16 December 2016, The Conversation, Climate change played a role in Australia’s hottest October and Tasmania’s big dry in 2015. Climate change made some of Australia’s 2015 extreme weather events more likely, according to research published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. As part of an annual review of global weather extremes, these studies focused on October 2015, which was the hottest on record for that month across Australia. It was also the hottest by the biggest margin for any month. October 2015 was also the driest for that month on record in Tasmania, which contributed to the state’s dry spring and summer, and its bad fire season. El Niño events usually drive global temperatures higher, and 2015 had one of the strongest on record. So were these records due to El Niño, or climate change? The research shows that while El Niño had some influence on Australia’s weather, it was not the only culprit. El Niño packed a punch – or did it? In 2015, a strong El Niño developed, with record high temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean contributing to 2015 being the hottest year on record globally (although 2016 will smash it). The Indian Ocean was also very warm. El Niño is often associated with warm and dry conditions across eastern Australia, particularly in spring and summer. The new studies found that for Australia as a whole, while El Niño did make the continent warmer, its direct contribution to record temperatures was small. Only in the Murray Darling Basin did El Niño make it more likely that the October 2015 heat would be a record. El Niño also played a small but notable role in the dry October in Tasmania. Read More here
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15 December 2016, The Conversation, Rising power bills signal the end of an era for Australia’s electricity grid. Electricity bills are set to rise further for households, according to a report from the Australian Energy Markets Commission (AEMC). The report, released this week to coincide with the December meeting of the COAG Energy Council, forecasts that electricity bills will increase by an average of A$78 by 2018 in the five eastern states and the ACT. Together these comprise the National Electricity Market (NEM). The AEMC has prepared these three-year reports each year since 2010. But no report has received as much publicity as this one. This is largely because the latest report comes hard on the heels of the announcement that Victoria’s Hazelwood power station is to close – the largest power station closure ever in Australia. It also follows the release of a specially commissioned report by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel that opens with the words: “The physical electricity system is undergoing its greatest transition since Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison clashed in the War of the Currents in the early 1890s.” So what does the latest report really say? Read More here
13 December 2016, Inside Climate News, ‘The Arctic Is Unraveling,’ Scientists Conclude After Latest Sobering Climate Report. The ill winds of climate change are irrevocably reshaping the Arctic, including massive declines in sea ice and snow and a record-late start to sea ice formation this fall. Those were the sobering conclusions of the 2016 Arctic Report Card released Tuesday. The report card is sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and co-authored by more than 50 scientists from Asia, North America and Europe. The data shows that the Arctic is warming at double the rate of the global average temperature. Between October 2015 and September 2016, temperatures over Arctic land areas were 2.0 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 baseline, the warmest on record going back to 1900. The report, released at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, clearly links the Arctic heatwave to a record-late start to formation of sea ice this fall, and to record high and low seasonal snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere. If the extreme warmth recorded in the Arctic this fall persists for the next few years, it may signal a completely new climate in the region, scientists said. Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA’s Arctic Research Program, said the report highlights the clear and pronounced global warming signal in the Arctic and its effects cascading throughout the environment, like the spread of parasitic diseases in Arctic animals. “We’ve seen a year in 2016 like we’ve never seen before … with clear acceleration of many global warming signals. The Arctic was whispering change. Now it’s not whispering. It’s speaking, it’s shouting change, and the changes are large,” said co-author Donald Perovich, who studies Arctic climate at Dartmouth College. Sustained observations of the Arctic is crucial to making science-based policy decisions, he added, a goal threatened by the inclusion of numerous climate deniers in President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet. This week, Trump’s transition team posted a new “Energy Independence” website that repeats his previous intentions to open up vast areas for fossil fuel development and to scrap existing climate action plans. Arctic ice doesn’t care about politics, and what happens in the region now is critically important to the U.S., said Rafe Pomerance, chair of Arctic 21 and a member of the Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Read More here
13 December 2016, Carbon Brief, Some 33 US states have cut CO2 emissions while growing their economies over the past 15 years, according to new analysis from the Brookings Institution. These states show that economic growth can be compatible with tackling climate change. The US as a whole is one of at least 35 countries around the world to have achieved the same feat, by decoupling GDP growth and CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2014. “This success is an encouraging juncture in the campaign to limit global warming, and would seem to license cautious optimism,” write Devashree Saha and Mark Muro, the authors of the new research from the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “Yet now all of that is in question. With the stunning election of Donald Trump to the presidency, every aspect of the low-carbon paradigm for national and world progress has been thrown into doubt.” If the US federal government turns its back on climate mitigation, can individual sub-national bodies step up their own efforts? The authors explain: “Given their substantial powers to encourage emissions decoupling, states and cities are crucial players in the carbon drama. Therefore, it is worth assessing whether states’ and localities’ momentum on decoupling is strong enough to maintain recent progress.” For more discussion of the debate around decoupling, check out this recent Carbon Brief article. For more on changes in US states and the factors behind their varied progress, check out the full Brookings Institution analysis. Read More here