Category Archives: Uncategorized

Australia ratifies Kyoto

Posted on by
2

As Ecolog reports that green house gas emissions reach near-record level highs, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has broken the stalemate and ratified kyoto just weeks after coming into power on his first day in office. Senator Penny Wong, the newly instated Minister for Climate Change, was quoted to say that the decision sets Australia up for a leadership role at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Bali later this month.

“Ratifying the Kyoto Protocol puts Australia back on the map,” she said.

“The world now knows that this nation is prepared to do its bit and be part of the global solution to climate change. This gives us an impetus to go into the Bali conference to set that leadership role. The purpose of the Bali conference is to set out the road map for what happens post the Kyoto period. We want to ensure that what we agree in Bali gives Australia and the world the best chance to moving towards a solution on climate change.”

Rudd’s decision has run into some interesting commentary in the news. Despite previous concern of greenhouse gas emissions from India and China, The India Times ran with the headline “India to gain as Australia signs Kyoto“, quoting “India smiled from the sidelines knowing that, in the least, it would augur well for Indian industry and, at best, would push its case in global negotiations. Meanwhile, Germany’s Environment Minister has called for an international market in carbon dioxide emissions to combat climate change, with a stronger focus on emission reduction from G8 countries and emerging nations. A joint statement released at the 10th China – European Union Leaders meeting has further stressed the importance of climate change and the willingness to cooperate in stabilising and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

As one astute commentator summarised, “No continent is an island“, but all this leaves the ABC news wondering “Can climate progress succeed without the US?”

More commentary from me on this during the lead up to Bali.

‘Young guns’ of coral reef research head downunder

Posted on by
Reply

A worldwide network of the next generation of leading coral reef scientists and managers is set to meet for the first time at The University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane on December 10-14, 2007.

Sponsored by the Coral Reef Targeted Research and Capacity Building for Management Program (CRTR), the Leadership Forum will attract 55 postgraduate and postdoctoral students in coral reef studies from 20 countries.

The students will be joined by internationally-renowned coral reef scientists and managers and together they will build the students’ understanding of a wide range of issues surrounding coral reef ecosystems.

“These future leaders in coral reef science will hone their leadership skills and learn how to increase their influence among networks that manage and set policy for coral reefs worldwide,” said Professor Paul Greenfield, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor at UQ, a key partner in the CRTR Program.

“One of the major goals of the CRTR Program is to build the scientific capacity and knowledge necessary to give coastal managers and policy-makers the information they need to sustain the world’s coral reefs.”

The CRTR Program sponsors or associates with more than 55 students in coral reef studies worldwide. Students from Mexico, The Philippines, Cuba, Tanzania, Kenya, USA, Australia, United Kingdom, Colombia, Venezuela, Palau, Thailand, Canada, Costa Rica, Belize and Guatemala will attend the event.

The CRTR Program is a leading international coral reef research initiative that provides a coordinated approach to credible, factual and scientifically-proven knowledge for improved coral reef management. The CRTR Program is a partnership between the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, UQ, the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and about 40 research institutions and other third-parties around the world.

Rudd unveils new cabinet

Posted on by
Reply

Reuters, November 29th

 

Australian Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd unveiled his ministerial team on Thursday, naming four women and a former rock star to the centre-left cabinet, and making close collaborator Julia Gillard his deputy.

 

 

Penny Wong becomes Australia’s first Asian-born minister. Taking on the new climate change portfolio, she will be in charge of carrying out Labor’s pledge to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Wong, 39, arrived in Australia from her native Malaysia as a child in 1977 and worked as a lawyer and barrister before entering parliament as a senator in 2002.

Peter Garrett, former lead singer with Midnight Oil, becomes environment, heritage and arts minister, but loses his hold on climate change after embarrassing his leader with policy gaffes during the campaign.

Rudd, 50, swept to power in Saturday’s election on a promise of generational change after more than 11 years of conservative rule under Prime Minister John Howard, 68.

Rudd and his ministers, forming what he called a rejuvenated government with fresh ideas, will be officially sworn in on Monday. (Read More)

The challenge: to go from climate laggard to climate leader

Posted on by
Reply

The Age, 27th November

LABOR’S exceptional victory is built on its core promises, and tackling climate change is one of them. Kevin Rudd has promised that one of his first acts in government will be to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This will come as a welcome relief to most Australians. We have been suffering from deferred ratification for a long time, and the move is 10 years overdue.

However, while in the conservative context of Australian climate politics ratification may seem like one giant leap for Australians, it is now only a modest step for mankind (and other species).

The annual meeting of parties of the UN Climate Change Convention begins in Bali next Monday. For the first time in a decade, Australia — with its delegation led by our prime minister — will sit as a credible participant in debates over the Earth’s climate future. What positions and targets will we support?

The only serious proposition on the table at Bali comes from the European Union. The EU has proposed a target for developed countries to cut their collective emissions by 30% below 1990 levels by 2020. Although this target is conservative, it is still well beyond what has been acceptable in Australia to date. How will we respond?

Continue reading →

Coral reefs bursting to go

Posted on by
Reply

Courier Mail, November 22nd

HERE is a chance for you to experience one of the planet’s most spellbinding natural spectacles. Within a few days, in the reefs around the Keppels, off Rockhampton and in the Capricorn Cays of the southern Great Barrier Reef, the annual spawning of coral is expected to take place.

After the bleaching of the corals in January and February in 2006, last summer’s spawning effort was half-hearted. “This year. they’re bursting to go,” said Central Queensland University coral ecologist Alison Jones. “If people can get to a reef and in the water between the 24th (tomorrow) and the 28th, about 7pm-7.30pm, they’ll have a good chance of seeing it happen.”

In a synchronised exercise, corals liberate millions of eggs on still nights, after a full moon, when the tides are not so strong, the water temperature is right, and there’s less chance of the eggs being swept away before fertilisation.

As a prelude to the spawning, reef life, little fish and shrimps become wildly agitated. Then, small pink balls can be seen bulging from the polyp mouths of the corals.

“They glow pink,” Jones explained. “Everything around the reef gets very excited and you know it will happen within half an hour.” (Read More)

Facing up to the realities of climate change

Posted on by
Reply

Developed countries must ‘show some spine’ on climate change
ABC News, 19th November

Some 2,500 scientists worked on the IPCC’s findings. The UN believes the worst case scenarios of global warming could be avoided if there were sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The economic cost it argues, is minimal compared with the cost of doing nothing.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is the Director of Marine Studies at the University of Queensland and also contributed to the IPCC report. “The report points out that if we are going to avoid those catastrophic scenarios, we actually have to peak our emissions in 2015, which is just around the corner, eight years away,” he said. “Now to do that, we have to have really major efforts to change the way we use energy and we’re going to have to have a range of international treaties in place not in 2012 but literally tomorrow.”

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg says it is imperative that developed nations such as Australia and the US set an example by cutting emissions immediately through reducing energy needs, better insulation and construction standards and use of technology that currently exists, like solar energy. “It’s up to the developed countries to show some spine on this issue and avoid what will be a global catastrophe. It’s relatively cost effective – in fact it’s you know, really quite cheap – to address the issue and achieve that level of stabilisation.

“If we go down the street of trying to stabilise at about 450 parts per million, it will shave only, and this is an upper estimate, only about 0.12 per cent of the average annual growth in GDP.” (Read more)


Oceans fail the Acid Test
Science Alert, 22nd November

Acid oceans are the elephant in the room of global change – an event potentially so massive and profound in its implications for life on Earth that the world media has largely avoided it, governments shunned it and scientists discussed it mostly in muted tones, usually behind closed doors.The acid oceans theory is quite straightforward: the CO2 emitted by human activity dissolves out of the atmosphere into the seas, gradually turning them more acidic. This is largely independent of global warming or other effects. It is a straight equation – about half of all the CO2 produced since the start of the industrial revolution has ended up in the sea, reducing the surface pH by 0.1 (some experiments indicate as much as 0.3 pH).

The change in acidity may seem minor but experiments by the Centre’s Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg suggest it could be enough to shut down coral growth and kill the calcareous algae that hold together the fronts of reefs. He has warned that Australia risks losing the Great Barrier Reef if atmospheric CO2 levels rise above 500 parts per million from their current level of 385ppm, as they are currently expected to do by mid-century.

If that were not serious enough, an even more profound impact is likely to occur among calcareous plankton which will be unable to form their chalky skeletons as the water acidifies. The vulnerable corals and plankton make up about a third of all life in the oceans. (Read more)

Analysis of the Australian government response to the IPCC

Posted on by
2

IPCC report shows Australian targets a sham
By Chris McGrath, Brisbane barrister and Climate Project presenter

 

Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Garrett both claim vindication on climate change from the synthesis report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Both are wrong.

Labor has a policy of reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050 compared with year 2000 emissions.

 

The Liberals have attacked this target as “likely to damage the economy”. They refuse to state their own target for emissions but this must logically be less onerous than Labor’s.

 

The central difficulty for both Labor and the Liberals in claiming vindication from the latest IPCC report is it indicates a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050 will be inadequate to protect our most valuable environmental assets such as the Great Barrier Reef.

Continue reading →

“Failing to act on climate change is criminally irresponsible.”

Posted on by
1

The Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released overnight in Valencia, Spain. If there is one thing that you are going to read from the IPCC, then it should be this document.

This is the final phase of the 4th Assessment report. The SPM draws together the evidence, discussion and conclusions of the 3 IPCC working groups from the fourth assessment report and provide it as a no-nonsense, on-partisan digest for policy makers.

Summarizing most the conclusions that fall into the IPCC’s ‘likely’ to ‘almost certain’ categories, the following seems to true for climate change. We are now in a rapidly warming climate that is changing natural and human systems. The burning of fossil fuels and land-use change by humans is driving these changes. Ice is disappearing from our glaciers and snow fields, water supplies are drying up and food production is being threatened. Natural ecosystems from rainforest to the southern ocean are changing rapidly. Millions of lives are threatened by the combination of a hot house future, with rising sea levels and intensifying natural disasters.

The synthesis highlights several growing certainties. These are that our current trajectory will put us into a world which is described at the upper end of the IPCC trajectories. “There is high agreement and much evidence that with current climate change mitigation policies and related sustainable development practices, global GHG (Green House Gas) emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades.“

Specifically, this will involve the loss of water supplies to hundreds of millions, the loss of coral reefs, rainforests and other significant global assets, the loss of 50% or more of species, increasing crop failures at low latitudes, inundation of coastal areas, and a rapidly rising death toll from disease, flooding and heat waves. The kicker is that many of these impacts, while serious at high latitudes will be greatest for developing nations which are mostly clustered at low latitudes.

The worst impacts will be on those people who least can afford to respond. Hence, in the words of Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), “Failing to recognize the urgency of this message and acting on it would be nothing less than criminally irresponsible.”

Continue reading →

IPCC release “Climate Change 2007” – the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)

Posted on by
Reply

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of the most rigorous scientific processes of modern times. In the synthesis report released today in Valencia, Spain, it has reasserts the undeniable evidence that the earth is warming rapidly due the rise of anthropogenic generated greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. These changes are being driven by the burning of fossil fuels and the massive destruction of nature landscapes such as forests.

The changes that we are seeing are unprecedented in the last several million years. Events thought to be unlikely, such as the breakup of the polar and Greenland ice sheets are now happening. The report indicates that natural ecosystems are changing rapidly, water availability is diminishing and that impacts on food supply for many countries will continue to grow. This report is yet another wake-up call to the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change.

Coral reefs are indicative of the changes that are occurring in natural ecosystems. Worldwide coral reefs are responsible for supporting the subsistence food supply for it leased 100 million people. It coral reefs disappear, as the IPCC report warns, there would be catastrophic consequences for many societies throughout the tropics and sub-tropics. For Australia, a loss of coral reefs would have serious economic consequences for boom economy states like Queensland. At present, the second-largest industry in Queensland is the tourist industry generated by the beauty and ecologically pristine nature of the Great Barrier Reef. Without the Great Barrier Reef, this $6 billion per year industry would dwindle.

The IPCC synthesis report also provides the very strong case that the consequences for human societies everywhere will be catastrophic if we don’t act right now. Decisive, non-partisan action is required. This action must listen to the science and the seriousness of the problem. It must act on that science. Anything less is foolhardy.

Without acting right now we will miss the only opportunity to act. Strong leadership is required that sets clear targets that must reduce our emissions to less than 10% within the next three decades. We have not seen that leadership in Australia or elsewhere as yet. Currently, with Australia’s leading the world as the highest emitters of CO2 per person, changing our current disastrous track will require some strong and clever decisions. Given this and the fact that we are wealthy as a nation, we should be leading the world rather than dragging our feet.

While both sides of politics in the recent electoral debates have recognized the issue of climate change as being important, both sides have been reluctant to specify the action that they will take to reduce emissions over the next few decades. This is unfortunate given that we need strong leadership not only to adapt to climate change (which is where most of the money has gone so far) and also to specify strong emission reduction targets that are commensurate with the scale of this global emergency. This decade may be among the last in which we can choose between a future during which humans to continue to prosper in many regions, versus one in which we will continually struggle to survive as the climate becomes more and more hostile, and beyond our control.

UQ Climate Change lab in the news

Posted on by
Reply

One of the students in my lab, Josh Meisel (a Fulbright scholar from Stanford University) was interviewed recently by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail about the recent rebuilding following the devastating fire at Heron Island research station earlier this year (see photographs). Construction is well underway on the new aquaria, research buildings and staff accomodation – read below for more details (good work Josh & Dorothea!)