Australia is at the other side of the planet and facing extremes that we have yet to deal with. Sure, we've had floods, hurricanes and fires this year, but not to the extent of Australia. Is Australia facing what our future is to become? That is the premise of the piece by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone, Climate Change and the End of Australia.
I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. "Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."
Why Australia then? Well, there is good reason for it, it has the one of the most volatile climates of our populated continents.
To climate scientists, it's no surprise that Australia would feel the effects of climate change so strongly, in part because it has one of the world's most variable climates. "One effect of increasing greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere is to amplify existing climate signals," says Karoly. "Regions that are dry get drier, and regions that are wet get wetter. If you have a place like Australia that is already extreme, those extremes just get more pronounced." Adding to Australia's vulnerability is its close connection with the sea. Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.
How bad could it get? A recent study by MIT projects that without "rapid and massive action" to cut carbon pollution, the Earth's temperature could soar by nine degrees this century. "There are no analogies in human history for a temperature jump of that size in such a short time period," says Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at Australian National University. The few times in human history when temperatures fell by seven degrees, he points out, the sudden shift likely triggered a bubonic plague in Europe, caused the abrupt collapse of the Moche civilization in Peru and reduced the entire human race to as few as 1,000 breeding pairs after a volcanic eruption blocked out the sun some 73,000 years ago. "We think that because we are a technologically sophisticated society, we are less vulnerable to these kinds of dramatic shifts in climate," McMichael says. "But in some ways, because of the interconnectedness of our world, we are more vulnerable."
With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production. Rising sea levels will wipe out large parts of major cities and cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to coastal homes and roads. The Great Barrier Reef will be reduced to a pile of purple bacterial slime. Thousands of people will die from heat waves and other extreme weather events, as well as mosquito-borne infections like dengue fever. Depression and suicide will become even more common among displaced farmers and Aborigines. Dr. James Ross, medical director for Australia's Remote Area Health Corps, calls climate change "the number-one challenge for human health in the 21st century."
Even though Australia adopted the Kyoto Protocol by pledging to cut carbon by 60% by 2050 they still depend a great deal on coal for their energy needs (80% according to this article).
This piece was written during Yasi, a category five Cyclone that hit Queensland in February of this year. It was devastating to the area but did less damage then feared (500 million is still nothing to sneeze at and it left thousands homeless.
The residents of North Queensland are assessing the damage after cyclone Yasi, the largest tropical storm to strike Australia since Europeans first settled there, created winds of 186mph and waves more than 9m high.
As meteorologists predicted, it was midnight when the destructive core of the category five cyclone crossed the coast at Mission Beach, a small resort where two World Heritage sites meet, 30 miles south of the town of Innisfail.
Thousands of the 400,000 people living in the path of the 300-mile wide cyclone spent a sleepless night in hot and crowded emergency evacuation centres set up in primary schools and shopping centres deemed strong enough to withstand the cyclone and avoid storm surges up to 8m high.
The cyclone is another blow to North Queensland's massive coal industry, banana and sugar cane growers and its tourism businesses, just when the state was open for business again after the floods in December and January, which left 35 people dead.
Source
Cyclone Yasi is seen as just one more sign that things are changing, another sign that it's not just weather that is altering, but climate itself a pattern of the actual make up there in Australia.
The question is of course, do we take these warnings seriously? Obviously many changes Nationally have been pretty difficult to push through. The Obama administration said Monday it was moving forward with oil-drilling leases off the coast of Alaska issued by the Bush administration in 2008, a victory for oil companies in the battle over Arctic Ocean drilling.
Coal is still a reality in the US even though its costs have been shown to do more harm than good to the US economy, it is still used and sold and is being rebranded as "clean". There is no such thing as "clean" coal. Just this week a study American Economic Review came out with the following:
It concludes that the "gross external damages" (GED) from the sickness and death caused by the pollution, is larger than their value add in several key industries – coal- and oil-fired electricity plants, solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, and marinas!
The most damning assessment is of coal, which is fingered for about $53 billion in damages a year. This estimate does not include climate change and uses a conservative estimate of health risks. The authors say that coal's damages bill ranges from 0.8 to 5.6 times value added.
Instead of being cheap and affordable, the study finds coal is likely the costliest source of electricity. Which is not to suggest that it immediately be shut down, they say, but that it should be understood that for every one-unit increase in output, the additional costs are higher than the revenues.
It made me think of the email I got yesterday from the Union of Concerned Scientists. They had a contest for editorial cartoons. This seems strangely appropriate doesn't it?
There is no such thing as clean coal and it is not cheap. It is deadly, not only to our health but to our environment, resources and communities.
There are answers. You can keep pushing for alternatives.
Beyond Coal
Stopping the Coal Rush, Sierra Club (Also part of Beyond Coal).
If the 100-plus coal-fired power plants currently proposed are built, the global warming pollution pumped into our air will make all our other efforts to reverse climate change irrelevant. Coal plants are the dirtiest, most regressive source of energy- poisoning our communities and environment. The Environmental Law Program is working with activists around the country to champion clean energy in the face of this unprecedented rush to build new coal plants.
Greenpeace, Coal is Dirty!
Coal fired power plants are the biggest source of man made CO2 emissions. This makes coal energy the single greatest threat facing our climate.
And what do you do? Support Sustainable communities and transitioning. Using less resources means less energy and saving money. I am involved with my city's transition start up and I also support our city's green initiative. Both will help us move towards reducing energy costs, make such things like solar, gray water installation etc. more affordable for homeowners and other things I want to do more readily available to every home owner.
Transition US
Transition US is a nonprofit organization that provides inspiration, encouragement, support, networking, and training for Transition Initiatives across the United States. We are working in close partnership with the Transition Network, a UK based organization that supports the international Transition Movement as a whole.
Green Initiativesmy city. :)
Do something in your community, in your home, school, work, somewhere. It can be big or small, but you can do something.