Tag Archives: Emissions

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29 September 2016, The Conversation, Putting carbon back in the land is just a smokescreen for real climate action: Climate Council report. Just as people pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the land also absorbs some of those emissions. Plants, as they grow, use carbon dioxide and store it within their bodies. However, as the Climate Council’s latest report shows, Australia’s fossil fuels (including those burned overseas) are pumping 6.5 times as much carbon into the atmosphere as the land can absorb. This means that, while storing carbon on land is useful for combating climate change, it is no replacement for reducing fossil fuel emissions. Land carbon is the biggest source of emission reductions in Australia’s climate policy centrepiece – the Emissions Reduction Fund. This is smoke and mirrors: a distraction from the real challenge of cutting fossil fuel emissions.Land carbon Land carbon is part of the active carbon cycle at the Earth’s surface. Carbon is continually exchanging between the land, ocean and atmosphere, primarily as carbon dioxide. In contrast, carbon in fossil fuels has been locked away from the active carbon cycle for millions of years. Carbon stored on land is vulnerable to being returned to the atmosphere. Natural disturbances such as bushfires, droughts, insect attacks and heatwaves, many of which are being made worse by climate change, can trigger the release of significant amounts of land carbon back to the atmosphere. Changes in land management, as we’ve seen in Queensland, for example, with the relaxation of land-clearing laws by the previous state government, can also affect the capability of land systems to store carbon. Burning fossil fuels and releasing CO₂ to the atmosphere thus introduces new and additional carbon into the land-atmosphere-ocean cycle. It does not simply redistribute existing carbon in the cycle. Read More here

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27 September 2016, Climate Central, The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently. In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate. At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million. That all but ensures that 2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists. Because carbon pollution has been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution and has shown no signs of abating, it was more a question of “when” rather than “if” we would cross this threshold. The inevitability doesn’t make it any less significant, though. September is usually the month when carbon dioxide is at its lowest after a summer of plants growing and sucking it up in the northern hemisphere. As fall wears on, those plants lose their leaves, which in turn decompose, releasing the stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide, there are signs that the process has begun but levels have remained above 400 ppm. Read more here

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21 September 2016, Climate News Network, Dire climate impacts go unheeded. New scientific studies address lack of awareness of the adverse economic, social and biodiversity effects that climate change is already having. The social and economic impacts of climate change have already begun to take their toll – but most people do not yet know this. Politicians and economists have yet to work out how and when it would be best to adapt to change. And biologists say they cannot even begin to measure climate change’s effect on biodiversity because there is not enough information. Two studies in Science journal address the future. The first points out that historical temperature increases depress maize crop yields in the US by 48% and have already driven up the rates of civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa by 11%. Economic growth Hot weather in future could slow global economic growth rates by nearly 0.30 percentage points per year. Almost as surprising, according to Solomon Hsiang, principal investigator in the Global Policy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, is that nobody seems to be aware of these facts. “People get so used to hot days, since they happen all the time, that they never stop to consider that those days are costing them,” Professor Hsiang says. “But if people used different technologies or organised their lives differently to adapt to their climate, then we might be able to do dramatically better.” Read More here

 

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19 September 2016, The Guardian, Adani Carmichael coalmine faces new legal challenge from conservation foundation. Foundation appeals against ruling that endorsed mine’s approval by the commonwealth. The Australian Conservation Foundation has renewed its legal challenge to Adani’s Carmichael mine, appealing against a federal court ruling that endorsed its approval by the commonwealth. The ACF on Monday lodged an appeal against last month’s decision, which found the then federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, was entitled to find the impact on global warming and the Great Barrier Reef from the Queensland mine’s 4.6bn tonnes of carbon emissions “speculative”. The president of the ACF, Geoff Cousins, said Australia’s national environment protection laws were “broken” if the minister could approve “a mega-polluting coalmine – the biggest in Australia’s history – and claim it will have no impact on the global warming and the reef”. “If our environment laws are too weak to actually protect Australia’s unique species and places, they effectively give companies like Adani a licence to kill,” Cousins said. “Be in no doubt, Adani’s Carmichael proposal is massive and will lock in decades of damaging climate pollution if it goes ahead, further wrecking the reef. “The science is clear that we can have coal or the reef – but we can’t have both.” Read More here