The Indian Ocean Dipole and Eastern Australian Droughts

Peter Hannam in The culprit behind east Australia's big dry explains that the Indian Ocean Dipole has a a huge effect on rainfall levels in Australia's eastern states.

In its so-called positive phase, tropical waters off Australia's north-west are relatively cool - compared with those near Africa - strengthening easterly winds and reducing the potential convection that typically supplies much of south-eastern Australia's critical winter and spring rains. A negative IOD has the opposite effect.

And of course, climate change is making it worse:

Dr Cai says that while the Indian Ocean is warming - along with others around the world - “the west is warming faster”. Under such conditions, "it’s easier to have an extreme positive IOD event", he said.
Such a future would be bad news for farmers, and raise doubts about the effectiveness of policies proclaimed to be "drought-proofing".
“We change the average climate by having these events more frequently or more strongly," Abram says. "It has an effect of changing our average rainfall.”

...

"We are perturbing the atmosphere in a profound way with greenhouse gases," England says. "How this changes our modes of variability is uncertain.”

The top 100 solutions to climate change

In A new book ranks the top 100 solutions to climate change. The results are surprising. David Roberts interviews Paul Hawken about Hawken's book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.

Unlike most popular books on climate change, it is not a polemic or a collection of anecdotes and exhortations. In fact, with the exception of a few thoughtful essays scattered throughout, it’s basically a reference book: a list of solutions, ranked by potential carbon impact, each with cost estimates and a short description. A set of scenarios show the cumulative potential.

...

The number one solution, in terms of potential impact? A combination of educating girls and family planning, which together could reduce 120 gigatons of CO2-equivalent by 2050 — more than on- and offshore wind power combined (99 GT).

...

Also sitting atop the list, with an impact that dwarfs any single energy source: refrigerant management. (Don’t hear much about that, do you? Here’s a great Brad Plumer piece on it.)

David MacKay on Sustainable Energy

In 2008 David MacKay FRS, the Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, wrote a book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air. This book is available free at his site www.withouthotair.com

The biggest takeaway I had from the book was this:

Have no illusions. To achieve our goal of getting off fossil fuels, these
reductions in demand and increases in supply must be big. Don’t be distracted
by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll
achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in
demand and in supply.

Change the energy market settlement time to encourage storage technologies

In Change market rules, and battery storage will easily beat gas Giles Parkinson argues that changing the settlement time in the energy market from 30 minutes to 5 minutes will encourage the adoption of fast response technologies like batteries and other forms of storage.

A mini ice age isn't coming

As Dana Nuccitelli reports in No, the sun isn't going to save us from global warming

To sum up, a number of scientific studies have asked the question, ‘if the sun were to enter another extended quiet phase (a grand solar minimum), how would that impact global surface temperatures?’. Every study agrees, it would cause no more than 0.3°C cooling, which would only be enough to temporarily offset about a decade’s worth of human-caused global warming.

2014 the hottest year on record

According to Ben Cubby in Climate changes amid the blaming game 2014 was the hottest year on record. Not only that, but the ten hottest years have all been since 1998.

Over the weekend, as bushfires scorched the Adelaide Hills, southern Australia was the hottest region on the face of the planet.

On Monday, it was announced by the respected Japan Meteorological Agency that 2014 had been the warmest year the world has seen since reliable measurements began in 1890. On Tuesday, our own Bureau of Meteorology revealed that 2014 had been Australia's third-warmest year, and NSW had just endured its hottest on record. All of the world's top ten hottest years have now taken place since 1998.

Will China do nothing about climage change for the next 16 years?

John Mathews and Hao Tan in FactCheck: does the new climate deal let China do nothing for 16 years? argue that far from doing nothing, China will be leading the world in the deployment of zero emission electricity generation. China's carbon emissions will likely peak well before their 2030 deadline.

Interesting change in green tactics

Mike Seccombe in Who is running green politics? looks at how some environmental groups are becoming more professional and targeting board rooms in their campaigns.

The benefits of coal are no longer worth the cost

In Ignore Abbott, we shouldn't feel bound to coal Greg Jericho argues that as we now know more of the impact of burning coal we should stop singing it's praises.

Devolving environmental approvals is a bad idea

Peter Martin in Don't put Australia's treasures in state hands explains the advantages in allowing states to compete with each other. However, he says, this should not extend to environmental approvals.

By competing, each state strengthens the whole. If an innovation in one state doesn't work, it stays there and doesn't damage the rest. If it does work, it spreads and makes the rest stronger. A paper commissioned by former premier Steve Bracks for the Council for the Australian Federation described Australia as a ship with eight separate watertight compartments: "When a leak is sprung in one compartment, the cargo stowed there may be damaged, but the other compartments remain dry and keep the ship afloat", it said.

...

But until now no Australian government has seriously countenanced the proposition that the environment was a matter solely for the states. Even the Gillard government, which experimented with devolution in an effort to counter "green tape", gave up after it realised state governments wouldn't impose the same high standards as the Commonwealth.

Now the Abbott government is legislating for what it calls a "one-stop shop". Billed as a "major step forward in the government's commitment to reduce red tape" the law would devolve responsibility for environmental approvals to "the most appropriate level of government".

Abbott and Hunt believe the appropriate level is state government, and if it chooses to delegate, local government, raising the spectre of at least eight "one-stop shops", each with different approval processes and none of them necessarily inclined to protect the national environment.

Solve congestion with more roads, rather than more public transport?

Brian Lee Crowley in Sick of congestion? Build roads, not transit notes that cities that invest in roads rather than public transport have less congestion and lower travel times.

This relationship between density and travel times is another counterintuitive puzzler for those who believe cars and roads are the problem, rather than the solution to transit woes. How easy it is to assume that travel times must be shorter where cities are dense and people therefore have shorter distances to travel to work.

What the real world shows us, though, is that when urban population density is lower, and jobs widely dispersed rather than concentrated in a city centre, commuter traffic is more widely scattered on the road network, lowering commuting times. This is a real challenge for the advocates of heavy investment in subways and light rail, which are reliant on commuting patterns focused on a hub-and-spoke model bringing workers downtown along densely developed transit corridors.

I think things are more complicated than that. There are also environmental and social costs associated with greater urban sprawl. Lower population densities lower the economic efficiency of public transport, while higher population densities will by itself increase congestion. It's also much easier to build or expand a new road in environments were there's little or no urban development - imagine trying to build a six lane freeway in the middle of Manhatten.

Nuclear waste safer than coal ash?

Mara Hvistendahl writes that Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste.

The article ends with a clarification:

As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.

Plastic bag bans may make us sick

Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in Are Plastic Bag Bans Making Us Sick? that:

The study, by Jonathan Klick of University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Property and Environment Research Center and Joshua D. Wright of the George Mason University School of Law, found that in jurisdictions where plastic bags were banned saw ER visits increase by about one-fourth, with a similar increase in deaths compared with neighboring counties where the bags remained legal.

Basically people were schlepping leaky packages of meat and other foods in their canvas bags, then wadding to the bags somewhere for awhile, leaving bacteria to grow until the next trip, when they tossed celery or other foods likely to be eaten raw in the same bags.

Washing plastic bags reduces the risk apparently, although it seems no one does it. What isn't discussed is the environmental cost in washing the bags.

Those opposing wind power

Mike Seccombe has written a two part series on the people and organisations behind much of the opposition to wind farms in Australia:
A field guide to the war on wind power and A field guide to the war on wind power (part two)

Sandi Keane also looks at the same people and how some residents are fighting back in Waubra Fights The Anti-Wind Bullies.

Is eating meat environmentally friendly?

In short it's complicated, but meat production may not be as environmentally bad as some people claim. At least according to Asa Wahlquist in The Carnivore's (Ongoing) Dilemma.

Monbiot on peak oil

In False Summit George Monbiot writes:

We were wrong about peak oil: there’s enough in the ground to deep-fry the planet.

Monbiot seems worried that new found oil supplies might not be such a good thing:

So this is where we are. The automatic correction – resource depletion destroying the machine that was driving it – that many environmentalists foresaw is not going to happen. The problem we face is not that there is too little oil, but that there is too much.

We have confused threats to the living planet with threats to industrial civilisation. They are not, in the first instance, the same thing. Industry and consumer capitalism, powered by abundant oil supplies, are more resilient than many of the natural systems they threaten. The great profusion of life in the past – fossilised in the form of flammable carbon – now jeopardises the great profusion of life in the present.

There is enough oil in the ground to deepfry the lot of us, and no obvious means by which we might prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world’s most powerful nation is once again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.

Myths of the Pacific Garbage Patch

In Lies You’ve Been Told About the Pacific Garbage Patch Annalee Newitz interviews Scripps Institution marine biologist Miriam Goldstein:

You've probably heard of the "Pacific garbage patch," also called the "trash vortex." It's a region of the North Pacific ocean where the northern jet stream and the southern trade winds, moving opposite directions, create a vast, gently circling region of water called the North Pacific Gyre — and at its center, there are tons of plastic garbage. 

Checking a climate prediction from 1981

In Now This Is Interesting: A Climate Prediction From 1981 James Fallows looks at a climate prediction made by James Hansen in 1981:

It is very much worth checking out an item on Real Climate, from two Dutch scientists. They have found a paper by James Hansen and others from 1981, before climate change was even an occasion for political disagreement.

Hansen is now famous in the world of climate studies, and infamous to the world of the right wing, but back then he was a 40-year-old researcher who came up with a projection of how rising CO2 levels might affect global temperatures. Science lives for the "falsifiable hypothesis" -- a claim that can be tested against the evidence -- and that is what the paper by Hansen and his colleagues offered up. Three decades later, his worst-case projections were matched against what has happened since then. You should read their full findings, but this gives you the idea.

Basically, actual observations show an increase on 30% over what Hansen predicted. Read the article to see a graph showing the increase.

Yet more evidence for the effects of CO2 on global warming

Pete Spotts writes in Ice age study delivers blow to global-warming skeptics:

A new study finds that rising levels of carbon dioxide drove rising temperatures at the end of the last ice age. The findings contrast with previous studies, which skeptics of human-triggered global warming said showed that CO2 levels weren't an important factor.

Gillard discusses carbon pricing on election eve

The night before the 2010 Federal election Julia Gillard was interviewed by The Australian. In their report on the interview, Julia Gillard's carbon price promise, Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan wrote:

JULIA Gillard says she is prepared to legislate a carbon price in the next term.

It will be part of a bold series of reforms that include school funding, education and health.

In an election-eve interview with The Australian, the Prime Minister revealed she would view victory tomorrow as a mandate for a carbon price, provided the community was ready for this step.

"I don't rule out the possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a market-based mechanism," she said of the next parliament. "I rule out a carbon tax."

This is the strongest message Ms Gillard has sent about action on carbon pricing.

While any carbon price would not be triggered until after the 2013 election, Ms Gillard would have two potential legislative partners next term - the Coalition or the Greens. She would legislate the carbon price next term if sufficient consensus existed.

So, it's now March 2012 and what do we have? We have a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. What don't we have? We don't have a carbon tax. I think Julia Gillard has actually kept her word.