vegetation has shrunk.

    Residents used to dig wells 10 to 20 metres (33 to 66 feet) deep to obtain water, said report director Deng Ping.

    “Now they have a few well-digging teams that have to get down to 100 metres or even 150 metres in some places to reach water,” she said.

    China is the world’s largest producer and user of coal, accounting for nearly half of worldwide consumption.

    Pollution has become a popular grievance, with communities around the country protesting about industrial plants that they fear could harm the environment or their health.

    A study released earlier this month by a US scientific journal found that a decades-old Chinese policy of giving out free coal for winter heating in the north of the country had reduced life expectancy there by more than five years.

    Beijing has set a target of raising non-fossil energy use to 15 percent of its total consumption by 2020, up from 10 percent in 2010.

  • Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Natural Gas

    Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Natural Gas

    Andrew Kramer for The New York Times

    A helicopter view of energy facilities in the Russian Arctic. The company Novatek controls natural gas fields there.

    By
    Published: July 24, 2013

    YURKHAROVSKOYE GAS FIELD, Russia — The polar ice cap is melting, and if executives at the Russian energy company Novatek feel guilty about profiting from that, they do not let it be known in public.

    Novatek

    A rendering of Novatek’s proposed $20 billion liquefied natural gas plant on Russia’s Arctic coast, scheduled to be done by 2016.

    From this windswept shore on the Arctic Ocean, where Novatek owns enormous natural gas deposits, a stretch of thousands of miles of ice-free water leads to China. The company intends to ship the gas directly there.

    “If we don’t sell them the fuel, somebody else will,” Mikhail Lozovoi, a spokesman for Novatek, said last month with a shrug.

    Novatek, in partnership with the French energy company Total and the China National Petroleum Corporation, is building a $20 billion liquefied natural gas plant on the central Arctic coast of Russia. It is one of the first major energy projects to take advantage of the summer thawing of the Arctic caused by global warming.

    The plant, called Yamal LNG, would send gas to Asia along the sea lanes known as the Northeast Passage, which opened for regular international shipping only four years ago.

    Whatever blame for the grim environmental consequences of global warming elsewhere in the world that might be placed on the petroleum industry, in the Far North, companies like Novatek and Total, Exxon Mobil of the United States and Statoil of Norway stand to make profit.

    “It’s a reality of what is available today, and commercially it is a route that cuts cost,” Emily Stromquist, a global energy analyst at the Eurasia Group, said in a telephone interview.

    Because of easing ice conditions and new hull designs, the tankers will not even require nuclear-powered icebreakers to lead the way — as is the practice now — except through the most northerly straits.

    Novatek’s alternative was extending the natural gas pipeline that goes to Europe over hundreds of miles of tundra, at great cost. While shipping the gas from the field on the Yamal Peninsula, one of the long, misshapen fingers of land that extend north of the Urals in Russia, remains expensive, it is relatively cheap to drill and produce from these rich fields, making the overall project competitive.

    In addition to making it easier to ship to Asia, the receding ice cap has opened more of the sea floor to exploration. This has upended the traditional business model of using pipelines to Europe. Thawing has proceeded more slowly in the Arctic above Alaska, Canada and Greenland, but one day what is happening in Russia could happen there.

    Still, the Arctic waters are particularly perilous for drilling because of the extreme cold. Tongues of ice that descend from the polar cap for hundreds of miles obstruct shipping and threaten rigs. After a rig ran aground last year, Shell canceled drilling this summer in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska.

    This is not the first Arctic venture to benefit from newly cleared sea lanes. The decision to open the Arctic Ocean to drilling passed Russia’s Parliament in 2008 as an amendment to a law on subsoil resources. Exxon and Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, are already in a joint venture to drill in the Kara Sea, and last month they agreed to expand to seven new exploration blocks in the Arctic. Fourteen wells are planned.

    With these ventures, Exxon has placed itself in the vanguard of oil companies exploring commercial opportunities in the newly ice-free waters.

    In Russia, the mining company Norilsk can now ship its nickel and copper across the Arctic Ocean without chartering icebreakers, saving millions of rubles for shareholders.

    Norway is also drilling deep in Arctic waters, but has less territory to explore. Tschudi, a Norwegian shipping company, has bought and revived an idled iron ore mine in the north of Norway to ship ore to China via the northern route.

    In northwest Alaska, the Red Dog lead and zinc mine moves its ore through the Bering Strait, which is less often clogged with packed ice than in past decades.

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