Showing posts with label global crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global crisis. Show all posts

Monday 17 July 2023

Climate Change State of Play in 2023: as seen from Yamba, Australia and the rest of the world

 

Yamba (pop. est. 6,388) at the mouth of the Clarence River estuary on the NSW far north coast, has an official weather station ID: 058012 which has been recording observations since May 1877 from a headline on the northside of the town.


What this relatively long history, of measuring air temperature, humidity levels, wind direction & velocity along with rainfall, is currently indicating is that from January to June 2023 monthly temperatures have been hotter than the 145 year averages.


While over the same period rainfall is so far below monthly averages that by June - the first month of Winter - rainfall was est. 125-127mm below the 145 year average for that month and occurred across only 7 of the 30 June days.


Yamba, like much of the Clarence Valley and 23.3% of the North Coast has been classified as Drought Affected on the NSW DPI Combined Drought Indicator (CDI).


NSW DPI CDI mapping as of 12 July 2023














Reading the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) webpages, it is looking increasingly likely that an El Niño event will be declared in the southern hemisphere before September 2023.


It seems that little Yamba and Australia are marching in step with the rest of the world.......


Washington Post, 13 July 2023:


The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.


The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding.


They’re blaring from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and China, with a severe heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in coming days.


They’re burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels considered “beyond extreme.”


And they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that have sent plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.


Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild.


The only question, scientists say, is when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.


This is not the new normal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “We don’t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil fuels … and we’re nowhere near doing that.”….


Read the full article here.


The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 July 2023, p 22:


Natural disasters and extreme weather are thrashing the northern hemisphere as temperature records rapidly topple. Floods are overwhelming parts of Asia and Europe, fires are ravaging the US, sea surface temperatures off Europe are the hottest on record and the global average temperature has been at a record high four times in the past week.


Drought is sapping northern parts of China and heatwaves are paralysing cities at the same time deadly floods displace thousands in the south. It's just a taste of what's to come as climate change worsens.


Marine heatwaves


The ingredients for the catastrophic weather events in the northern hemisphere have been brewing in global oceans for months. In the lead-up to Earth's hottest week in recorded history, between July 3 and 9 this year, 40 per cent of the world's oceans were stewing through severe marine heatwaves.


"A big part of the fact that we've got these records occurring is because the oceans are so warm," said marine heatwave expert Associate Professor Alex Sen Gupta from UNSW's Climate Change Research Centre. "It means it's very likely that this is going to be the warmest year on record."


Much of the North Atlantic suffered the most extreme marine heatwaves in history. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called a Category 5 (beyond extreme) heatwave in waters west of Ireland as temperatures climbed 5 degrees above the June average.


The record marine heat in the Atlantic spurred the formation of Tropical Storm Bret, the most eastward ever tropical storm this early in the year. Bret churned westward and swept through the Caribbean, damaging water infrastructure in Barbados and shuttering schools in St Lucia.


The ocean heatwaves have a high chance of holding strong for months, potentially contributing to bursts of damaging rain or intensifying heatwaves in Britain and Europe; one of either extremes. The warm water will mix deeper down into the ocean and have global effects - including on Arctic sea ice - for months.


The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts that by September, 50 per cent of the world's oceans could be experiencing marine heatwaves. The normal global rate is 10 per cent.


Weatherzone meteorologist Yoska Hernandez said the sea surface temperatures off Australia are the warmest on record, about 0.3 to 0.5 degrees warmer than last year.


Warm oceans are particularly concerning because they increase moisture in the atmosphere, which can lead to more intense rain events. In the past two weeks, major floods have swept across the US, China, Japan, Europe and Pakistan. Hernandez said the drivers behind the rain events were all separate, but all occurred in the context of climate change.


For example, the Pakistan event has been the result of seasonal monsoonal rains, with as much as six months' of rain falling in 18 hours over some cities.


The floods in the north of America have been driven by an intense front moving over the region, dumping a lot of rain. There's a lot of moisture in the atmosphere driven by the warming ocean temperatures.


In Spain, a large thunderstorm has resulted in flash flooding across Zaragoza in the country's northeast - with about 64mm falling over some parts in a few hours. This is almost the average rainfall during summer for the country.


Last week, there were four days in which Earth's average temperature reached record highs. The global average temperature hit 17.2 degrees on Thursday, July 6, surpassing the 17.18-degree record set on July 4 and equalled on July 5, according to data from the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyser. The previous record of 17.01 degrees was set on Monday, July 3.


The data relies on satellite information and computer simulations to measure the world's condition. It is, however, worth noting NOAA said it could not yet validate the data but that the agency recognised the warm period was due to climate change.


"Combined with El Niño and hot summer conditions, we're seeing record warm surface temperatures being recorded at many locations across the globe," the agency said last week.


The World Meteorological Organisation, a specialised agency of the UN, declared the El Niño event last week. It's one of the most important drivers of unusual weather over the entire globe. In the southern hemisphere, El Niño tends to have a drying effect, but in the northern hemisphere it can increase rainfall.


For most of Australia, El Niño brings dry weather, increasing bushfire risk. But in other parts of the world it leads to wetter conditions, as in southern America.


The Bureau of Meteorology is yet to formally declare an El Niño event, but is expected to do so in the coming weeks. The agency has different criteria than other international weather agencies.


Sen Gupta said it was unusual so many weather events associated with El Niño, including fires and marine heatwaves, were striking before the weather system had even formed (the system has a 90 per cent chance of fully taking hold in the second half of the year).


Countries including Australia were warned to prepare for bad fire seasons. North America is currently in the midst of its most catastrophic fire season ever, which has seen nearly 4000 fires tear across Canada. Smoke spewed from the incineration of 9.5 million hectares and caused the worst air pollution in large swathes of the US in recorded history, draping cities such as New York in orange clouds of smog last month.


Last week in Beijing, as heat records topple across Asia, the government ordered a pause in outdoor work as the city hit a 10-day streak of days above 35 degrees, at the same time floods carried off cars and destroyed buildings, killing at least a dozen people and displaced thousands more in central and southern China.


Pinpointing the effect of climate change on one weather event is a difficult science, but a network of global researchers from the World Weather Attribution zeroed in on a four-day heatwave that killed 13 people. They concluded that human-induced climate change made the deadly heat 30 times more likely. (Another 96 people died from heat-related conditions in India in June.)


Tipping point


It's a question we keep coming back to as records tumble.


Dr Nandini Ramesh, a senior research scientist at CSIRO Data61, said it's important to understand what a tipping point is.


"A tipping point is when you push something until it can't be undone and it exacerbates further warming. An example is the west Antarctic ice sheet collapsing, which would cause irreversible effects on ocean circulation and climate," she said…..


"The ocean will [have] almost constant marine heat waves if we keep on pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We have to continually update what we class as a marine heatwave or, or go to more extreme definitions."


More than 61,000 people died because of last year's brutal summer heat waves across Europe, according to a study in the journal Nature Medicine. The findings suggest that two decades of efforts in Europe to adapt to a hotter world have failed to keep up with the pace of global warming. Extreme heat had been expected that summer based on how much the planet had warmed in the past decade, the report notes. This trend is likely to continue.


"Having a warmer atmosphere makes both intense rain and heat waves worse," Ramesh said. "It will push us into temperatures that are dangerous to the human body."


Tuesday 15 December 2020

As we near the end of 2020 this message needs to be acted upon......

 

 

Thursday 19 December 2019

Fightback against Australian Morrison Government's attempt to scuttle effective global climate change action


The Morrison Coalition Government's use of 'carbon credits' as an accounting trick to cover failure to reduce Australian greenhouse gas emissions since 2014 will put the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C out of reach - thus plunging the world into catastrophic climate change - is being resisted by thirty-one other sovereign nations.


Logo

Media Release, 14 December 2019:
Leading countries set benchmark for carbon markets with San Jose Principles
MADRID – As UN climate talks in Madrid near its closing, a group of leading countries are working together to secure an ambitious outcome is delivered on the Article 6 negotiations. 
To make that happen, they have agreed on a set of principles, known as the San Jose Principles for High Ambition and Integrity in International Carbon Markets, that constitute the basis upon which a fair and robust carbon market should be built.
Known as the Unconventional Group, these countries (see the list below) have been working since the Pre-COP25 in San José, Costa Rica, to increase the level of ambition in talks dealing with carbon markets. 
The group presented the Chilean COP Presidency a set of principles (see attached) that outline what a successful outcome could look like in this Article, in the hope that this will support the Presidency’s efforts in creating an ambitious outcome.
Parties include (updated December 14, 11:45pm, CET)
  1. Costa Rica
  2. Switzerland
  3. Belize
  4. Colombia
  5. Paraguay
  6. Perú
  7. Marshall Islands
  8. Vanuatu
  9. Luxembourg
  10. Cook Islands
  11. Germany
  12. Sweden
  13. Denmark
  14. Austria
  15. Grenada
  16. Estonia
  17. New Zealand
  18. Spain
  19. Ireland
  20. Latvia
  21. The Netherlands
  22. Norway
  23. Slovenia
  24. Belgium
  25. Fiji
  26. Portugal
  27. France
  28. United Kingdom
  29. Italy
  30. Finland
  31. Trinidad and Tobago
Quotes from country representatives
Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, Minister of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica, said, “This is a definition of success on Article 6. Anything below these San Jose principles won’t create a fair and robust carbon market. The diverse group of countries supporting these principles know we need a just outcome to keep the 1.5C target within reach. The principles keep the door open for 1.5C, while ensuring the highest possible ambition in mitigation and adaptation. We encourage other parties to join our efforts in creating a basis upon which a fair and robust carbon market should be built”
Franz Perrez, Head of Delegation of Switzerland, said, “If markets are to increase ambition, the rules have to be as robust as the San Jose Principles”
Ambassador Janine Felson of Belize said, “An ambitious Article 6 outcome will create a new architecture for markets that moves beyond zero-sum offsetting approaches to accelerate the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is a key principle for members of my group and that is why these San Jose Principles are important”
Ricardo Lozano, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia, said “Colombia, as a highly vulnerable country that has supported an effective implementation of the Paris Agreement will apply these environmental San Jose Principles to guide its participation in the carbon market and ensure our efforts will help to build the basis for a robust system that promotes the highest climate ambition”
Svenja Schulze, Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety of Germany, said, “Art. 6 can be a very important part of implementing the Paris Agreement but it must be designed to increase ambition. The San José Principles lay out the essence of a robust mechanism which ensures environmental integrity”
Isabella Lövin, Minister for Environment and Climate, and Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, said, “The San Jose Principles provide an important foundation for the architecture of Article 6. Robust accounting that ensures environmental integrity and avoids double counting is key for Article 6 to deliver on climate mitigation and raising ambition.”
Dan Jørgensen, Minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities, Denmark, said, “Denmark supports the San José principles. The world is counting on us to secure a robust system that fosters ambition”
Hon. James Shaw, Minister for Climate Change, New Zealand, said, “If we are to prevent the climate crisis, it is critically important for countries to work to the highest possible standards. This is why New Zealand supports the San Jose Principles on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement”
Eric Wiebes, Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy of the Netherlands said, “If we want real emission reductions, we should be absolutely firm on the environmental integrity of the multilateral system. Without proper accounting, our climate action will be meaningless. We can show flexibility on certain issues, but not on the San Jose Principles for international carbon markets.”
Minister Alain Maron, Minister of  the Government of the Brussels-Capital Region, responsible for Climate Change, Environment, Energy and Participatory Democracy of Belgium, said, “We need robust and comprehensive rules for Article 6 so that markets can help drive ambition towards the PA goals and so that its environmental integrity and the SDGs are protected. We also need such rules to facilitate a global level playing field and to provide a signal of trust to all market actors.”
Ola Elvestuen, Norwegian Minister of Climate and Environment, said, “We all need to increase ambition. Carbon markets can have an important role for us to do more together. If we follow the San Jose Principles we are promoting robust markets with environmental integrity.”
Mrs. Camille Robinson-Regis, Hon. Minister of Planning and Development of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, said,"The importance of environmental integrity and overall mitigation are essential and critical elements of the market rules under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The market must be governed by robust rules to inspire the confidence of the private sector  and state and non state entities to participate fully and so ensure that operational and effective market mechanism under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. To do otherwise would undermine the utility of the market mechanism to contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Trinidad and Tobago supports such a robust system of rules.”

San Jose Principles for High Ambition and Integrity in International Carbon Markets
At the Pre-COP, a large number of participants shared their expectations on what is needed to deliver a robust and ambitious outcome for Article 6. 

They were of the view that the implementation of the Paris Agreement must be firmly grounded in what the best available science tells us is necessary to deliver on the long-term temperature goal of the Agreement: the highest possible ambition in mitigation and adaptation.
As the end of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol approaches, there is an urgent need for clarity with regard to the future international framework for use of market-based approaches towards international climate goals.
They expressed support to the COP presidency, and to work together with others to secure an ambitious outcome in Madrid to deliver the following principles, through an Article 6 rule book that at minimum:
  • Ensures environmental integrity and enables the highest possible mitigation ambition
  • Delivers an overall mitigation in global emissions, moving beyond zero-sum offsetting approaches to help accelerate the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions
  • Prohibits the use of pre-2020 units, Kyoto units and allowances, and any underlying reductions toward Paris Agreement and other international goals
  • Ensures that double counting is avoided and that all use of markets toward international climate goals is subject to corresponding adjustments.
  • Avoids locking in levels of emissions, technologies or carbon-intensive practices incompatible with the achievement of the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal.
  • Applies allocation methodologies and baseline methodologies that support domestic NDC achievement and contribute to achievement of the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal
  • Uses CO2-equivalence in reporting and accounting for emissions and removals, fully applying the principles of transparency, accuracy, consistency, comparability and completeness
  • Uses centrally and publicly accessible infrastructure and systems to collect, track, and share the information necessary for robust and transparent accounting
  • Ensures incentives to progression and supports all Parties in moving toward economy-wide emission targets.
  • Contributes to quantifiable and predictable financial resources to be used by developing country Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change to meet the costs of adaptation
  • Recognizes the importance of capacity building to enable the widest possible participation by Parties under Article 6
They further recognize the importance of Article 6.8 in supporting Parties in the implementation of their NDCs through non-market approaches.
They invited other countries, multi-national and sub-national entities and multinational institutions to join us in the full operationalization of all the above principles, to support the highest possible ambition and environmental integrity.
ENDS

Tuesday 14 May 2019

UN-UNESCO Global Assessment Report: "The loss of species, ecosystems and genetic diversity is already a global and generational threat to human well-being."


Smithsonian.com, 6 May 2019:

Our world is losing biodiversity, and fast. According to a report released today by the United Nations, up to one million species could face extinction in the near future due to human influence on the natural world. Such a collapse in biodiversity would wreak havoc on the interconnected ecosystems of the planet, putting human communities at risk by compromising food sources, fouling clean water and air, and eroding natural defenses against extreme weather such as hurricanes and floods.

In the sweeping UN-backed report, hundreds of scientists found that biodiversity loss poses a global threat on par with climate change. A 40-page “Summary for Policy Makers” was released in advance of the full report, which is expected to be published later this year and span nearly 2,000 pages. The document calls the rate of change in nature “unprecedented” and projects that species extinctions will become increasingly common in the coming decades, driven by factors such as land development, deforestation and overfishing.

“The basic message is the same as what the scientific community has been saying for more than 30 years: Biodiversity is important in its own right. Biodiversity is important for human wellbeing, and we humans are destroying it,” Robert Watson, the former chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) that produced the report, said during a press conference on Monday.

To produce the report, 145 biodiversity experts plus hundreds of other contributors compiled information over three years from 15,000 sources. For years, scientists have been sounding the alarm about biodiversity’s dramatic decline in what some have dubbed the world’s sixth mass extinction event. This die-off, however, differs from the other five in its central cause: humans.

As the global assessment confirms, human activity is a major driver of biodiversity decline among the millions of species on Earth. The report ranks some of the top causes of species loss as changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms (like hunting or fishing), climate change, pollution and invasive alien species (often introduced by human travel across ecosystems). The current global rate of species extinction is already “at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years,” and it’s expected to keep accelerating.

All in all, human action has “significantly altered” about 75 percent of the world’s land environment and 66 percent of its marine environment, according to the report. Insect populations have plummeted in tropical forestsgrasslands are increasingly drying out into deserts, and pollution along with ocean acidification is driving many coral reef ecosystems to the brink.

The destruction of biodiversity at all levels, from genes to ecosystems, could pose significant threats to humankind, the report says. In addition to affecting human access to food resources, clean water and breathable air, a loss of species on a global scale could also clear a path for diseases and parasites to spread more quickly, says Emmett Duffy, a biodiversity expert with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center who contributed to the report.

“Historically, a lot of us have thought about conservation and extinction in terms of charismatic animals like pandas and whales,” Duffy says. “But there’s a very strong utilitarian reason for saving species, because people depend on them. There’s an environmental justice aspect.”

The effects of biodiversity loss won’t be distributed equally, either, the researchers found. The most devastating impacts would disproportionately affect some of the world’s poorest communities, and the report concludes that the decline in biodiversity undermines global progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, milestones set by the U.N. General Assembly in 2015 to reduce global inequality…..

Important aspects of the Global Assessment
Building upon earlier IPBES assessment reports, especially the recently-released Land Degradation and Restoration Assessment and the Regional Assessment Reports for Africa, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe and Central Asia (March, 2018), the Global Assessment:
• Covers all land-based ecosystems (except Antarctica), inland water and the open oceans
• Evaluates changes over the past 50 years — and implications for our economies, livelihoods, food security and quality of life
• Explores impacts of trade and other global processes on biodiversity and ecosystem services
• Ranks the relative impacts of climate change, invasive species, pollution, sea and land use change and a range of other challenges to nature
• Identifies priority gaps in our available knowledge that will need to be filled
• Projects what biodiversity could look like in decades ahead under six future scenarios: Economic Optimism; Regional Competition; Global Sustainability; Business as Usual; Regional Sustainability and Reformed Markets
• Assesses policy, technology, governance, behaviour changes, options and pathways to reach global goals by looking at synergies and trade-offs between food production, water security, energy and infrastructure expansion, climate change mitigation, nature conservation and economic development
What the CSIRO and climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au state about coastal New South Wales:

KEY MESSAGES

·         Average temperatures will continue to increase in all seasons (very high confidence).
·         More hot days and warm spells are projected with very high confidence. Fewer frosts are projected with high confidence.
·         Decreases in winter rainfall are projected with medium confidence. Other changes are possible but unclear.
·         Increased intensity of extreme rainfall events is projected, with high confidence.
·         Mean sea level will continue to rise and height of extreme sea-level events will also increase (very high confidence).
·         A harsher fire-weather climate in the future (high confidence).
·         On annual and decadal basis, natural variability in the climate system can act to either mask or enhance any long-term human induced trend, particularly in the next 20 years and for rainfall.


At its ordinary monthy meeting of 23 April 2019 Clarence Valley Council passed the following resolution:



Sunday 31 March 2019

More evidence of Australia’s national extinction crisis


Twenty years ago my garden and the street in which I live rang with the sound of frogs calling after dark - at times it was deafening and drowned out the sound of the television news presenter.

Frogs of different species were in my letterbox, in the garden trees, catching moths on the window sills, hopping about on my patio and frequently in the house.

No more.

Anyone living in urban areas of the NSW Northern Rivers region would be aware that fewer frog species and fewer numbers within those frog species have been part of garden, park and nature reserve landscapes over the last twenty years.

Loss of habitat due to land clearing, drainage or development, depredation by introduced species, over use of herbicides/pesticides by councils and homeowners, decease in available food sources and disease are taking their toll on local frog populations.

When one sees the scale writ large it is terrible to behold.......

The Guardian, 29 March 2019:

A deadly disease that wiped out global populations of amphibians led to the decline of 500 species in the past 50 years, including 90 extinctions, scientists say.

A global research effort, led by the Australian National University, has for the first time quantified the worldwide impact of chytridiomycosis, or chytrid fungus, a fungal disease that eats away at the skin of amphibians.

The disease was first discovered in 1998 by researchers at James Cook University in Queensland investigating the cause of mysterious, mass amphibian deaths.

Chytridiomycosis is caused by two fungal species, both of which are likely to have originated in Asia, and their spread has been facilitated by humans through activities such as the legal and illegal pet trade.

Forty-two researchers worked on the new study, published in Science on Friday, which pinpoints the extent of the disease and how devastating it has been for frog, toad and salamander species.

They found evidence that at least 501 species had declined as a result of chytrid fungus and 90 of those were presumed or confirmed extinct.

“The results are pretty astounding” Benjamin Scheele, a research fellow at the ANU and the project’s lead researcher, said.

“We’ve known that chytrid is really bad for the better part of two decades but actually researching and quantifying those declines, that’s what this study does.”

The scientists identified declines in amphibian species in Europe, Africa, Central and South America and Australia because of the disease.

Scheele said there were no declines in Asia because species had evolved to be naturally resistant.

The impact of the disease has been hardest in Central and South America and in eastern Australia, where it flourishes in cool and moist conditions. It does not survive at temperatures above 28C.

In Australia, chytrid fungus is present in upland areas along the Great Dividing Range, down to the Otways in Victoria, and the edges of South Australia and Tasmania.

It is also found in some of the cooler mountain areas of Queensland.

Scheele said in Australia alone, there were 240 species of amphibian, 40 of which the researchers believed had suffered population declines as a result of chytrid fungus.

Seven of those 40 are believed to be extinct. One of those is the mountain mistfrog, which was last year added to a group of species the Australian government has been assessing to determine whether it should be moved to the national list of extinct wildlife.

Other species, including both the southern and northern corroboree frog, have suffered because of chytrid fungus, but large-scale captive breeding programs have worked to prevent their extinction..... [my yellow highlighting]