By Guy Pearse

(Sierra Club May/June 2010)

Drought revealed the skeletons of trees once covered by Lake Hume, a massive manmade reservoir bordering the states of New South Wales and Victoria.

If what Australia is experiencing is not global warming, it’s something that looks just like it.

The driest inhabited continent has just endured its warmest decade on record and its worst drought in history. It’s finally started raining again, but not before the 10-year “Big Dry” cost a quarter of all farm jobs. Most state capitals are turning to desalinating seawater, and severe water restrictions will remain a fact of city life. Water your garden in the middle of the day in Brisbane and you risk a AUS$200 fine; wash your car with potable city water in Melbourne and you’ll pay more than twice that. Drought is just the start of Australia’s torments, which also include floods, cyclones, and dust storms.

Hundred-year weather events seem to happen all the time now. Few openly link climate change to the 173 deaths in the Black Saturday bushfires of early 2009, but they are a horrible taste of what’s coming. Firefighters point to longer and more intense fire seasons, and scientists warn of a doubling or even trebling of extreme fire-weather days. In the wake of Black Saturday, a new level was added to the nation’s fire-danger rating system: catastrophic.

Australia is feeling the effects of climate change–and fueling them as well. It’s by far the world’s leading coal exporter, shipping out 290 million tons of coal a year from 120 inland mines, out of sight and out of mind for most Australians. The four companies that dominate the global coal trade–BHP Billiton, Xstrata, Anglo, and Rio Tinto–all have corporate offices in eastern Australia, as well as their largest coal-export investments. The coal rush down under also has lured the world’s two largest coal-mining companies, the U.S.-based Peabody and the China-based Shenhua. The government plans to let exports double in the next 10 years; by 2020, Australia will ship out as much carbon dioxide through coal as Saudi Arabia does today through oil.
Last year’s extreme weather events in Australia were capped by a mammoth dust storm that engulfed half of New South Wales and shrouded Sydney (above) in red dust.

Not long ago the Australian economy was said to ride on the sheep’s back. Now coal exports outnumber wool exports by 600 tons to 1, and most believe the economy rides a coal train. Coal is Australia’s biggest export, the centerpiece of a natural-resources sector partly credited with shielding the country from the global recession. Eighty percent of Australian coal is burned offshore–mainly in power plants and steel mills in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, but increasingly in China and India too. These coal-importing countries are the addicts, with booming economies based on the polluting fuel. Australia is their enabler.

Australians unwilling to see the irony of the situation sometimes have it forced on them. In 2007, cyclonic winds washed a coal tanker up on an iconic surf beach in New South Wales. Greenpeace seized the moment, projecting the words COAL CAUSES CLIMATE CHAOS onto the beleaguered ship’s hull. In Queensland a 500-year flood in 2008 submerged large open-pit coal mines, contaminating the Fitzroy River.

As striking as those images were, and as shocking as it is to most Australians to learn that coral bleaching will likely destroy the Great Barrier Reef within their lifetime, only a small handful of activists connect the coal-export industry with the climate change Australia is feeling. There is no Aussie counterpart, for example, to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal movement. Not one coal-fired power plant here has been closed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. On the contrary, previously decommissioned 1960s-era plants are being refurbished, and the coal industry flourishes with bipartisan political support.

That includes the Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, which has enthusiastically backed the doubling of Australia’s coal exports. Coal, Rudd has declared, is “the backbone of regional Australia.” The emissions-trading scheme he proposes is cloaked in the rhetoric of low-carbon economic transformation, but guarantees the future primacy of coal. No matter what reduction target Australia eventually accepts, its most-coal-dependent industries will get, on average, more than 80 percent of their emission permits for free, with no overall cap on their emissions or share of permits.
Much of the opposition to coal comes from farmers fearful of encroaching open pit coal mines like this one (below) in central Queensland.

The government openly acknowledges that emissions from these sectors will increase, and modeling released by the federal treasury suggests that even with Rudd’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction” scheme, actual emissions in 2020 will be higher than today’s. And conveniently, the 80 percent of Australian coal burned overseas is excluded from Australia’s emission targets.

Australia is attempting to reconcile its spiraling industrial emissions with its emissions-reduction commitments by buying cheap international carbon credits on a grand scale. It’s also seeking a change in international greenhouse-gas accounting rules so it can offload rapidly increasing carbon emissions from wildfires and drought as “natural disturbances.” And it wants credit for the huge amount of carbon that can potentially be sequestered in its soil, which may let the country avoid industrial emission cuts for another decade.

Ironically, the rest of the world views Rudd as an ecofriendly politician who ratified the Kyoto Protocol, championed an ambitious global climate agreement, and vowed to set a national target of lowering greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent by 2020. Barack Obama said Rudd was doing “a terrific job,” and Al Gore twice toured with him, heaping praise and recording a video for the prime minister’s Web site. Gore did distance himself from Rudd’s polluter-friendly emissions-trading scheme (“not what I would have written”), but the overall impression has been a glowing endorsement of the Australian government.

Rudd, at least, acknowledges that global warming is a problem. The other side of Australian politics is thoroughly controlled by climate skeptics. When “moderate” elements of the conservative opposition negotiated concessions from Rudd to make the proposed emissions-trading scheme even more polluter friendly, conservatives changed their leader rather than see it enacted. Their new leader, Tony Abbott, calls the scientific case for human-made global warming “absolute crap.”

The most conspicuous resistance to the Australian coal rush comes from farmers. It’s not that they link coal and climate change to the devastating drought (although scientists expect irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin, the most significant agricultural area, to be gone by 2100). Rather, coal mining and coal-bed methane extraction directly threaten the country’s 6 percent of arable land. In particular, farmers fear the mining could damage the headwaters and aquifers feeding into the Murray-Darling river system. The battle pits two of the country’s most potent lobbying forces against each other.

Rosemary Nankivell is one of hundreds of farmers whose outlook has been turned upside down. Since 1920, her family has farmed 5,000 acres of some of Australia’s best land, in the Liverpool Plains region of northwest New South Wales. Now she sees the devastation that coal mining has inflicted on farms in the neighboring Hunter Valley unfolding on her own doorstep: “We’re seeing the same divide-and-conquer strategy used to buy up farms, and we’re hearing the same hollow rhetoric about mining and farming coexisting peacefully and about mining not harming the rivers and groundwater. In truth, these companies don’t care about the devastation they leave behind.”

The farmers have attracted influential backing. The conservative National Party’s senate leader, Barnaby Joyce, for example, says, “There are certain peculiar areas in Australia where the quality of the land is so exceptional that you should not be compromising that for coal.” Yet Joyce is also a prominent greenhouse-gas skeptic and a supporter of coal mining; in 2006 he suggested that Australia should mine coal in Antarctica before others get to it.

A few well-connected farming communities may prevail in preserving their land, but it will scarcely dent Australia’s booming coal industry. Most transactions involve drought-weary farmers who can feel the climate changing, whether or not they blame human activity. As Nankivell puts it, “If someone is offered a million dollars for 500 acres of marginal country, they’re quietly taking the money.”

Perhaps as a subtle hint to would-be sellers, BHP Billiton, Xstrata, and others are sponsoring a “drought recovery concert” by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. “BHP Billiton brings soothing Symphony to drought-stricken farmers,” croons the press release. As greenhouse gases slowly broil Australia’s parched farms, the band plays on.

ON THE WEB See more photos from award-winning photographer Michael Hall.

Guy Pearse is a research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute.

The SE Asian region that spans from Vietnam to Myanmar contains 34% of the worlds coral reefs, possibly a third of the worlds mangroves and vast areas of seagrass. But this region also contains a rapidly burgeoning human population that is creating an ever worsening marine pollution problem. Last week saw the publication of a review about the region and its current marine pollution status by researchers at National University Singapore. This broad review is a stark reminder of the problems facing the marine environment of the region before it even considers the impacts of climate change.

Here is the abstract from the journal Biodiversity Conservation:

Pollutants, originating from both land and sea, are responsible for significant lethal and sub-lethal effects on marine life. Pollution impacts all trophic levels, from primary producers to apex predators, and thus interferes with the structure of marine communities and consequently ecosystem functioning. Here we review the effects of sediments, eutrophication, toxics and marine litter. All are presently major concerns in Southeast Asia (SE Asia) and there is little indication that the situation is improving. Approximately 70% of SE Asias human population lives in coastal areas and intensive farming and aquaculture, rapid urbanization and industrialisation, greater shipping traffic and fishing effort, as well as widespread deforestation and nearshore development, are contributing towards the pollution problem. As SE Asia encompasses approximately 34% of the worlds reefs and between a quarter and a third of the worlds mangroves, as well as the global biodiversity triangle formed by the Malay Peninsular, the Philippines, and New Guinea, the need to reduce the impacts of marine pollution in this region is all the more critical.

The discussion on the problem of marine litter takes me back to an incident in Sulawesi Indonesia where school kids doing a beach clean thought that the litter was normal and started clearing up all the organic debris instead of the rubbish. Where do you start? It also reminded me about hermit crabs in the Wakatobi happily using coke bottles as a home:

A chinese coal carrier has run around on the GBR.  The irony is palpable.

UPDATE: The ship was carrying about 65,000 tonnes of coal and 950 tonnes of oil (via Courier Mail).

From the AP via the NYT:

BRISBANE, Australia (AP) — A coal-carrying ship that ran aground and was leaking oil on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was in danger of breaking apart, officials said Sunday.

The Chinese coal carrier Shen Neng 1 ran aground late Saturday on Douglas Shoals, a favorite pristine haunt for recreational fishing east of the Great Keppel Island tourist resort. The shoals are in a protected part of the reef where shipping is restricted by environmental law off the coast of Queensland state in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

Authorities fear an oil spill will damage the world’s largest coral reef off northeast Australia, listed as a World Heritage site for its environmental value.

The ship hit the reef at full speed, nine miles (15 kilometers) outside the shipping lane, State Premier Anna Bligh said.

A police boat was standing by to remove the 23 crew if the ship broke apart and an evacuation was necessary, she said.

Patches of oil were seen near the stricken ship early Sunday, but Maritime Safety Queensland reported no major loss from the 1,000 tons (950 metric tons) of oil on board.

”We are now very worried we might see further oil discharged from this ship,” Bligh told reporters.

Maritime Safety Queensland general manager Patrick Quirk said the vessel was badly damaged on its port side.

”At one stage last night, we thought the ship was close to breaking up,” he told reporters. ”We are still very concerned about the ship.”

”It is in danger of actually breaking a number of its main structures and breaking into a number of parts,” he added.

A salvage contract had been signed but the operation would be difficult and assessing the damage to the ship could take a week, Quirk said.

Bligh said she feared the salvage operation could spill more oil, which could reach the mainland coast within two days.

Local emergency crews were on standby to clean any oil that reached mainland beaches, she said.

Aircraft on Sunday began spraying a chemicals on the oil patches to disperse it, she said.

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said authorities had been working through the night to determine what risks the ship posed to the environment.

”The government is very conscious of the importance of the Great Barrier Reef environment and ensuring that impacts on its ecology are effectively managed,” Garrett said in a statement.

The 755 foot (230 meter) bulk carrier was carrying about 72,000 U.S. tons (65,000 metric tons) of coal to China and ran aground within hours of leaving the Queensland port of Gladstone.

Conservationists have expressed outrage that bulk carriers can travel through the reef without a marine pilot with local expertise.

”The state government is being blinded by royalties and their shortsightedness will go down in history as killing the reef,” said Larissa Waters, spokeswoman for the Queensland Greens environmentally focused political party.

Bligh said the question of when ships should require a marine pilot on the reef was under review because of the increase in freight traffic that will flow from new gas and coal export contracts to China.

She said a separate inquiry would determine how the ship came to stray from its shipping lane.

Quirk said state authorities were seeking information about the effect the coal could have on the reef environment if the ship broke up before its cargo can be salvaged.

In response to our post about the serious errors found in his paper, John McLean said:

What’s the problem with your comprehension, Ove? As our response said, the derivative method was only used to determine the period of the time-lag, a period that was very similar that determined by Phil Jones, one of our critics. Once we’d established the time lag, the Discussion and Conclusions are based only on applying that time lag to the raw data.

It’s quite true that our response didn’t spend a lot directly rebutting Foster et al. That was because those criticisms were misdirected and on some issues downright mendacious.

I wrote the following response but have not received an answer.  The questions are very serious so I feel I should reiterate them:

Nothing wrong with my comprehension, John. I’ve read your paper and the Foster et al paper, and am quite shocked by either your poor understanding of how to analyse climate data or your complicity in deliberately hiding what you didn’t want to find.

John, seeing that you have not been able to counter the fatal flaws found in your paper by Foster and colleagues (Foster et al 2010), can you answer the following questions:

1) Will you and Bob Carter retract the paper and admit the errors publicly?

2) Given that Bob Carter has actively spread these errors and misinformation far and wide, will Bob Carter now apologise to Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce, Nick Minchin and the many other politicians that he has misled.

(I note that Bob Carter was featured talking about his study as part of  the recent Four Corners episode)

3) Given that Bob Carter wants to “Kill the IPCC” because it made a couple of relatively minor errors (out of 3000 pages), do you think that Bob Carter should be made to resign from James Cook University? Afterall, this is not the first time that adjunct Professor of Bob Carter has been caught out perpetrating a misinformation campaign on the issue of climate change.

4) Do you support a full investigation of you, Bob Carter, Ian Pimer and other sceptics/denialist scientists that have been found to be in such serious error? Or should different standards be applied to these individuals as opposed to the IPCC?

Bjorn Lomborg has again been given prime space in The Australian.  Reading the article, one is struck by  Bjorn’s oversimplification of the issues perhaps exemplified by his claim that a sea-level rise of 5m would not be so bad.  For whom?  Is it just coastal people in developing nations? The recently released Department of Climate Change report on sea level rise points out that “Up to $63 billion (replacement value) of existing residential buildings are potentially at risk of inundation from a 1.1 metre sea-level rise, with a lower and upper estimate of risk identified for between 157,000 and 247,600 individual buildings.”  and that’s just residential buildings.  What about the fact that Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne airports will be inundated as well and have to be moved?

Why are such clear impacts ignored by Bjorn?  The book from Yale University Press (“The Lomborg Deception“) should be useful in outlining in detail Lomborg’s long and pathological history of deception.

Here is the article in The Australian.  Make sure you read the responses from some readers – they reveal that most Australians are not taken by such simplistic and downright deceptive garbage.

The Australian (March 19 2010)

FOR the better part of a decade, I have upset many climate activists by pointing out that there are far better ways to stop global warming than trying to persuade governments to force or bribe citizens into slashing their reliance on fuels that emit carbon dioxide.

What especially bugs my critics is the idea that cutting carbon would cost far more than the problem it is meant to solve.

“How can that be true?” they ask. “We are talking about the end of the world. What could be worse or more costly than that?”

They have a point. If we actually face, as Al Gore recently put it, “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale preventative measures to protect human civilisation as we know it”, then no price would be too high to stop global warming. But are the stakes really that high?

The answer is no. Even the worst-case scenarios proposed by mainstream climate scientists, scenarios that go far beyond what the consensus climate models predict, are not as bad as Gore would have us believe. For example, a sea-level rise of 5m – more than eight times what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects, and more than twice what is probably physically possible – would not deluge all or even most of mankind.

READ ON

Provocative author and scholar Clive Hamilton will discuss why facing up to Climate Change is “Just too Hard” in a public lecture this month hosted by the newly established Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland.

There have been any number of urgent scientific reports in recent years emphasising just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act.

Around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming; others prefer to believe denialists such as Monckton and Plimer, in an effort to continue business as usual and maintain current lifestyles.

In the preface to ‘Requiem for a Species’ Hamilton describes his new book:

“It is a book about the frailties of the human species: our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. A story of a battle within us, between the forces that should have caused us to protect the earth, like our capacity to reason and our connection to nature, and our greed, materialism and alienation from nature, which, in the end, have won out.”

This is a free event, open to the public.
Book sales, signing and refreshments will follow the lecture.

24th March 2010
5.30pm
Abel Smith Lecture Theatre (Building 23)
St Lucia Campus
(Located at the top of Campbell Rd.)

Contact: gci@uq.edu.au

RSVP essential – www.gci.uq.edu.au/lecture

Evidence from Institute of Physics drawn from energy industry consultant who argues global warming is a religion
David Adams, Guardian , Thursday 4 March 2010 21.00 GMT

Evidence from a respected scientific body to a parliamentary inquiry examining the behaviour of climate-change scientists, was drawn from an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion, the Guardian can reveal.

The submission, from the Institute of Physics (IOP), suggested that scientists at the University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to support conclusions and that key reconstructions of past temperature could not be relied upon.

The evidence was given to the select committee on science and technology, which is investigating emails from climate experts at the University of East Anglia that were released online last year.

The committee interviewed witnesses on Monday, including Phil Jones, the scientist from the university’s climatic research unit (CRU), who is at the heart of the controversy.

The Guardian has established that the institute prepared its evidence, which was highly critical of the CRU scientists, after inviting views from Peter Gill, an IOP official who is head of a company in Surrey called Crestport Services.

According to Gill, Crestport offers “consultancy and management support services … particularly within the energy and energy intensive industries worldwide”, and says that it has worked with “oil and gas production companies including Shell, British Gas, and Petroleum Development Oman”.

In an article in the newsletter of the IOP south central branch in April 2008, which attempted to downplay the role carbon dioxide plays in global warming, Gill wrote: “If you don’t ‘believe’ in anthropogenic climate change, you risk at best ridicule, but more likely vitriolic comments or even character assassination. Unfortunately, for many people the subject has become a religion, so facts and analysis have become largely irrelevant.”

In November Gill commented, on the Times Higher Education website: “Poor old CRU have been seriously hacked. The emails and other files are all over the internet and include how to hide atmospheric cooling.”

The institute submission accused the East Anglia university scientists of “apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements”. This appears to refer to an email sent by Jones in which he said he had used a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a temperature series derived from tree-ring data, but which refers to a widely known feature of that data.

The IOP evidence concluded that the emails had “worrying implications for the integrity of scientific research in this field”. That was used by climate sceptics to bolster claims that the email affair, dubbed “climategate”, showed the scientists did not behave properly and that the problem of global warming was exaggerated.

The IOP has already been forced to issue a clarification that the evidence does not undermine the scientific basis for climate change. But many experts think this does not go far enough.

In an open letter to the institute, Andy Russell, an IOP member who works on climate at the University of Manchester, says: “If the IOP continues to stand by this statement then I will have no other option but to reconsider my membership.” He says the allegation of data suppression is “incorrect and irresponsible”.

The institute says its evidence was based on suggestions from the energy subcommittee of its science board. It would not reveal who sat on this sub-commitee, but confirmed that Gill was a member.

A spokeswoman for the institute said Gill was not the main source of information nor did the evidence primarily reflect his views; other members of the sub-commitee were also critical of CRU. However the IOP would not reveal names because they would get “dragged into a very public and highly politicised debate”.

Gill told the Guardian he helped prepare the submission but many of his suggestions were not in the final document.

The IOP added that the submission was approved by three members of its science board, but would not reveal their names. The Guardian contacted several members of the board, including its chairman, Denis Weaire, a physicist at Trinity College Dublin. All said that they had little direct role in the submission.

The institute supplied a statement from an anonymous member of its science board, which said: “The institute should feel relaxed about the process by which it generated what is, anyway, a statement of the obvious.” It added: “The points [the submission] makes are ones which we continue to support, that science should be practised openly and in an unbiased way. However much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information, we believe the case for openness remains just as strong.”

Evan Harris, a member of the science and technology select committee, said: “Members of the Institute of Physics … may be concerned that the IOP is not as transparent as those it wishes to criticise.”

By Paul Gilding | March 3rd, 2010, Cockatoo Chronicles 16

When we focus on news that reinforces our environmental challenges, of which there’s no shortage, we forget just how exciting the opportunities in fixing them are and how fast these solutions are now accelerating. Every story about melting icecaps or raging floods brings a smarter, cleaner world closer. My favourite example at the moment is electric cars. While they had a bad start, we are now on the verge of the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for, with around 30 models coming into the market from the major car companies and new start-ups over the next 3 years.

If we get this right, it’s hard to overstate the significance of the upside. This is a real game changer for our transport and energy systems. Forget any old ideas you have about niche markets, limited range and slow cars. There are some very exciting cars on the way and some business concepts that could change not just personal transport but the whole electricity sector. How will this unfold?

Imagine for example not charging your car overnight, but pulling into a “battery change station” where a machine simply takes out your battery pack and replaces it with a fully charged one, all in a few minutes, while you go and pick up a coffee. The batteries will have been charged by 100% renewable energy and you will have a contract that guarantees the price you pay, eliminating fears of petrol price rises. That’s the vision now being implemented across a number of countries by the very well funded Better Place and its founder Shai Aggasi as you can read here.

But it gets even better. You could also have a car that plugs into the grid when you’re not driving it. This means when the power is cheap because demand is low you will be able to charge your car and when there is high demand and power is expensive you can sell it back to the grid and make a profit. So your car effectively becomes a power station and you become a mini power company! An additional benefit of this is that the car fleet acts as a giant battery, enabling storage of intermittent renewables like solar PV and wind power.

By the way, they are also dramatically cheaper to run because electricity is so efficient at energy conversion. If you want some more details on the numbers take a look at this excellent summary by Andrew Simpson from Curtin University.

If you’re worried these electric cars will be boring to drive then take a look at Tesla Motors who are producing the Tesla Roadster that will go from 0 – 100kh/h in 4 seconds. Who said greenies don’t know how to have fun!

This is all in addition to the clean cites, no air pollution and countless new jobs created as we build the infrastructure for this transport and energy revolution.

Heard all this before and wondering if its real? Warren Buffet certainly thinks its is. He invested US$230 million in Chinese electric car company BYD in 2008 and his 10% stake is now worth close to $2 billion. China plans to put a million electric cars on the road by 2012 so BYD is looking like delivering on its name for its owners (BYD stands for Build Your Dream!).

As a transition this dramatic takes off in a market, it’s hard to tell where it will head but in any outcome the implications for consumers, business and markets are certainly profound. Alan Kohler makes an interesting argument in his investment newsletter The Eureka Report as to why all cars will be electric within 20 years. He points out that when people come to believe that the electric car is going to be the clear winner, they will suddenly realise their old petrol car will have close to zero resale value within a few years. At that point there will be a rush to go electric, to avoid the inevitable price collapse in second hand petrol cars. This will of course be self-reinforcing when it takes off.

Of course we can’t be sure which technologies, business models and companies will succeed. What we can now safely accept however is that with so many people and so much money focused on making this work, the time has clearly arrived when the internal combustion engine is heading for a rapid sunset.

Let you mind run over the implications of that for the oil industry and peak oil….

So next time you read about a melting glacier, remember how much fun driving into the future is going to be.