Global warming could cause disappearance of vast Alpine glacier
Vast Alpine glacier could almost vanish by 2100 due to warming, Reuters, Reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Frances Kerry GREAT ALETSCH GLACIER, SWITZERLAND | BY DENIS BALIBOUSE One of Europe’s biggest glaciers, the Great Aletsch, coils 23 km (14 miles) through the Swiss Alps – and yet this mighty river of ice could almost vanish in the lifetimes of people born today because of climate change.
The glacier, 900 meters (2,950 feet) thick at one point, has retreated about 3 km (1.9 miles) since 1870 and that pace is quickening, as with many other glaciers around the globe.
That is feeding more water into the oceans and raising world sea levels…….
even the Great Aletsch glacier, the biggest in the Alps and visible from space, is under threat from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from factories, power plants and cars that are blamed for global warming.
Andreas Vieli, a professor who heads the University of Zurich’s group of glaciology experts, said the Aletsch may lose 90 percent of its ice volume by 2100, with the lower reaches melting away.
“My kids are going to see a very different scenery in the Alps,” he said.
And on the ice, Aletsch guide Richard Bortis said, “if I stay on the glacier for several days … I can even see the changes myself.”
The glacier is a vast water reserve, important for irrigation and hydroelectric power……For glaciers around the globe, from the Andes to Alaska, rising temperatures mean that the volume lost from the summer melt exceeds snows that replenish the glaciers’ ice in winter. The Aletsch flows downhill at about 180 meters (590 feet) a year.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service says “the rates of early 21st-century mass loss are without precedent on a global scale” at least since measurements began around 1850.
Representatives from almost 200 governments will meet in Paris from Nov. 30-Dec. 11 to try to agree ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The United Nations’ panel of climate scientists says sea levels are set to rise by between 26 and 82 cm (10 and 31 inches) by the late 21st century, after a gain of about 20 cm (8 inches) since 1900, partly fed by water from melting glaciers. Rising oceans are a threat to places from San Francisco to Shanghai, to low-lying Pacific atolls and large parts of Bangladesh…… http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/15/us-climatechange-summit-earthprints-swit-idUSKCN0S914A20151015
Climate change already impacting Bangladesh coastal communities
Rising salinity threatens Bangladesh’s coastal communities – experts Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation – Tue, 13 Oct 2015 Author: Pantho Rahaman Reporting by Pantho Rahaman; editing by Jumana Farouky and Laurie Goering -the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, women’s rights, trafficking and corruption. Visitwww.trust.org/climate
“……..Climate change-induced alterations to sea level, temperature and rainfall are affecting freshwater supplies in low-lying coastal areas around the world, scientists and environmentalists say.
With more than a quarter of its population living in 19 districts facing or near the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh is especially vulnerable, they say.
If access to fresh water continues to decrease at current rates in Bangladesh, experts warn, the country faces worsening drinking and irrigation water scarcity in the next few decades.
“Left unattended, 2.9 million to 5.2 million poor (people) in southwest coastal Bangladesh will face serious river salinity problems by 2050,” said Susmita Dasgupta, the lead environmental economist of the World Bank’s research department, in an email interview.
A DIRE PICTURE
A study by the World Bank and Bangladesh’s Institute of Water Modelling (IWM) published last year paints a dire picture of the future of freshwater supplies for the country’s coastal communities.
In a worst case scenario, the study predicts that the area served by freshwater rivers – those whose salt levels measure less than 1 part per thousand – in the country’s 19 coastal districts will drop from 41 percent to 17 percent by 2050.
Researchers believe sea-level rise, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and a reduction of water flow in the country’s rivers could add to river salinity.
Losing freshwater could mean “significant shortages of drinking water” and a lack of irrigation water for dry-season agriculture, the study said.
“The impact of the increase in salinity is already being felt by the local communities, as they now have to purchase water from water treatment plants run by commercial operators,” said Ainun Nishat, a noted Bangladeshi environmentalist and one of the researchers on the World Bank study.
A dramatic decrease in the area served by freshwater rivers would also do damage to the region’s fishing industry, which supports approximately a half million families, researchers said…..
Of Bangladesh’s 19 southwestern coastal districts, the study pinpointed nine already in danger of being unable to protect their freshwater resources.
Even in the best case, by 2050 four districts – Barguna, Jhalokoti, Khulna, and Patuakhali – may no longer have regular access to fresh water from rivers. And in a worst-case scenario, Pirojpur district could lose 100 percent of its fresh river water, while Bagerhat and Barisal could lose over 90 percent, the study said.
In addition, the study said, five districts will suffer a serious shortage of water for dry-season agriculture.
“This worrying change might lead to a migration of people from southwestern Bangladesh,” Nishat said……http://www.trust.org/item/20151013101601-r0cyw/?source=jtDontmiss
Narrow window of opportunity to prevent rapid drastic fall in Antarctic ice sheets
the results leave a narrow opening through which humanity can slip. If temperatures remain within 2C (3.6F), the collapse of the shelves will stabilise and the sheets will remain mostly intact. Sea-level rise from Antarctica would remain within 23cm (9 inches) by 2300.
To achieve this, the authors said the world will have to follow the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) lowest emissions scenario.This requires global emissions to peak around 2020 and decline to below zero by 2100.
The new study “ultimately confirm[s] the suspicions of earlier glaciologists that the fate of ice shelves largely determines whether Antarctica contributes less than 1 metre or up to 9 metres to long-term sea-level rise”
Antarctic ice sheets face catastrophic collapse without deep emissionscuts, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/antarctic-ice-sheets-face-catastrophic-collapse-without-deep-emissions-cuts Guardian, Karl Mathiesen, 15 Oct 15
Study finds that a global temperature increase of 3C would cause ice shelves to disappear, triggering sea-level rise that would continue for thousands of years. A team of researchers has found that steep cuts to emissions during the next decade are the only way to avoid a catastrophic collapse of Antarctic ice sheets and associated sea-level rise that will continue for thousands of years.
The study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, found that should the global temperature increase to around 3C (5.4F) above the pre-industrial era then the ice shelves that hold back the giant continental ice sheets would be lost over the next few centuries. Continue reading
Climate action can slow down the disastrous melting of Antarctic ice shelves
New study projects that melting of Antarctic ice shelves will intensify http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/whoi-nsp100915.phpWOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION New research published today projects a doubling of surface melting of Antarctic ice shelves by 2050 and that by 2100 melting may surpass intensities associated with ice shelf collapse, if greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel consumption continue at the present rate.
Ice shelves are the floating extensions of the continent’s massive land-based ice sheets. While the melting or breakup of floating ice shelves does not directly raise sea level, ice shelves do have a “door stop” effect: They slow the flow of ice from glaciers and ice sheets into the ocean, where it melts and raises sea levels.
“Our results illustrate just how rapidly melting in Antarctica can intensify in a warming climate,” said Luke Trusel, lead author and postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “This has already occurred in places like the Antarctic Peninsula where we’ve observed warming and abrupt ice shelf collapses in the last few decades. Our model projections show that similar levels of melt may occur across coastal Antarctica near the end of this century, raising concerns about future ice shelf stability.”
The study, published Oct. 12, 2015, in Nature Geoscience, was conducted by Trusel, Clark University Associate Professor of Geography Karen Frey, WHOI scientists Sarah Das and Kristopher Karnauskas, Peter Kuipers Munneke and Michiel R. van den Broeke of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht University, and Erik van Meijgaard of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.
To study how melting evolves over time and to predict future ice sheet melting along the entire Antarctic coastline, the scientists combined satellite observations of ice surface melting with climate model simulations under scenarios of intermediate and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions until the year 2100.
The results indicate a strong potential for the doubling of Antarctica-wide ice sheet surface melting by 2050, under either emissions scenario. However, between 2050 and 2100, the models reveal a significant divergence between the two scenarios. Under the high-emissions climate scenario, by 2100 ice sheet surface melting approaches or exceeds intensities associated with ice shelf collapse in the past. Under the reduced-emissions scenario, there is relatively little increase in ice sheet melting after the doubling in 2050.
“The data presented in this study clearly show that climate policy, and therefore the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions over the coming century, have an enormous control over the future fate of surface melting of Antarctic ice shelves, which we must consider when assessing their long-term stability and potential indirect contributions to sea level rise,” said Frey.
Funding for the research was provided by NASA, the Doherty Postdoctoral Scholarship Program at WHOI, the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre, the Polar Program of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research, and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visitwww.whoi.edu.
The significance of Antarctica’s melting ice shelves, in climate change
Why scientists are so worried about the ice shelves of Antarctica, WP, By Chelsea Harvey October 12 When it comes to climate change, Antarctica is one of the world’s major places of concern, mostly because of the sheer amount of ice it contains — enough to theoretically cause about 200 feet of sea-level rise if it were all to melt — not that anyone thinks that will happen anytime soon. Still, smaller parts could be destabilized, and understanding how the Antarctic ice sheet will react to future climate change is a big priority for scientists.
One important key to building this understanding is studying Antarctic ice shelves, which are large, floating platforms of ice — sometimes spanning hundreds or thousands of square miles — that form where where an ice sheet meets the ocean.
“They play an incredibly important role in constraining the flow of this land ice into the ocean,” says Luke Trusel, a postdoctoral scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, comparing ice shelves to the “cork in a champagne bottle.” If an ice shelf breaks off, it can unleash a flow of ice into the ocean from the ice sheet behind it, which can contribute to sea-level rise in a major way. Indeed, without ice shelves to provide buttressing, glaciers behind the ice shelves flow faster, pouring more and more ice into the ocean.
[Scientists declare an ‘urgent’ mission – study West Antarctica, and fast]
In order to get a better grip on how climate change could affect Antarctic ice shelves, Trusel and a group of other researchers conducted a study to see how rising air temperatures might affect surface melting in Antarctica. This is a process that can directly influence the destabilizing of ice shelves.
Past observations have shown that as ice melts on a shelf’s surface, the melted water starts to pool, or “pond,” and trickle down into imperfections in the ice, causing the cracks to deepen and widen — which can eventually cause ice shelves to collapse, unleashing the flow of land ice behind them.
“Increases in air temperature, and surface melt and ponding, has led to the abrupt and catastrophic collapse of a number of ice shelves,” says Trusel, lead author of the study, which was published Monday in Nature Geoscience. These collapses have mostly been observed on the Antarctic Peninsula, where the thinning and retreat of ice shelves has been particularly pronounced, thanks to higher-than-average warming in the area. The concern, though, is that more ice shelves that ring around Antarctica, including its colder regions, will start to give way as temperatures continue to rise and that other more inland parts of Antarctica will then follow suit.
The researchers used models to investigate the potential future impacts of two different climate scenarios: a “business-as-usual” trajectory, in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise throughout the century, and a more middle-of-the-road trajectory, in which emissions start declining before mid-century and there’s less associated global warming.
They found that under both scenarios, Antarctic-wide surface melt doubles by the year 2050, with the amount of meltwater produced coming close to 200 gigatons per year (a gigaton is a billion metric tons). This is a troubling finding, said Nerilie Abram, a researcher from the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at Australian National University who was not involved with the study, in an e-mail to The Post. But, she said, “I think that the more interesting result is to look at the huge divergence in predicted Antarctic ice melt during the second half of the century.”
After 2050, the projections for the two climate scenarios differ drastically. In the middle-of-the-road scenario, melt doesn’t increase much after mid-century. But in the business-as-usual scenario, melt continues to speed up, eventually hitting a rate of more than 600 gigatons per year by the end of the century.
“The most important results are … that we can see how quickly melting can evolve,” Trusel said. The results suggest that ice shelf surface melting increases exponentially with air temperature……….
One of the most important takeaways from the paper is “how important human action is on the climate of Antarctica,” Trusel added in a follow-up e-mail to The Post. Past observations show that humans have already altered the face of the continent, and the projections suggest that we have the power to continue doing so, he said.
“This shows that we do have a choice in how the Earth changes over the coming century,” said Abram, the researcher from Australian National University. “[We have] the option of a future where many of Antarctica’s ice shelves are still viable if we can curb emissions, compared to a future where many of Antarctica’s remaining ice shelves will probably have been lost if we continue our current emissions trajectory.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/12/why-scientists-are-worried-about-the-ice-shelves-of-antarctica/
Why all glass building facades will go out of fashion – the heat problem
All-Glass Facades Won’t Exist in Sustainable Cities, Davis Baggs, Sourceable, 13 Oct 15 “……..Glass alone cannot cover all contingencies, and the hotter the summer sun, the less successful it is. In winter in cold and even temperate climates high transmissivity (untinted) highly insulated glass units with Low-E coatings are typical and work very well. Problem is, in summer unshaded glass lets a lot of heat in, and the very factors that work for the building and occupants now works against them letting heat in and keeping it in, very efficiently overheating buildings and people all the better for the air conditioning engineers (whose fees are often based on the size of the air conditioning plants) and suppliers (who designed some of the major software tools engineers commonly use to design buildings).
So to overcome this, heat absorbing and reflective glasses were developed and to greater or lesser extent are used in all glass facades in climates where there is any bite at all in the summer sun.
Herein lies some of the problem; heat isn’t just ‘heat’. Solar energy does enter buildings by conduction (efficiently offset by insulated glass units or IGUs) from the atmosphere but the majority enters via direct and diffuse solar radiation.
If we make the glass reflective enough to stop enough solar radiation to avoid overheating of unshaded all-glass facades, we create strong rogue reflections that cause accidents and literally melt cars. So we wind the reflectiveness back and bump up the tinting levels to absorb the radiation in the façade and this is where the next problems begin…………..
The human body is up to four times more sensitive to radiant heat than any other form of heat. In fact, we are more than two times more sensitive to radiant heat than all of the other heat loss or gain pathways (convection, conduction, respiration, and evaporation) combined. The body is highly sensitive to even small changes in radiant temperatures; that’s why we love radiators, heated floors and mass surfaces in buildings to retain heat and keep us both warm and cool.
But as you tint glass, it progressively absorbs more and more heat itself and it becomes in effect a large plate radiator. The darker the tint, the more heat it both absorbs and then eventually re-radiates even when it’s double-glazed, such as in IGUs. Its important to note that this doesn’t cause the room air to heat up much, so its not picked up by the room temperature sensors of the HVAC, but it does heat people up easily and effectively, even through clothes.
Even a few degrees of radiant temperature can make a room very uncomfortable. A radiant temperature increase (or decrease) of five degrees can make the room feel eight degrees hotter (or colder) without changing the temperature in the room…….
Let me share my experiences of a building I visited in mid-winter (January) in the desert, midway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It was comprised of two 12-storey office towers of azure blue (heat absorbing) reflective (silver blue mirror look to the outside) double glazed IGUs linked by a three-storey entry podium of clear IGUs……
At midday, things got even more interesting. The outside temperature had risen to 35 degrees, the inside air temperature was still 21 degrees, but the outside skin of the building in the sun measured 65 degrees and the inside skin temperatures of the blue IGU in the offices were 35.4 degrees. Interestingly, the clear insulated glass podium was an astounding 37.2 degrees – because it was not reflective like the blue IGUs, it absorbed more heat……the solar intensity in UAE at that time of year is similar to Australia in summer….
Unshaded all glass buildings as we know them now, have no place in sustainable cities of the future. https://sourceable.net/all-glass-facades-wont-exist-in-sustainable-cities/#
New York Times Editorial: Teaching the truth about climate change.
Misinformation about climate change is distressingly common in the United States – a 2014 Yale study found that 35 percent of Americans believe that global warming is caused mostly by natural phenomena rather than human activity, and 34 percent think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether global warming is even happening…
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/t/3895203828349907399
Doctors plan global day of climate action
Doctors urge climate action http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/10/11/doctors-urge-climate-action One of Australia’s peak medical bodies says political leaders must act on climate change to reduce serious health impacts. AAPThe Royal Australasian College of Physicians will hold a Global Day of Climate Action to put pressure on leaders at the coming United Nations climate talks in Paris in December.
Infectious diseases physician and senior lecturer at the Australian National University medical school, Dr Ashwin Swaminathan, said doctors are trying to raise awareness of serious health impacts caused by climate change. “Doctors want the community and our government representatives to know that health is at stake with climate change,” Dr Swaminathan said.
“The college recognises that climate change poses a risk to the health of all Australians across all regions.”
Health professionals have seen a spike in ambulance call-outs, hospital admissions and deaths during heatwaves, which are projected to increase further without checks on global emissions.
Dr Swaminathan said there will also be increases in water-borne and mosquito-borne diseases, with Australian disease specialists worried in particular about diarrhoea-causing bacteria and disease-carrying mosquitoes. Higher temperatures expand the areas in which these disease carriers can thrive.
Dr Swaminathan said the species of mosquitoes that can carry dengue fever, Ross River fever and Barmah Forest virus will be able to move further south in Australia under changed climate conditions.
Disease and climate change is attracting more attention from doctors. “It’s something that is becoming more discussed at infectious diseases forums,” Dr Swaminathan said.
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians has begun a Doctors for Climate Action campaign which, with the support of 50 medical organisations, is calling on world leaders to commit to meaningful targets for emissions reduction at the United Nations COP 21 Climate Change Conference in Paris.
Big El Nino weather period now on its way
As monster El Niño looms, the world rushes to get ready, New Scientist By Michael Slezak The world is preparing for a massive El Niño that could be the strongest since 1998. That event led to the deaths of an estimated 20,000 people and caused almost $100 billion of damage. The economic and human cost of this year’s event is already starting to mount.
El Niño emerges when winds blowing west across the Pacific weaken, and warm water spreads out east towards South America, dragging rainfall with it. As a result, chunks of Asia and Australia dry out, and rain is dumped on much of the Americas. The effects are felt further afield too, especially in Africa. El Niños are irregular, developing at intervals of two to seven years and lasting between nine months and two years……..
California, which is currently burning with the worst wildfire season in the state’s history, is expected to see more rain as El Niño develops, but it could go too far and cause floods, as it did in 1998.
The El Niño will intensify in the coming months and probably peak around February. The rains are yet to hit Africa and South America; marine impacts such as coral bleaching are expected to begin around December. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28296-as-monster-el-nino-looms-countries-around-the-world-rush-to-get-ready/
Extra $29bn pledged by World Bank to help poor nations adapt to climate change
World Bank pledges extra $29bn to poorer nations for climate change fight http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/10/world-bank-pledges-extra-29bn-to-poorer-nations-for-climate-change-fight
Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group, said it could boost funding by a third in response to client demand Dan Collyns The World Bank has pledged to boost by up to $29bn the financial assistance pledged to poorer nations to cope with climate change, bringing closer the possibility of reaching a target of $100bn a year by 2020.
Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank Group, said it could boost funding by a third, from 21% to 28%, in response to client demand. He spoke at a meeting of the World Bank and the IMF in Lima, Peru.
“As we move closer to Paris countries have identified trillions of dollars of climate-related needs. The bank, with the support of our members, will respond ambitiously to this great challenge,” Kim said.
In 2014 rich countries and businesses provided close to two-thirds, nearly $62bn, of the “climate finance” which is part of the global climate change negotiations, before the Paris conference this December, according to the OECD.
Rachel Kyte, the World Bank’s special envoy for climate change, said the bank’s pledge coupled with commitments from Germany, France and the UK to double their climate finance and similar pledges from multilateral development banks in Asia, Europe and Africa meant the total pledges were “well on the way to $100bn”.
“It’s a global investment plan for moving the world towards [limiting temperature rises to] two degrees which represent trillions of dollars of investment opportunity,” she told the Guardian.
But Oxfam estimates only $2 billion of the total is going to the countries hardest hit by extreme weather caused by climate change, in the form of adaptation grants.
The charity’s climate change policy expert Isabel Kreisler said finance ministers should agree at least half of “public funding going towards the $100bn goal should be for adaptation”.
Most of the money is going to green energy investments such as climate-smart transport solutions, renewable energy and enhanced water security.
“We should now see climate finance as investment in the low carbon transition,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for the COP21.
Finance ministers from the 20 countries most vulnerable to climate change, the V20, who held their inaugural meeting on Thursday, echoed calls to boost adaptation funding.
The countries range from Tuvalu, a Pacific island of 10,000 people, to Bangladesh and the Philippines.
Nuclear power facilities at risk from floods
Flood Risk at Nuclear Power Plants, UCS
However, water can quickly turn dangerous when floods occur. Flooding can damage equipment or knock out the plant’s electrical systems, disabling its cooling mechanisms. This is what happened at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan as a result of the March 2011 tsunami, causing severe damage to several of the plant’s reactors.
Floods due to natural causes
While tsunamis are not a significant risk for most U.S. nuclear power plants, there are other natural weather events that can lead to flooding. Heavy rain or snow can cause rivers to overflow, and tropical storms or nor’easters can cause storm surges that threaten coastal plants.
Floods from such natural weather events have caused problems at several U.S. nuclear power plants in recent years. In June 2011, unusually high water on the Missouri River, caused by a combination of heavy spring rains and Rocky Mountain snowmelt, inundated the Fort Calhoun plant in Nebraska. And in October 2012, flooding from Hurricane Sandy caused two New Jersey nuclear plants, Salem andOyster Creek, to shut down when high water levels threatened their water intake and circulation systems………
The NRC’s responsibility
Almost as worrisome as the threat of dam failure itself is the fact that the NRC apparently was aware of the increased risk for years before addressing it—and passages indicating this were blacked out in the 2011 report on its original release, according to an NRC engineer, Richard Perkins, who contacted the agency’s Inspector Generalin September 2012. The NRC had claimed that the redactions were necessary for security reasons, but Perkins asserted that the agency’s real motive was to avoid embarrassment.
The NRC should fulfill its responsibility to the public and act to ensure that the threat of flood risk is adequately addressed at our nation’s nuclear plants.http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-accidents/flood-risk-at-nuclear-power-plants#.VhhFHOyqpHw
Displacement Solutions advocates on behalf of climate refugees
UN drops plan to help move climate-change affected people, Guardian, Oliver Milman, 7 Oct 15 “…….Advocates for displaced people argue that a new international framework needs to be created to help them, given that the UN refugee convention does not cover them because they are not fleeing persecution.
“I’d hope the UN would put a new apparatus in place. At the moment this is being dabbled in – there’s nothing systemic,” said academic Scott Leckie, founder of Displacement Solutions, an NGO that facilitates moving people displaced by climate change within their countries.
Leckie’s organisation focuses its work in five countries – Bangladesh, Colombia, Fiji, Panama and the Solomon Islands – but said climate displacement was a global problem, even in wealthy nations such as the US where people in Alaskahave had to move and Boston faces a future of being a “city of canals” because of sea level rises.
“Successful relocation is very complicated and there’s a real gap in how governments do this internally,” he said. “It may seem simple to move 30,000 people within Panama, for example, but when you get into it there is a variety of land and ethnic tensions.
“The question for people on small islands is whether to stay or go, which is almost impossible to answer because the stakes are so high. Once you have people leave, you get a brain drain, investment dries up and you get into a vicious cycle of despair and poverty.
“This is solvable with political will and resources. There needs to be a coordinated human rights approach. Just as Australia takes in 12,000 Syrian refugees, there’s nothing stopping a further 1,000 places earmarked for people who have nowhere else to go in the Pacific islands.
“I think every country in the world responsible for CO2 emissions have some measure of responsibility for the predicament they’ve caused. Top of that list is Australia, given it is the worst per capita emitter in the world.” http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/07/un-drops-plan-to-create-group-to-relocate-climate-change-affected-people
International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde says now is the time for carbon tax
Now ‘right moment’ for carbon tax, IMF chief Christine Lagarde says http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-08/now-right-moment-for-carbon-tax-imf-chief-lagarde-says/6836532 The time is right for governments to introduce taxes on carbon emissions, which would help fight global warming and raise badly needed revenue, IMF chief Christine Lagarde says.
“It is just the right moment to introduce carbon taxes,” Ms Lagarde said at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Lima, Peru.
The issue is in the spotlight two months from a key United Nations conference in Paris tasked with delivering a comprehensive carbon-cutting pact.
Besides discouraging pollution, Ms Lagarde said, taxing greenhouse gas emissions would have the added bonus of helping governments boost their revenues at a time when many countries have dipped heavily into their “fiscal buffers” to get through a prolonged rough patch for the global economy.
“Finance ministers are looking for revenues. That’s the fate of finance ministers,” she said.
“But it’s particularly the case at the moment because many have already used a lot of their fiscal buffers… and are always in need of some fiscal buffers in order to fight the next crisis.”
Ms Lagarde urged governments to tax carbon emissions rather than rely on emissions trading, a competing system already in place in Europe in which governments essentially issue permits to pollute that can then be traded on an open market. I know that a lot of people would rather do emissions trading systems, but we believe that carbon taxation would be a lot better,” she said.
Australia scrapped its carbon tax in July last year. The Government has a target of generating 23.5 per cent of the country’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
Ms Lagarde said revenues from carbon taxes could contribute to rich nations’ funding target of $US100 billion ($139 billion) a year by 2020 to help poorer nations fight the impacts of climate change.
The world was still $US38 billion short of that target last year, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a new report.
Ms Lagarde said it was also the “right moment” to eliminate energy subsidies, which the IMF says will cost the world $US5.3 trillion this year — 6.5 per cent of the global economy.
Pacific islands’ climate change refugees – a warning from Fiji’s Prime Minister
Fiji PM Warns Of Syria-Style Refugee Crisis If Rich Nations Don’t Do More On Climate,Thom Mitchell, New Matilda, 2 Oct 15 Frank Bainimarama has taken aim at advanced nations for ignoring the plight of Pacific Islanders in pursuit of short-term economic growth. Thom Mitchell reports.
The Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama has hit out at developing nations for their “unacceptable” progress in reducing carbon emissions as part of a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, in which he warned of a humanitarian refugee crisis on the scale of the current migration out of Syria if more is not done.
The talks come as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop seeks a place for Australia on the UN Security and Human Rights Councils, but Bainimarama warned that developed nations like Australia are not listening to the voice of Pacific Island nations, whose human rights are threatened by rising seas and hostile weather patterns.
“It is simply not acceptable for advanced economies to build a high standard of living on the degradation of the earth and the seas,” Bainimarama said.
The choices we face may be politically difficult in the short run, but the consequences we are already seeing – environmental degradation, unbearable heat, drought, powerful tropical storms and unpredictable weather patterns – are simply unacceptable,” he said.
“[Fiji] plans to move some 45 villages to higher ground, and we have already started.
“We have committed to resettle people from other low-lying, South Pacific Island States that face the prospect of being swallowed up by the rising ocean and falling inexorably to oblivion.
“Should that happen, the people of those Island States would be refugees as desperate and lost as the hundreds of thousands fleeing conflict in Syria and Iraq,” he said.
As New Matilda reported in June, experts in migration law, like those at the University of New South Wales’Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, are already warning that the “disasters on steroids” climate change will bring is likely to create a need for special refugee visas.
It is clear by now that international pledges nations have made through the United Nations climate change process will not be enough to keep the global rise in temperature to less than two degrees, which is the level accepted as ‘safe’ by Australia and around 200 other nations: https://newmatilda.com/2015/10/01/fiji-pm-warns-syria-style-refugee-crisis-if-rich-nations-dont-do-more-climate#sthash.hk0kghO3.dpuf
Global warming endangers world’s energy systems
Why did this article not mention nuclear facilities – reactors, used fuel pools, waste containers, 
transport of radioactive trash – as being at risk from extreme climate events?
Energy systems, including fossil fuel power stations, distribution grids, and the networks that reach to people’s homes, are all at risk from effects such as flooding, severe storms and sea level rises, according to a new report from the World Energy Council, which brings together energy companies, academics and public sector agencies.
When energy systems fail, the knock-on effects on other aspects of modern infrastructure – from water and sewage to transport and health – can be catastrophic.
Experts point to the effects of Hurricane Sandy in New York to show that these effects are not limited to the developing world, where most of the serious consequences of climate change are expected to wreak havoc, but will be felt even in the most modern of cities.
Christoph Frei, secretary-general of the World Energy Council (WEC), warned that the question of the resilience of modern energy systems under the threat of imminent disaster must be treated as one of great urgency. “We are on a path where today’s unlikely events will be tomorrow’s reality,” he said. “We need to imagine the unlikely. Traditional systems, based on predicted events, no longer operate in isolation.”
The warning comes ahead of a UN climate summit in Paris later this year where developed and developing countries are expected to agree a deal on how to mitigate and adapt to global warming’s impacts………
WEC warned that the number of extreme weather events globally had risen by a factor of more than four in the past three decades, from about 38 events – such as major storms, heatwaves and flooding – to 174 events in 2014. The insurance industry has struggled to keep up, with global insured losses from natural catastrophes and man-made disasters reaching $35bn (£23bn) last year, with the losses of the uninsured exceeding $130bn.
Frei warned: “Current estimates for the cost of energy system adaptation do not fully account for the additional financing required to accommodate these new emerging risks.”………http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/01/worlds-energy-systems-at-risk-from-global-warming-say-leading-firms
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25 June- THE PUKE ON NUKES
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