Monthly Archives: April 2017

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12 April 2017, SMH – John Pilger, Australia is sleepwalking into a confrontation with China. Australia is sleepwalking into a confrontation with China. Wars can happen suddenly in an atmosphere of mistrust and provocation, especially if a minor power, such as Australia, abandons its independence for an “alliance” with an unstable superpower. The United States is at a critical moment. Having exported its all-powerful manufacturing base, run down its industry and reduced millions of its once-hopeful people to poverty, the principal American power today is brute force. When Donald Trump launched his missile attack on Syria ‒ following his bombing of a mosque and a school ‒ he was having dinner in Florida with the President of China, Xi Jinping. The attack on Syria was clearly, above all, to show his detractors and doubters in Washington’s war-making institutions ‒ the Pentagon, the CIA, the Congress ‒ how tough he was and prepared to risk a war with Russia. He had spilt blood in Syria, a Russian protectorate; he was surely now on the team. The attack was also meant to say directly to Xi, his dinner guest: this is how we deal with those who challenge the top dog. China has long received this message. In its rise as the world’s biggest trader and manufacturer, it has been virtually encircled by 400 US military bases ‒ a provocation described by a former Pentagon strategist as “a perfect noose”. This is not Trump’s doing. In 2011, the then president Barack Obama flew to Australia to declare, in an address to parliament, what became known as the “pivot to Asia”: the biggest build-up of US air and naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since the Second World War. The target was China. America had a new and entirely unnecessary enemy. Today, low-draft US warships, missiles, bombers and drones operate on China’s doorstep. In July, one of the biggest US-led naval exercises ever staged, the biennial Operation Talisman Sabre, will rehearse a blockade of the sea lanes through which run China’s commercial lifelines. Based on an Air-Sea Battle Plan for war with China, which prescribes a “blinding” attack, this “war game” will be played by Australia. Read More here

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12 April 2017, Nature, Antarctica’s sleeping ice giant could wake soon. The massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet looks stable from above — but it’s a dangerously different story below. These first direct observations confirmed a fear that researchers had long harboured: that warm waters from the surrounding ocean can sneak underneath the floating glacier tongue and eat the ice away from below1. “This could explain why Totten has been thinning in the past few decades,” says Rintoul. Findings such as these are revealing some scary truths about East Antarctica — the vast, remote landmass to the east of the Transantarctic Mountains (see ‘Ice king’). This region is about as big as the entire United States and the majority of it stands on a high plateau up to 4,093 metres above sea level, where temperatures can plunge to −95 °C. Because the East Antarctic Ice Sheet seems so cold and isolated, researchers thought that it had been stable in the past and was unlikely to change in the future — a stark contrast to the much smaller West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has raised alarms because many of its glaciers are rapidly retreating. In the past few years, however, “almost everything we thought we knew about East Antarctica has turned out to be wrong”, says Tas van Ommen, a glaciologist at the Australian Antarctic Division in Kingston, near Hobart. By flying across the continent on planes with instruments that probe beneath the ice, his team found that a large fraction of East Antarctica is well below sea level, which makes it more vulnerable to the warming ocean than previously thought. The researchers also uncovered clues that the massive Totten glacier, which holds about as much ice as West Antarctica, has repeatedly shrunk and grown in the past2 — another sign that it could retreat in the future. Read More here

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10 April 2017, The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef at ‘terminal stage’: scientists despair at latest coral bleaching data. ‘Last year was bad enough, this is a disaster,’ says one expert as Australia Research Council finds fresh damage across 8,000km. Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found. The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover. Australia’s politicians have betrayed the Great Barrier Reef and only the people can save it | David Ritter Scientists with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies last week completed aerial surveys of the world’s largest living structure, scoring bleaching at 800 individual coral reefs across 8,000km. The results show the two consecutive mass bleaching events have affected a 1,500km stretch, leaving only the reef’s southern third unscathed.Where last year’s bleaching was concentrated in the reef’s northern third, the 2017 event spread further south, and was most intense in the middle section of the Great Barrier Reef. This year’s mass bleaching, second in severity only to 2016, has occurred even in the absence of an El Niño event. Mass bleaching – a phenomenon caused by global warming-induced rises to sea surface temperatures – has occurred on the reef four times in recorded history. Prof Terry Hughes, who led the surveys, said the length of time coral needed to recover – about 10 years for fast-growing types – raised serious concerns about the increasing frequency of mass bleaching events. “The significance of bleaching this year is that it’s back to back, so there’s been zero time for recovery,” Hughes told the Guardian. “It’s too early yet to tell what the full death toll will be from this year’s bleaching, but clearly it will extend 500km south of last year’s bleaching.” Read more here

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10 April 2017, Reuters, U.S. scuppers G7 bid to find joint stance on energy and climate. Italian energy minister said the United States is reviewing its strategy on climate change and Paris Agreement. The U.S. administration of Donald Trump on Monday scuppered efforts by the Group of Seven industrialised countries to reach a common stance on energy when it asked for more time to work out its policies on climate change. Trump signed an order in March to undo climate change regulations drawn up under his predecessor Barack Obama, calling into question U.S. support for an international deal to fight global warming. The order’s main target was Obama’s Clean Power Plan, requiring states to slash carbon emissions from power plants – a key factor in U.S. ability to meet commitments under a climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015. At a news conference wrapping up the G7 Energy meeting in Rome, Italian industry and energy minister Carlo Calenda said the United States was reviewing its strategy on climate change and the Paris Agreement. “While this is under way, the United States reserves its position on these key priorities,” he said. “It was not possible to sign a joint declaration since it would not cover the whole range of topics in the agenda.” Calenda, who chaired the G7 meeting, said all other European Union countries remained strongly committed to the Paris accord to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Speaking from Madrid later on Monday, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Europe would “respect everyone’s opinion on the matter but it would not accept making any steps backward with respect to the strategic choices made on climate change”. Gentiloni is due to meet Trump at a G7 summit Italy will host in Sicily next month, with Italy anxious to get public backing from all leaders on the Paris accords. A source close to the G7 talks said the inability of U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry to commit showed the isolation of the United States at the ministerial meeting. “The U.S. also wanted to include references to coal and fossil fuels,” the source said. During his election campaign, Trump pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, arguing it would hurt U.S. business. Environmental groups have criticised the administration’s order, arguing it runs dangerously counter to the global trend toward cleaner energy technologies. But Washington has still not spelt out its stance on the Paris agreement and some officials hope there is room for manoeuvre. “The talks were constructive and there was no friction,” Calenda said. The Italian minister is due to hold bilateral talks with Perry on Tuesday. (Additional reporting by Isla Binnie in Madrid; Editing by Francesca Landini and Janet Lawrence) Read More here