Picture from the Wikipedia 2013 bushfires overview, here
IPCC authors, Dr Abha Chhabra from the Indian Space Research Organisation and Dr William (Bill) Collins from Berkeley UCLA
Good evening everyone. It’s very lovely, and a bit overwhelming to be here in such distinguished company. We welcome here tonight, Working Group CO-Chairs, Professor Qin Dahe and Professor Thomas Stocker, along with all our IPCC Working Group 1 lead authors and editors.
With 39 nations represented in this room at MONA, I feel like the world has arrived in Tasmania!
I wish to pay my respects to Tasmania’s first people, the palawa. To Aboriginal Elders, past and present, I pay my deepest respects, and I acknowledge today’s Tasmanian Aboriginal community as the original owners and the custodians of this beautiful island, lutriwita – Tasmania.
On behalf of the Tasmanian Government, can I say, we are so proud to host the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group 1, Fourth lead authors meeting.
Hosting this event in Hobart – and tonight here at our fabulous Museum of Old and New Art - recognises the strength and depth of the scientific community in Tasmania, and that an internationally significant, indeed vital body of work based here, is contributing so much to global climate science endeavour.
As I like to tell anyone who’ll listen, Hobart has the highest number of scientists per capita of any city in Australia. In fact, Tasmania hosts 65 per cent of all Australia’s Antarctic and Southern Oceans research scientists. We are blessed indeed.
Among you tonight, Tasmania’s own coordinating lead authors: Dr John Church, Dr Steven Rintoul, Dr Nathan Bindoff.
Also, Tasmanian scientists and lead authors, Dr Ian Allison and Andrew Constable, along with many other local contributors, including Susan Wijffels, Tas Van Ommen, and James Risbey. And of course, I must pay tribute to Dr Tony Press from the ACE CRC, who I know has also worked very hard, clearly very persuasively, to bring Working Group 1 to Tasmania …
We Tasmanians are immensely privileged to be such a haven of scientific excellence, to host world class research and educational institutions from the Antarctic Climate Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, to the CSIRO Marine Laboratory, IMAS, UTAS, and Australian Antarctic Division, as well as CCAMLR.
We have, for example, developed the world-leading Climate Futures work, which applies the IPCC projections onto our landscape at a fine scale. Farmers, irrigators, planners, property owners and government have access to a very precise set of evidence-based projections out to 2100.
Since the formation of this Labor/Green Minority Government in 2010, we have established a robust and active Adaptation Unit within Government. Tasmania is developing a number of the tools necessary to adapt to climate change, to embed resilience and sustainability into our economic structures, and to prosper in the face of what your work tells us, lies ahead for the global community.
And now, you are drawn here – 270 or so of the brightest scientific minds in the world – a font of deep knowledge on the planet’s natural systems and what we, as a brilliant but flawed species, are doing to disrupt the climate and ecosystem balance – what we appear to be prepared to leave to our children and grandchildren.
A planet of heat and catastrophic extremes, of poverty, and conflict over arable land and water, of drowned cities, of parched forests and dramatically diminished biodiversity.
You are here to work through the closing stages of your contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis, I know you understand the urgency. You live and breathe it.
Esteemed guests, you have arrived just over a week since one of the most extreme weather events in Tasmania, indeed Australia’s recorded meteorological history.
On the evening of Thursday the 3rd of January, a sequence of thunderstorms struck the Tasman peninsula to our south. We could see the lightning strikes from Hobart. The next day, Friday, the mercury hit 41.8 degrees Celsius. Hot, wild northerly winds blew across Bass Strait from a baking continent and there was conflagration that destroyed 200 properties on the Peninsula and on the East Coast, scorched 90,000+ hectares statewide, killed countless endemic birds, possums, wallabies, potoroos and wombats, and left a whole community at Dunalley reeling in the smoking ruins of their town.
A number of these fires are still burning, and there are communities still at risk.
Almost miraculously, there was no loss of life last weekend – in part due to much better early emergency warning systems, and the fact that the inferno struck a very coastal area – there were beaches to flee to for safety.
It will take many years to rebuild, and I am absolutely certain we must rebuild a greener, more resilient, adaptive and climate aware community, with government, NGOs and a whole range of experts, working side by side with that community, for it is the locals who must drive and ‘own’ what rises from the ashes – but it must be far-sighted and informed. Informed by the science.
Is this, as Australia’s Climate Commission warned this week, the new normal?
And down here last week, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said: “Whilst you would not put any one event down to climate change, weather doesn’t work like that, we do know over time that as a result of climate change we are going to see more extreme weather events and conditions.”
It seems you were right and will continue to be so.
Don’t you wish – just occasionally – that you were wrong? I sure do.
As I said, the fires are still burning, but already social media – Facebook and Twitter – is awash with denialists, finger-pointing and not least of all at us, the Greens … In Tasmania, blaming the Greens for all manner of woes is something of a favourite pastime within a certain demographic. But still, one in five Tasmanians vote Green, I am one of two Green Ministers in a power-sharing government with the Labor Party, and more and more informed and very worried young people, in fact voters from across the demographic spectrum, are turning to our party for action and hope.
They are looking for hope wherever it can be found – and the science, your science, tells us there’s hope alright but we must act now.
As a mother of four, as a Green Parliamentarian, humanist, amateur naturalist, I am sometimes baffled as to humanity’s own self-harming behaviours. From a public policy perspective – on climate change – we’re lurching along the path to an epic fail.
What is it about the psychology of our species that makes meaningful, collaborative, coordinated action on emissions reduction so hard to achieve? Why were the Durban talks such a terrible but predictable disappointment?
Why did the legislated price on Carbon in Australia, and associated massive investment in renewable energies, carbon farming, biodiversity preservation and landscape restoration, become such a political football during and after it was negotiated through by our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in cooperation with the Australian Greens, and a small number of enlightened independent MPs?
And, having implemented a price on Carbon, how can the same Prime Minister and her Australian Labor Party, backed up by the conservatives, endorse the coal mining boom in Queensland’s Galilee Basin?
Advanced plans are in place to build nine mega mines in the Galilee Basin. Five of these projects would each be larger than any coal mine currently operating in the country. If these go ahead, they could produce more coal than Australia currently exports. If the Galilee Basin were a country, the carbon dioxide produced from using this coal would make it the seventh dirtiest fossil fuel burner on the planet. The Galilee Basin coal boom is not just one of the greatest ever environmental threats to Australia, its climate implications are global.
It beggars belief.
How can the Australian media – particularly News Ltd - and the conservative political parties so proudly trumpet their anti-science, pro-profit at any cost creed, so shamelessly? And get away with it, so often simply unchallenged?
Why did the Ministerial Select Council on Climate Change – of which I am a member, along with the Climate Change and Environment Ministers of the Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments – why did it late last year, abolish itself? By the way, I can assure you I voted against its abolition…
What is it that allows so many individuals, politicians, governments and corporations to abrogate their responsibility to future generations?
And, why is the message – the message that is unambiguous from your work – not getting through?
When I was thinking about addressing you tonight, I wondered what benefit I might actually be able to bring to you apart from a warm welcome and expression of great gratitude for your work. What could I pass on and hope to be heard by all you brilliant minds crammed full of so much knowledge, in the short time I have.
Well ……
As the daughter of an ABC foreign correspondent, myself an ex-journalist, a former communications adviser in the Keating Labor Government, and later to Greens Senator Christine Milne, and as a community activist to save an estuarine Conservation Area from a 500 home canal housing estate ala the Gold Coast at sea level just across the river from here, the one thing I do understand is the power of direct language, the language of persuasion – hard, confronting facts, a call to action, with an overlay of hope to stave off despair and thus, inaction.
Where we all fall down, I believe, is in a failure to effectively communicate. It’s a failure of world political leaders, of local leaders, of corporate leaders and – increasingly critically – of scientific leaders.
I’m convinced that the scientific community has a role to play here that it has not yet fully explored or embraced. There is hope for the future, we know that, and I’d like to hear more members of your scientific community, say that more often and a little louder.
Frankly ladies and gentlemen, and with the greatest of respect - you need to speak out more … I understand this sits extremely uncomfortably with many of you, but it’s true.
As one of your Tasmanian IPCC colleagues pointed out to me – in most reasonable tones - last week, he could spend every spare moment of his days, engaging the community on climate science and the need for action, or, rebutting the denialists and skeptics – and, that would be time lost to scientific understanding.
As a Green politician, I do understand that it can be frustrating and it can feel demeaning to deal with the self-serving and the foolish, but we must take them on in the public domain, for we are not only talking to them. In most instances, their minds are closed anyway.
Just think of them as a tool ……for getting a vital message across!
As leaders within our respective communities, we must intensify efforts to educate the public policy makers (like those bureaucrats and politicians in Tasmania who resist the setting of an interim 2020 emissions reduction target for fear it would send the wrong message to business …..). I’m still working on them but it is one of the challenges of a power-sharing government.
We must go into corporate boardrooms and challenge their shareholder bottom line and profit charged thinking. We must challenge the mainstream media to report science accurately, not to sensationalise the noisy denialists and feel the need to give them equal air time. And through the mainstream and social media, we must reach into the minds of ordinary people who I have absolutely no doubt want to see meaningful action on climate change.
They just don’t have the personal power to change the world, they don’t know where to begin. It can feel more comfortable, safer, to confine your thoughts and deeds to your immediate sphere. I’m sure we’ve all been there.
Where our major party politicians have at times failed to demonstrate leadership, the time has come for our climate scientists to become much more assertive about their work, its findings, the projections, what the future looks like if we don’t change the way we run our economic and social policy structures, now.
The integrity of your work as a stand-alone scientific evidence base for human-induced climate change is no longer enough.
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, early last century, evolved a view of human life as one fundamentally defined by the relationship between two people – Thou and I was his seminal work. As a member of the political arm of the Earth Defence Movement, I think of Buber often.
When you communicate the climate science, these frightening projections, to any audience, think about it as a conversation where just one person is listening. If you are on radio, doing a TV interview, think about the ordinary person sitting at home, or driving their car – listening to your words – you are appealing to them to listen, to heed, to act.
You, as scientists - independent thinkers and voices - can empower individuals, business leaders and policy makers, through your knowledge, your words and your message that there is still time to avoid the worst.
When you as scientific leaders within your communities do step up to talk about the findings of the 5th Assessment Report – and I believe you have a compelling moral responsibility to do so – look your audience in the eye, reach into their minds, explain to them at an individual level, what climate change will mean for the people they love in the future, the landscape they feel connected to ….
And explain to them that we can still avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
That we have a moral responsibility to do so …. This planet is not ours to trash. It’s ours to save, from ourselves.
Too overtly political? Too activist? Maybe, but the time for respectful and informed conversations within our own cliques – whether it be within a political party, business, community groups or scientific collective – that time, is over.
There’s a great quote from Rachel Carson after she penned Silent Spring. I used it in my inaugural speech – it’s an outstanding code for living ..
“We must all have a great sense of responsibility,” she told an interviewer in 1962, “and not let things happen because everyone takes the comfortable view that someone else is looking after it. Someone else isn’t looking after it.”
That’s us, ladies and gentlemen. All of us who know we have a responsibility to use our time on this marvellous planet – this giant organism that gave us life – to best effect.
That’s how many of us feel about Tasmania. This beautiful island, this little green jewel washed as it is by the mighty Southern Ocean, is changing – like the rest of the world. We have giant forests of kelp that are struggling to survive in warming waters, fisherman now catch tropical Marlin out of the blue off our coastline where they have never been snagged before – the only time I have ever seen one of this long-beaked giants was on a beach in Queensland as a kid, thousands of kilometres from here. And, we have bushfires raging across our landscape, with temperatures reaching peaks unknown in 130 years of meteorological record keeping.
The times and tides are changing, rapidly. So must we all, to mitigate, to adapt, to endure.
I would like to end with my favourite quote of late which is from Prince Charles. I’ve always thought a Prince who talks to his tomato plants must be pretty cool. He said:
“I’ve gone on for years about the importance of thinking about the long-term in relation to the environmental damage, climate change and everything else.
“We don’t, in a sensible world, want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren, to leave them with the real problem.
“I don’t want to be confronted by my future grandchild and (have) them say: ‘Why didn’t you do something?’ So clearly now that we will have a grandchild, it makes it even more obvious to try and make sure we leave them something that isn’t a total poisoned chalice.”
So, thank you for all the work that you do and I want you to know that we who care, are listening and we long to hear more of your wise words, and to know that you are taking on the climate recalcitrants, the voices of shameless self-interest, wherever you live and work. Know that we are with you all the way…. Because we believe, and we have hope in our hearts.
Thank you.
(Speech delivered Wednesday evening, January 16)
Show Comments
Comments (39)
I congatulate the minister for her forthright speech but O’Connor’s error is a common one that affects us all.
Saying we have time to avoid the worst aspects is correct, but we now face an inevitable 9 metre sea level rise if the last 40 million years are an indicator, drowning whole countries as well as affecting all seaboard cities.
We have passed tipping points for some species and expensive ex-situ conservation efforts will be needed. We may save some, but others are likely to join the dodo.
Hot days, intense storms, long droughts, larger floods, disease will all impact on us.
However, whilst people believe there is a way out they will take it.
Until we have the disasters again and again so that habits change many will repeat the mistakes of the past.
Markets for change need to move out of the forests and down to the coal mine and out to the oil field.
Bravo Cassy! I am proud that we have a State politician who writes with such passion about our future and who does it in the awareness that the latest scientific predictions are so grim. We are now beyond preventing climate change due to the continued inaction of previous governments all over the world. Let’s hope that countries will now co-operate, so that mitigation and adaptation will occur and perhaps, then, we can endure.
Why is O’Connor’s government subsidising our electricity for RioTinto Alcan when they are a coal producer?
If the Labor-Green government thought climate change was important they would not buy dirty electricity from Queensland but would use clean electricity from Tasmania.
Obviously they put cost before the climate so if O’Connor can’t influence the government she is a cabinet member of, then why waste her time grandstanding to everybody else?
As an environmental scientist I have been aware of climate change for many years. Perhaps the first distinguished scientist to draw attention to its effect on coral was Charles Darwin. A century and a half ago he explained how rising sea levels, the result of melting ice sheets, caused fringing reefs to grow upwards, leaving the central land as a smaller and smaller core that led to atoll formation once the core was drowned.
Are we certain that this process has completely ended? Prior to hurricane Sandy, hurricanes in the same area about 1832 and 1938 caused equal or higher surges. In Australia the present heat wave has produced record high temperatures but, at least in some cases, the previous record was set over half a century ago. Was the first natural and the second anthropogenic?
It is dangerous, without absolute certainty, to atempt prevention rather than adaptation.
Great speech Cassy. Wonderful opportunity for the Tasmanian Greens to blow their trumpet to an audience of world class scientists.
Yes, being a minority partner to a political party that pushes coal must be frustrating. But, I bet every scientist present at that conference was appreciative of the fact that, at least, there was a Green thinker “inside” the political process; this fact due to our representational voting system.
When the scientific report gets published it will contain more damning evidence about climate change and the increasing rapidity of its development. Like you suggested in your speech, it is up to all of us to have a greater, more active sense of responsibility rather than leaving it up to others to look after the earth.
Thank you for being a representative of the type of world I want to live in.
Cassy, how about fixing a few local problems instead of trying to save the world. You are a politican in a state of little national and no international significance. What you say about climate change is pointless because of your lack of influence and vacuous in any event because of its lack of content. What we do have is a toxic dump on your doorstep, a forest industry in disarray, a state economy down the tubes and small business going to the wall. These are issues you can and in fact should as the responsible minister or a member of cabinet, deal with. Please do so and save the self promotion for when you deserve it. There is a world of difference, dear Cassy, between publicly spruiking green ambitions to garner support and actually achieving those ambitions. If you cannot achieve please get out of the job and give it to some one who can or will. It is so disappointing to see you becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the political hacks your party claims to be different from. However, if I had known your political pedigree and lack of real world experience I should have expected little less.
Cassie’s speech was much as might be expected from a Green- generally alarmist rubbish- and the TT commentators will- generally- love it.
Comment #8 is plain, ugly trolling with bigotry born of blind, bewildered ignorance.
I agree with Anonymous. Climate change is coming whether we like it or not, and there’s naff all we can do. We must concentrate on other things.
Adaption, rather than prevention, is the key.
Meantime, for starters, howabout we spend some money removing the many crumbling asbestos sheds on the sides of our country roads, and take the carcinogenic bracken plants out of our rural school playgrounds.
World population and it’s standard of living must be included as the major factor in atmospheric carbon. It’s not considered at all by the Greens and yet they support taxing carbon. With only a couple of billion people on the planet, those people could produce as much carbon as they wanted and it would have no effect. With over 7 billion humans and counting it does have an effect. Ask Cassy for her target population figure for Tasmania? Ask her for a maximum population figure for Australia? And the world? Could the Greens be like some well known religions that benefit from humans breeding like rabbits? They are only tackling half the problem and the fact they can’t see it is more amazing than the fact Cassy doesn’t understand why humans are self-destructive.
#5 Failure in arguement is to believe the intensity of hurricanes is fixed in time. Of course there can be similarly intense hurricanes it is the coincidence of events around climate that follow or are ahead ofthe modelled predictions that shows the climate is being changed by human activity mainly the burning of coal.
In 1896 Arrenhuis described the phenomenon and in 1970, some 45 years ago Keeling showed the trend.
Sydney’s previous record temperature was in 1939. It is not the record high but the fact that the world has been recording consecutive warmer temperatures that show a trend. Except for 1998 the warmest 9 years in the period of temperature records have been in the 13 years of this century.
Instead of viewing events in silos, as the media often does and so misses the point, take on board all the evidence.
Then, if you are a persons whose views are evidence based, the realization that the Minister’s address was mild in comparison to wgat it could have been.
Is #3 suggesting we force Rio to use only coal. In #4 he rightly exposes Labor’s hypocrisy. The greens would be a failure if they were elected to government and renewed such a contract but as majority rules, the voters get what they elect.
I find it odd that all the positive things the greens in coalition have achieved are reduced to one or two things they cannot control and then blamed for those supposed ills. Its almost as though those complaining want things to remain as bad as they are or even get worse to ensure they have something to kick.
If you want any more compelling evidence of empty ideological babble designed to fluff the feathers and boost the psychopathy of the empty heads attending this ego fest, you have it in O’Connor’s semantic dribble. The final paragraph and sentence, “Because we believe, and we have hope in our hearts.”, is a prime example of enslaved clones having faith in hope, and not reality.
The evidence this is just another elitist ego fest, is they will not be releasing anything to the public. Everyone knows when the elites refuse to release documentation and decisions that deals with the publics interests and is being paid for by the people, you know it is covering up their real agenda. Just as when the business, bureaucracy and politicians claim commercial in confidence, cabinet or party confidentiality, when ripping of the people and feeding the greed and gluttony of their vested interest masters. It’s the people who pay for all of this and it’s the people who suffer when these elitist empty heads create secrete deals which disenfranchise the people. In this case, these fools have taken their ideological insanity to the greatest depth of all, the extinction of life of the planet. Bet they are waiting for their god/s to come save them and sane evolved humans know the outcome of that faithful hope, disaster.
Climate change is not coming, it is well and truly here. Absolutely nothing can or will be done to prepare, change direction or alleviate the problem. The Greens are up to their necks in this ideological desperation to seek fatalistic outcomes in their “belief and hope” their delusional ideological illusions will save their souls and vindicate their primitive, infantile mindsets.
O’Connor states “It will take many years to rebuild, and I am absolutely certain we must rebuild a greener, more resilient, adaptive and climate aware community, with government, NGOs and a whole range of experts, working side by side with that community, for it is the locals who must drive and ‘own’ what rises from the ashes – but it must be far-sighted and informed. Informed by the science.”
Yet the opposite has already begun, more wooden power poles, building out of the same materials and in the same ways as the destroyed homes and buildings. Yesterday we watched road re fencing being done using treated pine fence posts, which will burn instantly and rot away in a couple of years. Concrete corner and strainer posts with metal in between are the only sensible long term solutions, but that wont put money into the hands of political vets interests and give unnecessary ongoing work to these interests at the expense of sane logical economic outcomes in the people interests.
Then we have the political party morons giving all the clean up and rebuilding work to political vested interests, who contributed very little or nothing at the time of the disaster. Whilst local businesses who gave everything they could in equipment and fuel to fight the fires, get nothing and will be out of pocket for their community efforts. There were no government fuel supplies, or backup equipment because of Green/lab/lib policies, designed to keep the peoples money flowing to their political backers. Whilst local volunteer fire and emergency services have to fend for themselves by raising money from their communities so hard hit. Yet the bureaucracy and political vested interests will reap monetary benefits from the people and nothing will change,just more of the same and getting worse.
O’Connor and McKims offices are powered by fossil fuel electricity from ERM Energy. Unbelievably, ERM generates electricity from coal seam gas.
http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2011/01/28/202951_tasmania-news.html
http://pipeliner.com.au/news/coal_seam_gas_booming_in_the_east/001023/
So #13, you will be most pleased to hear the Government’s Bushfire Recovery Unit will have 25 bureaucrats just itching to involve themselves in matters they should be kept well away from.
And you will hear plenty from them too as they have a Communications Unit of 6 people! I can find, only one communications person in the whole of the Education Department…
# 10.carcinogenic bracken plants:
Thank you for that bit of information. I have compiled a sizeable file on carcinogenic bracken since reading your comment.
I was aware of the danger to livestock eating bracken, but was totally unaware of the carcinogenic danger to us humans from bracken
Davies, there is a good reason for only having one media person in the Education Department. The government do not think there are any votes to be won. Bushfire disaster recovery on the other hand is sexy, feel good, flouro jacket stuff.
Cynical I know, but look long enough and some things become crystal clear.
#15, we see then driving down and back to Hobart, one or two to a tax payer funded car, they probably get travelling allowance, hardship allowance, lunch and dinner money, over time at premium rates and free clothing embossed with bullshit. They arrive, sit round and have coffee, chat, disappear into Marquees or air conditioned mobile offices and about lunch time have a press conference and go to lunch. After lunch they go in their tents for a while, speak briefly to a few people, then slowly dwindle away back to Hobart. It’s all good in the world for them.
You only need 3 people to run and co-ordinate the recovery, you’d find that expertise and knowledge within the local firies, SES and communities.
Those entities have people from every walk of life who know and understand the situation and how to get it done fast and properly, plus they listen to their communities.
Unlike those given the plumb job of running it, have no knowledge or experiences outside their programmed ego and are far removed from the communities effected,in every way.
Someone please tell the ABC it’s not all doom and gloom out there.
I would be happy for the ABC to give due weight to evidence based scientific opinion about Anthropogenic Global Warming. For every 98.3 climate scientists who can show it is happening the 1.7 with some argument about other causes could appear in its media. Such a ratio would reflect the balance in opinion.
Aitkin may wish for good news stories about the environment, but should the ABC make up puff pieces when the outlook for the environment on many measures is actually gloomy. For example plants dependent on low temperatures and moisture from clouds and mists are under threat all over the world. It does not matter if more trees are planted if the suite of species is markedly reduced by extinctions caused by activities humans could avoid.
The ABC may supposedly be out step with the supposed view of certain elements in Australia on some subjects but to lump all those elements and claim they are a group is raising the spectre of speaking for a silent majority, an unheard opinion because such a group does not exist. Conservative opinions are not consistently held, let alone capable of standing up to an argument when exposed for the hollow rhetoric of others that they often are.
Why isn’t the monolithic nature of privately owned media empires also questioned. Where are its codes of practice and policies drawn into the glare of public perusal and critique. Has the Australian, with its consistently conservative values taken to itself the role of attempting to balance the ABC or is Aitkin seeking to disarm the ABC by calling for an impartiality in a partial world of opinion?.
It would be better for the achievement of ‘balance’ if the 24hour news cycle was replaced with a more measured approach by all staring with the paper that most often calls for the ABC to be impartial when it fails that test on the measures of many others.
Today (Sat) The Weekend Australian cartoon makes fun of the six month old Emissions Trading Scheme failure to impact on decades of global inaction on reducing the emissions that are responsible for the nine hottest years this century in a record dating back to 1880. This excludes 1998, the hottest year.
Recently the Hadley Centre has been criticised for reviewing its temperature forecasts for the next decade and trending them down a little.
They were criticized for predicting the rapid decline of the Amazon rainforests and their important carbon sequestration function impacting mid this century.
Its is not just logging, flooding for hydro or plantation farming that is causing the Amazon to loose its important global function hastening the catastrophes now associated with a changing climate trending towrd runaway under the business as usual secenarion the fossil fools would like us to follow.
No doubt it makes the self interested fossil fools and their vested media sycophants happy to spread confusion and play down the reality.
The unfortunate thing for all of us is that the predictions are becoming fact before our very eyes should we care to look rather than bury our heads in the sand.
Divestment from coal and oil interests should be the national goal but instead Australia’s old political parties, aligned with outdated energy moguls from the oil, gas and coal industries, ensure we proceed on a contradictory course ensuring new development of these dangerous fuels grows apace.
Severe Climate Jeopardizing Amazon Forest, Study Finds
Jan. 18, 2013 — An area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California continues to suffer from the effects of a megadrought that began in 2005, finds a new NASA-led study. These results, together with observed recurrences of droughts every few years and associated damage to the forests in southern and western Amazonia in the past decade, suggest these rainforests may be showing the first signs of potential large-scale degradation due to climate change.
An international research team led by Sassan Saatchi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., analyzed more than a decade of satellite microwave radar data collected between 2000 and 2009 over Amazonia. The observations included measurements of rainfall from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and measurements of the moisture content and structure of the forest canopy (top layer) from the Seawinds scatterometer on NASA’s QuikScat spacecraft.
The scientists found that during the summer of 2005, more than 270,000 square miles (700,000 square kilometers, or 70 million hectares) of pristine, old-growth forest in southwestern Amazonia experienced an extensive, severe drought. This megadrought caused widespread changes to the forest canopy that were detectable by satellite. The changes suggest dieback of branches and tree falls, especially among the older, larger, more vulnerable canopy trees that blanket the forest.
While rainfall levels gradually recovered in subsequent years, the damage to the forest canopy persisted all the way to the next major drought, which began in 2010. About half the forest affected by the 2005 drought—an area the size of California—did not recover by the time QuikScat stopped gathering global data in November 2009 and before the start of a more extensive drought in 2010.
“The biggest surprise for us was that the effects appeared to persist for years after the 2005 drought,” said study co-author Yadvinder Malhi of the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. “We had expected the forest canopy to bounce back after a year with a new flush of leaf growth, but the damage appeared to persist right up to the subsequent drought in 2010.”
Recent Amazonian droughts have drawn attention to the vulnerability of tropical forests to climate change. Satellite and ground data have shown an increase in wildfires during drought years and tree die-offs following severe droughts. Until now, there had been no satellite-based assessment of the multi-year impacts of these droughts across all of Amazonia. Large-scale droughts can lead to sustained releases of carbon dioxide from decaying wood, affecting ecosystems and Earth’s carbon cycle.
The researchers attribute the 2005 Amazonian drought to the long-term warming of tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures. “In effect, the same climate phenomenon that helped form hurricanes Katrina and Rita along U.S. southern coasts in 2005 also likely caused the severe drought in southwest Amazonia,” Saatchi said. “An extreme climate event caused the drought, which subsequently damaged the Amazonian trees.”
Saatchi said such megadroughts can have long-lasting effects on rainforest ecosystems.
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“Our results suggest that if droughts continue at five- to 10-year intervals or increase in frequency due to climate change, large areas of the Amazon forest are likely to be exposed to persistent effects of droughts and corresponding slow forest recovery,” he said. “This may alter the structure and function of Amazonian rainforest ecosystems.”
The team found that the area affected by the 2005 drought was much larger than scientists had previously predicted. About 30 percent (656,370 square miles, or 1.7 million square kilometers) of the Amazon basin’s total current forest area was affected, with more than five percent of the forest experiencing severe drought conditions. The 2010 drought affected nearly half of the entire Amazon forest, with nearly a fifth of it experiencing severe drought. More than 231,660 square miles (600,000 square kilometers) of the area affected by the 2005 drought were also affected by the 2010 drought. This “double whammy” by successive droughts suggests a potentially long-lasting and widespread effect on forests in southern and western Amazonia.
The drought rate in Amazonia during the past decade is unprecedented over the past century. In addition to the two major droughts in 2005 and 2010, the area has experienced several localized mini-droughts in recent years. Observations from ground stations show that rainfall over the southern Amazon rainforest declined by almost 3.2 percent per year in the period from 1970 to 1998. Climate analyses for the period from 1995 to 2005 show a steady decline in water availability for plants in the region. Together, these data suggest a decade of moderate water stress led up to the 2005 drought, helping trigger the large-scale forest damage seen following the 2005 drought.
Saatchi said the new study sheds new light on a major controversy that existed about how the Amazon forest responded following the 2005 megadrought. Previous studies using conventional optical satellite data produced contradictory results, likely due to the difficulty of correcting the optical data for interference by clouds and other atmospheric conditions.
In contrast, QuikScat’s scatterometer radar was able to see through the clouds and penetrate into the top few meters of vegetation, providing daily measurements of the forest canopy structure and estimates of how much water the forest contains. Areas of drought-damaged forest produced a lower radar signal than the signals collected over healthy forest areas, indicating either that the forest canopy is drier or it is less “rough” due to damage to or the death of canopy trees.
Results of the study were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other participating institutions included UCLA; University of Oxford, United Kingdom; University of Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom; National Institute for Space Research, Sao Jose dos Campos, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Boston University, Mass.; and NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Persistent effects of a severe drought on Amazonian forest canopy PNAS 2013 110 (2)565-570; published ahead of print December 24, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1204651110
I am pleased to see the diverse opinions spewed into this thread. It means that it will be business as usual into the future and as usual nothing has been learned.
The same old raft of deniers has popped up and are giving us their thoughts on why climate change is not really happening and even if it was, it is not caused by humans.
All good stuff to divert attention away from what is really going to happen.
OK here is the future of Homo Saps.
Peak oil will gradually tighten the screws on the economy.
We are getting a lot of propaganda from big oil about how shale oil and gas is going to save the world and especially America.
This is nonsense of course and already the output is falling because of the high depletion rate and the cost of constantly drilling new wells.
This will inevitably bring on the really big financial crisis and with it start serious rioting from the poorer countries as food shortages get worse.
This will spread to the first world countries as they too feel the pinch.
The rate that global warming is increasing will accelerate.
This will cause even more severe food shortages and of course for countries that depend on oil and gas for heating during their very cold winters will bring more hardship.
By then the health systems will not be able to cope with the increase in health problems due to these events and the death rate will increase.
Eventually the population will start to reduce as it has before under similar circumstances.
Ask the Mayans who did not get their calander right but still disappeared.
The climate will make a large part of the area on either side of the equator uninhabitable. The population from there will try to migrate to the north and south and will be fiercely resisted by the people there.
If there are still areas where survival is possible, a small population of humans and other life will survive but this is not a given.
I can hear the howls of denialists now, shrieking ” doomsayer”, as they trot out all the usual tortured theories about how it is not happening.
So be it.
Carry on with BAU, continue blocking efforts to really make a difference. You might make a few extra dollars for your electronic bank account, you might be able to build an even bigger Macmansion, you might be able to increase your fleet of fabulous expensive cars, you will even be able to continue to take very expensive holidays in exotic parts for a while longer.
I will not be around to see this but your grandchildren and great grandchildren will curse you for what you have done to them.
I have no grandchildren to be concerned about.
How lucky am I?
Robert Lepage 22. We can run cars and industry on ethanol provided Kia and Great Wall make motors that have alcohol-resistant seals. I think the Chinese are already running the Australian economy anyway and they kindly allow us to get beaten at cricket by a little island like Sri Lanka so we can retain our Oiy,Oiy,Oiy identity. You haven’t covered world domination by mutant android psychos and the final cataclysmic showdown between the monotheistic religions. Not many people have got religion, energy and carbon on the same page which is why we are being run by hair stylists and unmarried loners.
Karl Stevens, You’re entitled to be cynically anti-Green and anti-whatever else you might be if you so wish, but your credibility plummets when you stoop to questioning someone’s abilities based on marital status (#23).
Well may we laugh Karl, but when cheap oil and gas starts running out, solar and biofuel energy systems will not be sufficient to replace it.
Prices for everything will rise, incomes will drop, and the dominoes will fall.
Nuclear power is the only possible energy replacement, and it will come to Australia despite the risks because people will demand it as the energy crisis unfolds.
There will be challenges - ever seen an electric airliner?
The only question is the timeline - will all this happen in five years or 50?
No doubt people will look back afterwards and wonder what the hell we were thinking during the oil years.
We need to prepare now. Cheap oil allows us to build affordable infrastructure, but it won’t be this way forever.
#13 Has one good point. Why hasn’t Tasmania adopted the Victorian bushfire rebuilding codes?. They spent the time working them out, it is a crime to not take advantage of that.
Re #25: The latest Rear Vision - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting ...
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision
“We are told that Germany now leads the world in terms of green technology and the generation of renewable electricity. So how has this come about, what are ...”
Karl Stevens No 23: Cars and industry CANNOT be run on ethanol for the very simple reason that there would not be enough agricultural land to grow sufficient corn ( the main ingredient) and certainly not enough to provide food as well.
Of course the Chinese are running the Australian economy.
The Chinese make their junk after buying the materials from the Australian quarries. They sell them to the US after lending them the money to pay for it.
The Us gets deeper into debt everyday.
This is a cycle that has to be repeated to keep it going but inevitably will crash at some stage, probably caused by the demand on oil exceeding the supply.
Hang on a moment Robert Lepage #28:“Cars and industry CANNOT be run on ethanol ...”
Some cars and some industries can, some run n electric power, some on hydrocarbons like LNG or even hydrogen gas.
It is not a matter of simply just setting a cut of date for the whole world or even Tasmania.
There will be changes and there will be challenges for a whole range of reasons, there always were and there always will be as long as life goes on.
Look for the documentary:“How Cuba survived peak oil”. There are hard landings and soft landings, changes and end and new beginnings, new opportunities also.
Who would have thought in 1987 that we can Skype with our friends and families overseas on a wireless communication system?
Did you?
So let’s explore the issues colleberatively not in total panic.
I am not having any better times if I just look at the problems and negatives, it is a mindset and not a two dimentional issue, not a stop or go, block or white world.
Cheers for now
Frank Strie 29.
By saying that they cannot run on ethanol, my meaning was that there would not, could not be enough to supply them.
All of the so called “alternatives” just do not do the job. Hydrogen is a non starter because you finish up with less energy than you started with.
There is a thing called the gas cliff, which is when the whole world is trying to use it for BUA and you run out. Yes I know “they” are telling us that we have oodles of it but we had oodles of oil at one stage and we have a lot now but the elephant is the constantly increasing population.
Yes I know about Cuba and what they did but can you imagine the average Sydneysider growing what will be nearly all of his food in the front garden, hopping on the back of a truck to go and work in the fields? They were an inspiration to all but they did have a benevolent dictatorship to organise and run it. We don’t
The very tone of some of the comments show that this is not going to be an option here let alone most “first world” countries.
The comment about there always being changes ” as long as life goes on” is prescient, how long will life go on?
The positivity of Frank Strie should be recognised. Although none of us have lived-thru peak oil and climate change before, some of the posters here seem to be getting ready to cannibalise their neighbours. Sure our kids would have to salute the Chinese flag at school every morning in Tasmania but life would go on.
#31 Peak oil! There’s more being discovered every day- America has too much of it.
An “inevitable 9 metre sea rise” #1- Well, #9 can take some comfort that the “troll” at #8 will be submerged.
And it was “I and Thou” - no t’other way around!
And- according to Rachel Carson- and I was ‘affected’ at the time by Silent Spring-over 50 years ago now! (Cassie is how old?) we probably shouldn’t still be here - but we are- indeed tens of millions more than then, and it’d be nice if a Climate Minister would occasionally acknowledge the possibility that it will be ok and we will adapt where necessary.
Certainly there is not much evidence children and especially grandchildren are too concerned- gap years overseas and continually flying somewhere.
Then building big houses and driving big cars and installing huge tv’s.alongside every other energy-consuming appliance.
Few with a garden in which to try to be self-sufficient in vegetables.
We must harden our hearts to the violins of “what about the grandchildren” Get’em out of school sooner and into work more quickly. Too much education- not enough hard yakka.
Cassy probably meant “I and Thou”- but getting things wrong way round is a feature of much Green thinking- trees first, peoplelast an example.
And Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring impressed everyone who read it over 50 years ago- How old is Cassy? - but the forecast disasters haven’t come about and our children and grandchildren are more concerned about taking gap-years, travelling everywhere and then building a big house with a big tv and other energy consuming gadgets and keeping the big four-wheel drive and boat in good nick.
It’d be a useful ‘parallel world’ experiment to let Cassy lose with her no coal mines and exclusively renewable energy policy: there’d be a mass exodus from Green-land as reality bit!
So far as ethanol is concerned, let’s look at the harsh realities.
Even if you could turn crops into ethanol with 100% efficiency, taking *all* the food the average person eats in a *year* still only provides the equivalent of 90 litres of petrol. Allowing for conversion losses its’ even less.
We could take everything that Australians eat, turn it into ethanol and end up with enough petrol (but not diesel, fuel oil, aviation fuel etc) to run South Australia. Meanwhile we’d have no fuel in Qld, NSW, ACT, Vic, Tas, WA or NT and even SA would be without any oil fuel other than actual petrol.
Ethanol has a role to play making use of crop wastes etc to help save a bit of oil but it’s no a large scale solution that’s for sure. At best, might give us enough liquid fuel for limited use in applications where electricity is especially difficult.
Now consider how much fuel it takes to grow and harvest the crops in the first place and it’s readily apparent that ethanol is a dud.
What about other biomass? Well Tasmania used to be a world scale woodchip exporter, all 6 million tonnes or so of it. If we burnt all that in a power station, we’d be able to generate roughly half the state’s electricity. Now remember that most places don’t have wood resources on anywhere near the scale that Tasmania does relative to population, and that even here that rate of logging was doing rather a lot of damage environmentally.
I don’t know what we’ll actually do in the long term (globally) but it’s not going to involve maintaining today’s rates of energy use simply by switching to biofuels. At least it won’t unless plants suddenly start growing 50 times faster and do so without chemical fertilizers.
So much for ‘peak oil’. Australia is about to become oil self-sufficient thanks to massive shale oil deposits in Coober Pedy SA.
http://www.news.com.au/business/companies/trillion-shale-oil-find-surrounding-coober-pedy-can-fuel-australia/story-fnda1bsz-1226560401043
#37. Great, all we need is the ability to put more and more carbon and waste into the atmosphere and destroy life on the planet quicker. Excellent news.
Well said AK. Even if there was plenty more oil, it would be way too expensive because its harder and dirtier to extract and sheer bloody madness to burn it. Who’s going to be able to afford it, especially when all other commodities go through the roof due to increased transport and production costs.
Sadly Lepage is probably bang on, because Humans are terrible at acting on maybes. We only react quickly in a crisis and by then its often too late. We have a long history of ignoring warning signs and outgrowing the capacity to feed ourselves as we expand for those who care to look. Jared Diamond anyone?
I will not feed the troll by mentioning his name (I think we all know and groan in unison), but saying all the doomy Silent Spring predictions did not transpire, so they won’t in future sets new depths in wrong headed reasoning for which they are infamous for. No predictions are completely right, but show me where Rachael always got it completely wrong?
Our kids seems unconcerned because they are being led by example from fools such as yourself. I don’t know, but the high rate of teen suicide, teen depression and depression in general tells me that people are concerned. My personal belief is that depression arrives from the innate sense that something is not right but being unable to fix it. Hence continuing to live with the wrongness knowing by continuing, you are perpetuating it and being constantly stymied when you attempt to address it. But lets not get depressed or angry, we might actually do something about it if we did. Lets give that right emotion a negative label and medicate it.
It doesn’t have to be gloomy if we act and act quickly, effectively and decisively, but thats a pretty big if.
If we learned to live with less, grew our own food, taxed mining heavily and put it into renewables and energy efficiency R&D, actively reduce populations by scraping the catholic church and introducing massive birth control, while helping poorer nations convert to clean energy modernisation by donation of technology (while scraping third world debt and promoting womens education).......
we MIGHT just have a chance of retaining some semblance of civilisation.
Maybe.