8 November 2016, The Conversation, Natural disasters are affecting some of Australia’s most disadvantaged communities. Bushfires have been the most common natural disaster in New South Wales over the past decade, according to our study published today in Nature’s Scientific Reports. Our study, the first of its kind, looked at disaster declarations in local government areas (LGAs). We found 207 disasters affected the state between 2004 and 2014. Bushfires were the most common, responsible for 108 disaster declarations, followed by storms (55) and floods (44). By looking at where disasters were declared, we found a “hotspot” in northern New South Wales, which includes some of the state’s most disadvantaged communities. This suggests that to help communities prepare for disasters, we need to address underlying causes of disadvantage. There’s nothing natural about a disaster Disasters are a regular part of life for communities across the globe. So far in 2016, disasters have cost US$71 billion and claimed some 6,000 lives. Globally, the number and cost of disasters is rising. Australia has a long history of natural disasters, from catastrophic bushfires to flooding rains. Many people are asking whether such disasters are becoming more frequent, and what we can do to better prevent and prepare for them. Despite the way we talk about them, fires, floods and storms are not inherently natural disasters. Though they may threaten social systems or the environment, they are more accurately classified as natural hazards. A disaster occurs when a natural hazard overwhelms a social system’s capacity to cope and respond. Instead, disasters require many agencies and a coordinated response. Many factors such as vulnerability, resilience and population density influence a how a community copes with hazards.Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
2 November 2016, Renew Economy, Malcolm Turnbull blown off course by South Australia’s 100% renewable energy. It is something of an irony that prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s attempts to visit the South Australian city of Port Lincoln over the weekend should have been thwarted by strong winds – winds, it should be noted, that provided 100 per cent of the state’s power needs for much of the day. According to local media reports, Turnbull’s planned visit to Port Lincoln on Sunday was aborted when his plane was unable to land after two attempts due to strong winds. It is not the first time Turnbull’s attempts to land in Port Lincoln have been thwarted by strong winds – a similar attempt a month ago was also abandoned in the face of bad weather. The winds in Sunday were strong – not strong enough to stop wind turbines from spinning however, as deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and South Australia Senator Nick Xenophon like to believe, but enough to provide more than 100% of South Australia’s underlying electricity demand for more than 10 hours on Sunday. According to Dylan McConnell from the Melbourne Energy Institute, who provided the graph above, wind provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s needs from 8:10am to 6:40pm. During that period the price averaged approximately negative $25/MWh. At 2pm on Sunday, wind was (very briefly) was producing 46 per cent more than underlying demand – around 1370 MW of wind and 935MW demand from the grid (which does not include rooftop solar being consumed in homes). As it happened, it was not just windy that day, but also quite sunny. And according to the APVI solar map, rooftop solar PV was producing about 293MW, which means that variable renewable energy sources (wind and solar) were producing 1,670MW. Read More here
1 November 2016, Bloomberg, Geoengineering to Alter Climate Moves Closer to Reality. A United Nations body is investigating controversial methods to avert runaway climate change by giving humans the go-ahead to re-engineer the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. So-called geoengineering is seen as necessary to achieve the COP21 Paris agreement clinched in December, when 197 countries pledged to keep global temperatures rises below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to researchers who produced a report for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. “Within the Paris agreement there’s an implicit assumption that there will need to be greenhouse gases removed,” said Phil Williamson, a scientist at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, who worked on the report. “Climate geoengineering is what countries have agreed to do, although they haven’t really realized that they’ve agreed to do it.” Large-scale geoengineering may include pouring nutrients into oceans to save coral habitats or spraying tiny particles into the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect sun rays back into space. Geoengineering proposals have been shunned because of their unpredictable consequences on global ecosystems. Read more here
1 November 2016, The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef: why are government and business perpetuating the big lie? At the core of the Australian government’s failure to protect our Great Barrier Reef is the big lie. Through its actions and inaction, rhetoric, funding priorities and policy decisions, the Australian government has implicitly pursued the line that it is possible to turn things around for the reef without tackling global warming. This is the big lie. Last year, when the federal and Queensland governments released the Reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan, experts were emphatic about the deceit. Eminent coral reef scientist Prof Terry Hughes commented that the “biggest omission in the plan is that it virtually ignores climate change, which is clearly the major ongoing threat to the reef”. Great Barrier Reef historian Iain McCalman wrote that the new measures “deliberately ignore the dire long-term threats to the reef that are contained in the now unutterable words ‘climate change’”. “They are akin to investing in cures for a patient’s skin diseases while ignoring their cancer symptoms,” he wrote. As the experts make plain, any attempt to decouple the future of the Great Barrier Reef from the quest to contain global warming is simply dishonest. As another expert, Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland, has said, we either “re-examine the current plans for unrestricted coal exports, taking proper account and responsibility for the resulting greenhouse emissions, or watch the reef die”. Read More here