The unrelenting assault

phill Parsons

Another in the occasional report on how the climate is behaving under the unrelenting assault we are making on the natural systems that underpin human society.

IT IS interesting that in the group of articles under latest Climate in the Austrlaian online is the story about the legal challenge to Gunns pulpmill. It would seem that the Austrlaian accepts the argument that pulpmill operations are related to the climate.

The Hydro storage is at almost record lows at 18.6% [Lowest 18.2%]. The Liberals have returned to normal, announcing a need for more storages [dams] to make a system that is dependent on rainfall more secure when the trends are for less of that rainfall.

At least the Hydro shows some understanding of the trends advising the government to opt for wind and mini hydro. One mini htdro they could consider upgrading is the scheme in the north east that had to close recently when leaking supply pipes could not be replaced on the income from low flows.

The flows down the Darling have been swallowed by a parched landscape and the Murray remains stressed. Wong may have funded new irrigation infrastructure and a scheme to buy back surplus water, hopefuly to fund improvements to infrastructure but if the water remains absent as an impact of climate instability the efforts will come to nought.

That would be an indication that a turning point has passed and it is time to abandon the inland and focus on closing down GHG emissions worldwide and quickly in the hope that the inland returns to the rainfall patterns that supported it some day.

The governments injection of $13.9B and a decade should show if Austrlaia’s major river system can be saved or we should evacuate climate instability catapulting the region into the ranifall predicted for 50 years hence.

Giving a best chance for not evacuating behind a new Goyder line will be ensuring that carbon is fully accounted for in working out the emissions trading scheme and that no exemptions from payment for that pollution is allowed.

The sense of an argument should not be measured by the number of submissions taking a particular line.

The system of payment may vary but at a point in the near future, say 2020, all industries including aluminuim should be paying for the carbon in and the cost of distributing their product.

We hear from the loosers here coal, steel, aluminuim cement; but not from the finanancial winners under such accounting. The farmers who change practices and increase carbon storage, the forestry industry with the embodied carbon stored in timber products such as housing and furniture and in the forests.

Such existing industries need to grasp the nettle quicky and take the benefi of our attempyts at changing behavior.

And then there is the public who will loose big time with delays to full carbon accounting raising the price of action later; perhaps past affordability as the climate becomes more and more unstable as a precursor to catastrophic disaster.

Changes to a pattern in the ENSO of at least 300 years long as measured in tree ring records of the long lived Aotearoa New Zealand kauri [Agathis australis] first showed in 1870.

Mor recently we have seen a pattern where this heat island that is so important for the planets climate has fewer and shorter cooler periods [La Nina], coinciding with the decline in rainfall and now the prolonged drought in SE Australia.

Another part of that climate system governed by the oceans is the conveyor that transfers heat around the planet by a system of surface flows and submarine returns of colder water.

German climate scientists say temperature rises will stall temporarily as a result of the slowing of the global currents that transport heat around the planet. Their research, in the latest edition of the journal Nature, is an attempt to more accurately forecast global temperature changes and variations on a shorter time scale.

Climate modellers from the Leibniz Institute for Marine Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology have stressed they do not directly contradict the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which last year estimated temperature increases of about 0.2C a decade over the next 20 years.

The research suggests a cooling diversion for the next 15 to 20 years after which there is likely to be accelerated temperature increases as global warming overrides the cooling effect.

“In the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” Noel Keenlyside from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences told the BBC.

“In the long term, radiative forcing dominates. But it’s important for policymakers to realise the pattern.”

The latest research illustrates the complexity and uncertainty in trying to model the specific behaviour of the oceans.

Research released by the CSIRO in January predicted an acceleration, rather than a slowing, of the earth’s currents caused by increased pollution in the northern hemisphere.

CSIRO’s Wenju Cai and Tim Cowan found that these pollutants or aerosols cool the ocean surface in the northern hemisphere, causing an imbalance that is redressed by an acceleration of these global currents. This effect is called global dimming.

Dr Cai said his theory was not completely at odds with the latest German research, as both would result in relative cooling across the northern hemisphere.

“Aerosols are mitigating the warming – without them we could have warmed more, and there is a net cooling effect from aerosols and that is going to intensify the gulf stream,” hesaid.

Other scientists have questioned the research, saying the slowing of the currents may be caused by changes in the saltiness of ocean waters. No mentionof ice cap melt though.

Such changes may have taken attention form the urgent need to act if they were not understood, now the results will simply be meat for the deniers to feed up to those who cannot see anything unusual in their street.

Climate stability action in Tasmania remains a dream of government. The sale of the Bell Bay gas fired power station robs Tasmanians of a means of offsetting the costs of importing power and havin lower GHG emissions than the imported dirty brown coal fired power.

It demonstrates how action on climate matters is still window dressing rather then a thouroughly thought through whole of government approach. You will know that change has come when a Minister for anything and the team of advisers flashes by on the bikeway or take up the back of your bus.

Recent work on brown coal at Beaconsfield has been lauded as a leap forward for reducing GHG emissions. Hooray, brown coal can now, with the expenditure of some GHG’s be wrung free of water and so become about as polluting as black coal.

Well, if carbon capture and storage can be made to work in time that would be important but if the collapse of the Murray Darling Basin caused by a marked change in the behavior of ENSO and a change in the rate of ocean circulation are correctly predicted a huge and rapid reduction in GHG emissions should undertaken by all countries

One could better understand the destruction of the system upon which we depend if there was a positive outcome at the end but on the evidence the scale of negatives is set to grow.

phill Parsons is not optomistic that changes in human behavior can occur quickly enough given the degree of doubt about the cause of climate change and the increasing rate of change precursing greater climate instability.