On land, Australia’s rising heat is ‘apocalyptic.’ In the ocean, it’s worse.: Washington Post

"The Washington Post’s examination of accelerated warming in the waters off Tasmania marks this year’s final installment of its global series “2C: Beyond the Limit,” which identified hot spots around the world. The investigation has shown that disastrous impacts from climate change aren’t a problem lurking in the distant future: They are here now. 

Nearly a tenth of the planet has already warmed 2 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, and the abrupt rise in temperature related to human activity has transformed parts of the Earth in radical ways. 

In the United States, New Jersey is among the fastest-warming states, and its average winter has grown so warm that lakes no longer freeze as they once did. Canadian islands are crumbling into the sea because a blanket of sea ice no longer protects them from crashing waves. Fisheries from Japan to Angola to Uruguay are collapsing as their waters warm. Arctic tundra is melting away in Siberia and Alaska, exposing the remains of woolly mammoths buried for thousands of years and flooding the gravesites of indigenous people who have lived in an icy world for centuries. 

Australia is a poster child for climate change. Wildfires are currently raging on the outskirts of its most iconic city and drought is choking a significant portion of the country."

Read the Washington Post article

'Blown away': Safe climate niche closing fast, with billions at risk: SMH

By Peter Hannam

May 5, 2020

As much as one-third of the world's population will be exposed to Sahara Desert-like heat within half a century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the pace of recent years.

Scientists from China, the US and Europe found that the narrow

climate niche that has supported human society would shift more over the next 50 years than it had in the preceding 6000 years.

"As many as 3.5 billion people will be exposed to "near-unliveable" temperatures averaging 29 degrees through the year by 2070. Less than 1 per cent of the Earth's surface now endures such heat.

That heat compares with the narrow 11- to 15-degree range that has supported civilisation over the past six millennia, according to research published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

Xu Chi, a researcher at China's Nanjing University and one of the paper's authors, said: "We were frankly blown away by our own initial results. As our findings were so striking, we took an extra year to carefully check all assumptions and computations."

Read the complete SMH article

Australian businesses call for climate crisis and virus economic recovery to be tackled together: The Guardian

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australia Industry Group, says Covid-19 and climate are ‘urgent’ challenges that overlap.


A leading Australian business group is calling for the two biggest economic challenges in memory – recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and cutting greenhouse gas emissions – to be addressed together, saying it would boost growth and put the country on a firm long-term footing.

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says economic recovery from the virus and the transition required to meet net-zero emissions by 2050 are overlapping issues that should be taken on together.

“There’s a lot that we can do to rebuild stronger and cleaner,” Willox planned to say on Tuesday, according to a speech released in advance.

“The need is urgent. Covid-19 and climate are bigger than any economic challenge we’ve faced in the last century.” 

Read the complete The Guardian article

NSW and Queensland coal industry uses as much water as all Sydney households, report finds: The Guardian

"The coal industry in New South Wales and Queensland is using as much water as all of Sydney’s households, according to new research.

A new report by University of Adelaide water resources academic Ian Overton, commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation, used public data to examine the impact of coal mining and coal-fired power on water resources.

It finds the amount of water consumed by coal mining and coal-fired power in NSW and Queensland is about 383bn litres a year, roughly equivalent to the household water needs of 5.2 million people."

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Read the complete The Guardian article 

 ' “While farmers recover from the last devastating drought and prepare for the next, each year the coal industry uses as much freshwater as every household in Queensland or the entire population of Sydney,” she said.

“When you add coal-fired electricity’s water consumption and contamination to its climate pollution, it’s clear Australia should rapidly replace coal-fired power with clean energy.

“Becoming a modern renewable energy nation will enable us to weather future shocks and become a safer, more sustainable and resilient country.”  '

‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal: Rolling Stone

'Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”

That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.” Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.” '

Read the Rolling Stone article

14 ways to turn your coronavirus cabin fever into climate action: Grist

In these times of unprecedented uncertainty, my to-do list helps me stay sane.

It doesn’t matter that I have no places to go or people to see. With COVID-19 tossing normal life down the drain the world over, the shred of normalcy helps me stave off apathy, paralysis, and my sudden aversion to wearing proper pants.

I’m not the only one desperate for a little structure in my life in the age of social distancing and sheltering in place. Many of us who are fortunate enough to stay home during this crisis have been busy establishing work-life boundaries, maintaining an exercise routine, and staying in touch with loved ones. While these are all great ways to break up the monotony of sheltering in place, it’s also possible to pencil climate action into your newfound daily routine.

 

To get started, Grist put together a to-do list of daily climate-related activities that are compatible with social distancing for two weeks straight.

Day 1: Stock up — thoughtfully. Before you speed out to the store and panic-buy everything in sight, stop and take inventory. Check out everything you already own, notice what should be consumed soon, and write down what you really need. Bulk beans, lentils, and grains are solid options: They’ll stay good for ages, are healthy and versatile, and are climate-friendly foods. And having a consolidated, well-planned list and an organized fridge will prevent food waste — a major contributor to climate change — and save you unnecessary trips to the store. You can even take a first step towards growing some of your own food by buying an herb to grow on your windowsill — mint, sage, oregano, parsley, and rosemary are all pretty hard to kill. (Before you finalize your shopping list, check out the action items for Days 2, 5, and 10.)

Day 2: Power strips to the rescue. Now that you’re working from home (alongside a partner, perhaps, or kids home from school), consolidate your outlets and save electricity by plugging your chargers into power strips that can be switched off when you don’t need them. Ditto if you have a toaster, coffee machine, and electric kettle all plugged in on the kitchen counter. If you don’t own power strips, add them to your list for Day 1 — lots of essential stores sell them. It’s easy to forget about all the appliances we leave plugged in to suck up power like vampires, but now that you aren’t rushing off to work, it’s easy to stop wasting power.

Day 3: Junk mail begone! By your third day indoors, it’s probably become apparent just how much junk mail piles up when left to its own devices. Why companies still send snail mail advertisements addressed to “Current Resident” is beyond me, but asking to be taken off their lists will save paper, energy, and your time. The website Catalog Choice makes it easy to get off the mailing lists of businesses that just won’t leave you alone. Now’s also a good time to switch all your monthly bills and medical statements to online only if you haven’t already.

Read the original Grist article

The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?: GRIST

' “I think the main issue is that people focus way, way too much on people’s personal footprints, and whether they fly or not, without really dealing with the structural things that really cause carbon dioxide levels to go up,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

Transportation makes up a little over 20 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. (In the United States, it makes up around 28 percent.) That’s a significant chunk, but it also means that even if all travel were completely carbon-free (imagine a renewable-powered, electrified train system, combined with personal EVs and battery-powered airplanes), there’d still be another 80 percent of fossil fuel emissions billowing into the skies.

So where are all those emissions coming from? For one thing, utilities are still generating roughly the same amount of electricity — even if more of it’s going to houses instead of workplaces. Electricity and heating combined account for over 40 percent of global emissions. Many people around the world rely on wood, coal, and natural gas to keep their homes warm and cook their food — and in most places, electricity isn’t so green either." '

Read the original GRIST article