12 September 2016, Renew Economy, Garbage in, garbage out: Why the CCA got it so wrong. If Australia continues to rely on a renewable energy target to help meet its share of the global goal of capping global warming by 2°C, it is likely to result in new coal plants being built in the 2040s. Sound implausible? Does it sound completely crazy? Yes, but this is the advice that was given to the Climate Change Authority and presumably helped them form their controversial stance on climate policies that was delivered to the government last week. The idea that Australia, in a world aiming at cutting missions, would be likely to open new coal plants at a time when it should be hitting a zero net carbon target seems extraordinary. Yet that is what consultancy Jacobs is suggesting, even though its modelling shows that 90 per cent of Australia’s generation by 2040 would come from renewables under an extension of the RET. Here’s the graph above. Under Jacobs’ modelling – apart from the reference case where Australia ignores global warming – coal-fired power becomes extinct in all its policy scenarios in Australia by the mid 2030s. Until suddenly, in the renewable energy target scenario, it makes a comeback in the late 2040s. (That’s the blue uptick on the bottom right). “Fossil generation increases from 2040, largely driven by new CCGTs (combined cycle gas plants), although some supercritical black coal generators are also built,” it says. This is despite the share of renewable energy in generation being at 74 per cent in 2030, and peaking at 91 per cent in 2039. Quite where baseload coal plants, or gas plants for that matter, fit into that high renewables scenario is not clear, given the need for flexible generation. And just who would invest in a new coal plant two decades hence, with 90 per cent renewables, as the world nears the zero emissions target it has locked itself into through the Paris agreement, boggles the mind, but that is what we are told the modelling tells us. Read More here
Yearly Archives: 2016
11 September 2016, Climate News Network, Ocean warming intensifies power of typhoons. The violence of typhoons that devastate Asian coastal regions is being magnified by rising sea surface temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The typhoons that have slammed into the coasts of east and southeast Asia have become more violent, increasing in intensity by between 12% and 15% over the last four decades, according to a new study. And the proportion of storms that meet the classification of category 4, with winds at 200 kilometres per hour, and category 5, with gusts of more than 250 kph, has at least doubled and may have tripled. The good news for mariners is that those tropical cyclones that stay over the open ocean have not got significantly worse. The windstorms that pound the land, though, are potentially more destructive. The cause of the intensity is an overall warming of ocean surface waters in the northwest Pacific. And the researchers say: “The projected ocean surface warming pattern under increasing greenhouse gas forcing suggests that typhoons striking eastern mainland China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan will intensify further. Read more here
9 September 2016, The Conversation, EcoCheck: the Grampians are struggling with drought and deluge. Our EcoCheck series takes the pulse of some of Australia’s most important ecosystems to find out if they’re in good health or on the wane. The Grampians National Park is a large conservation reserve, sprawling across 168,000 hectares embedded in western Victoria’s agricultural landscape. With a rich cultural heritage and regionally important flora and fauna, it is a hugely significant area for conservation. But in recent years it has been subjected to a series of major wildfire events, a flood, and long periods of low rainfall. Our research shows that this has sent small mammal populations on the kind of boom-and-bust rollercoaster ride usually seen in arid places, not temperate forests.The fire and the flood We began studying the Grampians in 2008, investigating how small mammals had responded to a catastrophic wildfire that burned half of the national park in 2006. What started as a one-year study has turned into a long-term research program to investigate how the past few years of hypervariable rainfall and heightened bushfire activity have affected the animals that live in the park. Fortunately (for our study, at least), the beginning of our research in 2008 was in the middle of a long run of very poor rainfall years, as the Millennium Drought reached its height. The drought was broken at the end of 2010 by the Big Wet, which led to well-above-average rainfall and floods in the Grampians. But soon after, rainfall rapidly dipped back to below average. It has stayed there ever since. We also saw two more major fire events, in 2013 and 2014, which together with the 2006 fire burned some 90% of the Grampians landscape. Read More here
9 September 2016, The Conversation, He may have insulted Obama, but Duterte held up a long-hidden looking glass to the US. This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has taken his “bad manners” – having gained global notoriety with his election campaign insults earlier this year – to a new level. At a press conference at Davao International Airport on Monday, on his way to meet US President Barack Obama and other leaders attending the ASEAN summit, Duterte muttered a few short words in tagalog at the end of a lengthy and irritated reply to a local journalist. With those words, he again made international headlines. If that were all there was to it, we could rightly roll our eyes and move on. After all, Duterte’s language is vulgar; his slander of people and groups is liable to incite violence; and his determination to kill drug pushers (to fight “crime with crime”) an abuse of power. He should not be defended for any of this.But as someone who has spent a long time studying US-Philippine relations, I think there’s something more for us to see here. And if we want to judge the Philippine president (and, by default, the nation for electing him) from high moral ground, I think we have a responsibility to pay attention to it. Restoring an invisible history “Who is he to question me about human rights and extrajudicial killings?” So asked Duterte on Monday. It’s actually a very good question, and one long overdue from a Philippine president. The extent to which the violence of US relations with the Philippines has been made invisible by a history written predominantly by Americans themselves cannot be overstated. It began with a three-year war (1899-1902) that most Americans have never heard of. The war overthrew a newly independent Philippine republic and cost between 250,000 and a million Filipino lives – only to be called “a great misunderstanding” by American colonial writers. Read More here