Despite America’s intense political polarization over climate change, the scientific measurement of global warming is not in dispute. Since 1900, the earth as a whole has warmed by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, an empirical fact that has become an official statistic of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It is a seemingly minuscule and barely perceptible increase of average temperature, but spread over the entire surface of the earth that extra energy accumulates into an enormous force. Just what the impact is on the climate system is something that scientists are only now beginning to understand.

“Seemingly very small changes can have very big implications,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

The 1.4 degree rise in average temperature means the entire surface of earth’s 500 million square kilometers has become home to between 250 and 500 million megawatts of energy that used to escape the planet’s atmospheric shell into space. That’s an extra 0.5 to one watt, or roughly one Christmas light bulb’s worth of heat, falling on every square meter of land and sea.

“It might seem small, but it actually is very significant when you look at earth’s history,” said Pushker Kharecha, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and The Earth Institute at Columbia University. For the climate to be relatively stable, he said, the energy balance must remain “within a small fraction of a watt [per square meter].”

“No question about it, it’s a lot of energy,” said Warren Washington, a senior scientist at NCAR.

In a year’s time, this energy imbalance is roughly equivalent to 15 to 30 times the global energy consumption of 2007, or to the amount of power generated by 250,000 to half a million large coal-fired power plants.

Natural fluctuations in solar output are “somewhat” responsible, Kharecha said. But “when we look at the interdecadal trends, it’s very clear that the human force is what’s causing the vast majority of change in recent decades.”

“What humans are doing is creating an imbalance,” said Jeff Kiehl, a senior scientist in the climate modeling section of NCAR. “We’re … putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which limits the amount of flow of infrared radiation [heat] going back out into space.”

As a result, the planet as a whole is heating up, Kiehl said, because “[earth's] response is to warm up or cool down in response to any energy imbalance.”

“It’s a fundamental law of physics that energy is conserved. It can’t be created or destroyed. It can be transferred or transformed,” he continued. “If we’re trapping infrared radiation on this planet that energy has to go somewhere. It can’t just disappear.”

Extra Energy and Extreme Weather

So where exactly does all the extra energy go, and how does it influence earth’s complex weather phenomena? “Some goes into the oceans and some as latent heat in the atmosphere, and that energy is available to be transformed into things like storms,” Kiehl explained.

Scientists say most of the extra energy ends up warming the world’s seas because of water’s enormous capacity to trap heat. The rest goes into the ground or toward raising temperatures in the atmosphere. That captured heat can melt ice caps and evaporate water, creating additional water vapor, a greenhouse gas.

The extra moisture can also power climatic extremes, including severe thunderstorms.

Consistent with this picture of rising heat and moisture in the atmosphere, Kiehl said, is that the “frequency and intensity of extreme weather events should also increase,” including record heat waves, floods, blizzards and droughts.

“The big question is, is that what we’re seeing today?”

Climate scientists say the lack of uniform and lengthy historical data and the complexity of the climate system makes it difficult to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between the extra heat and extreme weather events, which seem to be occurring with alarming frequency in recent years.

“There’s a lot of complexity,” said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at NCAR. “You can’t understand the [climate] system with simple links.”

But amid the current wild extremes the question is growing in importance. A quick look at some recent devastating weather events reveals why:

Across the U.S. Midwest and East Coast, temperatures climbed to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this month. According to NOAA’s National Weather Service, 1,149 daily high maximum temperature records were broken between July 1 and July 19.

July 2010 was Russia’s hottest July in at least 130 years. Temperatures reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Moscow as wildfires burned hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and peatlands. The fires destroyed about a third of Russia’s cultivable land, leading to a temporary ban on wheat exports that sent food prices soaring.

The ongoing drought in East Africa is the worst to strike the region in six decades. Somalia has been particularly hard-hit as crop failure exacerbates a humanitarian crisis caused by military conflict and years of famine. The UN estimates that 10 million people are threatened by starvation.

In May 2011, the combination of heavy rains and snowmelt from a stormy winter fueled the worst floods to hit the Mississippi River Basin since at least 1937, prompting the Army Corps of Engineers to blow up levees to save cities from the surging waters.

Last year in Australia heavy precipitation triggered mass flooding from Dec. 2010 to Jan. 2011. In Queensland, flooding covered an area equal to the size of France and Germany. Thousands were evacuated from their homes, with total damage estimated to be $20 billion.

Not So Simple

“These things are consistent with the kind of changes we expect to see [from global warming],” said Kathleen Miller, a NCAR scientist who studies natural resource systems and the impact of climate change on societies. But she was wary of identifying global warming’s role.

“Anything you see is some combination of natural internal variability and the effects of climate change,” she said. “For any particular event, you can’t clearly separate out what is the primary influence.”

“We’re more certain of some things than others,” said Meehl. “Temperature is the one where there’s the greatest certainty.”

For instance, the United States had twice as many record-high daily temperatures than record lows from 2000-2009 compared to the 1950s, when the two were about equal, according to a study by Meehl.

That same trend is seen in decadal average temperatures, said Washington of NCAR, which “have gone up over time.” Other statistics show “the number of heat waves is increasing and the number of cold waves is decreasing,” he said.

Hurricanes, which get their power from hot humid air over the oceans, are also on the rise in parts of the world. Trenberth says there is a direct causal link with extra atmospheric heat.

“It’s now one degree Fahrenheit warmer and there’s four percent more moisture [over the oceans] than 30 to 40 years ago. That’s the environment in which all storms now develop … [and these are] conditions that tend to make storms more intense.”

In the tropical North Atlantic, said Kharecha, there’s a “strong correlation” between increasing sea surface temperatures and the “frequency and intensity” of hurricanes since the 1950s. But that trend cannot be found in hurricane trends worldwide, and the lack of reliable data before the 1960s — when satellites were first put into use — means more research is needed.

Extremes in rainfall patterns are also likely being affected, data shows. In the U.S., the amount of heavy precipitation events increased 16-20 percent from 1958 to 2007, said Washington, referencing a 2009 report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

“The hydrological cycle of the earth is spinning up as we put more energy into the climate system,” said Kiehl.

A Key Metric

With global average temperature expected to rise another 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of the current century, scientific certainty over just how the extra energy will ripple through the climate system will likely lag behind the occurrence of extreme weather events.

But there remains little doubt among scientists that a planetary energy imbalance is changing the weather system. This, more than rising average temperatures, is perhaps the most important metric for understanding changes to the climate system.

“Temperature is a way to measure the heat, it’s a great metric,” Kharecha said. But energy imbalance is “the most fundamental gauge of the state of the climate system at any given time” and can help provide insight into “how much we must reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas levels to restore the planet’s energy balance.”

Source IBTimes Canada

Named by the French in 1792 the Peak stands 262 metres above sea level. At the base of the impressive rock formation, signs point the way to what is described as a two hour round trip to the summit. Being a very hot and humid day and with the suggestion that it should only be attempted by fit hikers, I decided to give the summit climb a miss!

There was another sign at the base that caught my attention. The origins of the rock. Geologists had established that the massive granite formation was formed 120 million years ago; a long time. The sign went on to detail how the cave on the top of Frenchman’s Peak was formed by waves over thousands of years, 40 million years ago during the Middle Eocene period, when sea level was 250 metres higher than today.

Excerpt from SkepticalScience.com

Around 40 million years ago, sea surface temperatures rose around 5°C in a period called the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO). A new study Transient Middle Eocene Atmospheric CO₂ and Temperature Variations (Bijl et al 2010) has found atmospheric CO2 was the primary driver of this global warming event. During this period, CO2 levels rose dramatically to 2 to 3 times previous levels. This study gives us further insight into how climate responds to changing CO2 levels and provides evidence for strong climate sensitivity. Read more Skeptical Science article

As you watch the following YouTube videos, it may strike you as it did me that everything viewed from the top of Frenchman’s Peak by these visitors; 40 million years ago was below the sea! A very different world!

With continuing rises in greenhouse emissions Frenchman’s Peak may one day return to its origins.

We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years since global recordkeeping began in 1880 have come since 1998.

The effects of rising temperature are pervasive. Higher temperatures diminish crop yields, melt the mountain glaciers that feed rivers, generate more-destructive storms, increase the severity of flooding, intensify drought, cause more-frequent and destructive wildfires, and alter ecosystems everywhere. We are altering the earth’s climate, setting in motion trends we do not always understand with consequences we cannot anticipate.

Crop-withering heat waves have lowered grain harvests in key food-producing regions in recent years. One with a profoundly direct human impact was the searing heat wave that broke temperature records across Europe in 2003. The intense heat, which contributed to the world grain harvest falling short of consumption by 90 million tons, also claimed more than 52,000 lives.

There has also been a dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the area of the globe experiencing very dry conditions expanded from less than 15 percent in the 1970s to roughly 30 percent by 2002. The scientists attribute part of the change to a rise in temperature and part to reduced precipitation, with high temperatures becoming progressively more important during the latter part of the period. A 2009 report published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reinforces these findings. It concludes that if atmospheric CO2 climbs to 450–600 ppm, the world will face irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions of the world. The study likened the conditions to those of the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.

The warming is caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases and other pollutants in the atmosphere. Of the greenhouse gases, CO2 accounts for 63 percent of the recent warming trend, methane 18 percent, and nitrous oxide 6 percent, with several lesser gases accounting for the remaining 13 percent. Carbon dioxide comes mostly from electricity generation, heating, transportation, and industry. In contrast, human-caused methane and nitrous oxide emissions come largely from agriculture—methane from rice paddies and cattle and nitrous oxide from the use of nitrogenous fertilizer.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the principal driver of climate change, have climbed from nearly 280 parts per million (ppm) when the Industrial Revolution began around 1760 to 387 ppm in 2009. The annual rise in atmospheric CO2 level, now one of the world’s most predictable environmental trends, results from emissions on a scale that is overwhelming nature’s capacity to absorb carbon. In 2008, some 7.9 billion tons of carbon were emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and 1.5 billion tons were emitted from deforestation, for a total of 9.4 billion tons. But since nature has been absorbing only about 5 billion tons per year in oceans, soils, and vegetation, nearly half of those emissions stay in the atmosphere, pushing up CO2 levels.

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is produced when organic matter is broken down under anaerobic conditions, including the decomposition of plant material in bogs, organic materials in landfills, or forage in a cow’s stomach. Methane can also be released with the thawing of permafrost, the frozen ground underlying the tundra that covers nearly 9 million square miles in the northern latitudes. All together, Arctic soils contain more carbon than currently resides in the atmosphere, which is a worry considering that permafrost is now melting in Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia, creating lakes and releasing methane. Once they get under way, permafrost melting, the release of methane and CO2, and rising temperature create a self-reinforcing trend, what scientists call a “ positive feedback loop.” The risk is that the release of a massive amount of methane into the atmosphere from melting permafrost could simply overwhelm efforts to stabilize climate.

Another unsettling development is the effect of atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs) consisting of soot particles from burning coal, diesel fuel, or wood. These particles affect climate in three ways. First, by intercepting sunlight, they heat the upper atmosphere. Second, because they also reflect sunlight, they have a dimming effect, lowering the earth’s surface temperature. And third, if particles from these brown clouds are deposited on snow and ice, they darken the surface and accelerate melting. These effects are of particular concern in India and China, where a large ABC over the Tibetan Plateau is contributing to the melting of glaciers that supply the major rivers of Asia. Soot deposition causes earlier seasonal melting of mountain snow in ranges as different as the Himalayas of Asia and the Sierra Nevada of California, and it is also believed to be accelerating the melting of Arctic sea ice.

In contrast to CO2, which may remain in the atmosphere for a century or more, soot particles in ABCs are typically airborne for only a matter of weeks. Thus, once coal-fired power plants are closed or wood cooking stoves are replaced with solar cookers, atmospheric soot disappears rapidly.

If we continue with business as usual, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) projected rise in the earth’s average temperature of 1.1–6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century seems all too possible. Unfortunately, during the several years since the IPCC study was released, both global CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations have exceeded those in its worst-case scenario. With each passing year the chorus of urgency from the scientific community intensifies. Each new report indicates that we are running out of time. For instance, a landmark 2009 study by a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that the effects of climate change will be twice as severe as those they projected as recently as six years prior. Instead of a likely global temperature rise of 2.4 degrees Celsius, they now see a rise exceeding 5 degrees.

Another report, this one prepared independently as a background document for the December 2009 international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, indicated that every effort should be made to hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Beyond this, dangerous climate change is considered inevitable. To hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees, the scientists note that CO2 emissions should be reduced by 60–80 percent immediately, but since this is not possible, they note that, “To limit the extent of the overshoot, emissions should peak in the near future.”

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change sponsored an analysis of some 40 scientific studies that link rising temperature with changes in ecosystems. Among the many changes reported are spring arriving nearly two weeks earlier in the United States, tree swallows nesting nine days earlier than they did 40 years ago, and a northward shift of red fox habitat that has it encroaching on the Arctic fox’s range. Inuits have been surprised by the appearance of robins, a bird they have never seen before. Indeed, there is no word in Inuit for “robin.”

Douglas Inkley, National Wildlife Federation senior science advisor, notes, “We face the prospect that the world of wildlife that we now know—and many of the places we have invested decades of work in conserving as refuges and habitats for wildlife—will cease to exist as we know them, unless we change this forecast.” Unfortunately, this observation holds true for humans as well. If we cannot quickly reduce carbon emissions, it is civilization itself that is at risk.

Adapted from Chapter 3, “Climate Change and the Energy Transition,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4.

Additional data and information sources at http://www.earth-policy.org/.

Photo courtesy dirtybusinessthefilm.com

The following presentation may make you think twice about how you use or limit the use of electricity. For Jeff Goodall, author of Big Coal, the Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future, he says: Clean coal is sort of like healthy cigarettes or limited nuclear war or fat free donuts. It’s one of the great oxymoron’s of our time.

“Next in the sales brochure, we are off back to the Northern Hemisphere to a balmy climate that until now has been largely overlooked by holiday makers, Siberia.”

“On offer here we have one or two new tourist attractions—thawing peat bogs!! This could be symbolized by thinking of the Olympic rings linking up and ever increasing in diameter. As the permafrost starts to melt the outside of the circles fall inward in an ever widening pool of melting peat. As the sides collapse in a positive feedback, puddles become ponds, which become lakes. A real sight, but not for any freestyle Olympic swimmer to tackle—better leave this for the extreme sports crowd. Covering an area of a million square miles and frozen for eleven thousand years, Siberia has, as is the situation with the Arctic, been storing carbon since the last ice age. The simple botanical lesson works like this. The moss and lichen surviving on the frozen permafrost over thousands of years have been slowly absorbing massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Until now it’s been a little too chilly for the seasonal growth to fully decompose, so for the last eleven thousand years the ever thickening, year after year layers, are now around 25 meters thick. We have on offer again, assisted by the standard no-option heater, up to a quarter of all the carbon that has been taken up in the world vegetation and soils since the last ice age. Now as average temperatures rise at three times the global average these frozen Siberian peat bogs are melting into putrid puddles, then swamps, then lakes. Lacking in oxygen, they release methane. More than twenty times more powerful and faster acting as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the critical level of atmospheric concentrations could be reached, exceeded, and on a run to massive climatic destabilization in a heartbeat.”

“From 2002 to 2005 reports stated, that while the West Siberian peat lands had remained stable, the big thaw was now on, warming faster than anywhere on the planet. With every year the spring melt has been starting earlier and earlier adding to the positive feedback. Increasing levels of rainfall are making the area far wetter and with spring coming sooner and the winter freeze coming later, many areas of Siberia and Alaska are retaining their warmth longer. As the peat on the bottom of the lakes is converting its methane cocktail, the gases bubble to the surface. Some of the southernmost lakes are remaining unfrozen during winter, lakes that had frozen each year for thousands of years. Where the winter snow does fall, it acts as a blanket to keep the lower levels warm, where the spring melt can add even more moisture. Add to that the fact that the dark lakes, as with the expanses of open ocean in the Arctic free of sea ice, absorb more warmth the cumulative effects of warming are amplified. These areas were now being referred to as an ‘ecological landslide that is probably irreversible.’”

“Where the pebble had fallen previously on hard ground, it now falls into a quicksand of fetid swamp. Lakes of melting permafrost can be seen to stretch for hundreds of kilometers with the clear and present danger that methane release is happening at an alarming rate already.” “As the zero-degree isotherm line moves ever further north (the point at which the land reached the melting point of ice, 0 degrees centigrade) year after year it is not a case of if, but one of inevitability. Not a case of, will the methane contribute to further planetary warming, but how much and when will the critical level be reached?”

“In northern Siberia lakes are releasing methane at a rate five times higher than previously estimated. Studies by Katey Walter, an International Polar Year postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, reported in Nature in 2006 that her team’s calculations increase the present estimates of methane emissions from northern wetlands by between 10 and 63 percent. She explains: ‘This newly recognized source of methane is so far not included in climate models.’ Estimates suggest the area has 500 gigatons (1,100 trillion pounds) of carbon, largely in the form of ancient dead plant material. Walter suggests: ‘Permafrost models predict significant thaw of permafrost during this century, which means that yedoma permafrost is like a time bomb waiting to go off—as it continues to thaw, tens of thousands of teragrams of methane can be released to the atmosphere enhancing climate change.’”

“Monitoring of methane releases is becoming an advanced area of research. London’s Royal Holloway College oversees a large international program led by Euan Nisbet to monitor emissions. Their studies suggest that releases from the West Siberian region are up to 100,000 tonnes per day, with a representative warming effect on the planet as a whole of greater than all of the emissions from the United States manmade attributable emissions. Nisbet suggests that ‘If the peat lands become wetter with warming and permafrost degradation, methane releases to the atmosphere will dramatically increase. Methane storage once released is estimated to be equivalent to all manmade emissions for the last 200 years.’

When?

“It has already started,” said the super salesman.

Get the book in hard cover or e-book HERE

In an article published June 18 in Science magazine, scientists reveal the growing atmospheric concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet.

The findings of the report emerged from a synthesis of recent research on the world’s oceans, carried out by two of the world’s leading marine scientists, one from The University of Queensland in Australia, and one from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the USA.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, lead author of the report and Director of The University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, says the findings have enormous implications for mankind, particularly if the trend continues.

He said that the Earth’s ocean, which produces half of the oxygen we breathe and absorbs 30% of human-generated CO₂, is equivalent to its heart and lungs. “Quite plainly, the Earth cannot do without its ocean. This study, however, shows worrying signs of ill health.

“It’s as if the Earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day!”

He went on to say, “We are entering a period in which the very ocean services upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail,” says Prof. Hoegh-Guldberg. “Further degradation will continue to create enormous challenges and costs for societies worldwide.”

He warned that we may soon see “sudden, unexpected changes that have serious ramifications for the overall well-being of humans,” including the capacity of the planet to support people. “This is further evidence that we are well on the way to the next great extinction event.”

The “fundamental and comprehensive” changes to marine life identified in the report include rapidly warming and acidifying oceans, changes in water circulation and expansion of dead zones within the ocean depths.

These are driving major changes in marine ecosystems: less abundant coral reefs, sea grasses and mangroves (important fish nurseries); fewer, smaller fish; a breakdown in food chains; changes in the distribution of marine life; and more frequent diseases and pests among marine organisms.

Report co-author, Dr John F. Bruno, an Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina, says greenhouse gas emissions are modifying many physical and geochemical aspects of the planet’s oceans, in ways “unprecedented in nearly a million years.” “This is causing fundamental and comprehensive changes to the way marine ecosystems function,” Dr Bruno said.

“We are becoming increasingly certain that the world’s marine ecosystems are approaching tipping points. These tipping points are where change accelerates and causes unrelated impacts on other systems, the results of which we really have no power or model to foresee.”

The authors conclude: “These challenges underscore the urgency with which world leaders must act to limit further growth of greenhouse gases and thereby reduce the risk of these events occurring. Ignoring the science is not an option.”

In their study, the researchers sought to address a gap in previous studies that have often overlooked the affects of climate change on marine ecosystems, due to the fact that they are complex and can be logistically difficult to study.

According to leading US marine scientist, the University of Maine’s School of Marine Services Professor Robert S. Steneck, the study provides a valuable indicator of the ecological risk posed by climate change, particularly to coastal regions.

“While past studies have largely focused on single global threats such as ‘global warming’, Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno make a compelling case for the cumulative impacts of multiple planet-scale threats,” Prof. Steneck said.

Source Science Daily

“Assuming no new climate policies,” the EIA says, “worldwide increases in output per capita and relatively moderate population growth overwhelm projected improvements in energy intensity and carbon intensity.”

EIA’s predictions may not come true for two reasons. First, China, the country that emits the most greenhouse gases (GHG), pledged to reduce emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. Second, last week, companies from China and Finland signed 12 clean technology deals with a value of about $250 million. 

Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang said of the deals, “As China is experiencing rapid industrialization and urbanization, we have to build a resource-saving and environmentally friendly society as soon as possible.” He added, “Finland has advanced capability in clean tech innovation and application, so there’s great potential for cooperation between the two countries in this regard. I hope our companies will grasp the opportunity, strengthen development and application of clean tech and carry out more reciprocal cooperation.”

What about America?

What about the U.S., the second largest emitter of GHGs? Unfortunately, the outlook for climate change legislation to pass in Congress this year is not sunny with November elections coming up for Congress followed by the December break for Congress.

“There is little chance anything will happen this year,” said Tom Lewis, chief executive. “Healthcare legislation was passed because the president made a major push but no one is willing to take a major step prior to the mid-term elections,” Lewis said. “The Democrats are in line to lose a number of seats and I don’t see a passionate push between now and November 2 to get this over the finishing line,” he added.

President Obama said he hopes bill will pass this year because the oil spill highlights the need for energy reform, but he may have used up his political influence to pass healthcare reform legislation in March.

“Obama may have used all his political capital to get healthcare over the finishing line,” said Chelsea Maxwell, managing partner of the Clark Group and former senior climate advisor to Senator John Warner.

A recent article in the Guardian, a British newspaper, hit the proverbial nail on the head when it comes to the U.S. government and the oil industry. The article says that politicians have “allowed themselves to be seduced by the cheap petrol and tax provided by BP.” The article added that in the U.S. “big oil firms, like big banks are too big to bury.” There is one factor the article overlooks: the American people, who are disgusted by the disaster in the Gulf, and BP’s bungling of it.

Source Care2

The greatest coal rush the world has seen is being conducted as if climate change is not happening, and coal is king.

It wasn’t always this way. Coalmining has a long history in Australia, but coal wasn’t an important export until the last few decades. Before 1960, Queensland had no coal-export industry. Most of the coal mined was used to fuel state-owned power stations, or BHP’s Newcastle and Illawarra steel mills. As recently as 1981, Australia was but a minor medallist in the global coal trade – exporting less than half as much coal as the US. But just as climate change inconveniently peeked over the horizon, Australia started to bet big on coal. As recently released cabinet documents reinforce, the Fraser government, with strong support from the eastern states, decided to use cheap coal to attract energy intensive investment. State governments provided export infrastructure, low royalties and long-term sweetheart deals between state-owned power generators and industries such as aluminium smelting. The demise of BHP’s steel production in Newcastle, the rise of Asian demand and a UN climate convention that let fossil-fuel exporters off the hook by counting emissions where fuels are burned were just some of the many green lights given to coal exporters.

The coal push became a rush, and Australia quickly became headquarters for a global trade that bakes as it booms: our thermal coal pushes cheap and dirty electricity on many countries, and our coking coal and iron ore underpin an Asian boom in the use of blast furnaces, the most emission-intensive steel-making option. (In developed countries, most steel is produced in electric arc furnaces fed with either scrap metal or direct reduced iron, which can be made without coal.)

Yet, the coal industry remains a benign abstraction for most, not much more than a hum of economic and political waffle on the periphery of everyday life: “biggest export, thousands of jobs, economic backbone”, “‘clean coal’ on the way”. Many link coal to global warming, but conclude that coal exports are a necessary evil. Few appreciate the incomprehensible magnitude and pace of the current rush, or ponder its climate-changing consequences. Right now, around 120 mines across New South Wales and Queensland export more than 280 million tonnes of black coal annually (Victoria’s vast brown coal reserves have not been economically viable as an export proposition).

Coal used to be labour intensive: in 1908 it employed more than three-and-a-half times as many people (as a share of Australia’s population) as it does today. The process is now largely automated. Coal is extracted with the help of gargantuan dragline excavators, hauled by three-storey-high trucks to piles from which conveyor belts tip it into freight trains, which can be 100 carriages long and take three locomotives to shift. It then clatters and grinds its way to one of nine coal terminals dotted along the east coast of Australia, where ships queue to ferry loads of up to 200,000 tonnes to ports around the world. Along with all the diesel and electricity used to extract and transport coal, mines release large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO2. But these emissions pale in comparison with those released when the coal is burned offshore. A single train might carry a load that will generate the annual emissions equivalent of 6000 cars, a ship the equivalent of more than 90,000 cars. With every tonne of coal generating 2.7 tonnes of CO2, our exports generate more than 750 million tonnes of CO2 annually – much more than the emissions occuring in Australia. The plan to double exports before 2020 puts us on track to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest carbon exporter in the next 15 years.

There’s really no physical limit on the rush. Australia’s recoverable coal reserves are estimated at 40 billion tonnes; there’s enough to increase exports for the rest of this century. Around 40 new export mines or expansions of existing ones are under way, thousands of kilometres of new railway track are being laid, and new coal terminals are being built (and existing ones expanded) to handle a doubling of exports. The scale of the expansion makes it easy to forget that the industry is the result of more than a century of deliberate and generous government subsidy. Most coalmines built in the first half of the twentieth century were government-owned. When coalmining, power generation and railways were virtual state-run monopolies, it made sense to co-locate rail and power infrastructure close to the mines. As coal has become an export commodity and domestic power has been opened up to competition, the coal industry was gifted an unassailable competitive advantage courtesy of the taxpayer.

Nothing captures the government’s role in developing Australia’s coal industry quite like the eulogies to Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. As Bob Katter Jr put it, were you to remove the close relationship between Sir Joh and Sir Leslie Thiess from history, you would “erase the coal industry from the face of Queensland”. Having paved the way for Thiess (along with Mitsui and Peabody) to establish Queensland’s first big export mines, Bjelke-Petersen championed the expansion of the coal industry, assisting with substantial infrastructure and a five-cents-a-ton royalty rate that companies such as Utah and Mitsubishi found impossible to refuse. As a young MP, Katter had serious doubts about public investments that he saw as “irresponsible risk-taking”; now he says Joh was nation-building. However, there’s no mention of the jury finding that Sir Les bribed Sir Joh so he would win coal projects, and no mention of the 453 million tonnes of CO2 that Queensland’s coal exports now add to the atmosphere annually. Taking all this into consideration, Katter’s youthful caution looks inadvertently prescient: it was irresponsible risk-taking, and it will come back to bite us.

Only not just yet, as successive generations of politicians and bureaucrats have decided that doubling the stakes to stay at the table is the way to avoid paying coal liabilities. Just keep playing, and let the next generation cash in what’s left of the chips. Having spent billions subsidising coal exports into existence, governments won’t walk away. That would mean having to say “no” to friends and ex-colleagues: to Australia’s largest coal union (the CFMEU), which has regularly been federal Labor’s biggest external donor; to coal baron Clive Palmer whose Mineralogy Pty Ltd is the biggest external donor to Queensland’s Liberal National Party; and to former premiers, treasurers and ministers now paid by the coal industry. It would also mean saying “no” to senior politicians on both sides of politics who have recently made what locals call “fortunate purchases” of rural properties on which coalmining is anticipated. The media tips a 200% to 500% return on these properties, but only if the coal rush rolls on.

Governments are behaving as if the more hopeless their coal addiction, the less likely it is they will be asked to quit. Not a single Australian coal-fired power station has been closed to reduce emissions. Antique 1960s power stations are being dusted off, and a dozen new ones are in the planning stage. Much of the coal rush is only viable thanks to government subsidies to build, for example, ‘missing link’ railways. Queensland is currently spending more on coal-related infrastructure ($15.6 billion) than it has made from coal royalties over the past decade ($11.4 billion). For that $15.6 billion, the government, in partnership with the private sector, could replace more than one-third of Queensland’s existing coal-fired power stations with renewable energy generators. Instead, the “smart state” wants to spend it on doubling the amount of ‘world-class’ coal it exports. It also wants to salve Queensland’s budget by privatising coal-related port and rail assets, thereby hooking more private investors to the coal addiction.

In NSW the planning laws have been rewritten so that protections that would normally apply can be swept aside by ministerial fiat once a project is declared to be of state significance – which most coalmines are. Although 16 NSW rivers have been permanently damaged by careless mining – mainly as a result of subsidence caused by long-wall coalmines – the government is happy to consider coalmines underneath the water catchments of Sydney and the central coast. Calls for a kilometre-wide buffer around rivers and aquifers have been dismissed. Meanwhile, the Keneally government is getting back to the business of buying its own coalmines – even though the estimated value of the coal-fired power assets it is looking to privatise has reportedly fallen from $35 billion to $6 billion in just over a decade.

In Canberra, Kevin Rudd calls the coal industry “the backbone of regional Australia”. His resources minister, Martin Ferguson, regards new coal-fired power stations as inevitable and warns against holding back coal export growth. With the explicit aim of doubling exports, federal environmental approval and billions of dollars in subsidies are being given to expand port, rail and road infrastructure. And billions more are propping up pilot projects to help maintain the illusion that ‘carbon capture and storage’ might clean up Australia’s coal industry. On the other side of politics, where climate-change sceptics choose the leader, one of Tony Abbott’s first items of business was visiting a Hunter Valley coalmine to declare that this “great industry” should flourish – not merely survive.

When Shenhua funds a new rural health clinic in Gunnedah, when Rio Tinto’s Coal & Allied sponsors Newcastle’s NRL team, when BHP Billiton and Xstrata fund drought-relief concerts by the Sydney Symphony, coal stealthily locks in permanency. With each state-owned coal asset that is privatised, an implicit guarantee is given that the coal industry’s expansion will be unfettered. But it is not the governments addicted to coal that are the victims; most victims of the climate chaos being fuelled by Australian coal are yet to be born in places like Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa. The ordeal of the more immediate victims of the rush – Glenn Beutel and the thousands like him – is unknown to most Australians.

“Now just one last question if I can. I have looked over your plans for the future and see the strategy you have planned for global warming. Your other advisors, those of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the collective Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change amongst others, have mapped out the future with ‘best available science’ rising temperatures slowly degree by degree year by year. They may be right with the timing, only time will tell. They seem however to stop comfortingly at 2100. Just far enough into the future so that most of the decision makers here today, can get another few terms of office in and most of those born today, don’t feel immediately threatened, although anticipating an inconvenience to some extent, over the coming decades. My final question is, will you be stopping at 5.8 degrees warmer? Or will you be happy going a little higher, let’s say to 10 degrees or 15 or above? How much curry do you want in that vindaloo and how many of Mother Nature’s hot chilli peppers would you like to spice it up?” End excerpt.

Climate change could make half of the world uninhabitable for humans as a rise in temperature makes it too hot to survive, scientists have warned

Researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia and Purdue University in the US said global warming will not stop after 2100, the point where most previous projections have ended.

In fact temperatures may rise by up to 12C (21.6F) within just three centuries making many countries into deserts.

The study, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said humans will not be able to adapt or survive in such conditions.

Professor Tony McMichael, one of the authors, said if the world continues to pump out greenhouse gases at the current rate it will cause catastrophic warming.

“Under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees or even more,” he said. “If this happens, our current worries about sea level rise, occasional heatwaves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties will pale into insignificance beside a major threat – as much as half the currently inhabited globe may simply become too hot for people to live there.”

Professor Steven Sherwood, a fellow author, said there was no chance of the Earth reaching such temperatures this century.

But he said there was a good chance temperatures could rise by at least 7C (12.6F) by 2300, that would also make much of the world inhabitable.

“There’s something like a 50/50 chance of that over the long term,” he said.

Prof Sherwood said climate change research had been “short-sighted” not to probe the long-term consequences of the impact of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

“It needs to be looked at,” he said. “There’s not much we can do about climate change over the next two decades but there’s still a lot we can do about the longer term changes.”

::The world should shift to a low carbon economy not to stop climate change but to preserve ‘human dignity’, according to a report from a self-styled “eclectic” group of academics.

The UN process has failed, they argue, and a global approach concentrating on CO2 cuts will never work.

They urge instead the use of carbon tax revenue to develop technologies that can supply clean energy to everyone and provide ‘human dignity’.

Their so-called Hartwell Paper is criticised by others who say the UN process has curbed carbon emissions.

The paper is named after Hartwell House, the Buckinghamshire mansion, hotel and spa where the group of 14 academics from Europe, North America and Japan gathered in February to develop their ideas.

Source Telegraph UK