Climate Tasmania

As a global economic depression begins to look ever more likely, what are the prospects for redirecting our own economy? [24 January 2012 | Peter Boyer]

A satellite view of Costa Concordia on the rocks of Isola del Giglio, Italy. SOURCE DIGITAL GLOBE

If there’s a single all-embracing emblem of what most of our political and business elite promote as an ideal economy, it has to be one of those floating fantasy-lands we call cruise liners.

They tick most boxes. Their huge size and sleek, modern lines proclaim stability. They attract the investment of large numbers of passengers who in turn become model consumers, opening the wallet or accumulating debt for all those little on-board extras.

Costa Concordia offered an escape from humdrum cares as its crew took care of clients’ every need. Gleaming white by day, brilliantly luminescent by night, it oozed permanence, certainty and success as it cruised the enclosed pond called the Mediterranean.

And then it hit a rock. As it lost its power and rolled alarmingly in winter darkness, its crew were found wanting, and passengers had to rely on their own initiative to help themselves and each other. The grand symbol of serenity and stability had suddenly become a death-trap.

In the harsh light of day Costa Concordia (which means “peaceful coast”) looked anything but permanent — a sad, decaying hulk defiling the coast of a small island whose peace it had shattered.

The analogy with the global economy, especially the sad state of affairs in Europe, is obvious. But in considering likely culprits (the hapless ship’s captain, the Greek deficit, European governments or banks) it’s prudent to consider our own back yard.

Australia is travelling much better than Europe or Costa Concordia. The rising global economic power, China, just happens to be in our own region and to want commodities like iron ore, coal and gas — which we just happen to possess in abundance. Our luck might continue for some time yet, but we shouldn’t count on it.

Tasmanians know all too well that economic prosperity is transient and often illusory; for all our wealth in primary production we tend to lag behind mainland economies. But we were ill-prepared for the sudden drop in GST revenue in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.

We’re now in a bind. Good long-term policy demands that we focus on a sustainable economy based on real wealth, not the Costa Concordia model based on the illusion of endless growth. Yet to achieve this seems to demand serious allocation of resources that we don’t have.

Or does it? The public advocacy group Climate Action Hobart believes the government has tools currently available to implement an effective policy at minimal cost to develop a sustainable economy while mitigating climate change.

They’ve outlined their ideas in a submission to Climate Change Minister Cassy O’Connor. Based on scientific advice that early action is imperative, the group lists “low-cost or no-cost” steps to make Tasmania a national leader in climate change action. Among its 93 proposals:

• Take a national lead on climate policy, arguing for strong national actions and making climate action a defining feature of Tasmania. Set 2050 as the target for a carbon-neutral Tasmania and set 2020 as the target for 60 per cent emissions reduction. Define greenhouse emissions as pollution.

• Apply early and argue vigorously for Federal funding for home initiatives such as solar hot water.

• Manage forests as carbon stores, fund a State seed-bank, regulate private forest management, encourage closed-loop timber use and apply a state-wide fire management strategy.

• Provide funding for low-income households to cut energy use, require disclosure of building energy efficiency in property sales and rentals and support trades training in energy efficiency.

• Make Tasmania’s electricity 100 per cent renewable by 2020, taking a national lead on renewable energy. Support community-based power generation and remove aluminium smelting subsidies to release energy for more sustainable purposes.

• Protect productive land near population centres for growing food, develop a state-wide building code to ensure green building standards, embody sustainability principles in State and regional planning, and preference “fill-in” development over expansion for new housing.

• Use funds from increased registration fees for fuel-inefficient vehicles to subsidise bus transport and prioritise rail renewal throughout Tasmania, divert bypass road funds to low-emission transport, and introduce free buses and park-and-ride on key routes.

• Adopt triple-bottom-line accounting covering financial, social and environmental responsibilities. Salary packages for all public servants to favour adoption of Metro Greencards, fuel-efficient vehicles, and bicycles. Ensure departmental support for government carpooling.

• Investigate and support commercial enterprises less vulnerable to energy constraints, preference local marketing, promote low-carbon tourism and in-season food consumption.

• Develop small-scale recycling enterprises in Tasmania, introduce a deposit scheme to encourage recycling, discourage curb-side waste through less frequent collection, implement regular green waste collection, encourage cradle-to-grave manufacturing legislation

• Implement a “green scissors” program to cut barriers to appropriate behaviour and perverse incentives in government fees, charges and subsidies.

Faced with a daunting reality Costa Concordia passengers improvised, using a human chain to save lives. If the government can find the courage to act decisively for a more sustainable future, who knows what resources might be brought to bear by a supportive population?

Mawson’s scientific venture gets the credit it deserves as modern science seeks to understand what’s happening to the Antarctic ice sheet [17 January 2012 | Peter Boyer]

Antarctica with its great ice sheet (top) and without it (above), showing Aurora and Wilkes subglacial basins and the thousands of kilometres of coastline where ice is in direct contact with seawater.

A hundred years ago this summer, an expedition led by a South Australian geologist named Douglas Mawson made this country a world leader in the science of the far south.

As you read this, Australia’s ice research vessel Aurora Australis has just completed retracing the route of Mawson’s ship Aurora to Cape Denison, Antarctica, to celebrate the achievements of the 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

Mawson’s venture was a supremely successful scientific enterprise, bringing back more data on the geology, geography, biology and climate of the far south than any contemporary expedition — including those of Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton.

Last week Hobart-based scientist Steve Rintoul gave due credit to Mawson’s little ex-whaling ship Aurora which in 1912, under Captain John King Davis, was the platform for a major oceanographic voyage gathering Southern Ocean data between Hobart and Cape Denison.

The information gained from Aurora’s effort, notably its temperature and salinity data down through the water column, forms a baseline for current investigations of how polar waters south of Tasmania are responding to climate change.

Rintoul sees the region of very cold, very salty water off Mertz Glacier, near Cape Denison, as one of the “engine rooms” driving world ocean circulation, a role it shares with a handful of other sites off Antarctica and Greenland.

Ocean waters are the dominant influence on world climate, so getting a firm handle on how these waters are changing is an essential component of the vast global enterprise that is modern climate science. But there’s another pressing reason to be informed about Antarctic ocean waters.

How the Antarctic ice sheet interacts with ocean waters around it is playing heavily on the minds of Hobart-based scientists such as oceanographers John Church, Neil White and John Hunter and glaciologists Tas van Ommen and Roland Warner.

The Antarctic ice sheet, sitting on a rocky foundation around the South Pole, holds 90 per cent of the world’s ice — nearly 25 million cubic kilometres of solid water covering an area nearly twice the size of Australia. If there were no Antarctic ice sheet, seas around the world would be more than 60 metres higher than they are today.

The larger part of the southern continent, called East Antarctica because it’s mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere, is mostly based on a continental shield, once joined to Australia in a single southern supercontinent, Gondwana.

But West Antarctica and the part of East Antarctica that lies south of Tasmania (including Cape Denison) are by contrast peninsulas or archipelagos topped with a big slab of ice.

That means that a large part of the Antarctic coast is mostly not a rocky shoreline but rather the point at which the ice sheet ceases to be “grounded” on rock and starts to float on the sea. The ice sheet is thus in direct contact with sea water.

While Antarctica can change abruptly (such as in 2002, when the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula disappeared over a mere six weeks), the processes of change tend to be very gradual. If the ice sheet is to disappear again as it has done in times past, it will happen over a millennium or two.

But change can happen more quickly at a regional level, and a major driver of this is a warming ocean. Over the past few years scientists have paid special attention to a part of the Antarctic coast where a large glacial stream enters the Amundsen Sea, southwest of South America.

The Pine Island Glacier drains the part of West Antarctica at the base of the Antarctic Peninsula. Satellite images reveal little of what’s going on, because all the action is out of sight, about 1000 metres below the ocean surface.

A US-British investigation using a robotic submarine has found that in 2009 alone about 80 cubic kilometres of Pine Island Glacier was melted by warmer incoming seawater. Over a 35-year period the glacier’s rate of flow to the ocean has increased by 70 per cent.

Like Mawson before them, van Ommen and Warner are studying the East Antarctic ice sheet — specifically, how it works and how it changes over time. They’re especially focused on two large subglacial basins, Wilkes and Aurora (the latter named after Mawson’s ship) extending deep into the hinterland south of Cape Denison and Australia’s Casey station.

As with Pine Island Glacier, the Antarctic coast north of Wilkes and Aurora Basins is defined mostly by the grounded ice sheet, putting hundreds of kilometres of ice into direct contact with seawater. This may deplete and potentially destabilise the ice sheet.

Aerial surveys of the ice of Aurora Basin over the past couple of summers are the start of a big research project to define how far seawater might intrude under the East Antarctic ice sheet. What they and their international colleagues uncover will help White, Church and others determine the likely rate of sea level rise over coming decades and centuries.

The last big survey of climate science, the 2007 IPCC report, was conservative about the influence of the big ice sheets on sea level because we didn’t know enough about how they worked.

Since then, as well as the Pine Island Glacier and Aurora Basin studies, we’ve benefited from an array of satellite-based tools for measuring surface and mass fluctuations of the Antarctic ice sheet.

These research projects are getting us closer to the point where we can state definitively how Antarctica is changed by the climate, and how Antarctica, in turn, will affect the level of our seas.

It’s getting some stick from international airlines and governments, but the European court determination that airlines must pay for carbon emissions is a win for the planet. [10 January 2012 | Peter Boyer]

TOP TWO IMAGES: “Jet Trails” (2007), a 1.5m x 2.4m digital image by Chris Jordan (with detail above) depicting 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours. Water condensation trails, in addition to carbon dioxide and ozone, are a factor in aviation’s contribution to global warming. BOTTOM: Graph from a research paper published June 2010 showing the comparative short-term (5-year) impact on temperature of different forms of transport (based on year 2000 data).

Politics is the art of the possible, so the politicians tell us. They’re the ones who define what’s possible, so in the absence of adventurous leadership things happen very slowly, or not at all.

Climate policy is a good case in point. Science has found a mountain of reasons why we should act decisively to reduce carbon emissions, but politics has uncovered an equally big mountain of reasons why we shouldn’t.

The biggest obstacle to action is corporate or personal self-interest. If either big business or a sizeable chunk of the population is convinced that its well-being will suffer from emission-cutting measures, the politicians will tend to find reasons not to act.

So when personal and corporate self-interest are combined, you can rely on political leaders to bend over backwards to accommodate it, even to the extent of re-defining it as “national interest”.

That’s why, amid all the brouhaha around climate and energy policy, over the years international aviation has enjoyed a free ride (pun intended). Unlike land transport operators, carriers operating across national borders pay no tax on the fuel they put in their aircraft.

Until a few days ago they weren’t penalised for carbon emissions either. The aviation industry sees itself as a moderate carbon emitter, but it’s easily the most carbon-intensive way to transport people and freight, with a global carbon footprint that’s doubled since 1990 and may triple by 2020.

The short-term impact of aviation is even greater. A 2010 European study found that for five years after any given flight, the impact on global temperature of an airliner per passenger-kilometre is over four times that of the next worst offender, the car.

I think I’m on safe ground in saying most Australians will not feel comfortable knowing about this. Growing numbers of ordinary people are now able to afford the pleasure and reward of intercontinental travel. Who wants to curtail that?

Think, too, what’s at stake for professional people (including climate scientists attending regular international meetings, often many in a year), and the real movers and shakers, corporate high-fliers, politicians and bureaucrats, who like all of us love tripping to distant places. With such people as customers, the aviation industry has very powerful support where it counts.

This is all by way of background to a court’s decision in Europe last month that’s already ruffled some government and corporate feathers. Remember that Europe, despite its problems, remains a globally important economic power and the centre of world tourism.

In 2008, frustrated with global inaction over aviation emissions, Europe’s parliament decided to cap such emissions from 2012. As of now, every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted on a flight to, from and within Europe will require operators to surrender a permit (or “allowance”).

Operators must account for each year’s emissions and surrender the matching number of allowances to designated national authorities. They can determine how and where they reduce emissions by trading allowances within the European carbon market.

This seems perfectly fair and reasonable when you consider that other industries in Europe, under the European Union trading scheme, face similar penalties for carbon emissions. But the reaction from North America since the European laws were passed has been unremitting hostility.

US and Canadian airlines, with tacit support from their governments, took the EU to the European Court of Justice on the basis that the scheme violated international aviation agreements. After lengthy legal wrangling, only days before the law was to take effect the case was resolved in the EU’s favour.

The judges held that because the scheme applied only to aircraft within the EU and because non-EU airlines were free to choose not to land in EU airspace, the new regime did not infringe US or Canadian sovereignty.

As EU climate change commissioner Connie Hedegaard saw it, by engaging in the action the North American airlines accepted the rule of law. “So now we expect them to respect European law.”

The biggest non-European players in international aviation these days, the US and China, were predictably unhappy. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned of “appropriate action”, and China is reported to have blocked a planned purchase of new European-made Airbuses.

Clinton told EU President José Manuel Barosso that Europe could be isolated by its move, but given Europe’s pre-eminence as a destination that seems unlikely, as are the prospects of a US House of Representatives bill banning US airlines from complying with the EU scheme.

Infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese said last June he favoured an international system and thought the Europeans may have “got it wrong”, though the government has not responded to the European court decision. Australia’s new carbon pricing regime allows for adjustments to excise on domestic aviation fuel, but doesn’t apply to international air transport.

But Europe’s law provides for incoming flights to be exempt if the nation of origin has measures in place to offset international emissions. That suggests that it may be open for Australia to tweak its own carbon pricing scheme to allow exemption to Australians travelling to Europe.

Whatever that outcome, the European Commission estimates the per-passenger cost is likely to be less than 20 Euros. That’s not going to break anyone.