23 May 2016, The Conversation, Coastal law shift from property rights to climate adaptation is a landmark reform. Coastal management in Australia is subject to competing interests and challenges. These range from land use and strategic planning issues to ecosystems preservation. Local councils are at the coalface as both key decision-makers and the first point of contact for communities. Exacerbating these day-to-day challenges for councils are risks to property. A quantitative assessment undertaken by the then-Department of Climate Change in 2009 identified impacts of sea-level rise as a serious threat to property. In New South Wales, under scenarios of a 1.1-metre sea-level rise, risks of damage or inundation to residential housing alone affected tens of thousands of properties, potentially costing millions of dollars. The NSW 2009 sea-level rise policy (now repealed) saw coastal councils considering this future risk when developing coastal zone management plans. These metrics, while important, say little of the wide-ranging benefits of a freely accessible coast. Going to the beach is a fundamental part of Australian identity; it’s a “special place” for Australians. Local councils are most exposed to the issues and challenges of a changing coastline in which there are many interests. Councils are often the first decision-makers for local development, asset management and land-use and strategic planning. Increased coastal erosion, storm events, more frequent and severe flooding impacts and higher tides can and will make these regular functions of councils more complicated. In this context, the tabling of the NSW Coastal Management Bill on May 3 marks the formalisation of Stage 2 of the most significant law reform to coastal management since the 1970s. The NSW state government saysthat, by better integrating coastal management with land-use planning, the legislation offers: … a modern, coherent coastal management framework that is responsive to current needs and future challenges. Read More here
Yearly Archives: 2016
23 May 2016, The Conversation, Why has climate change disappeared from the Australian election radar? Two weeks into a protracted election campaign, it is looking ever-more likely that climate change is to be placed way down the order of business – at least for the major parties. The contest over climate change that characterised the previous three elections seems to have disappeared off the political radar despite the issue being more urgent than ever. Since the Paris climate summit, global average temperatures continue to break month-on-month records. Just a few weeks after the summit, the North Pole was briefly not even able to reach freezing point – in the middle of winter. And just this month, Cape Grim surpassed a 400 ppm baseline minimum. Then there is the truly frightening climate spiral developed by Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. It shows what an El Niño amplified global temperature has climbed to. The spiral assumes a tight-knit but ever-expanding ball until April 2015, when the spiral line starts to separate dramatically from the ball. This year it careers dangerously close to the 1.5℃ threshold. Climate spiral. Ed Hawkins. The diminishing political and media spiral on climate. While global temperatures may be spiralling out of control, the opposite appears to be happening with the climate issue attention cycle in Australia.Apparently, climate is less important than jobs and growth – or, in Labor’s case, health and schools. A big part of this change in political climates is undoubtedly the Paris summit itself. The political triumphalism of the summit belies the scientific pessimism of so many climate scientists and activists. Kevin Anderson from Manchester University’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research even declared the summit to be “worse that Copenhagen”, in that it is based on out-of-date science, does not include aviation and shipping, and includes negative emissions in its scenarios for achieving abatement. On the other hand, after the collapse of talks at Copenhagen, some activists see no choice but to climb aboard with the Paris agreement, insofar as it at least signifies a mainstream seachange in action – even if the actual measures are inadequate. The INDCs that came out of the conference still put the world on a path to 3.5℃. Read More here
21 May 2016, Climate News Network, Antarctic glacier melt could raise sea level by 3m. A huge glacier in the frozen wastes of East Antarctica, a region previously thought stable, could melt much faster than expected, scientists say. One of Antarctica’s great glaciers could become unstable if global warming continues at the present pace. As warm seas wash the ice shelf, the land-based mass of ice could begin to retreat, cross a critical threshold in the present century and then withdraw 300 kilometres inland. In the course of doing so it would spill tremendous quantities of water into the oceans: enough to raise global sea levels by 2.9 metres and threaten cities that are home to billions. And here is the bad news: glaciologists have known for decades that West Antarctica’s ice sheets are unstable. But the Totten glacier is part of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, a mass of ice most researchers had believed to be stable and highly unlikely to lose much of its ice, even in a warming world. Scientists from Australia, New Zealand, the US and Britain report in Nature that they explored the underlying geology of the Totten glacier to build up a picture of its advance and retreat over many millions of years. Greater vulnerability “The evidence coming together is painting a picture of East Antarctica being much more vulnerable to a warming environment than we thought,” said Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. “This is something we should worry about. “Totten Glacier is losing ice now, and the warm ocean water that is causing this loss has the potential to also push the glacier back to an unstable place.” The identification of a weak spot in the bastion of frozen water that embraces East Antarctica is new. But alarm about the rate of melting and the potential for change across the world’s last largely uninhabited continent is not. In the past few years researchers have pinpointed the insidious effect of warming sea currents, and identified immediate hazards to the glaciers of the fast-warming West Antarctic region. Read More here
20 May 2016, Renew Economy, Why we must ‘think global, act local’ on climate change. Many catchy slogans come and go: “Just do it”, “Carpe Diem”, “play hard.” But out of all of them, “think global, act local” is the one that resonates the most with me, and seems to apply best in this age when we are all connected but still have individual responsibilities.It’s a slogan that’s become more and more applicable in an era of distributed energy when every consumer that wants to, can make a difference at the local level. Disruptive technology typically depends on many individuals making small individual decisions that collectively have large impacts on corporate behaviour. In that spirit and as part of the “cognitive surplus” its seems worthwhile to pull together three articles that summarise some well known, and some slightly less well known, features of the global context that underlies the unfolding energy transformation in Australia. Article 1 today is a very brief and familiar summary of the global warming data and the primary contributors to CO2 emissions. Article 2 will summarise the global renewable energy picture; and Article 3 will look at some of the recent global data and analysis, including China and India coal-fired electricity generation and economics. Global temperature. I prefer to look at the global temperature in percentage terms. That’s because, in my experience, 1 degree doesn’t sound like something very important to the man in street, who is used to daily fluctuations of 10 degrees or more. Using percentages has its own problems, as Centigrade percentages will differ from Fahrenheit and, for the truly obsessed, Kelvin scales. Our primary data source is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and we like to use a 20-year moving average as the most smoothed form of data. The disadvantage of moving averages is that they are out of date and give equal weight to old observations This can be seen in the chart below. For that reason the ABS uses a “Henderson” trend for monthly and quarterly data, which gives more weight to the current observations and less weight to the older observations. Any stats-inclined people out there who want to calculate a 20-year Henderson weight, please get in touch. Here’s the chart then. The anomaly average for calendar 2016 year to date is 1.13°C, about 8 per cent above the 20th century average. GOOD SERIES OF GRAPHS IN ARTICLE. Read More here