A Texan tragedy: ample oil, no water

The Guardian has an article on the unfortunate intersection of the Texas drought and shale oil boom - A Texan tragedy: ample oil, no water.

Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

"The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes," she said, blinking back tears. "I went: 'dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind."

Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry's outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart's case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking.

The town — a gas station, a community hall and a taco truck – sits in the midst of the great Texan oil rush, on the eastern edge of the Permian basin.

A few years ago, it seemed like a place on the way out. Now McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.

But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire's property ran dry.

No-one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town's central water supply. "Everyone just said: 'too bad'. Well now it's all going dry," McGuire said.

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Methane Hydrates Could Be Disastrous For The Planet

Climate Progress has a look at methane hydrates, which are seeing a fairly continuous stream of interest over the years - ‘Fire Ice’: Buried Under The Sea Floor, This New Fossil Fuel Source Could Be Disastrous For The Planet

Methane is a potent carbon-based greenhouse gas that is emitted from decaying organic matter (i.e. landfills, cow digestion, and melting permafrost). The natural gas industry has been harvesting methane buried deep underground for decades to supply their product, despite persistent climate and safety concerns. Yet there’s an even more dangerous collection of methane hidden at the bottom of the sea. Though it’s somewhat easy to forget about it, a potentially enormous source of carbon pollution: methane hydrate.

Fossil fuel companies have not forgotten and they are extremely interested in finding an economical way to extract it from the sea floor. The reason is that the latest estimates put the amount of methane hydrate at 700,000 trillion cubic feet, or more energy than all oil and gas that has ever been discovered. It’s extremely hard to extract, and all known methods are very risky.

Also known as methane clathrate, or “fire ice,” methane hydrate is created when decaying organic matter under the ocean floor emits methane. This seeps up and mixes with seawater at the bottom of the ocean. It forms a cement-like icy compound within and on top of the ocean sediment, which actually stops more methane from seeping into the ocean. If the water above it gets warmer, some of the methane hydrate melts as methane, which bubbles up through the water column. In shallow water, it bubbles straight to the atmosphere but in deeper waters, the methane bubbles bond with the dissolved oxygen and water, creating carbon dioxide which bubbles to the surface, or stays in the water and makes the already-acidifying ocean more acidic.

But new research suggests that slow melting is not the only fate of methane hydrate. A study published in Nature Geoscience on Sunday found that undersea earthquakes could speed up this process. The researchers suggested that seismic activity fractures the seafloor, causing the methane below the surface to bubble up and get trapped within methane hydrates and sediment on the ocean floor. An earthquake could also cause methane to percolate through the water, either oxidizing in shallow water or escaping the ocean as methane emissions. ...

Earlier this year, Japanese researchers successfully tested a new process that extracted methane hydrate from the ocean floor for the first time. The director of Japan’s Agency for Natural Resources compared this to the way shale gas was viewed a decade ago — too expensive for commercialization — but concluded “now it’s commercialized.” This process does have similarities to fracking, but instead of pumping fracking fluid into the earth and exploding the rock, it drills down to the seabed, relieves pressure on the hydrates, and dissolves the crystals into gas and water for collection.

However, harvesting methane hydrates poses the same risks faced by offshore oil drillers — pressure, drilling at depth, and the catastrophic ramifications of failure. If the drilling causes an underwater landslide, the methane could erupt to the surface all at once, a scenario called the “methane gun hypothesis.” This could release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, dealing a serious blow to cutting carbon emissions.

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Ontario Phases Out Coal-Fired Power

Scientific American has an article on Ontario's plans to phase out coal fired power entirely - Ontario Phases Out Coal-Fired Power.

By the end of the year, Ontario will become the first jurisdiction in North America to shut down almost its entire coal fleet. Yesterday, the province announced that its last two large coal units will close before 2014, making more than 99 percent of the province's electricity generated from non-coal sources. It is a major shift for Ontario, which fired 25 percent of its grid from coal a decade ago.

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Look at the whole picture

I liked this picture from this week's installment of Another Week of Climate Disruption News, July 21, 2013.

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Rapid Arctic thawing could be economic timebomb, scientists say

The Guardian has a look at a new report on the cost of unfreezing the arctic - Rapid Arctic thawing could be economic timebomb, scientists say.

Rapid thawing of the Arctic could trigger a catastrophic "economic timebomb" which would cost trillions of dollars and undermine the global financial system, say a group of economists and polar scientists.

Governments and industry have expected the widespread warming of the Arctic region in the past 20 years to be an economic boon, allowing the exploitation of new gas and oilfields and enabling shipping to travel faster between Europe and Asia. But the release of a single giant "pulse" of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea "could come with a $60tn [£39tn] global price tag", according to the researchers who have for the first time quantified the effects on the global economy.

Even the slow emission of a much smaller proportion of the vast quantities of methane locked up in the Arctic permafrost and offshore waters could trigger catastrophic climate change and "steep" economic losses, they say.

The Arctic sea ice, which largely melts and reforms each year, is declining at an unprecedented rate. In 2012, it collapsed to under 3.5m sqkm by mid September, just 40% of its usual extent in the 1970s. Because the ice is also losing its thickness, some scientists expect the Arctic ocean to be largely free of summer ice by 2020.

The growing fear is that as the ice retreats, the warming of the sea water will allow offshore permafrost to release ever greater quantities of methane. A giant reservoir of the greenhouse gas, in the form of gas hydrates on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), could be emitted, either slowly over 50 years or catastrophically fast over a shorter time frame, say the researchers.

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Snow and Arctic sea ice extent plummet suddenly as globe bakes

the Washington Post has a look at this years arctic sea ice melt - Snow and Arctic sea ice extent plummet suddenly as globe bakes.

You may recall, late last summer the Arctic sea ice extent dropped to its lowest level on record, 49 percent below the 1979-2000 average. It’s not clear if 2013 levels will match 2012′s astonishing record low, but – with temperatures over the Arctic Ocean 1-3 degrees above average – the 2013 melt season has picked up in earnest during July.

“During the first two weeks of July, ice extent declined at a rate of 132,000 square kilometers (51,000 square miles) per day. This was 61% faster than the average rate of decline over the period 1981 to 2010 of 82,000 square kilometers (32,000 square miles) per day,” the National Snow and Ice Data Center writes on its website.

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CIA Backs Geoengineering Study

Mother Jones has an article on geoengineering funding in the US - CIA Backs $630,000 Scientific Study on Controlling Global Climate. I think the title is overstating it a bit - geoengineering (in any of its myriad, crazed forms) isn't really "controlling" the climate.

The Central Intelligence Agency is funding a scientific study that will investigate whether humans could use geoengineering to alter Earth's environment and stop climate change. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will run the 21-month project, which is the first NAS geoengineering study financially supported by an intelligence agency. With the spooks' money, scientists will study how humans might influence weather patterns, assess the potential dangers of messing with the climate, and investigate possible national security implications of geoengineering attempts.

The total cost of the project is $630,000, which NAS is splitting with the CIA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA. The NAS website says that "the US intelligence community" is funding the project, and William Kearney, a spokesman for NAS, told Mother Jones that phrase refers to the CIA. Edward Price, a spokesman for the CIA, refused to confirm the agency's role in the study, but said, "It's natural that on a subject like climate change the Agency would work with scientists to better understand the phenomenon and its implications on national security." The CIA reportedly closed its research center on climate change and national security last year, after GOP members of Congress argued that the CIA shouldn't be looking at climate change.

The goal of the CIA-backed NAS study is to conduct a "technical evaluation of a limited number of proposed geoengineering techniques," according to the NAS website. Scientists will attempt to determine which geoengineering techniques are feasible and try to evaluate the impacts and risks of each (including "national security concerns"). One proposed geoengineering method the study will look at is solar radiation management—a fancy term for pumping particles into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight away from the planet. In theory, solar radiation management could lead to a global cooling trend that might reverse, or at least slow down, global warming. The study will also investigate proposals for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The National Academies has held two previous workshops on geoengineering, but neither was funded by the intelligence community, says Edward Dunlea, the study director for the latest project. The CIA would not say why it had decided to fund the project at this time, but the US government's apparent interest in altering the climate isn't new. The first big use of weather modification as a military tactic came during the Vietnam War, when the Air Force engaged in a cloud seeding program to try to create rainfall and turn the Ho Chi Minh Trail into muck, and thereby gain tactical advantage. Between 1962 and 1983, other would-be weather engineers tried to change the behavior of hurricanes using silver iodide. That effort, dubbed Project Stormfury, was spearheaded by the Navy and the Commerce Department. China's "Weather Modification Office" also controversially seeded clouds in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, hoping to ensure rain would fall in the Beijing suburbs instead of over the Olympic stadiums.

Although previous efforts to manipulate weather and climate have often been met with mockery, many geoengineering proposals "are fundamentally doable, relatively cheap, and do appear to be able to reduce climate risk significantly, but with risks," explains David Keith, a Harvard researcher and top geoengineering proponent.

But if geoengineering is cheap and "fundamentally doable," as Keith claims, that suggests foreign countries, or even wealthy individuals, could mess with the climate to advance their own ends. "This whole issue of lone actors: Do we need to be concerned about China acting unilaterally? Is that just idle chatter, or is that something the US government should prepare for?" asks Ken Caldeira, a geoengineering researcher at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology and a member of the current National Academy of Sciences panel.

At least one individual has already tried modifying the climate. Russ George, the former head of Planktos, a company that works to develop technology to deal with global warming, seeded the Pacific Ocean off western Canada with iron to generate a plankton bloom that, in turn, was supposed to suck up carbon dioxide from the air. George's effort was widely condemned, but at present there's little to stop other individuals or countries from trying it or something similar. That's part of what has the US intelligence community interested.

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Peak oil, not climate change worries most Britons

Reuters has an interesting column on some polling done in Britain - Peak oil, not climate change worries most Britons.

Most people in Britain want to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, but due more to fears of shortages and rising prices than to fears about climate change, according to a poll developed by researchers at Cardiff University and funded by the UK Energy Research Centre.

Nearly 2,500 people were surveyed across England, Scotland and Wales in August 2012. The results, published on Tuesday in a report on "Transforming the UK energy system: public values, attitudes and acceptability," provide a trove of information about public opinion on climate and energy policy.

By a large majority, respondents were either very concerned (24 percent) or fairly concerned (50 percent) about climate change and thought it was partly (48 percent) or mainly (28 percent) caused by human activity. Only a minority thought fears about climate change have been exaggerated (30 percent), though more expressed uncertainty about what the effects will really be (59 percent).

Nearly everyone agreed with the statement that Britain needs "to radically change how we produce and use energy by 2050". ...

By overwhelming majorities, those polled were fairly or very concerned gas and electricity would become unaffordable (83 percent); Britain will become too dependent on energy from other countries (83 percent); the country will have no alternatives if fossil fuels are no longer available (83 percent); and petrol will become unaffordable (78 percent).

Nearly four out of five respondents agreed the country should reduce its reliance on fossil fuels (79 percent). When asked for their reasons, respondents cited concerns about fossil fuels running out, being unsustainable or non-renewable (48 percent), costly (7 percent) and implied dependence on other countries (5 percent), compared with worries they are harmful to the environment and polluting (19 percent) or contribute to climate change (17 percent).

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Ocean Warming Report Reviews Implications for Re/Insurers

Insurance Journal has a look at a report on the implications of ocean warming for insurance companies - Geneva Association Ocean Warming Report Reviews Implications for Re/Insurers.

“In some high-risk areas, ocean warming and climate change threaten the insurability of catastrophe risk,” according to one of the conclusions of a research report issued today by the Climate Risks and Insurance working group of international insurance think tank, The Geneva Association .

The report is a follow up to the facts presented at the Association’s recent conference in London, which focused on the necessity for governments and the re/insurance industry to work more closely together to take remedial measures to lessen the damages and losses caused by natural catastrophes. “There is new, robust evidence that the global oceans have warmed significantly,” said John Fitzpatrick, Secretary General of The Geneva Association. “Given that energy from the ocean is a key driver of extreme events, ocean warming has effectively caused a shift towards a ‘new normal’ for a number of insurance-relevant hazards. This shift is quasi irreversible—even if greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions completely stop tomorrow, oceanic temperatures will continue to rise.”

Falk Niehorster of the Risk Prediction Initiative of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science, and the lead author of the study, said: “In the non-stationary environment caused by ocean warming, traditional approaches, which are solely based on analyzing historical data, increasingly fail to estimate today’s hazard probabilities. A paradigm shift from historic to predictive risk assessment methods is necessary. As a consequence today’s hazard probabilities become more and more ambiguous and the report calls for scenario-based approaches and tail risk modeling to become an essential part of enterprise risk management.”

The report also notes that while most people think of global warming affecting the atmosphere, not the oceans; the seas are “the principle conveyor of energy around our planet. Through being the main source of water to the atmosphere, the oceans largely determine our weather patterns and provide the energy for the development of extreme events.”

According to the report, “the most significant driver to the rising of insured costs is driven by socio-economic factors, not least the increasing wealth of individuals and the increasing concentrations of development and therefore risk in coastal areas and on flood plains.”

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Goodbye, Miami

Here's some funeral week futurism from Rolling Stone, mourning the passing of Miami - Goodbye, Miami.

By century's end, rising sea levels will turn the nation's urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin.

When the water receded after Hurricane Milo of 2030, there was a foot of sand covering the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontaine­bleau hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane's 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city. In South Beach, the old art-deco­ buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A 17-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay. Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera. More than 800 people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; 13 people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread – falsely, it turned out – that one of the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, an aging power plant 24 miles south of Miami, had been destroyed by the surge and sent a radioactive cloud over the city.

The president, of course, said Miami would be back, that the hurricane did not kill the city, and that Americans did not give up. But it was clear to those not fooling themselves that this storm was the beginning of the end. With sea levels more than a foot higher than they'd been at the dawn of the century, South Florida was wet, vulnerable and bankrupt. Attempts had been made to armor the coastline, to build sea walls and elevate buildings, but it was a futile undertaking. The coastline from Miami Beach up to Jupiter had been a little more than a series of rugged limestone crags since the mid-2020s, when the state, unable to lay out $100 million every few years to pump in fresh sand, had given up trying to save South Florida's world-famous­ beaches. In that past decade, tourist visits had plummeted by 40 percent, even after the Florida legislature agreed to allow casino gambling in a desperate attempt to raise revenue for storm protection. The city of Homestead, in southern Miami-Dade County, which had been flattened by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, had to be completely abandoned. Thousands of tract homes were bulldozed because they were a public health hazard. In the parts of the county that were still inhabitable, only the wealthiest could afford to insure their homes. Mortgages were nearly impossible to get, mostly because banks didn't believe the homes would be there in 30 years. At high tide, many roads were impassable, even for the most modern semiaquatic vehicles.

But Hurricane Milo was unexpectedly devastating. Because sea-level­ rise had already pushed the water table so high, it took weeks for the storm waters to recede. Salt water corroded underground wiring, leaving parts of the city dark for months. Drinking-water­ wells were ruined. Interstate 95 was clogged with cars and trucks stuffed with animals and personal belongings, as hundreds of thousands of people fled north to Orlando, the highest ground in central Florida. Developers drew up plans for new buildings on stilts, but few were built. A new flexible carbon-fiber­ bridge was proposed to link Miami Beach with the mainland, but the bankrupt city couldn't secure financing and the project fell apart. The skyscrapers that had gone up during the Obama years were gradually abandoned and used as staging grounds for drug runners and exotic-animal traffickers. A crocodile nested in the ruins of the Pérez Art Museum.

And still, the waters kept rising, nearly a foot each decade. By the latter end of the 21st century, Miami became something else entirely: a popular snorkeling spot where people could swim with sharks and sea turtles and explore the wreckage of a great American city.

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Leave coal in ground, scientists urge government

The SMH has an article on a report by the Climate Commission - Leave coal in ground, scientists urge government.

Most of Australia's coal reserves will have to be left unburned if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a major new report from the federal government's Climate Commission.

The report puts the key science advisory body on a collision course with some of the nation's biggest export industries, and marks the first time a government agency has endorsed calls for fossil fuel industries to be phased out because of their contribution to climate change.

Its findings mean that most of Australia's known coal, oil and gas reserves – many of which are already subject to minerals production licences held by companies such as BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto – must somehow be left alone if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.

The Climate Commission acknowledged its conclusions were "sobering" and that the potential for economic disruption could be serious, but said there was no alternative if the world was to avoid dangerous climate change.

"How people react to this is up to the policymakers and governments, as well as investors," said Professor Lesley Hughes, co-author of the report The Critical Decade 2013 – Climate change science, risks and responses, to be released on Monday.

"It isn't our job to reconcile the politics of this with the science," she said. "We are simply presenting the facts as best we know them. Just because the facts may be unpalatable to some people doesn't make them any less important."

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Extreme Weather Possibly Increasing Power Outages ?

Stuart at Early Warning has a post pondering if increasing extreme weather events are causing more frequent power outages - Extreme Weather Possibly Increasing Power Outages?.

I'm reading up on the economics of power outages at the moment, and I stumbled across the graph above in this National Wildlife Federation analysis. It shows the number of power outages caused by non-weather related factors, and weather related factors (from 1992-2010 in the US). There has been a material increase in both categories, but much more so in the weather related problems.

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UN sounds alarm on record Arctic ice melt

The SMH has a report on last year's arctic ice melt - UN sounds alarm on record Arctic ice melt.

The Arctic's sea ice melted at a record pace in 2012, the ninth-hottest year on record, compounding concerns about climate change underscored by extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy, the UN weather agency says. In a report on the situation in 2012, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Thursday that during the August to September melting season, the Arctic's sea ice cover was just 3.4 million square kilometres. That was a full 18 per cent less than the previous record low set in 2007.

WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud dubbed it a "disturbing sign of climate change." "The year 2012 saw many other extremes as well, such as droughts and tropical cyclones. Natural climate variability has always resulted in such extremes, but the physical characteristics of extreme weather and climate events are being increasingly shaped by climate change," he said. "For example, because global sea levels are now about 20 centimetres higher than they were in 1880, storms such as Hurricane Sandy are bringing more coastal flooding than they would have otherwise," he added.

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Marcott's Climate Reconstruction For the past 11,000 Years

The Atlantic has a look at a new study of historical temperatures - We're Screwed: 11,000 Years' Worth of Climate Data Prove It

Back in 1999 Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann released the climate change movement's most potent symbol: The "hockey stick," a line graph of global temperature over the last 1,500 years that shows an unmistakable, massive uptick in the twentieth century when humans began to dump large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It's among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann's back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists.

Now it's gotten a makeover: A study published in Science reconstructs global temperatures further back than ever before -- a full 11,300 years. The new analysis finds that the only problem with Mann's hockey stick was that its handle was about 9,000 years too short.

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Summer on the NEM: What the extreme heat didn’t do to demand

While it's been hot this summer you wouldn't be able to tell from slumping electricity grid demand (courtesy of a pleasingly large takeup of solar PV in recent years) and probably helped along by the government's efforts to push solar hot water and roof insulation a couple of years ago- Summer on the NEM: What the extreme heat didn’t do to demand.

With a run of recent summers of below par temperatures, energy pundits have been eagerly awaiting a good summer heat wave to see just how our electricity system would stand up. The big question was what would happen when all those newly installed air conditioners finally got ramped up, once the the la Nina cycle broke and we got a good roasting? Would a return to hotter conditions finally break the trend of declining energy demand over the last four or five years?

Well it looks like we got the summer that would answer these questions, and the answers are no doubt causing a fair bit of head scratching amongst the pundits.

Since the last hot summer in 2010, our electricity system has seen a lot of changes. For one thing, almost 2 gigawatts of distributed generation has been added in the form of domestic solar PV. To put that in context, 2GW represents a touch under 10 per cent of average summer demand, though of course solar PV only produces at near maximum levels for a few hours in the middle of a sunny summer day. However, when solar PV is producing it takes away from the demand for electricity that otherwise would be dispatched across the poles and wires via our National Electricity Market – or NEM.

So with this summer just past setting new records for extreme heat, it’s a good time to point the summer sun on the NEM and see how it is standing up.

With blistering summer heat, particularly across New South Wales and Queensland, there was an expectation we might see new records in peak demand. But despite the weather and the supposed new air-conditioning load, the NEM doesn’t seem to have been pushed very hard at all during this last summer.

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Climate trends create an angry summer

The SMH pints to a new report from the Climate Commission on this summer's record heat - Trends create angry summer.

''Statistically, there is a one in 500 chance that we are talking about natural variation causing all these new records,'' said Will Steffen, the report's lead author and director of the Australian National University's climate change institute. ''Not too many people would want to put their life savings on a 500-to-1 horse.''

The statistic comes from tallying known weather records from around the world, and measuring the likelihood of record-breaking extremes happening without the influence of extra energy accumulating on Earth due to the build-up of greenhouse gases.

''We are talking about a massive amount of additional energy, most of which is being held around the surface layers of the ocean, which is driving the increased evaporation and rainfall,'' Professor Steffen said.

The tumbling of records has also prompted conversations in the scientific community to turn a corner, he said. Previously, ''weather is not climate'' was the mantra, but now the additional boost from greenhouse gases was influencing every event.

''I think the steroids analogy is a useful one,'' Professor Steffen said. ''Steroids do not create elite athletes - they are already very good athletes. What happens when athletes start taking steroids is that suddenly the same athletes are breaking more records, more often. We are seeing a similar process with the Earth's climate.''

This summer was the hottest on Australian record. In the 102 years of uniform national records, there have been 21 days where the continent averaged more than 39 degrees, and eight of those took place this year. Rainfall extremes have smashed records, with rain contributing more to floods and less to watering crops. The effects have continued into autumn.

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Australia's "Dome of Heat"

The Economist has a look at Australia's record breaking heatwave at the start of the year, dubbed the "Dome of Heat" (which eventually resulted in a new record temperature for Sydney of 45.8 degrees) - Up to Eleven: An uncomfortable time for Australians, especially climate-change sceptics.

IN OODNADATTA, an outback town in South Australia, the roads melted. Sydney, Australia’s biggest city, sweltered through heat of 42.3°C (108.1°F). In Tasmania, a Dunkirk-style flotilla of small craft swung into operation to rescue locals and tourists stranded by fires on the isolated Tasman peninsula. Australia’s summer-holiday season has barely begun. Yet a heatwave has swept across the country, smashing temperature records and raising questions both about the impact on annual weather patterns of global warming, and about Australia’s vulnerability to the changes.

Heat is part of the national mythology. It killed some of the country’s first white explorers, and has sparked many devastating fires. The worst, “Black Saturday” in Victoria, killed 173 people four years ago. Thanks to better preparation, firefighting skills and a good dose of luck, fires raging in four states in the latest heatwave have spared humans. Yet Australia is getting ever hotter. The 2013 heatwave has set a new record, 40.3°C, for the highest national average temperature. So far, Leonora, a town in Western Australia, has been the hottest place of all, at 49°C on January 9th. That is still below the highest temperature ever recorded in Australia, 50.7°C at Oodnadatta 53 years ago.

The authorities are preparing for such recordings as the new normal. On January 8th the Bureau of Meteorology added new colours, purple and pink, to its weather map to denote temperatures once considered off the scale: 50-52°C and 52-54°C respectively. (In “Spinal Tap” parlance, it turned the knob up to 11.) The bureau says more “significant records” are likely to be set, with no end to the heatwave in sight.

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China consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined

Stuart at Early Warning points to this article on Chinese coal consumption - good for Australian coal miners (other than when they get flooded each year), bad for everyone else - China consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined

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Nicholas Stern: 'I got it wrong on climate change – it's far, far worse'

The Guardian has an interview with Nicholas Stern - Nicholas Stern: 'I got it wrong on climate change – it's far, far worse'.

Lord Stern, author of the government-commissioned review on climate change that became the reference work for politicians and green campaigners, now says he underestimated the risks, and should have been more "blunt" about the threat posed to the economy by rising temperatures.

In an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Stern, who is now a crossbench peer, said: "Looking back, I underestimated the risks. The planet and the atmosphere seem to be absorbing less carbon than we expected, and emissions are rising pretty strongly. Some of the effects are coming through more quickly than we thought then."

The Stern review, published in 2006, pointed to a 75% chance that global temperatures would rise by between two and three degrees above the long-term average; he now believes we are "on track for something like four ". Had he known the way the situation would evolve, he says, "I think I would have been a bit more blunt. I would have been much more strong about the risks of a four- or five-degree rise."

He said some countries, including China, had now started to grasp the seriousness of the risks, but governments should now act forcefully to shift their economies towards less energy-intensive, more environmentally sustainable technologies.

"This is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one? These risks for many people are existential."

Stern said he backed the UK's Climate Change Act, which commits the government to ambitious carbon reduction targets. But he called for increased investment in greening the economy, saying: "It's a very exciting growth story."

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Doha Climate Talks Enter Week 2

The SMH has an article on the latest round of climate negotiations - It's the end of the world as we know it.

THE world is on track to see "an unrecognisable planet" that is between 4 and 6 degrees hotter by the end of this century, according to new data on greenhouse gas emissions.

As United Nations climate negotiations enter their second week in Doha, Qatar, an Australian-based international research effort that tracks greenhouse gas output will release its annual findings on Monday, showing emissions climbing too quickly to stave off the effects of dangerous climate change.

The new forecast does not include recent revelations about the effects of thawing permafrost, which is starting to release large amounts of methane from the Arctic. This process makes cutting human emissions of fossil fuels even more urgent, scientists say.

The new data from the Global Carbon Project found greenhouse gas emissions are expected to have risen 2.6 per cent by the end of this year, on top of a 3 per cent rise in 2011. Since 1990, the reference year for the Kyoto Protocol, emissions have increased 54 per cent.

It means that the goal of the Doha talks – to hold global temperature rise to 2 degrees – is almost out of reach. That goal requires that emissions peak now and start falling significantly within eight years.

"Unless we change current emissions trends, this year is set to reach 36 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels, we are on the way to an unrecognisable planet of 4 to 6 degrees warmer by the end of this century," said the executive director of the Global Carbon Project, Dr Pep Canadell.

"Unless the negotiators in Doha wake up tomorrow and embrace a new green industrial revolution to rapidly change our energy systems, chances to stay below global warming of 2 degrees Celsius are vanishing very fast, if they are not already gone."

Emissions are growing in line with the most extreme climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to a paper in the journal Nature Climate Change that explains the Global Carbon Project's findings.

The trajectory means a temperature range of between 3.5 and 6.2 degrees by the year 2100, with a "most likely" range of between 4.2 and 5 degrees. ...

Matthew England, a colleague of Professor Pitman and fellow author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, said: "While the science is clear that emissions reductions are required urgently, each year we are emitting more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This is like a smoker ramping up the number of cigarettes smoked each day despite grave warnings to stop smoking altogether – sooner or later this catches up with you."

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