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  • Tony Abbott’s climate policy is a deniers’ figleaf

    climate code red

    Tony Abbott’s climate policy is a deniers’ figleaf

    Posted: 08 Jul 2013 04:53 PM PDT

    Abbott’s direct inaction policy would condemn Australia to even worse heatwaves, extreme floods and bushfires 

    by Alexander White

    Australia's opposition leader Tony Abbott
    Tony Abbott. Photograph: Stefan Postles/Getty Images

    Tony Abbott is the alternative prime minister of Australia, and later this year he will face an election presenting a climate change policy that is frankly insulting and potentially dangerous.

    The Coalition’s climate change policy amounts to a bullet point in a pamphlet – the “Real Solutions for Australians” plan – number 10 of 12 such bullet points. It reads:

    “We will take direct action to reduce carbon emissions inside Australia, not overseas – and also establish a 15,000-strong Green Army to clean up the environment.”

    Digging down, the direct action “policy” comprises of:

    • An “Emissions Reduction Fund” of $3bn to fund projects that would reduce carbon emissions, based on a tender process.
    • Support for projects such as “soil carbon technologies and abatement”.
    • A commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 5% by 2020.

    Not directly part of any climate policy, but related to the environment, the Coalition would implement the discredited Howard Murray Darling Basin plan, “reduce reliance” on desalination plants, build more dams, “streamline” (read: weaken) environmental approval processes, and support the industrial fishing industry in marine protected areas. Lenore Taylor reports on Guardian Australia that some in the Coalition are calling for the renewable energy target to be reviewed or scrapped.To understand this “voluntary approach” to climate change policy, you need to understand where Abbott and the Coalition are coming from: a position of denial that climate change is real and driven by human activity. In addition to saying “climate change is crap“, in a more considered interview with the ABC’s Four Corners, Abbott said:

    “I have pointed out in the past that there was that high year a few years ago and the warming, if you believe various measuring organisations, hasn’t increased … the point is not the science, the point is how should government respond, and we have a credible response.”

    If you don’t believe that global warming is real, then the “direct action” policy could be considered “credible”.

    An increasing number of Coalition members are climate denialists.

    Senator Cory Bernardi, in between comparing same-sex marriage to bestiality, has declared climate change science to be “increasingly discredited”. Kevin Andrews has expressed doubts about the human factor in climate change. Almost all Tasmanian Liberal senators have expressed the same doubts – Stephen Parry, Guy Barnett, Eric Abetz and David Bushby. The ABC reported that former Liberal senator and Abbott mentor Nick Minchin said “a majority [of Coalition MPs] don’t accept” that human activity is causing climate change.

    It seems that Abbott has taken as his main scientific adviser on climate change the discredited denialist Ian Plimer – a geologist by training. Abbott has ignored the advice of the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology – two leading climate research institutes – as well as the Australian Academy of Science’s report on the science of climate change.
    Even if you only read the summary of the AAS’s report, the findings are pretty clear:

    “The global average surface temperature has increased over the last century and many other associated changes have been observed. The available evidence implies that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause. It is expected that, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at business-as-usual rates, global temperatures will further increase significantly over the coming century and beyond.”

    The Coalition climate policy is dangerous, because it creates the impression that unproven soil carbon storage and $3bn in funding of emissions reduction projects could possibly reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by any amount, let alone by 5%.

    The CSIRO’s review into soil carbon storage highlights the uncertainties involved long-term with such a policy.

    A review by Monash University research officer Tim Lubcke into the sequestration side of the Coalition’s policy – the Green Army planting trees – estimated that:

    “to achieve pledged return of an annual 85 million tonnes of CO2 captured would require equivalent to a plantation within a minimum size more than twice the size of Melbourne and to increase wood production by more than an additional 300%. As this analysis relied upon the most optimistic assumptions, real world limits to tree plantation ignored and optimal yield was used. With this in mind, the scale of DAP would be much larger physically, in management and in cost with real world conditions.”

    The effect of the Coalition’s “direct action” policy is direct inaction on climate change. The architects of this inaction policy, as reported by Guardian blogger and Desmogblog regular columnist Graham Readfearn, is extremist conservative thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs:

    “The Institute of Public Affairs, a leading promoter of climate science denial and misrepresentation, has revealed its recommendations for the next government in a document outlining budget cuts. The plan was written by Alan Moran, director of the thinktank’s deregulation unit.
    The document made the pages of The Australian newspaper but the report did not mention the document’s detailed plans to obliterate all climate change functions in the country’s public sector. In one section the document outlines the thinktank’s recommendations for public sector departments. In dealing with the future of the “Climate Change and Energy Efficiency” department, Moran writes simply: “Abolish”.
    Pretty much every other federal government function to administer climate change policy, research global warming, ensure sustainable development or support renewable energy gets chopped under Moran’s plan. Many publicly-funded research programs and agencies are either chopped entirely or cut to the bone.”

    The deep connections between the secretive IPA and the Liberal Party are documented by the Climate Action Network in a 2010 report entitled “Doubting Australia: the roots of Australia’s climate denial“:

    “The IPA’s extensive connections to the Liberal party go back decades. Today this includes its executive director, John Roskam, a Liberal party powerbroker, and former Howard government staffer, who has run for election on several occasions. Its board chair is former Senator in the Howard Government, Rod Kemp. On its board are former Victoria Liberal party president Michael Kroeger, and former Rio Tinto and liberal party PR adviser Tim Duncan, who now works for Hintons PR.”

    This network is not unsurprising. The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg in February reported that anonymous billionaires are funding climate denialist networks to the tune of $120m:

    “The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising ‘wedge issue’ for hardcore conservatives.
    The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Donors Capital caters to those making donations of $1m or more.”

    Because the IPA does not disclose its funding sources, we don’t know if any of this dark money has been used to fund thinktanks in Australia. However, key Abbott supporter Senator Cory Bernardi has controversially been sponsored by the Heartland Institute to travel to the US to speak at a conference. The Heartland Institute famously linked belief in climate change to the Unabomber last year in a series of offensive billboards.

    The most honest assessment of the Coalition’s climate policy, ironically, comes from the man who once led the Liberal party itself: Malcolm Turnbull.

    Having been defeated by Abbott for the leadership of the Liberal party by one vote in 2009, then-backbencher Turnbull wrote that the policy was “a farce”. Amid several “home truths”, Turnbull underlines the problem with Abbott and the direct inaction policy:

    “…the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming. As Tony observed on one occasion ‘climate change is crap’ or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, it’s cooling and the climate change issue is part of a vast left wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the world.
    Now politics is about conviction and a commitment to carry out those convictions. The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is ‘crap’ and you don’t need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing. After all, as Nick Minchin observed, in his view the majority of the Party Room do not believe in human caused global warming at all. I disagree with that assessment, but many people in the community will be excused for thinking the leadership ballot proved him right.
    Remember Nick Minchin’s defense of the Howard government’s ETS was that the Government was panicked by the polls and therefore didn’t really mean it.”

    Turnbull may now have returned to the fold as shadow communications minister – this opinion piece is conspicuously absent from his website – but the lack of a credible policy remains.

    Barack Obama declared last week in his landmark climate speech that he doesn’t have “much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat earth society.”

    Abbott’s climate change direct inaction policy is dangerous because it would lock in a “flat earth society” future for Australia where super-storms, heatwaves, droughts, extreme floods, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and bushfires are allowed to run rampant.

    Australia “registered the warmest September–March on record, the hottest summer on record, the hottest month on record and the hottest day on record” in the 2012-13 summer, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. The changing climate will continue to have a serious impact on Australia in future years. Australians thinking about who to vote for in 2013 should know what Abbott’s true intentions are on climate policy.

    Given this, it is past time that Abbott faced more substantial scrutiny on his climate policy.

    Note: I am a member of The Wilderness Society (Victoria) committee of management, and a director of Greenpeace Australia Pacific. The views here are mine alone

  • Risk maps for Antarctic krill under projected Southern Ocean acidification

    Risk maps for Antarctic krill under projected Southern Ocean acidification

    Published 9 July 2013 Science Leave a Comment
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    Marine ecosystems of the Southern Ocean are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification1. Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba; hereafter krill) is the key pelagic species of the region and its largest fishery resource2. There is therefore concern about the combined effects of climate change, ocean acidification and an expanding fishery on krill and ultimately, their dependent predators—whales, seals and penguins3, 4. However, little is known about the sensitivity of krill to ocean acidification. Juvenile and adult krill are already exposed to variable seawater carbonate chemistry because they occupy a range of habitats and migrate both vertically and horizontally on a daily and seasonal basis5. Moreover, krill eggs sink from the surface to hatch at 700–1,000 m (ref. 6), where the carbon dioxide partial pressure (pCO2) in sea water is already greater than it is in the atmosphere7. Krill eggs sink passively and so cannot avoid these conditions. Here we describe the sensitivity of krill egg hatch rates to increased CO2, and present a circumpolar risk map of krill hatching success under projected pCO2 levels. We find that important krill habitats of the Weddell Sea and the Haakon VII Sea to the east are likely to become high-risk areas for krill recruitment within a century. Furthermore, unless CO2 emissions are mitigated, the Southern Ocean krill population could collapse by 2300 with dire consequences for the entire ecosystem.

     

    Kawaguchi S., Ishida A., King R., Raymond B., Waller N., Constable A., Nicol S., Wakita M. & Ishimatsu A., in press. Risk maps for Antarctic krill under projected Southern Ocean acidification. Nature Climate Change. Article (subscription required).

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  • The Culture of Nature (MONBIOT)

    The Culture of Nature

    Posted: 08 Jul 2013 12:27 PM PDT

    The ignorance and philistinism of those who attack nature lovers knows no bounds.

     

    By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 9th July 2013

    Two months ago, American canvas weevil was found in the archives of the National Gallery. After ravaging the Metropolitan and Guggenheim collections in the US, it is now working through the gallery’s storage rooms. Hundreds of Old Masters have been destroyed. The curators fear that much of the collection will go the same way.

    The media has greeted this devastation with near-silence. A front-page article in the Guardian’s review section dismissed expressions of love for the paintings being destroyed as “bourgeois escapism”. Those seeking to arrest the spread of canvas weevil were compared to “anti-immigration demagogues [who] claim that foreigners will destroy a unique and distinctive British culture.”

    Inconceivable? You would hope so – and this story is, happily, fictitious. But the responses I’ve mentioned are real, when you swap art for nature.

    Earlier this year, the former energy minister John Hayes described concerns about the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia – which, with their tigers, orangutans and thousands of unique species, are being destroyed to grow biofuels – as “bourgeois views”(1). (Coming from a Tory MP, this was magnificent). In the Guardian review on Saturday, Steven Poole took up his call(2). Echoing Mao’s denunciations of pre-revolutionary Chinese culture, he castigated those of us who write about our love of nature as bourgeois and snobbish, and suggested that our concerns about the spread of exotic invasive animals and plants are a form of cryptofascism: “the green version of the English Defence League”.

    Exotic invasive species are a straightforward ecological problem, wearily familiar to anyone trying to protect biodiversity. Some introduced creatures – such as brown hare, little owl, field poppy, corncockle and pheasant’s eye in Britain – do no harm to their new homes, and are cherished and defended by nature lovers. Others, such as cane toads, mink, rats, rhododendron, kudzu vine or tree-killing fungi, can quickly simplify a complex ecosystem, wiping out many of its endemic animals and plants(3). They have characteristics (for example, inedible to any native carnivore or herbivore, omnivorous, light-excluding, toxic) that allow them to tear an ecosystem to shreds. These aren’t cultural constructions. They are biological facts.

    Comparing those who describe this process to racists is the intellectual equivalent of stating that evolution through natural selection is a coded attack on the welfare state, or that the first law of thermodynamics was hatched by green campaigners intent on conserving energy. It is to see the words but not to understand the science they describe. This fallacy – mistaking scientific findings for cultural concepts – was deliciously ripped apart by Alan Sokal’s satirical paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity”(4,5).

    I see a love for the diversity and richness of nature as an aesthetic and cultural impulse identical to the love of art. It is a form of culture as refined and intense as any other, yet those who profess it tend to be regarded as nerds, not connoisseurs. (That’s true snobbery for you). Steven Poole and people like him position themselves among the philistines: those who see no value in the wonders with which others are enchanted.

    Consider the issue of dry rot in historic buildings. It’s a major problem. Anyone who dismissed the concern of conservators as a form of neofascism would be considered insane. Dry rot is an exotic invasive species: a fungus which, until we introduced it in shipments of timber, lived quietly on pine and yew trees in the Himalayas(6). Unchecked, it could destroy much of our cultural heritage. What’s the difference?

    Why is this Red Guard philistinism directed at those whose hearts are broken by the heedless destruction of the natural world, by people who wouldn’t dream of trivialising the heedless destruction of the Bamiyan buddhas, or the demolition last month of a 4,000-year old pyramid at El Paraiso in Peru?(7)

    I think there may be three reasons. The first is ignorance. A complete absence of cultural understanding would be career death in the media. A complete absence of scientific understanding is no impediment at all, as almost all media outlets are run and dominated by humanities graduates. I think, among some commentators, there’s also a sense that concern for the living planet is a check on human progress, an affront to the view of humanity as deus invictus, the weightless god, floating above the grubby realities of life on earth.

    But most important, perhaps, is an unconscious absorption of the demands of money. Unlike most art, the wonders of nature often stand in the way of attempts to extract resources or to build airports or shopping centres. Corporate attacks on people who love and seek to defend the natural world have seeped into every pore. Culturally hegemonic, the developers’ view finds expression in the most unlikely places.

    So those of us whose love of the natural world is a source of constant joy and constant despair, who wish to immerse ourselves in nature as others immerse themselves in art, who try to defend the marvels which enthrall us, find ourselves labelled – from the Mail to the Guardian – as romantics, escapists and fascists. That, I suppose, is the price of confronting the power of money.

    www.monbiot.com

    References:

    1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/07/bourgeois-john-hayes

    2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/06/nature-writing-revival

    3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/oct/04/bird-eating-mice-species-introduced

    4. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

    5. See also http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html

    6. Jagjit Singh et al, 1994. The Search for Wild Dry Rot Fungus (Serpula lacrymans) in the Himalayas. Journal of the Institute of Wood Science, Vol.13, no.3, pp.411-412.

    7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/04/pyramid-peru-torn-down-el-paraiso
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  • Trees: our life savers are dying

    Trees: our life savers are dying

    For centuries we’ve treated forests poorly. Yet we’re only just learning how crucial trees are to our survival

    trees in Arcadia, Peloponnese, Greece

    ‘Scientists admit trees and forests are poorly studied.’ Photograph: Alamy

    Several years ago a few trees in my 15 acres of pine forest in Montana turned from green to a rusty brown, killed by swarms of bark beetles. Four years later virtually all of my centuries-old forest was dead. It wasn’t just the beetles that did in my trees, but much warmer winters here in the Rocky mountains that no longer killed the bugs, allowing them to expand exponentially.

    Since then, as a science journalist for the New York Times, I have written many stories about the dying of the trees – and the news is not good. Many forests across the length and breadth of the Rockies have died in the last decade. Most of the mature forests of British Columbia are gone, from a combination of climate and insects.

    The bristlecone pines of the US – the most ancient trees in the world, with some more than 4,000 years old – will die in the coming years because of a combination of bark beetles and a fungal disease, enabled by a warmer climate. Tree-ring studies on the bristlecone show that the last 50 years are the warmest half century in the last 3,700 years.

    All this is to say that the fungus killing ash trees in Britain is unlikely to be a one-off. Trees across the world are dying. It’s not only the changes brought by a warmer world. We’ve treated the world’s trees poorly for centuries, without regard to ecological principles. We’ve fragmented forests into tiny slivers, and selected out the best genetics again and again with no regard to the fitness of those that remain. Air pollution and soil abuse has taken a toll. And scientists admit trees and forests are poorly studied. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” a leading redwood expert told me.

    Yet the little that is known indicates trees are essential. They are the planet’s heat shield, cooling temperatures beneath them by 10C and blocking cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. They are robust filters of our air and water, and soak up climate-warming carbon dioxide. Forests slow the runoff of rainfall. Many of the world’s damaging floods are really caused by deforestation.

    These functions are well known. But trees play many other critical roles that we know little about. Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that as the leaves from trees decompose, humic acid leaches into the ocean and helps fertilise plankton, critical food for many other forms of sea life. Japanese fisherman began an award-winning campaign called Forests Are the Lovers of the Sea, and planted trees along the coasts and rivers that rejuvenated fish and oyster stocks.

    Also in Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing“. Hiking through the forest has been shown to reduce stress chemicals in the body and to increase NK or natural killer cells in the immune system, that fight tumours and viruses. Elsewhere researchers have demonstrated that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in neighbourhoods with trees in the picture.

    Hundreds of different kinds of chemicals are emitted by trees and forests, many beneficial. Taxane from the Pacific yew tree is a powerful anti-cancer drug. Many other tree compounds are proven to be antibacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral and even to prevent cancer. The active ingredient of aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid, for example, comes from willows. Recommended by doctors to prevent a range of cancers, as well as heart attack and stroke, some believe this chemical in the wild has a medicinal impact on the health of all creatures as it is aerosolised into the air and water, and breathed in and drunk. Yet, it hasn’t been researched.

    Trees are greatly underused as an eco-technology – “working trees” – to make natural systems, as well as the world’s cities and rural areas, more resilient. They are used here in the US to prevent soil erosion and shade crops. In a neat bit of alchemy, trees can be used to clean up the most toxic of wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, because of a dense community of microbes as thick as a finger around the tree’s roots, a process known as phytoremediation.

    The question is what to plant to withstand the challenges of a changing world to assure a world with trees. In the UK a group called Future Trees Trust is breeding more resilient trees. And a shade-tree farmer from the US named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, and whom I have written about, is making copies of some of the world’s oldest and largest trees, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland – with proven survivor genetics – to be part of a future forest mix. “These are the supertrees,” he says, “and they have stood the test of time.”

    Before I began this journey I felt planting trees was a feeble response to the planet’s problems. No longer. As the proverb asks: “When is the best time to plant a tree?” Twenty years ago. “The second-best time?” Today.

  • Solar-powered sedan hits Dutch streets

    Solar-powered sedan hits Dutch streets

    By John Upton

    This solar-powered car, Stella, was unveiled Thursday.
    Bart van Overbeeke
    This solar-powered car, Stella, was unveiled Thursday.

    Plug-in electric car? That’s so 2013.

    The electric sedans of the future will also generate their own photovoltaic power.

    That’s the philosophy behind a new class of competition in this year’s World Solar Challenge.

    Since 1987, the challenge has had solar-powered cars racing across the parched Australian outback every couple years. But the solar-powered vehicles that have competed in the challenge, while exciting and innovative, have been anything but consumer-friendly. They have typically carried only an uncomfortable driver in a craft shaped like a sheet of aluminum foil precariously perched over three wheels.

    This year’s challenge, scheduled for October, will push teams to go even further. The new Michelin cruiser class has been created for vehicles that could conceivably be marketed as family sedans. Ten teams have entered, and they will compete against each other for points awarded based on such criteria as practicality, attractiveness, and energy consumption.

    On Thursday, one of the those teams unveiled its entry, taking a car it dubbed Stella to cordoned-off Dutch streets to strut its photovoltaic stuff. And it’s pretty as a pug. Watch:

    The team of 22 Eindhoven University of Technology students behind Stella has vowed to register the car for on-road use, helping to demonstrate its potential commercial viability. From a press release:

    ‘Stella’ is the first ‘energy-positive car’ with room for four people, a trunk, intuitive steering and a range of 600 kilometers.

     

    By combining aerodynamic design with lightweight materials like carbon and aluminum, a very fuel-efficient car has been designed, which also has ingenious applications like a LED strip and touchscreen that make all the buttons and knobs we know today superfluous. Intuitive driving is enabled by a steering wheel that expands or contracts when you are driving too fast or too slowly. STE will have the car officially certified for road use to prove that this really is a fully-fledged car.

    John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

  • Brooded coral larvae differ in their response to high temperature and elevated pCO2 depending on the day of release

    Brooded coral larvae differ in their response to high temperature and elevated pCO2 depending on the day of release

    Published 8 July 2013 Science Leave a Comment
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    To evaluate the effects of temperature and pCO2 on coral larvae, brooded larvae of Pocillopora damicornis from Nanwan Bay, Taiwan (21°56.179′N, 120°44.85′E), were exposed to ambient (419–470 μatm) and high (604–742 μatm) pCO2 at ~25 and ~29 °C in two experiments conducted in March 2010 and March 2012. Larvae were sampled from four consecutive lunar days (LD) synchronized with spawning following the new moon, incubated in treatments for 24 h, and measured for respiration, maximum photochemical efficiency of PSII (F v/F m), and mortality. The most striking outcome was a strong effect of time (i.e., LD) on larvae performance: respiration was affected by an LD × temperature interaction in 2010 and 2012, as well as an LD × pCO2 × temperature interaction in 2012; F v/F m was affected by LD in 2010 (but not 2012); and mortality was affected by an LD × pCO2 interaction in 2010, and an LD × temperature interaction in 2012. There were no main effects of pCO2 in 2010, but in 2012, high pCO2 depressed metabolic rate and reduced mortality. Therefore, differences in larval performance depended on day of release and resulted in varying susceptibility to future predicted environmental conditions. These results underscore the importance of considering larval brood variation across days when designing experiments. Subtle differences in experimental outcomes between years suggest that transgenerational plasticity in combination with unique histories of exposure to physical conditions can modulate the response of brooded coral larvae to climate change and ocean acidification.

     

    Cumbo V. R., Edmunds P. J., Wall C. B. & Fan T.-Y., in press. Brooded coral larvae differ in their response to high temperature and elevated pCO2 depending on the day of release. Marine Biology. Article (subscription required).

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