Australia asks UN to dismiss Torres Strait Islanders’ claim climate change affects their human rights
Complaint argues Morrison government has failed to take adequate action on emissions or adaptation measures, Guardian, Katharine Murphy Political editor 14 Aug 20 The Morrison government has asked the human rights committee of the United Nations to dismiss a landmark claim by a group of Torres Strait Islanders from low-lying islands off the northern coast of Australia that climate change is having an impact on their human rights, according to lawyers for the complainants.
The complaint, lodged just over 12 months ago, argued the Morrison government had failed to take adequate action to reduce emissions or pursue proper adaptation measures on the islands and, as a consequence, had failed fundamental human rights obligations to Torres Strait Islander people.
But the lead lawyer for the case, Sophie Marjanac, says the Coalition has rejected arguments from the islanders, telling the UN the case should be dismissed “because it concerns future risks, rather than impacts being felt now, and is therefore inadmissible”.
Marjanac said lawyers for the commonwealth had told the committee because Australia is not the main or only contributor to global warming, climate change action is not its legal responsibility under human rights law.
“The government’s lawyers also rejected arguments that climate impacts were being felt today, and that effects constituting a human rights violation are yet to be suffered”.
A spokesman for the attorney general, Christian Porter, said submissions to the human rights committee were not publicly available……
Lawyers for the islanders have alleged that the catastrophic nature of the predicted future impacts of climate change on the Torres Strait Islands, including the total submergence of ancestral homelands, is a sufficiently severe impact as to constitute a violation of the rights to culture, family and life.
The challenges associated with sea level rise in the Torres Strait have been well documented. A report from the Climate Council on the risks associated with coastal flooding notes that Torres Strait Island communities are extremely low-lying and are thus among the most vulnerable in Australia to the impacts of climate change.
The report concludes the shallowness of the strait “exacerbates storm surges and when such surges coincide with very high tides, extreme sea levels result”. It cites sea level data collected by satellite from one location in the Torres Strait between 1993 and 2010 that indicated a rise of 6 mm per annum, “more than twice the global average”,
Although the report notes this was a single dataset, low-lying islands in the Pacific – and Torres Strait islands such as Masig and Boigu – are likely to be at the forefront of forced displacement. Some forecasts have predicted up to 150 million people could be forcibly displaced by climate change by 2040 – larger than the record number of people already forced from their homes globally.
The non-profit group ClientEarth is supporting the complaint. A spokesman for the group said: “It is shameful that Indigenous communities on Australia’s climate frontline are being told that the risk of climate change to their human rights is merely a future hypothetical issue, when scientists are clear these impacts will happen in coming decades”.
Climate Change Is a Security Threat to the Asia-Pacific
Climate change is likely to alter the local physical and strategic environment profoundly, and potentially catastrophically.
The Diplomat, By Shiloh Fetzek and Dennis McGinn, August 10, 2020 This week the ASEAN Joint Task Force on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) will meet via video conference, with the COVID-19 pandemic escalating just as some countries in the disaster-prone Indo-Asia Pacific enter their cyclone, drought, heatwave, or monsoon seasons. The overlaying of the pandemic with existing complex challenges is a timely reminder that planning for HADR capacities – and regional security – needs to be attuned to the increasing likelihood of multiple, overlapping hazards and converging security risks, especially in a future where climate change alters the context in which other disasters and crises take place. Developing a clearer recognition of how climate change can reshape the strategic environment will be essential for preserving regional security, stability, and prosperity in the face of complicated and interlocking challenges, as we argue in a new report on the Indo-Asia Pacific published by the International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS).
The Indo-Asia Pacific is highly exposed to climate change impacts. Climate change is likely to alter the local physical and strategic environment profoundly, and potentially catastrophically. More frequent or intense extreme weather, sea level rise, and ocean acidification (among other climate impacts) will create a range of threats to the well-being and security of countries in the region, many of which are already threatened by disaster vulnerability and increasingly complex security tensions.
McKinsey sees $6.6 trillion in annual GDP at risk as Asian climate warms, https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/mckinsey-sees-6-6-trillion-in-annual-gdp-at-risk-as-asian-climate-warms-20200813-p55ley.html By Bloomberg News, August 14, 2020 Lethal heatwaves, droughts, floods and typhoons will become more common in Asia-Pacific, which faces more severe potential impacts from climate change than many parts of the world, McKinsey & Co. researchers warn.Asia is particularly at risk because it has such a high number of poor people, who tend to rely more on outdoor work, living in areas most vulnerable to extreme increases in heat and humidity, McKinsey Global Institute said in a new report published on Thursday. By 2050, the loss of that labor could cost the region as much as $US4.7 trillion ($6.6 trillion) a year in GDP, about two-thirds of the global total at risk.
The report underscores the economic risks of delaying investments that mitigate or adapt to climate change. The potential for widespread damage is similar to the region’s experience during the current pandemic, according to McKinsey.
What we have seen is that countries, cities and people can take resolute actions and if we do take these actions and sustain them, we can cooperate globally and see positive outcomes,” said Oliver Tonby, McKinsey’s Asia chairman, who co-authored the report.
The projections are based on a scenario in which the world fails to cut greenhouse gas emissions and Asia warms by 2 degrees Celsius. They show that by 2050, between 500 million and 700 million people living in places like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan could experience heatwaves that exceed the survivability threshold.
The loss of outdoor labour during those times could shave off 7 per cent to 13 per cent off GDP in those three countries, resulting in losses of $US2.8 trillion to $US4.7 trillion across the whole of Asia on average per year, according to the report.
Extreme precipitation events could rise three- or four-fold by 2050 in parts of Japan, China, South Korea and Indonesia, according to McKinsey. Increased riverine flooding could cause $US1.2 trillion in damage in Asia, about 75 per cent of the global impact.
Conversely, as the earth warms, parts of southwestern Australia could spend more than 80 per cent of a decade in drought conditions by 2050 and regions of China could experience droughts 40 per cent to 60 per cent of the time.
Climate change will also increase the likelihood of severe typhoon strikes from the Philippines and Vietnam to Northeast Asia. It will also create winners and losers, increasing surface water supply in parts of northern India and China while depleting reservoirs in Australia.
To face the business risks, Tonby said companies need to assess their exposure and take it into consideration when making plans. A significant opportunity lies in infrastructure development in Asia as the region is still rapidly urbanising.
In June, the Russian Arctic reached 100.4F, the highest temperature in the Arctic since record-keeping began in 1885. The heat shocked scientists, but was not a unique or unusual event in a climate-changed world. The Arctic is warming at nearly three times the rate of the global average, and June’s single-day high was part of a month-long heatwave. This relentless heat has melted sea ice and made traditional subsistence dangerous for skilled Indigenous hunters. It’s fueled costly wildfires, some of which are so strong they now last from one summer to the next. And it’s sped up permafrost thaw, buckling roads and displacing entire communities.
I study the Arctic. The decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord is reprehensible – but we can’t give up hope
When you stand facing an exposed edge of permafrost, you can feel it from a distance.
It emanates a cold that tugs on every one of your senses. Permanently bound by ice year after year, the frozen soil is packed with carcasses of woolly mammoths and ancient ferns. They’re unable to decompose at such low temperatures, so they stay preserved in perpetuity – until warmer air thaws their remains and releases the cold that they’ve kept cradled for centuries.
I first experienced that distinct cold in the summer of 2016. I was traveling across Arctic Europe with a team of researchers to study climate change impacts. We were a few hours past the Finnish border in Russia when we stopped to first set foot on the tundra. The ground was soft but solid beneath our feet, covered with mosses and wildflowers that stretched into the distance until abruptly interrupted by a slick, towering wall of thawing permafrost.
As we stood facing the muddy patch of uncovered earth, the sensation of escaping cold felt terrifying.
The northern hemisphere is covered by 9m sq miles of permafrost. This solid ground, and all the organic material it contains, is one of the largest greenhouse gas stores on the planet. Frozen, it poses little threat to the 4 million people that call the Arctic home, or to the 7.8 billion of us that call Earth home. But defrosted by rising temperatures, thawing permafrost poses a planetary risk.
Four years later, those changes are happening much sooner than scientists predicted. The carbon-laden cold of the Arctic’s permafrost is leaking into Earth’s atmosphere, and we are not ready for the consequences.
In June, the Russian Arctic reached 100.4F, the highest temperature in the Arctic since record-keeping began in 1885. The heat shocked scientists, but was not a unique or unusual event in a climate-changed world. The Arctic is warming at nearly three times the rate of the global average, and June’s single-day high was part of a month-long heatwave. This relentless heat has melted sea ice and made traditional subsistence dangerous for skilled Indigenous hunters. It’s fueled costly wildfires, some of which are so strong they now last from one summer to the next. And it’s sped up permafrost thaw, buckling roads and displacing entire communities.
Watching the heat of 2020 devastate the Arctic, I think back to the fear we experienced while watching that permafrost thaw in 2016, but I also remember feeling hopeful.
Just weeks before our expedition began, 174 countries had signed the Paris agreement on the first day it opened for signatures. Barack Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping released a joint statement of climate commitments for the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters. It seemed like every world leader had finally dedicated themselves to climate action. Throughout our trip across the Arctic, my colleagues and I discussed the difficulties of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, but, with the momentum of Paris, we agreed that it was still possible to contain a climate catastrophe.
It is much harder to find hope today than it was four years ago – but it’s not impossible.
The Arctic’s skies are blackened with wildfire smoke and we are not even halfway through summer. The Trump administration has reversed 100 environmental rules and stands on the precipice of pulling the US out of the Paris agreement in November 2020.
Things may seem hopeless, but we are not helpless.
Every individual has a skill, a voice, a career to wield as a tool to address climate change. Ultimately, climate action is not powered by the Paris agreement – it’s powered by people. From presidents to protesters, we each have a part to play in limiting the devastation of the climate crisis.
Climate change cannot be stopped. The Arctic’s ice will melt and large swaths of frozen ground will thaw. Climate change is already causing devastating loss of life, destroying irreplaceable cultural heritage and inundating the places we hold dear. With every degree we allow our world to warm, the more we lose. But by demanding climate action from our governments, and demanding climate action from ourselves, we can work today to avert the worst damage and adapt to the impacts we can no longer avoid.
As the Arctic burns, we cannot afford climate silence from anyone. The cost of inaction is too high.
Dr Victoria Herrmann is the president and managing director of the Arctic Institute
Analysts at 38 North, a website that monitors North Korea, said commercial satellite imagery from August 6-11 showed how vulnerable the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center’s nuclear reactor cooling systems are to extreme weather events.
The Korean peninsula has been hammered by one of the longest rainy spells in recent history, with floods and landslides causing damage and deaths in both North and South Korea.
Located on the bank of the Kuryong River about 100 km (60 miles) north of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, Yongbyon is home to nuclear reactors, fuel re-processing plants and uranium enrichment facilities that are thought to be used in the country’s nuclear weapons programme.
The five-megawatt reactor – believed to be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium – does not appear to have been operating for some time, and an Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR) has not yet come online, but such flooding in the future would likely force a shutdown, the 38 North report said.
“Damage to the pumps and piping within the pump houses presents the biggest vulnerability to the reactors,” the report said. “If the reactors were operating, for instance, the inability to cool them would require them to be shut down.”
While there was further flooding downstream, it did not appear to reach the Yongbyon facility’s Uranium Enrichment Plant and by August 11 the waters appear to have somewhat receded, 38 North said.
South Korea’s Ministry of Defence declined to comment on the report, but said it is always monitoring developments related to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes and maintaining close cooperation with the U.S. government.
At a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Vietnam in 2019, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un offered to dismantle here Yongbyon in exchange for relief from a range of international sanctions imposed over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.
At the time Trump said he rejected that deal because Yongbyon is only one part of the North’s nuclear programme, and was not enough of a concession to warrant loosening so many sanctions.
Reporting by Josh Smith. Additional reporting by Hyonhee Shin.; Editing by Lincoln Feast.
‘Derecho’ storm causes Cargill plant closure, emergency shutdown of nuclear plant in Iowa
The storm caused crop damage and outages throughout the Midwest Star Tribune,
By Mike Hughlett Star Tribune, AUGUST 12, 2020 — A violent storm that tore through Iowa on Monday caused an emergency shutdown at a nuclear power plant near Cedar Rapids.
The storm packing hurricane-force winds tore across the Midwest, compounding troubles for a U.S. farm economy already battered by extreme weather, the U.S.-China trade war and most recently, the disruption caused to labor and consumption by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Grain silos were ripped apart, and Minnetonka-based Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland closed crop-processing plants in Cedar Rapids.
The Duane Arnold nuclear plant lost its connection to the electricity grid. At about 1 p.m., the plant in Palo, 11 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids, declared an “unusual event” — an indication of a safety threat, according to a report posted Tuesday by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
An unusual event is the lowest of four levels of emergency conditions under NRC regulations. While the Duane Arnold plant is not now producing electricity, it does have power to run its emergency systems.
The plant is stable and is using a backup power source at this time,” Duane Arnold’s majority owner and operator, Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources, said in a statement.
The storms damaged the plant’s cooling towers, which are used in electricity production to cool steam after it exits the turbine, NextEra said. The cooling towers are not part of the safety systems used to cool the reactor and other critical components…….
David Lochbaum, former director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ nuclear safety project, said that loss of off-site power at nuclear power plants — usually due to storms — happens about four to five times a year in the U.S.
Iowa’s 45-year-old Duane Arnold plant, which is a little smaller than Xcel Energy’s nuclear plant in Monticello, is due to shut down later this year……….
Twenty-five years after the disaster, Zibtsev and others predicted that if the forests in the exclusion zone were completely consumed by fire, residents in Kyiv would face an increased risk of dying from cancer and government bans would need to be imposed on foods produced as far as 90 miles away. Although such a large and intense fire is currently unlikely, recent fires have been sizable enough to create similar problems. “If Chernobyl forests burn, contaminants will migrate outside the immediate area,” says Zibtsev. “We know that.”
This April’s fires, which scorched 23 percent of the exclusion zone, were the largest burns ever recorded in the area, nearly four and a half times the size of fires in 2015. Flames torched trees less than three miles from the ruined nuclear reactor, which is now enclosed by an arch-shaped steel shroud.
Trees now cover most of the exclusion zone, and climate change is making them more likely to burn. Story by Jane Braxton Little 10 Aug, 20 In the clear, calm, early hours of May 15, 2003, three miles west of the hulking ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Vasyl Yoschenko was bustling around a stand of Scotch pines planted 30 years earlier. The trees were spindly and closely spaced, but he was skinny enough to move easily among them, taking samples of biomass and litter. Just beyond the trees, he tinkered with the horizontal plates he had placed on the ground in a diagonal grid and covered with superfine cloth designed to absorb whatever came their way.
Yoschenko had just finished adjusting his monitoring equipment in the mid-afternoon when the first gusts of smoke billowed from the far side of the pines. Firefighters were torching the edges of an area the approximate size and shape of a football field. Wearing respirators, camouflage pants, and khaki shirts, cloth bandannas covering their heads, the men were systematically setting the woods ablaze. Flames leapt five feet up trunks, racing to the tops of some trees and sending plumes of smoke aloft.
Yoschenko, a Ukrainian radioecologist, had planned the controlled burn to study how radioactive particulates would behave in a fire, and he knew about the risks represented by the nuclear contamination swirling overhead. He prudently scooted to the edge of the forest, donned a gas mask, and began taking photographs. Was it dangerous? Yoschenko shrugs: “Not so much. We were lucky the wind didn’t change direction.”
The forest burned intensely for 90 minutes, releasing cesium-137, strontium-90, and plutonium-238, -239, and -240 in blasts of smoke and heat. In just one hour, the firefighters—and Yoschenko—could have been exposed to more than triple the annual radiation limit for Chernobyl’s nuclear workers.
…….. Californians may feel like they’re enduring an epidemic of fire. The past decade has seen half of the state’s 10 largest wildfires and seven of its 10 most destructive fires, including last year’s Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest wildfire ever.A new study, published this week in the journal Earth’s Future, finds that the state’s fire outbreak is real—and that it’s being driven by climate change. Since 1972, California’s annual burned area has increased more than fivefold, a trend clearly attributable to the warming climate, according to the paper.
The trend is dominated by fires like the Mendocino Complex Fire—huge blazes that start in the summer and feed mostly on timberland. Over the past five decades, these summertime forest fires have increased in size by roughly 800 percent. This effect is so large that it is driving the state’s overall increase in burned area.
Why are summertime forest fires so much more likely? Because climate change has already redefined the seasons in Northern California. Since the early 1970s, summers in Northern California have warmed by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.8 degrees Celsius) on average. A few degrees may not sound like much, but heat has an exponential relationship with forest fire.
“Each degree of warming causes way more fire than the previous degree of warming did. And that’s a really big deal,” Park Williams, a climate scientist at Columbia University and an author of the paper, told me. Every additional increment in heat in the environment speeds up evaporation, dries out soil, and parches trees and vegetation, turning them into ready fuel for a blaze. For that reason, Williams said, hot summers essentially overpower anything else happening in Northern California. Even during a wet year, an intense heat wave can choke forests so that it is as though the rain never fell…….. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/climate-change-500-percent-increase-california-wildfires/594016/
Low water levels may curb output at France’s Chooz nuclear reactors -RTE, https://in.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear/low-water-levels-may-curb-output-at-frances-chooz-nuclear-reactors-rte-idINL8N2FC5XG PARIS, Aug 10 (Reuters) – Production may be reduced at EDF’s Chooz nuclear reactors in northern France on Saturday due to high temperatures lowering the water level on the Meuse River, French grid operator RTE said on Monday.The two reactors produce 1.45 gigawatts (GW) of power each. The shortfall could be equal to the production of one unit, RTE said.
The heat wave is forecast to peak at 37 degrees Celsius in the region on Wednesday, with temperatures falling as the week progresses, according to Meteo France’s weather forecast.
Consumption in France is projected to reach 44.7 GW on Saturday, RTE data showed.
French nuclear availability is currently at 60.6% of total capacity, with 24.6 GW offline. (Reporting by Forrest Crellin and Bate Felix; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Germany’s ‘very, very tough’ climate battleEnvironment Minister Svenja Schulze aims to steer tough talks over upping the bloc’s 2030 climate goal. Politico, By KALINA OROSCHAKOFF, 08/09/2020, BERLIN — EU leaders last week agreed to increase the bloc’s 2030 climate target by the end of the year. Now it’s up to German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze to make it happen.
That’s a big change for Berlin, which has traditionally been wary of higher EU climate targets.
Germany holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, which means Schulze chairs meetings of environment ministers until the end of December. She’ll have to oversee tricky negotiations on raising the bloc’s 2030 emissions reduction goal from 40 percent to as high as 55 percent — something that pits rich countries against poor and East against West.
“We have to deliver an updated [EU climate commitment] in 2020. It’s only six months [but] we have to deliver,” Schulze told POLITICO from her Berlin office after hosting a first informal meeting with her peers in mid-July. “The pressure is huge … We need very, very tough negotiations. There are no summer holidays for anyone.”
The issue will heat up in late September when the European Commission is due to come out with a plan for reaching the 2030 target, and map implications for the energy sector. The 2030 goal is also part of the bloc’s commitment under the Paris Agreement, and there’s pressure for countries to submit updated and ideally higher emissions reduction objectives by the end of the year.
“Not to fulfill the Paris Agreement, not delivering, that’s a global signal the EU shouldn’t give … It’s not an option,” Schulze said. “The Paris Agreement is clear, we need to deliver in 2020 … that’s the challenge for the German presidency.”
Busy fall……
the German minister faces a massively complex political puzzle in the next months.
“Yes, there are some states who worry how they’re supposed to manage it all. They have corona, are dealing with its impacts, they have to revive the economy … and have to do more about climate protection. To bring it all together isn’t easy,” Schulze said. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/09/germany-climate-change-goals-393035
NASA/NOAA Satellites Observe Surprisingly Rapid Increase in Scale and Intensity of Fires in Siberia, SciTech Daily By KASHA PATEL, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY AUGUST 7, 2020 Abnormally warm temperatures have spawned an intense fire season in eastern Siberia this summer. Satellite data show that fires have been more abundant, more widespread, and produced more carbon emissions than recent seasons.The area shown in the time-lapse sequence above includes the Sakha Republic, one of the most active fire regions in Siberia this summer. The images show smoke plumes billowing from July 30 to August 6, 2020, as observed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA/NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Strong winds occasionally carried the plumes as far as Alaska in late July. As of August 6, approximately 19 fires were burning in the province……
Estimates show that around half of the fires in Arctic Russia this year are burning through areas with peat soil—decomposed organic matter that is a large natural carbon source. Warm temperatures (such as the record-breaking heatwave in June) can thaw and dry frozen peatlands, making them highly flammable. Peat fires can burn longer than forest fires and release vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. ……
“The destruction of peat by fire is troubling for so many reasons,” said Dorothy Peteet of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “As the fires burn off the top layers of peat, the permafrost depth may deepen, further oxidizing the underlying peat.” Peteet and colleagues recently reported that the amount of carbon stored in northern peatlands is double the previous estimates.
Fires in these regions are not just releasing recent surface peat carbon, but stores that have taken 15,000 years to the accumulate, said Peteet. They also release methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
The U.S. stands to avoid 4.5 million premature deaths if it works to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degree Celsius, according to new research from Duke University.
The same study found working to limit climate change could prevent about 3.5 million hospitalizations and emergency room visits and approximately 300 million lost workdays in America.
“The avoided deaths are valued at more than $37 trillion. The avoided health care spending due to reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits exceeds $37 billion, and the increased labor productivity is valued at more than $75 billion,” Drew Shindell, a professor at Duke University, told lawmakers Wednesday.
On average, this amounts to over $700 billion per year in benefits to the U.S. from improved health and labor alone, far more than the cost of the energy transition.”
Shindell, who conducted the study alongside researchers at NASA, unveiled the findings during a House Oversight Committee hearing on the economic and health consequences of climate change.
The study aimed to show the benefits to the U.S. if the nation sticks with the goal of the Paris Climate Accord, which President Trump has formally moved to leave. The U.S. cannot officially exit the agreement until Nov. 4 — the day after the presidential election.
Shindell encouraged committee members to transition away from fossil fuels, a move that would help ease climate change while also spurring health benefits from reduced air pollution.
The benefits could be seen in the relatively short term.
“Roughly 1.4 million lives could be saved from improved air quality during the next 20 years. As we’ve seen with the coronavirus lockdowns in many places, air pollution responds immediately to emissions reductions,” he said.
“Our work shows that action now means benefits now.”
Democrats have introduced a number of bills to combat climate change, but they’ve failed to get much traction.
The House passed a $1.5 trillion green infrastructure package in July, but the Republican-led Senate isn’t expected to take it up.
Just one day earlier, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis unveiled its road map for solving the climate crisis.
Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said lawmakers need to focus on tackling the problem despite the current coronavirus pandemic.
“Handling one crisis does not negate our responsibility to face another.”
Human-induced climate change is causing ‘extreme’ melting in New Zealand glaciers, The study is only the second to draw a direct link between glacier melt and human-induced climate change. SBS NEWS 4 AUG 20 BY BIWA KWAN New analysis of data and photo records of melting glaciers in New Zealand has found human-induced climate change increased the likelihood of mass ice melt.
The new modelling techniques were applied to 10 glaciers in New Zealand to reveal a more detailed picture of what is driving the accelerating rates of ice melt in the region.
Lead researcher Lauren Vargo said the analysis compared ice melt under pre-industrial greenhouse gas emissions and current-day emissions to uncover “a quite extreme result”.
“Some of the glaciers were at least six times more likely to have experienced that high mass loss because of humans,” said Dr Vargo, who is based at the Victoria University of Wellington.
“We’re really confident with that number because that is the low end. The high end is 350 times more likely.
“But with the high ice mass loss event we saw [in 2018], it would not have happened at all without humans.”
The first study to make a direct link between human-induced climate change and glacier melt focused on glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere where more robust data records exist. The study – published in the journal Science in 2014 – looked at records between 1851 and 2010 using a running mean over 20-year periods.
Dr Vargo said the rate of ice melt has resulted in the loss of a quarter of New Zealand’s glaciers since the 1970s.
Rapid melt events in 2011 and 2018 prompted the study. ……
A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything.
The country’s latest calamity illustrates a striking inequity of our time: The people least responsible for climate change are among those most hurt by its consequences. NYT, By Somini Sengupta and Julfikar Ali Manik 30 July 20,
Torrential rains have submerged at least a quarter of Bangladesh, washing away the few things that count as assets for some of the world’s poorest people — their goats and chickens, houses of mud and tin, sacks of rice stored for the lean season.
It is the latest calamity to strike the delta nation of 165 million people. Only two months ago, a cyclone pummeled the country’s southwest. Along the coast, a rising sea has swallowed entire villages. And while it’s too soon to ascertain what role climate change has played in these latest floods, Bangladesh is already witnessing a pattern of more severe and more frequent river flooding than in the past along the mighty Brahmaputra River, scientists say, and that is projected to worsen in the years ahead as climate change intensifies the rains.
“The suffering will go up,” said Sajedul Hasan, the humanitarian director of BRAC, an international development organization based in Bangladesh that is distributing food, cash and liquid soap to displaced people.
This is one of the most striking inequities of the modern era. Those who are least responsible for polluting Earth’s atmosphere are among those most hurt by its consequences. The average American is responsible for 33 times more planet-warming carbon dioxide than the average Bangladeshi.
This chasm has bedeviled diplomacy for a generation, and it is once again in stark relief as the coronavirus pandemic upends the global economy and threatens to push the world’s most vulnerable people deeper into ruin.
How Hot Will the Future Feel? New Yorker, 29 July 20, By Bill McKibben
Even among the grim daily toll of pandemic deaths and job losses, the most fateful numbers in the news last week probably came from a huge study carried out by a team of scientists at the World Climate Research Programme. It wove together the warming that we’ve observed so far, the latest understanding of feedback effects from clouds and other systems, and the record of the climate in the deep past to conclude that doubling the amount of carbon in the atmosphere (which, at current rates, will occur toward the middle of the century) will raise the average surface temperature on Earth between two and a half and four degrees Celsius
This is the first significant narrowing of that range in decades—ever since the nineteen-eighties, we’ve been saying one and a half to four and a half degrees. Now, though, researchers are essentially ruling out the bottom end of the range: two and a half degrees, now essentially the best-case scenario, is an enormous number. Dealing with the volume and complexity of data “was such a long and painful process,” one researcher, Kate Marvel, at nasa’s Goddard Institute, said. James Hansen, the former Goddard chief and the world’s premier climate scientist, said, “It is an impressive, comprehensive study, and I am not just saying that because I agree with the result. Whoever shepherded this deserves our gratitude.”
Indeed, they do. But, in truth, the numbers—what we might call pure climatology—can tell us only so much. What will haunt our future are two other variables, both of which are even harder to calculate. The first is: How much damage will that extra heat wreak? So far, scientists—who tend to be conservative in their forecasts—have under-predicted everything from coral die-off to Arctic ice melt. The past week, during which the Atlantic-hurricane alphabet hit “H” earlier in the season than ever before, provided more reminders that even the one degree Celsius that the temperature has already risen is an awful lot. In China, record rains were powering remarkably dangerous flooding along the Yangtze River—by last weekend, people were beginning to raise fears for the Three Gorges Dam, the largest structure of its kind in the world.
But, again, the level of damage that comes from rising temperatures—let’s call it applied climatology—is not as telling, ultimately, as our collective ability to respond to that damage. The brittleness of political systems in the face of change on this scale is even scarier than the brittleness of dams. The Times Magazineoffered a remarkable glimpse into such a possibility this week, with a long examination of climate migration—present and future—from Central America. As more and more people find themselves in zones too hot to support life, they will move, and, as we already know, those movements provoke both compassion and demagoguery. “The best outcome requires not only good will and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing,” Abrahm Lustgarten writes. “The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war.”
The pandemic shows us above all, I think, that twenty-first-century survival depends on an ability to handle chaos: that our political leaders, and our other institutions, have to devote themselves as never before to humane competence. And, as this summer’s racial reckoning should remind us, the pain that’s coming needs to be distributed far more fairly. We’re fast running out of margin. The capacity of political systems to respond to extreme stress can’t be predicted as numerically as the response of physical systems to extra carbon, but it will be measured, as with covid-19, in deaths. Just on a much larger scale…… https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/how-hot-will-the-future-feel
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