Conservation of our existing forests is essential to combat climate catastrophe. Whether the tree is in The Amazon or in NSW it is essential as carbon storage.
This short documentary depicts the beauty and unique ecosystem of the
Kalang area and the forests of north-eastern New South Wales, while
exposing the unsustainability of past and future logging operations and
the destruction of endangered wildlife habitats. What can you do to help protect this amazing biodiverse region and its
inhabitants?
- Support the proposed Great Koala National Park:
http://www.koalapark.org.au
- Sign the petition to protect this ancient native forest and its headwaters from logging on Change.org:
https://www.change.org/p/premier-of-n... - Spread the word and share this video !
"People must use less transport, eat
less red meat and buy fewer clothes if the UK is to virtually halt
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the government's chief environment
scientist has warned.
Prof Sir Ian Boyd said the public had little idea of the scale of the challenge from the so-called Net Zero emissions target.
However, he said technology would help.
The conundrum facing the UK - and elsewhere - was how we shift ourselves away from consuming, he added.
In
an interview with BBC News, Sir Ian warned that persuasive political
leadership was needed to carry the public through the challenge.
Asked whether Boris Johnson would deliver that leadership, he declined to comment.
Mr
Johnson has already been accused by environmentalists of talking up
electric cars whilst reputedly planning a cut in driving taxes that
would increase emissions and undermine the electric car market."
Five-yearly report says climate change is escalating the threat and window of opportunity for action is now.
"The outlook for the Great Barrier Reef has deteriorated from poor to
very poor according to an exhaustive government report that warns the
window of opportunity to improve the natural wonder’s future “is now”.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s
outlook report, published every five years, finds coral reefs have
declined to a very poor condition and there is widespread habitat loss
and degradation affecting fish, turtles and seabirds.
It warns
the plight of the reef will not improve unless there is urgent national
and global action to address the climate crisis, which it described as
its greatest threat."
"The Amazon is the largest tropical forest in the world, covering more
than five million square kilometres across nine countries: Brazil,
Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.
It acts as an enormous carbon sink, storing up to an estimated 100 years worth of carbon emissions produced by humans, and is seen as vital to slowing the pace of global warming.
"The Amazon is the most significant climate
stabiliser we have, it creates 20 percent of the air we breathe and it
also holds 20 percent of the fresh flowing water on the planet," Poirier said."
"Record fires are raging in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, with more than 2,500 fires currently burning.
They are collectively emitting huge amounts of carbon, with smoke plumes visible thousands of kilometres away.
Fires in Brazil increased by 85 percent in 2019, with more than half in the Amazon region, according to Brazil's space agency.
This
sudden increase is likely down to land degradation: land clearing and
farming reduces the availability of water, warms the soil and
intensifies drought, combining to make fires more frequent and more
fierce."
"From power cuts to infrastructure failure, the impact of climate change
on US cities will be huge – but many are already innovating to adapt."
"Deaths. According to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, an average of 658 people die every year from
heat-related causes. From 1999 to 2010, 8,081 heat-related deaths were
reported in the United States and occurred more commonly among older,
younger and poorer populations. Urban heat islands retain heat
overnight, preventing people from sleeping well and leading to even more
health problems, says Lucy Hutyra, an associate professor of earth and
environment at Boston University. Air pollution is often worst on hot
days, and when people leave windows open for air flow, the quality of
the air can cause respiratory problems. Warmer, moister conditions also
mean that heavy rainfall and subsequent flooding is on the rise; so far
this year 78 people have died as a result, according to the National
Weather Service."
"Economic Impact. According to a 2018 study by Texas
A&M University: “The growing number of extreme rainfall events that
produce intense precipitation are resulting in –and will continue to
result in – increased urban flooding unless steps are taken to mitigate
their impacts.” The 2017 National Climate Assessment concluded: “Heavy
downpours are increasing nationally, especially over the last three to
five decades …[and that] … increases in the frequency and intensity of
extreme precipitation events are projected for all U.S. regions.”
Between 2007 and 2011 alone, urban flooding in Cook County, Illinois,
resulted in over 176,000 claims or flood losses at a cost of $660m
(£545m)." Read complete The Guardian story
These
changes are significantly adding to climate-warming emissions. They are
also making forests and other natural systems, which can store key
greenhouse gases, less able to do so. Many calls to limit
emissions focus on those from energy and transportation. But as the IPCC
report points out, agriculture and land use are also major greenhouse
gas sources. In the past decade, land use was responsible for 22% of
global greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 35% for energy and 14% for transportation.
For the past 20 years, I have been working to understand how severe climate change will be
in the coming century. Scientists know that Earth’s climate responds to
both changes in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and changes in
land use. This report makes clear that solving the climate crisis will
require serious choices about how humans interact with the land systems
that provide our societies with food, water and shelter.
The story
is not all doom and gloom. There are strategies that can reduce
greenhouse gas emissions from land use, food production and agriculture,
and also generate economic and social benefits. Acting on these
recommendations would be a big step toward addressing climate change in a
meaningful way.
"Yet,
a lot of Earth's flora is at risk of vanishing completely. More than 20
percent of the world's known plant species, or one in five, are
threatened with extinction, a 2016 study by experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London found.
Gordon,
who was not involved in the study, said that unless we take dramatic
action, that figure is "unlikely to improve" due to the continued
stresses that all of the world's species, including humans, are facing.
Some of the biggest threats identified in the Kew study include agricultural destruction
(such as livestock farming and palm oil production); biological
resource use (logging, gathering terrestrial plants); residential and
commercial development; and invasive and problematic species. Climate
change is also a growing threat."
States that invest heavily in renewable energy
will generate billions of dollars in health benefits in the next decade
instead of spending billions to take care of people getting sick from air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, according to a new study from MIT and reported on by The Verge.
In
fact, 10 states across the Midwest could see massive savings. Ohio
stands to gain $4.7 billion in health benefits by 2030 if they stick
with their current renewable energy standards. The research shows that
as states make their demands for renewalble energy more stringent, the
health benefits and cost savings increase.
Scott Morrison blasted by Pacific heat while trying to project calm on climate
Things are not under control when it comes to Australia meeting our
Paris target, even if Scott Morrison wants us to believe that.
We’ll get to climate, and the rumble in the Pacific,
but I want to begin closer to home. It’s been a busy news week, so you
might have missed an excellent story from my colleague Adam Morton on
Tuesday revealing that a coalmine in Queensland has nearly doubled its greenhouse gas emissions in two years without penalty under a Morrison government mechanism that is supposed to impose limits on industrial pollution.
According to documents released under freedom of information laws,
mining company Anglo American was given the green light under the
safeguards mechanism to increase its emissions by about 1m tonnes at its
Moranbah North mine, in central Queensland. The case study matters, because it helps us separate spin from substance.
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The new energy and climate minister of Denmark, a
frontrunner in fighting climate change, said on Friday he was confident
fellow EU countries would soon agree to go carbon-neutral by 2050
despite resistance in the east of the bloc. A push by most European Union nations for the world’s biggest
economic bloc to go carbon-neutral by 2050 was dropped to a footnote in
June after fierce resistance from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary
who fear it would hurt economies like theirs dependent on nuclear power
and coal.
“I think it will happen in the near future,” energy
and climate minister Dan Jorgensen said, referring to an EU-wide
commitment to achieving a balance between carbon emitted and removed
from the atmosphere within the next three decades.
The prime minister of Fiji has warned Australia to reduce its coal
emissions and do more to combat climate change as regional leaders
prepare to gather in Tuvalu ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum this week. Speaking in Tuvalu
at a climate change conference ahead of the forum on Monday, Frank
Bainimarama appealed directly to Australia to transition away from
coal-powered energy and asked its government “to more fully appreciate”
the “existential threat” facing Pacific nations.
Logging has a serious effect on climate change, writes Frances Pike.
THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL for Climate Change (IPCC) recommends that "natural solutions" are employed to deal with
climate change emergency. The immediate protection and restoration of
natural systems for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are preferred to
geo-engineering and B.E.C.C.S — burning biomass as a fossil fuel substitute while using some sort of carbon capture and storage.
It is clear that the resilience of natural systems must be enhanced
to withstand climate change impact, lest they falter and collapse,
inhibiting their capacity for CDR.
The fairytale that burning wood instead of coal is carbon
neutral continues to wreak havoc on the world’s extant forests. But that
fairytale could soon end, taking with it the myth that the industrial
logging of the world’s native forests has been and is now "sustainable".
For a long time, the falsity of carbon emission accounting for forest
bioenergy has been apparently invisible to many policymakers. A Weekend Australian commentator said, in relation to UK power station Drax which has converted to wood: “The
CO2 it emitted as a coal station was causing climate change; the
increased CO2 now emitted from burning wood is defined by the EC
bureaucrats as not existing”.
Report after report have been warning about the dangers of climate change - and that it is happening right now.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has put the minds of more than 100 scientists together.
What they are saying is alarming: Not only are rising temperatures threatening the planet, but so are the world's eating habits.
The way food is farmed is drastically degrading the Earth's land, and
scientists predict that is making global warming worse and will lead to
food shortages.
So, how will governments respond to this warning?
Presenter: Mohamed Jamjoom
Guests:
Simon Lewis - Professor of global change science at University College London
Patrick Holden - CEO of Sustainable Food Trust
Jan Kowalzig - Senior climate policy adviser at Oxfam Germany
Drawing from a major new archive on the fossil fuel billionaire Koch
brothers, Sharon Kelly explains how its documents help illuminate the origin story for Charles and David Kochs' powerful network of influence.
DeSmog also launched a new research tool, the Koch Network Database,
to profile the dozens of organizations and individuals linked to
Charles Koch or other members of the Koch family, Koch Industries, and
related entities.
The Koch political network includes a wide range of groups working to
spread the Kochs’ free market vision on a range of civic issues, which
includes fighting against regulations on carbon emissions and denying
the existence or seriousness of man-made climate change.
Now, you can find this network’s members and activities, all in one
place. We have around 50 profiles to start and many more to come. Please
let us know if you have any information or documents to contribute.
"It’s a tragic missed opportunity. The new report on land
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shies away from
the big issues and fails to properly represent the science. As a
result, it gives us few clues about how we might survive the century.
Has it been nobbled? Was the fear of taking on the farming industry –
alongside the oil and coal companies whose paid shills have attacked it
so fiercely – too much to bear? At the moment, I have no idea. But what
the panel has produced is pathetic.
The problem is that it concentrates on just one of the two ways of
counting the carbon costs of farming. The first way – the IPCC’s
approach – could be described as farming’s current account. How much
greenhouse gas does driving tractors, spreading fertiliser and raising
livestock produce every year? According to the panel’s report, the
answer is around 23% of the planet-heating gases we currently produce.
But this fails miserably to capture the overall impact of food
production.
The second accounting method is more important. This could be
described as the capital account: how does farming compare to the
natural ecosystems that would otherwise have occupied the land? A paper published in Nature
last year, but not mentioned by the IPCC, sought to count this cost.
Please read these figures carefully. They could change your life."
Tomorrow a special report on how land use affects climate change will be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Land degradation, deforestation, and the expansion of our deserts,
along with agriculture and the other ways people shape land, are all
major contributors to global climate change.
Conversely, trees remove carbon dioxide and store it safely in their
trunks, roots and branches.
Using ecological mechanisms for reducing and storing carbon is a
growing field of study. Broadly known as “natural climate solutions”,
carbon can be stored in wetlands, grasslands, natural forests and
agriculture.
This is called “sequestration”, and the more diverse and longer-lived
the ecosystem, the more it helps mitigate the effect of climate change.
Allowing trees to regenerate
naturally is a more effective, immediate and low-cost method of removing
and storing atmospheric carbon than planting new trees.Shutterstock
Research has estimated these natural carbon sinks can provide 37% of the CO₂ reduction needed to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2℃.
But this research can be wrongly interpreted to imply that the
priority is to plant young trees. In fact, the major climate solution is
the protection and recovery of carbon-rich and long-lived ecosystems,
especially natural forests.
Read more:
Extreme weather caused by climate change has damaged 45% of Australia's coastal habitat
With the imminent release of the new IPCC report, now is a good time
to prioritise the protection and recovery of existing ecosystems over
planting trees.
Forest ecosystems (including the soil) store more carbon than the atmosphere. Their loss would trigger emissions
that would exceed the remaining carbon budget for limiting global
warming to less than the 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, let alone 1.5℃,
threshold.
Read more:
40 years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right
Natural forest systems, with their rich and complex biodiversity,
the product of ecological and evolutionary processes, are stable,
resilient, far better at adapting to changing conditions and store more carbon than young, degraded or plantation forests.
Protect existing trees
Forest degradation is caused by selective logging, temporary
clearing, and other human land use. In some areas, emissions from
degradation can exceed those of deforestation. Once damaged, natural ecosystems are more vulnerable to drought, fires and climate change.
Recently published research found helping natural forest regrow
can have a globally significant effect on carbon dioxide levels. This
approach – called proforestation – is a more effective, immediate and
low-cost method for removing and storing atmospheric carbon in the
long-term than tree planting. And it can be used across many different
kinds of forests around the world.
Avoiding further loss and
degradation of primary forests and intact forest landscapes, and
allowing degraded forests to naturally regrow, would reduce global
carbon emissions.Shutterstock
The
way we currently communicate climate change — be it through articles in
the newspaper, conversations with friends, or billboard adverts — is
fundamentally flawed.
Most discussions of climate change are framed negatively. Take the below screenshot from The Guardian’s
climate change section for instance (as of 17 Dec 2018). We have
climate change ruining dreams of a white Christmas, the message that the
next two years will determine humanity’s fate, corrupted businesses,
activists not doing enough protesting, and the end of blackcurrants.
It’s no wonder most people fail to engage with the narrative around
climate change: it’s simply all gloom and doom.
Can one climate change scientist change the minds of a roomful of climate change sceptics?
Insight: Tuesdays at 8:30pm on SBS ONE http://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight
How many millions of people will be forced to leave their homes by 2050?
This documentary looks at the so-called hotspots of climate change in
the Sahel zone, Indonesia and the Russian Tundra.
Lake Chad in the Sahel zone has already shrunk by 90 percent since the
1960s due to the increasing heat. About 40 million people will be forced
to migrate to places where there is enough rainfall. Migration has
always existed as a strategy to adapt to a changing environment. But the
number of those forced to migrate solely because of climate change has
increased dramatically since the 1990s. It is a double injustice: after
becoming rich at the expense of the rest of the world, the
industrialized countries are now polluting the atmosphere with their
emissions and bringing a second misfortune to the inhabitants of the
poorer regions. One of them is Mohammed Ibrahim: as Lake Chad got hotter
and drier, he decided to go where the temperatures were less extreme
and there was still a little water, trekking with his wife, children and
70 camels from Niger to Chad and then further south. The journey lasted
several years and many members of his herd died of thirst. Now he and
his family are living in a refugee camp: they only have seven camels
left. Mohammed is one of many who have left their homelands in the Sahel
- not because of conflict and crises, but because of the high
temperatures. He's a real climate refugee.
A heat wave is causing unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Meanwhile, the World Meteorological Organization just declared July 2019 the hottest month ever recorded. We speak with Jason Box, professor and ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, about the intensifying climate crisis.
He says humanity must move toward living in balance with the environment. “If we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ultimately stabilize CO2 … there’s no real prospect for a stable society or even a governable society,” Box says. “Perpetual growth on a finite planet is, by definition, impossible.”
After Europe experienced record-breaking temperatures this month,
climate scientists are now concerned that a heat wave will settle
farther north. This week, a so-called “heat dome” is expected to strike
over the Arctic, causing worries about potential ice melt and rising
sea levels. Washington Post reporter Andrew Freedman joins Hari
Sreenivasan to discuss the causes and consequences.
"Switching just some of the huge subsidies supporting fossil fuels to
renewables would unleash a runaway clean energy revolution, according to
a new report, significantly cutting the carbon emissions that are
driving the climate crisis.
Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support,
compared with $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for
Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said."
