Yearly Archives: 2015

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3 August, The Guardian, Senate inquiry recommends national standards on windfarm noise levels. Independent committee will set noise levels and states that refuse to adopt them barred from receiving renewable energy certificates under proposal. An independent scientific committee should be created to set national standards on the level of sound emitted by windfarms, the final report of a Senate inquiry into turbines has recommended. States that refuse to adopt the national limits should be barred from receiving renewable energy certificates, it said. The independent expert scientific committee on industrial sound should report back to state and federal health ministers on the health effects of proposed windfarms, the report by the select committee on wind turbines said. If the project poses a risk, it should not be accredited. The report was tabled in the Senate on Monday, and urges the federal government to put a cap on renewable energy certificates of five years…. “If the government follows through on the recommendations in the majority report it will just cement Australia’s place as a global climate pariah with regional communities and the environment paying the price.” The final report also recommends that the national health and medical research council should research the ill health effects of wind turbines, a syndrome for which no evidence has been found. “The committee believes there is an urgent need to put in place a central point of expert scientific advice on the risks of wind turbines to human health,” the report said. The Australian Medical Association refused to front the inquiry and has said that “there is no accepted physiological mechanism where sub-audible infrasound could cause health effects”. The report criticised the AMA’s decision not to give evidence, and hammered the research council for taking the advice of “Big Wind”. Read More here

26 June 2015, The Guardian, Minimal sound and almost no fury: life in the shadow of Australia’s windfarm ‘hell’: As the political cacophony about ‘noisy, visually awful’ wind turbines reaches fever pitch, Calla Wahlquist visits the farmers who host one of the southern hemisphere’s largest windfarms and finds them stubbornly unperturbed. Read More here

 

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3 August 2015, Potsdam Institute, CO2 removal cannot save the oceans – if we pursue business as usual. Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activities do not only cause rapid warming of the seas, but also ocean acidification at an unprecedented rate. Artificial carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere has been proposed to reduce both risks to marine life. A new study based on computer calculations now shows that this strategy would not work if applied too late. CDR cannot compensate for soaring business-as-usual emissions throughout the century and beyond, even if the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration would be restored to pre-industrial levels at some point in the future. This is due to the tremendous inertia of the ocean system. Thus, CDR cannot substitute timely emissions reductions, yet may play a role as a supporting actor in the climate drama. Ocean acidification affects the shells of plankton like Pteropods. “Geoengineering measures are currently being debated as a kind of last resort to avoid dangerous climate change – either in the case that policymakers find no agreement to cut CO2 emissions, or to delay the transformation of our energy systems,” says lead-author Sabine Mathesius from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “However, looking at the oceans we see that this approach carries great risks.” In scenarios of timely emissions reductions, artificially removing CO2can complement efforts. “Yet in a business-as-usual scenario of unabated emissions, even if the CO2 in the atmosphere would later on be reduced to the preindustrial concentration, the acidity in the oceans could still be more than four times higher than the preindustrial level,” says Mathesius. “It would take many centuries to get back into balance with the atmosphere.” Read More here

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3 August 2015, Science Daily, Glaciers melting faster than ever. The World Glacier Monitoring Service has compiled worldwide data on glacier changes for more than 120 years. Together with its National Correspondents in more than 30 countries, the international service just published a new comprehensive analysis of global glacier changes. In this study, observations of the first decade of the 21st century (2001-2010) were compared to all available earlier data from in-situ, air-borne, and satellite-borne observations as well as to reconstructions from pictorial and written sources. “The observed glaciers currently lose between half a metre and one metre of its ice thickness every year — this is two to three times more than the corresponding average of the 20th century,” explains Michael Zemp, Director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service and lead author of the study. “Exact measurements of this ice loss are reported from a few hundred glaciers only. However, these results are qualitatively confirmed from field and satellite-based observations for tens of thousands of glaciers around the world.” Global glacier decline According to the international author team, the current rate of glacier melt is without precedence at global scale, at least for the time period observed and probably also for recorded history, as indicated also in reconstructions from written and illustrated documents. In addition, the study shows that the long-term retreat of glacier tongues is a global phenomenon. Read More here

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3 August 2015, The Conversation, The scariest part of climate change isn’t what we know, but what we don’t. We know a lot about what climate change will do, but ‘when’ is a tougher question. “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”: so goes a Danish proverb attributed variously to baseball coach Yogi Berra and physicist Niels Bohr. Yet some things are so important — such as projecting the future impacts of climate change on the environment — that we obviously must try. An Australian study published last week predicts that some rainforest plants could see their ranges reduced 95% by 2080. How can we make sense of that given the plethora of climate predictions? In a 2002 press briefing, Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defence, distinguished among different kinds of uncertainty: things we know, things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know. Though derided at the time for playing word games, Rumsfeld was actually making a good point: it’s vital to be clear about what we’re unclear about. So here’s my attempt to summarise what we think we know, don’t know, and things that could surprise us about climate change and the environment. Read More here