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Arctic sea ice could disappear completely through September if temps increase 2 degrees

Arctic could be iceless in September if temps increase 2 degrees, Science Daily 

Date:
August 13, 2019
Source:
University of Cincinnati
Summary:
Arctic sea ice could disappear completely through September each summer if average global temperatures increase by as little as 2 degrees, according to a new study.

Arctic sea ice could disappear completely through September each summer if average global temperatures increase by as little as 2 degrees, according to a new study by the University of Cincinnati.

The study by an international team of researchers was published in Nature Communications.

“The target is the sensitivity of sea ice to temperature,” said Won Chang, a study co-author and UC assistant professor of mathematics.

“What is the minimum global temperature change that eliminates all arctic sea ice in September? What’s the tipping point?”

The study predicted that the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free in September with as little as 2 degrees Celsius of temperature change. Limiting warming to 2 degrees is the stated goal of the 2009 Paris Agreement, the international effort to curb carbon emissions to address warming. The Trump Administration withdrew the United States as a participant in 2017……..

The less summer sea ice the Arctic has, the longer it takes for the Arctic Ocean to ice back over for the polar winter. That could spell bad news for Arctic wildlife such as seals and polar bears that rely on sea ice to raise pups and hunt them, respectively.

The researchers applied the new statistical method to climate model projections of the 21st century. Using the climate models, the authors found at least a 6% probability that summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will disappear with warming of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. At 2 degrees, the likelihood increases to 28%…….https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190813160526.htm

August 15, 2019 Posted by | ARCTIC, climate change | Leave a comment

The Anthropocene is not an epoch. It’s a passing blink in geological time

The Anthropocene Is a Joke, On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.  The Atlantic,  PETER BRANNEN   AUG 13, 2019
Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told. Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400 years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the atmosphere. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this year, the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes.These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates—single-frame snapshots from deep time—can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene.

So what to make of this new “epoch” of geological time? Do we deserve it? Sure, humans move around an unbelievable amount of rock every year, profoundly reshaping the world in our own image. And, yes, we’re currently warping the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans violently, and in ways that have analogues in only a few terrifying chapters buried deep in Earth’s history. Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages. If 100 million years can easily wear the Himalayas flat, what chance will San Francisco or New York have?

The idea of the Anthropocene is an interesting thought experiment. For those invested in the stratigraphic arcana of this infinitesimal moment in time, it serves as a useful catalog of our junk. But it can also serve to inflate humanity’s legacy on an ever-churning planet that will quickly destroy—or conceal forever—even our most awesome creations.

What paltry smudge of artifacts we do leave behind, in those rare corners of the continents where sediment accumulates and is quickly buried—safe from erosion’s continuous defacing—will be extremely unlikely to be exposed at the surface, at any given time, at any given place, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years in the geological future. Sic transit gloria mundi……..

Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.

Geological time is deep beyond all comprehension……..

For context, let’s compare the eventual geological legacy of humanity (somewhat unfairly) to that of the dinosaurs, whose reign spanned many epochs and lasted a functionally eternal 180 million years—36,000 times as long as recorded human history so far. But you would never know this near-endless age was so thoroughly dominated by the terrible reptiles by looking to the rock record of the entire eastern half of North America. Here, dinosaurs scarcely left behind a record at all. And not because they weren’t here the entire time—with millions of generations of untold dinosaurs living, hunting, mating, dying, foraging, migrating, evolving, and enduring throughout, up and down the continent, in great herds and in solitary ambushes. ……

What, then, will a few decades of industrial civilization get us? This is the central question of the Anthropocene—an epoch that supposedly started, not tens of millions of years ago, but perhaps during the Truman administration…….

The most enduring geological legacy, instead, will be the extinctions we cause. The first wave of human-driven extinctions, and the largest hit to terrestrial megafauna since the extinction of the dinosaurs, began tens of thousands of years ago, as people began to spread out into new continents and islands, wiping out everything we tend to think of as “Ice Age” fauna—mammoths, mastodons, giant wombats, giant ground sloths, giant armadillos, woolly rhinoceroses, giant beavers, etc. This early, staggered, human-driven extinction event is as reasonable a starting date as any for the Anthropocene and one that has, in fact, been proposed. However, a few thousand years—or even a few tens of thousands of years—will be virtually indistinguishable in the rocks a hundred million years hence. That is, it would not be obvious to the geologists of the far future that these prehistoric human-caused extinctions were not simultaneous with our own modern-day depredations on the environment. …… To future geologists, the modern debate about whether the Anthropocene started 10 minutes ago or 10,000 years ago will be a bit like arguing with your spouse on your 50th wedding anniversary about which nanosecond you got married.

What humans are doing on the planet, then, unless we endure for millions to tens of millions of years, is extremely transient. In fact, there exists a better word in geology than epoch to describe our moment in the sun thus far: event. ….

The idea that we’re in a new epoch is a profoundly optimistic one, for it implies that we’ll persist into the future as an industrial technological civilization on something like a geological timescale…….

The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations. It is of a thread with our species’ peculiar, self-styled exceptionalism—from the animal kingdom, from nature, from the systems that govern it, and from time itself. This illusion may, in the long run, get us all killed. ……https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/

August 15, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, environment | Leave a comment

Wildfire cloud study sheds light on the processes of ‘nuclear winter’

To better grasp nuclear winter, scientists study wildfire cloud, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/cloud-wildfires-how-nuclear-winter-works/  

A giant cloud from 2017 Canadian fires lingered in the atmosphere for a year, showing scientists how a cloud from a nuclear bomb would behave. BY MADELEINE STONE

PUBLISHED AUGUST 8, 2019 If a nuclear war were ever to occur, the toll would be catastrophic. Bombs would flatten entire cities, spreading deadly radiation far and wide. Fires sparked by the explosions would raze vast swaths of forest, sending toxic smoke streaming into the upper atmosphere where it would block the sun and trigger a global nuclear winter.

At least, that’s what the models say. Observations published Thursday in Science are confirming a key bit of physics underpinning those apocalyptic forecasts. The new data doesn’t come from a nuclear attack, but from a giant thundercloud formed by fire.

“Our previous model simulations showed that smoke, put into the lower stratosphere—above the layer where we live—would be heated and lofted to the upper stratosphere,” says study co-author Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. “But we’d never observed that until this case where there was smoke put up by forest fires.”

The ‘mother of all fire clouds’

Those forest fires occurred on August 12, 2017, during a blisteringly hot, pyrotechnic summer in British Columbia. On that day, weather conditions conspired with the intense heat from a rash of wildfires to create a powerful updraft. That updraft pushed a plume of particles aloft, forming a cluster of towering, smoke-filled thunderclouds. Scientists had observed such fire weather systems before, but never quite at that scale.

It was, as Robock put it, the “mother of all fire clouds.”

Like a chimney, the fire cloud began funneling smoke some 8 miles up into the stratosphere, creating a hazy plume. Over the course of two months, the plume rose and rose, fanning out across the Northern Hemisphere and peaking at an altitude of about 14 miles. Smoke lingered in the stratosphere for the better part of a year.

It was the plume’s continued ascent after its initial injection into the upper atmosphere that the new study focuses on and attempts to explain. According to lead study author Pengfei Yu of the Institute for Environment and Climate Research at Jinan University in China, models of nuclear winter produce similar behavior due to tiny flecks of soot, or black carbon, inside the nuclear fireball-fueled smoke plume.

“The soot will absorb solar energy, warming the surrounding air,” Yu says. “And the air will become more buoyant.”

By matching data from satellites with numerical model simulations, the researchers determined that the 2017 plume’s ascent was best explained by black carbon comprising about 2 percent of its mass.

“It validates our theory,” Yu says.

The observation also bolsters our understanding of basic fire weather physics, says Craig Clements, director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory at San Jose State University. Normally, he says, when researchers think about a rising plume, they’re only considering how heat from the fire itself creates updrafts.

“But what they’re showing is the carbon actually causes the warming and the plume to rise in height,” Clements says. “That’s cool.”

Nuclear fires

If the 2017 fire cloud sheds a little light on how a nuclear attack would ripple through the sky, it also highlights the limits of our knowledge about such cataclysms.

In addition to black carbon, the researchers showed that the 2017 fire plume was filled with organic matter. Yu says these particles weren’t previously considered in nuclear winter models because of the assumption that they’ll be quickly degraded in the stratosphere.

But in 2017 “we clearly saw organics stay in the stratosphere for a few months,” Yu says. “The lifetime is much longer than we thought previously.”

Then again, fires that torch entire cities might be chemically quite different from a forest fire. All of those melting plastics and asphalt could, potentially, kick up fewer organics but far more soot, perhaps causing the plume to self-loft even higher.

And the sheer scale of nuclear fires may be larger than anything humans have experienced. While the researchers estimate that some 331,000 tons of particles were shot into the stratosphere during the 2017 event, that’s “at least a factor of 10 smaller than an amount we’d estimate from a war between India and Pakistan,” Robock says.

Studying future extreme fire weather events could help fill in some of the gaps. Robock and co-author Brian Toon of University of Colorado, Boulder are conducting additional simulations to better understand how nuclear winter could impact everything from global crop production to the marine food web.

This work is all rather grim, Yu admits. “We don’t want nuclear winter to happen in our lives at all,” he says. “But I think as scientists, we have to show people the really bad climate impacts of nuclear war so people avoid it.”

August 10, 2019 Posted by | Canada, climate change | Leave a comment

Russia’s planned dangerous expansion into the Arctic with nuclear icebreakers, Rosatom in control, increasing climate change

Russia to build two more nuclear icebreakers   https://bellona.org/news/arctic/2019-08-russia-to-build-two-more-nuclear-icebreakers

Russia has said it will build two new nuclear icebreakers in a bid to make a rapidly melting trade route through the Arctic accessible to shipping traffic on a year round basis.  August 7, 2019 by Charles Digges

Russia has said it will build two new nuclear icebreakers in a bid to make a rapidly melting trade route through the Arctic accessible to shipping traffic on a year round basis.

The announcement came on July 10 when Atomflot, which runs Russia’s nuclear icebreaker fleet, posted an official tender for two new nuclear vessels for a total price of $147 billion.

The new orders represent an addition to three nuclear icebreakers that Russia already has under construction, called the Arktika,” the “Sibir” and “Ural,” all of which are expected to enter service by 2022. The two new icebreakers now under tender, which will be an extension of that line, are to launch by 2024 and 2026 respectively.

These vessels of the so-called LK-60Ya type are built to enormous dimensions. Each is up to 173 meters long, and is powered by twin RITM-200 reactors, which deliver a combined 175 megawatts of power – making them the most powerful civilian vessels in the world.

It is widely expected that the Baltic Shipyard in St Petersburg – where the other three icebreakers are being built – will get the massive tender, though two other shipyards, one in Crimea and the other in the Russian Far East, are expected to bid on the project as well.

Atomflot’s new order is part of Moscow’s push to bring the Arctic under its control as climate change thins polar ice, opening a shipping corridor between Europe and Asia. The 6,000-kilometer Arctic passage, called the Northern Sea Route, is thought to lop days off more conventional shipping schedules via the Suez Canal. But icebreaking vessels are still needed to keep trade lanes open for cargo convoys for much of the year – a service for which Moscow charges shippers a hefty toll.

President Vladimir Putin is betting big on the Arctic thaw, last year has ordering his government to boost shipping through the Northern Sea Route to 80 million tons a year by 2024, a fourfold uptick over current levels.

Moscow’s ministries and state corporations have promised to deliver the goods, and already some 10 percent of Russia’s total investments are in Arctic projects.

The Yamal LNG project, which went into production earlier this year, expects to ship 15.5 million tons of natural gas a year. The Yamal LNG II project, expected to open in 2023, will add another 19.8 billion tons.

Yet more traffic through the Northern Sea Route will be accounted for by oil – much of it from pipelines funneled from Central Siberia to Arctic seaports specifically to fulfill Putin’s increased cargo demands.

But it’s not just traffic from fossil fuel industries that Moscow is banking on. Earlier this year, Russian Parliament adopted legislation giving Rosatom a monopoly over managing access to the Northern Sea Route through its icebreakers, which will chaperone foreign traffic.

The Russian government’s claim that shippers need Moscow’s permission to pass through the route has irked some. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called the Kremlin’s intentions to run the Northern Sea Route like a toll road “illegal.”

But others, like China, are keen to play by Moscow’s rules – in exchange for part of the profits. Beijing, which is the largest foreign investor in Russia’s Yamal LNG project, is developing an Arctic trade strategy that has dubbed “The Polar Silk Road.” Shippers in South Korea and Denmark have conducted pilot voyages through the Northern Sea Route as well.

Moscow has meanwhile backed up its claims as the Arctic’s traffic cop with military might. Ten disused Arctic military airfields have been reopened, and 13 more are being built. The bases cover almost the entire coastline and are, if required, ready to protect or disrupt any traffic along the North Sea Route.

All of this is part of a bigger bet Russia is making on climate change. According to data from NASA, Arctic ice has shrunk by 12.8 percent a year on average since 1979. Last year’s ice cover was 42 percent lower than 1980. By some estimates, the entire Polar Region could be largely ice-free by 2050.

While most nations with access to the Arctic have been shy about capitalizing on global warming to commercialize the pristine polar environment, Putin has not. The Kremlin strategy suggests that by the time climate change helps make the Northern Sea Route navigable all year, Russia will have full control of any traffic on the route, and will be actively exploiting it for its own commodity exports, shortening the shipping path to Asia.

How that approach will affect the rest of the world, however, is not in dispute. According to a study published by the science journal Nature, Russia’s current climate policies would push up global temperatures by more than 5 degrees Celsius — at least 3 degrees higher than the limit climate scientists are aiming for.

Russia is currently operating four other nuclear icebreakers: The “Yamal,” the “50 Let Pobedy,” the“Taymyr,” and “Vaygash.”

August 8, 2019 Posted by | ARCTIC, climate change, Russia, technology | Leave a comment

Another French nuclear plant having difficulties due to hot weather, and poor river flow

Reuters 3rd Aug 2019 French utility EDF may curb power generation at its 3,000 megawatt Chooz nuclear reactor in the north of France due to the low flow rate of the
Meuse river which it uses to cool the two reactors at the plant. “Due to
flow forecasts of Meuse river, production restrictions are likely to affect
EDF’s nuclear generating fleet on Chooz production units starting
Thursday August 8,” the company said. EDF’s use of water from rivers as
coolant is regulated by law to protect plant and animal life. It is obliged
to reduce output during hot weather when water temperatures rise, or when
river levels are low.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-fr

August 5, 2019 Posted by | climate change, France | Leave a comment

‘Thermal limits’ – extreme heat effects on the body

How extreme heat affects your body


Independent 27th July 2019 Extreme global temperatures are pushing the human body “close to thermal limits”, according to a climate scientist. Record-breaking heat has swept
through Europe this week with temperatures topping 40C in a number of
countries.

However, in places such as South Asia and the Persian Gulf,
people are already enduring temperatures reaching up to 54C. Despite all
the body’s thermal efficiencies, these areas could soon be uninhabitable,
according to Loughborough University climate scientist Dr Tom Matthews in
The Conversation.https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/exteme-global-temperatures-heatwave-human-body-limits-a9023421.html

July 29, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

Unprecedented wildfires in the Arctic release huge CO2 to the atmosphere

Telegraph 27th July 2019 An unprecedented outbreak of wildfires in the Arctic has sent smoke across Eurasia and released more carbon dioxide in two months than the Czech
Republic or Belgium does in a year.

As 44C heatwaves struck Europe,
scientists observed more than 100 long-lasting, intense fires in the Arctic
in June, the hottest month on record, and are seeing even more in July,
according to Mark Parrington of the European Centre for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts.

Mostly in Alaska and Russia, the infernos have
collectively released more than 120 million tonnes of CO2, more than the
annual output of most countries. It is the most carbon emitted since
satellite monitoring began in the early 2000s. This will further exacerbate
climate change and has sent smoke pouring toward more populated parts of
the world. Pollutants can persist more than a month in the atmosphere and
spread thousands of kilometres.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/27/climate-change-warning-arctic-circle-burning-record-rate-forest/

July 29, 2019 Posted by | ARCTIC, climate change | Leave a comment

Boris Johnson government could reach net zero, without nuclear power

Utility Week 26th July 2019 ,  Boris may not need the nuclear option to reach net zero. The proposal to use the regulated asset base model to fund new nuclear projects this week
was given a mixed reaction. SSE chief executive Alistair Phillips-Davies
writes exclusively for Utility Week about why he believes the government
should now be showing the same level of support for renewable electricity
if it is serious about reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

https://utilityweek.co.uk/boris-may-not-need-nuclear-option-reach-net-zero/

July 29, 2019 Posted by | climate change, politics, UK | Leave a comment

Huge Arctic fires have now emitted a record-breaking amount of CO2

Huge Arctic fires have now emitted a record-breaking amount of CO2, 25 July 2019  By Adam VaughanHuge wildfires are continuing to burn across the Arctic, and have now released more carbon dioxide in 2019 than in any year since satellite records began nearly two decades ago.

Temperatures have been well above average in the region, and fires erupted in boreal peatlands across Siberia around 9 June. Normally the fires would last a few days, but this year some vegetation and peatland has been ablaze for a month and a half.

The result is the rapid release … (subscribers only)  https://www.newscientist.com/article/2211013-huge-arctic-fires-have-now-emitted-a-record-breaking-amount-of-co2/#ixzz5v1ZsBrij

July 29, 2019 Posted by | ARCTIC, climate change | Leave a comment

Soaring temperatures in Europe – risk of record ice melt in Greenland

July 27, 2019 Posted by | climate change, EUROPE | Leave a comment

Germany’s Grohnde nuclear plant headed for shutdown, due to high temperatures

Nuclear power plant in Germany at verge of getting switched off due to heat wave – Nuclear phase-out, 26 Jul 2019, Benjamin Wehrmann  https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/nuclear-power-plant-germany-verge-getting-switched-due-heat-wave

Clean Energy Wire / NDR / Bloomberg  

A nuclear power plant in northern Germany has come to the verge of being taken off the grid on Friday, a Lower Saxony state environment ministry spokesperson told Clean Energy Wire. The ministry on Thursday had said the Grohnde nuclear plant near Hannover would likely be taken offline, as high temperatures were excessively warming a river used for the plant’s cooling system, and should be started up again once the heat wave that has hit Germany and other European countries with unprecedented temperatures has abated. On Friday, the plant’s operator, Preussen Elektra had informed the ministry that water temperatures were not rising as quickly as expected. However, precautions for a possible shutdown were taken nonetheless, the operator said. The river Weser, into which the plant’s cooling water is discharged, is suffering low water levels and has warmed to above 26 degrees Celsius. Additional heat from the nuclear reactor could damage the river’s ecosystem, the ministry said.

According to preliminary figures from meteorological service DWD, 25 June set another temperature record for Germany. Lingen in Lower Saxony recorded a high of 42.6 degrees, breaking the previous day’s all-time German high of 40.5 degrees.

July 27, 2019 Posted by | climate change, Germany | Leave a comment

Climate change’s impacts on the nuclear industry – wildfires shut down parts of Idaho nuclear research site

Idaho nuclear research site shuts down some operations because of wildfire
The public has not been threatened as the 90,000-acre blaze burns near the Idaho National Laboratory, NBC News, July 24, 2019, By Phil Helsel

A brush fire that has burned about 90,000 acres in Idaho has curtailed much of the staff at one of the nation’s leading nuclear research facilities, officials said Tuesday.

No injuries have been reported, and there has been no damage or threats to buildings at the Idaho National Laboratory since the fire was sparked in grassland near the center about 6:30 p.m. Monday.

“The public has not been threatened at all,” Juan Alvarez, chief operations officer for the national lab, said at a news conference Tuesday…….. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/idaho-nuclear-research-site-shuts-down-some-operations-because-wildfire-n1033266

July 25, 2019 Posted by | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

Climate change continues to affect France’s nuclear power industry

EDF could extend Golfech nuclear power plant outage because of heatwave,  https://www.euronews.com/2019/07/22/edf-could-extend-golfech-nuclear-power-plant-outage-because-of-heatwave

22/07/2019 –PARIS (Reuters) – French utility EDF <EDF.PA> could prolong planned outages at its two Golfech nuclear reactors because of a heatwave expected across France this week, the power utility said on Monday.

EDF plans to halt production at the 1,300 megawatt (MW) Golfech 2 reactor from Tuesday until July 29 and will stop power generation at Golfech 1 on Wednesday until same day next week.

The utility had said on Friday that it could halt electricity generation at the 2,600 megawatt (MW) Golfech plant in southern France because of high temperatures forecast on the Garonne river, water from which is used to cool the reactors.

EDF said on Monday that the current forecast for the end of the outages was based on available temperature forecasts and that the outages at both reactors could be prolonged.

The company’s use of water from rivers to cool its reactors is regulated by law to protect plant and animal life. It is forced to cut output when water temperatures rise or when river levels and the flow rate are low.

Another spell of sizzling temperatures is expected in France and much of western Europe this week, the second heatwave this summer. A record temperature of 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 Fahrenheit) was set in southern France last month.

Separately, EDF delayed the restart of its 1,500 MW Chooz 2 nuclear reactor by a couple days to Aug. 1, saying that the planned maintenance outage could be extended because of the amount of work required for its second 10-year overhaul.

(Reporting by Bate Felix; Editing by David Goodman)

July 23, 2019 Posted by | climate change, France | Leave a comment

Swedish climate champion Greta Thunberg has received the first Freedom Prize in France

Greta Thunberg awarded first Normandy Freedom Prize

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg wins France’s first Freedom Prize,  SBS News, A 16-year-old Swedish climate champion has received the first Freedom Prize in France, and has urged people to recognise the link between climate change and “mass migration, famine and war.”

Swedish teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg, whose Friday school strikes protesting government inaction over climate change helped spark a worldwide movement, has received the first Freedom Prize in France.

Flanked by two WWII veterans who sponsor the prize, the 16-year-old accepted the award at a ceremony in the northwestern city of Caen, Normandy, on Sunday.

“This prize is not only for me,” Greta said. “This is for the whole Fridays for Future movement because this we have achieved together.”

She said she would donate the AU$28,000 prize money to four organisations working for climate justice and helping areas already affected by climate change.

The prize was awarded before an audience of several hundred people and in the presence of several D-Day veterans, including France’s Leon Gautier and US native American Charles Norman Shay.

Greta said she had spent an unforgettable day with Mr Shay on Omaha Beach, one of the sites of the 1944 Normandy landings that launched the Allied offensive that helped end World War II.

Paying tribute to their sacrifice, she said: “the least we can do to honour them is to stop destroying that same world that Charles, Leon and their friends and colleagues fought so hard to save for us.”

Mr Shay said that young people should be prepared to “defend what they believe in.”………

She said the “link between climate and ecological emergency and mass migration, famine and war was still not clear to many people” and urged change.

The Freedom Prize was set up to honour the values embodied by the Normandy landings. Its winner is chosen by a worldwide online poll of respondents aged between 15 and 25……https://www.sbs.com.au/news/teen-climate-activist-greta-thunberg-wins-france-s-first-freedom-prize

July 23, 2019 Posted by | climate change, France | Leave a comment

Australia’s government doesn’t mention climate change: it’s not happening in Australia

We are now in a place we’ve never been before https://southwind.com.au/, 

23 July 2019 by Peter Boyer    Australia’s big dry is now its worst drought on record. Which is pretty much the way it is everywhere.  Following a lead from our state and federal governments, today I’m going to avoid the delicate matter of future climate. Instead I’ll focus on what’s happening around us now.

Weather records tell us that June in Australia was 0.26C warmer than average and 31 per cent drier. The first half of 2019 produced the continent’s second warmest and seventh driest conditions in 120 years of records.

In those six months the Murray-Darling Basin had about half its normal rainfall. Basin residents might have coped with this in normal times, but these are not normal times. Dry, warm, high-evaporation weather since January 2017 has left them with conditions they’ve not seen before.

Now it’s official. Rainfall records reveal that today’s Murray-Darling experience is Australia’s worst drought on record – more severe than the Federation, the World War II, the Millennium or any other drought in our recorded history.

Bureau of Meteorology climatologist David Jones told a BOM seminar last week that proxy evidence indicates Australia hasn’t been as dry as this for two or three million years, long before humans existed. This puts the current state of our weather in a completely new place.

Numerous NSW and southern Queensland towns now have emergency water restrictions in place. Many towns in upper Darling catchments calculate their water storage as a few months at most. In Tenterfield they’re pumping already-depleted groundwater to try to keep storage levels stable.

Water is now being carted to the small town of Guyra, 150 km away, but for Tenterfield that’s not an option – at least not a sustainable one. Its businesses and 4000 residents would need 1400 B-double truckloads a month, or nearly 50 each day, to sustain even minimal water use.

The list of towns threatened with losing their water supply is growing, including Warwick and Stanthorpe in Queensland. The larger centres of Tamworth, Armidale, Orange and Dubbo are lining up to join them if good rain doesn’t come this year. The Bureau is not hopeful of that happening.

Running out of water is a nightmare for any community. Cape Town almost ran out a year ago and is still in a tenuous position. In much-larger Chennai on India’s southeast coast, where it hasn’t rained for six months, the situation is dire. Monsoon rain is not expected for another month or two.

This city of 10 million people consumes over 500 million litres a day. The provincial government is now using trains to transport water every day from a half-full storage over 300 km away, but if the city were to run out completely that supply would have to increase 50-fold. That won’t happen.

Early monsoonal downpours in India’s Assam along with Nepal and Bangladesh have brought the opposite problem: too much water, displacing millions of people and killing over 100.  Not far away in the high Himalayas, the rate of glacier melt has been found to have doubled in less than 20 years to more than eight billion tonnes a year. A scientific assessment published in June is a very bad omen for downstream communities depending on glacial meltwater.

Meanwhile America’s Pacific north-west is preparing for another nasty fire season. A scientific wildfire survey has just informed Californians, after their worst season ever last year, that the state’s summer fires have increased five-fold since the 1970s, with rising temperature the key cause.

Wildfire anxiety has spread northward, to the dark, dank forests of British Columbia. The Canadian province’s wildfire service has warned that abnormally high fire conditions will be experienced in coastal regions including Vancouver Island at least till the end of summer.

This comes after several summers of intense wildfires up and down the Canadian west coast, mostly started by lightning strikes. They have been especially devastating in new-growth forests, where less genetic diversity and lower tree density allows higher moisture loss.

Things are hotting up in the far north. Alert, a Canadian military base on Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic, normally has a daytime maximum around 7C in July, but it’s currently experiencing an unprecedented heatwave that has seen temperatures climb above 20C.

Canada’s chief climatologist, David Phillips, says this heatwave is just the latest indicator of what will be a long, hot Arctic summer. The main trigger, say scientists, was a dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice over the past decade that allowed the ocean to absorb much more heat from the sun.

Smoke has become a regular contributor to Arctic weather, and this year is no exception. These are not forest fires so much as peat fires. The dried-out tundra itself is now burning in Alaska and across wide Siberian expanses, sending choking black smoke into the air.

Among the many things I’ve left out are Darwin’s groundwater crisis, depleted Great Barrier Reef coral, Europe’s unprecedented June heat, vanishing Antarctic sea ice, chronic drought in Africa and the Americas and floods in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Did I mention climate change?

VICTIM of a chronic decline in government support, Hobart’s venerable environment and sustainability body, Sustainable Living Tasmania, has been forced to close its doors after nearly 50 years of quiet achievement. It will continue as a volunteer-run organisation with no office

July 23, 2019 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, climate change | Leave a comment

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