Climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels, contributing to the Great Deluge, is consigning Australia to escalating climate disasters
Most of Australia’s East Coast from Cape York south to the Victorian border has had over a meter of rain by the end of October — with the rains still continuing. Some of these areas have had more than 2 meters, and a few more than 3 meters! Many rainfall records have been smashed in all of the eastern states: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania; leading to almost constant flooding through the whole area that is continuing today. The latest reports from the BOM tell us the rains will continue into summer.
This is clearly a function of global warming. Physical laws dictate that as air temperatures rise, the air can carry more water vapor before it begins to condense as rain. Higher temperatures increase the rate of evaporation of water from soils and standing water – encouraging drought. Seemingly contradictory warmer air can precipitate more water in areas where it is raining. As the water condenses out as rain it also releases its ‘heat of fusion’ — and more heat is available to drive more extreme winds able to carry rain to high elevations before the rain freezes to fall back to Earth in devastating hail storms. Over larger areas there is also more energy available to fuel increasingly powerful cyclones.
Increased water means increased plant growth, increased temperature increases the rate at which soils and vegetation dry out — ensuring ever more catastrophic wildfires.
Ever more floods, fires and tempests cause increasing damage to infrastructure and people’s livelihoods and property until the catastrophes follow one another so closely that there are simply not physical or human resources left to repair the damage from one catastrophe before the next catastrophe causes even more damage. If the warming is not stopped this progression leads inevitably leads to social collapse (as we are already seeing in parts of the world), agricultural collapse (and famines as we are already beginning to see in Africa and the Middle East), ecological collapse (as we are already seeing in marine habitats with coral reef communities, kelp beds, sea grass meadows), and finally, population collapses when the land has literally been swept bare (areas in Africa are already on the edge of the cliff).
With the collapse of society, humans will quickly lose the scientific and engineering capabilities to fight further climate change already dialed into the system, such that there will be little hope of avoiding near-term global mass extinction. Continuing ‘business as usual’ support of the fossil fuel industry more-or-less ensures this grim outcome.
The Climate Council’s report, presented below, presents the facts and explains what they mean here in Australia, and some of the things we can to moderate and mitigate the expected damages. This is a good start, but I would be a silly liar if I said this was all we need to do in order to keep from utterly destroying our future.
Vote Climate One will continue to do whatever we can do to encourage serious government leadership and action to fight climate change. Please do what you can to pressure your representatives to counteract the self-serving special interests who consume our resources and return little or nothing from the super-profits they take overseas.
If we can help get climate savvy governments on the problems that really matter, they may be able to mobilize enough action so we can survive our accidental disruption of Earth’s Climate System so our kids and grandkids inherit a world they can live in….
Let’s hope that we can stop global warming soon enough to leave them with a future where they can survive and flourish
Featured Image: Rainfall and Flooding 2022 – Queensland to Tasmania. Current year data from 1 January to 2 November, sourced from Bureau of Meteorology, 2022. Graphic from Chapter 2, The Great Deluge: Climate Extremes in Action, in the featured article.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Smoke and Sandstorm, Seen From Space: A time-lapse image of smoke from wildfires in New Mexico and dust from a storm in Colorado illustrates the scope of Western catastrophe.
The video is mesmerizing: As three whitish-gray geysers gush eastward from the mountains of New Mexico, a sheet of brown spills down from the north like swash on a beach.
What it represents is far more destructive.
The image, a time-lapse captured by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, shows two devastating events happening [at the same time] in the Western United States. The first is a wildfire outbreak in northern New Mexico that started last month and has intensified in the past two weeks, fueled by extreme drought and high winds. The second is a dust storm caused by violent winds in Colorado.
Both are examples of the sorts of natural disasters that are becoming more severe and frequent as a result of climate change.
Featured Image: A dust storm approaching Spearman. In: Monthly Weather Review, Volume 63, April 1935, p. 148. Date: 1935April 14 Location: Texas, Spearman …an excellent view of a dust storm that occurred at Spearman, Tex., on April 14, 1935. The photograph was submitted by the official in charge, Houston, Tex., and was taken by F. W. Brandt, cooperative observer at Spearman, Tex. Credit: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service / Public Domain / Wikipedia
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Results: Extreme single-day fire spread events >1,100 ha (the top 16%, >1 SD) accounted for 70% of the cumulative area burned over the period of analysis. The variation in annual area burned was closely tied to the number and mean size of spread events and distributional skewness towards more large events. For example, we identified 441 extreme events in 2020 that together burned 2.2 million ha across our study area, in contrast to an average of 168 per year that burned 0.5 million ha annually between 2002 and 2019. Fire season climate variables were correlated with the annual number of extreme events and area burned. Our models predicted that the annual number of extreme fire spread events more than double under a 2°C warming scenario, with an attendant doubling in the area burned.
Conclusions: Exceptional fire seasons like 2020 will become more likely, and wildfire activity under future extremes is predicted to exceed anything yet witnessed. Safeguarding human communities and supporting resilient ecosystems will require new lines of scientific inquiry, new land management approaches and accelerated climate mitigation efforts.
Featured Image: Hypothetical distribution of daily fire spread events during normal and extreme fire years. Increases in the annual area burned could potentially be accounted for by more fire spread events (number), larger event size (mean) and/or more large events (right skewness) / From the article
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
At 3:30 A.M. on January 9, 2018, half an inch of rain poured down on the charred slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains in coastal southern California. The flames of the Thomas Fire—at the time the largest wildfire in state history—had swept through the previous month, leaving the soil and vegetation scorched and unable to soak up the onslaught of water. The destabilized ground gave way in a devastating landslide. Boulders crashed into houses in the town of Montecito, Calif., and a highway was buried under several feet of mud. The disaster killed 23 people and caused an estimate of around $200 million in damage.
Featured Image: This image from a rescue helicopter records the burn scar from the Thomas Fire, as well as the path of a deadly mudslide in Montecito, Calif., in January 2018. Credit: California National Guard, CC BY 2.0 / from No Relief from Rain: Climate Change Fuels Compound Disasters: Climate change is increasing the risk of fire-rain events, raising mudslide concerns in fire-prone communities. by Leah Campbell, 12/12/2021 in EOS.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
conditions conducive to higher frequency fires. In the coniferous boreal forest, the world’s largest terrestrial biome, fires are historically common but relatively infrequent. Post-fire, regenerating forests are generally resistant to burning (strong fire self-regulation), favoring millennial coniferous resilience. However, short intervals between fires are associated with rapid, threshold-like losses of resilience and changes to broadleaf or shrub communities, impacting carbon content, habitat, and other ecosystem services.
by Buma et al., 22/03/2022 in Scientific Reports
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
‘Brown carbon’ from burning forests, tundra, and peat soils drives temperatures higher in positive feedback loop with increasing global temps
Taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite on January 4, 2021, this image shows smoke from fires burning in southeastern Australia. NASA says it is likely that some of the white patches above the smoke are pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which resemble violent thunderstorms and can form above intense fires. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens. Picture via Australia’s “firenadoes” summon images of Hiroshima, atomic bombs By Dawn Stover | January 14, 2020 in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Source: Cell Press, 18/03/2022 in Science News
Wildfires devastate the land they burn, and they are also warming the planet: The 2021 wildfire season broke records globally, leaving land charred from California to Siberia. The risk of fire is growing, and a recent report warned that wildfires are on track to increase 50% by 2050. These fires destroy homes, plant life, and animals as they burn, but the risk doesn’t stop there. Researchers detail how the brown carbon released by burning biomass in the northern hemisphere is accelerating warming in the Arctic and warn that this could lead to even more wildfires in the future.
Featured Image: Several wildfires in the Sakha Republic, in and around the Arctic Circle, Russia (Lat: 66.88913, Long: 150.72075) – July 20, 2020 – Enhanced natural colors with IR overlay – Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2020], processed by Pierre Markuse – Image is about 77 km wide. / Downloaded from Flikr
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How a hurricane fueled wildfires in the Florida Panhandle: The wildfires that broke out in the Florida Panhandle in early March 2022 were the nightmare fire managers had feared since the day Hurricane Michael flattened millions of trees there in 2018. It might sound odd – hurricanes helping to fuel wildfires
. But Michael’s 160 mph winds left tangles of dead trees that were ready to burn.
Featured image:Using satellites, the Florida Forest Service mapped the damage to timber in the Panhandle. Florida Forest Service / via The Conversation article.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
There is no good news in the IPCC’s AR6 pt II report on impacts of ongoing global warming. If frequent, catastrophic risks will be uninsurable.
The problem with most extreme weather events like wildfire, floods, droughts, cyclones, etc., is that their catastrophic effects normally cover large areas.
Insurance companies are only profitable if premium payments produce more income than is paid out on claims for losses over the number of customers. If only a small proportion of insured people make claims, the company can still profitably sell the policies for a small fraction of the average payout, such that people can expect full payouts on the claims made, even though the premium paid is only a fraction of the payout.
Even in the case of widespread catastrophes, if such catastrophes are rare enough over the world, a retail insurance company can insure themselves against a huge payoff by buying re-insurance from a specialist company betting that the total number of catastrophic risk events will be small relative to the policies they sell. Both the retail insurer and the reinsurer can still make a profit to stay in business.
However, if catastrophic loss events become too common, to stay profitable insurers have to charge premium fees that become such a large fraction of the cost of the possible loss that customers simply can no longer afford to pay the premium cost, as many people and businesses located in areas such as flood planes, bush lots in fire prone regions, and low-lying coastal area susceptible to cyclones and rising sea-levels deemed to be at high risk of catastrophic losses.
Thanks to rising rates and ferocities of wildfires and intense flooding many people are discovering that their catastrophic risks of total loss in such events are no longer insurable at an affordable cost — even assuming they can find someone willing to sell them such a policy.
As explored in the attached news items, the just released IPCC report tells the insurance industry that the frequency of catastrophic risk events is likely to continue rising, at an accelerating rate as the world continues to warm. This will undoubtedly mean that many more people and businesses will no longer be able to find insurance against total loss in the event of a climate catastrophe.
The likelihood of East Coast flooding and its costs
Underinsurance is more common than many realise. And if you live in an area where most people don’t have enough home and/or contents insurance, the financial and social catastrophe that follows a disaster can be community-wide. Even if you’re well covered, your neighbourhood may struggle long after the dust has settled, as houses lie derelict, people struggle to bounce back and social cohesion frays….
AAP /Jason O’Brien in The Conversation
by A. King, et al., 02/03/2022 in The Conversation
…Even though his house has never before had water through it, he couldn’t get flood insurance, explaining “no one will do it, no one would give it to me”.
“Hardened by a history of floods, residents are ‘getting on’ with the clean-up while waiting for politicians to address climate change” Guardian
In Australia, the political context and implications are also crystal clear. For years our LNP COALition Government has been owned and controlled by mindlessly greedy fossil fuel special interests. Both work to deny the science that shows us the world is warming at an accelerating rate from the continued burning of fossil carbon and to fill the thought space with endlessly distracting humbug and blather. The COALition’s priorities are clear in their lack of interest in using any of their Emergency Response Funds for mitigation or recovery. Burning coal clearly comes first!
As I have noted many times previously in my Climate Sentinel posts, even a child can still draw reasonable conclusions from the kinds of facts that the IPCC has exhaustively documented. Too bad for us all that the COALition are blinded to the reality of what they are doing.
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic idea that there is a ‘safe’ emissions budget, everything else Greta says is spot on: even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.
In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.
We’ll be having a Federal Election in a couple of months. Now is our chance to rid ourselves of the dead hands of this puppet government and replace the puppets with sensible people who have committed themselves to prioritizing action on the climate emergency on the top of their agendas if elected to Parliament. Our Traffic Light Voting System can help you use our preferential voting system to its best advantage towards meeting this goal.
Help us work towards insuring our kids have a future life.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The sensational title describes reality. World’s largest carbon store, peat covering permafrost, is now burning year-round through midwinter
The featured graphic above shows a false-color picture of an active fire burning on a forested area of permafrost in the drainage of the Lena River not far from Yakutsk, capital of the Sakha Republic in Siberia. The video below, from the Siberian Times, documents that the Arctic is burning, even through the entire winter under snow cover in the peat layer covering permafrost. This is only one of many reports (e.g., see Burning the High Arctic: 2020 Spring and Summer Fire Season in Sakha Republic. A Precursor of Fire Seasons to Come?) in this source of the escalating frequency, area, and ferocity of the wildfires burning forests, tundra, and peaty organic soils covering permafrost in the Arctic (Alaska, Canada, and Eurasia (mostly Russia/Siberia). This is also a phenomenon I personally studied extensively last year using freely available access to NASA and European Space Agency satellite monitoring: “Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost“.
At least where the burning Arctic in Siberia is concerned, peaty soils covering permafrost are susceptible to prolonged burning from the the margins of the Arctic Ocean to the southern boundaries of the permanently frozen soils as just reported in the journal article here that matches ground truth reporting with the satellite monitoring results.
Figure 1. The study areas.
by Kuklina et al, 23/02/2022 in Land
Fires on Ice: Emerging Permafrost Peatlands Fire Regimes in Russia’s Subarctic Taiga
Abstract
Wildfires in permafrost areas, including smoldering fires (e.g., “zombie fires”), have increasingly become a concern in the Arctic and subarctic. Their detection is difficult and requires ground truthing. Local and Indigenous knowledge are becoming useful sources of information that could guide future research and wildfire management. This paper focuses on permafrost peatland fires in the Siberian subarctic taiga linked to local communities and their infrastructure. It presents the results of field studies in Evenki and old-settler communities of Tokma and Khanda in the Irkutsk region of Russia in conjunction with concurrent remote sensing data analysis. The study areas located in the discontinuous permafrost zone allow examination of the dynamics of wildfires in permafrost peatlands and adjacent forested areas. Interviews revealed an unusual prevalence and witness-observed characteristics of smoldering peatland fires over permafrost, such as longer than expected fire risk periods, impacts on community infrastructure, changes in migration of wild animals, and an increasing number of smoldering wildfires including overwintering “zombie fires” in the last five years. The analysis of concurrent satellite remote sensing data confirmed observations from communities, but demonstrated a limited capacity of satellite imagery to accurately capture changing wildfire activity in permafrost peatlands, which may have significant implications for global climate.
What do I mean by “Too late already”? for a burning Arctic
It is still early days for an exact quantification of the amount of organic carbon sequestered in the Arctic and subarctic region (e.g., as organic matter in the form of living things, peaty soils, and frozen CO₂ and methane hydrates on, in and under the permafrost). However, our best estimate is that the permafrost region currently holds probably at least two times the total mass of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere. This is not the fossil carbon being released by human industries. According to the US NOAA Arctic Report Card article for 2019 on Permafrost and the Global Carbon Cycle by T. Schuur:
Northern permafrost region soils contain 1,460-1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon, about twice as much as currently contained in the atmosphere.
This pool of organic carbon is climate-sensitive. Warming conditions promote microbial conversion of permafrost carbon into the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane that are released to the atmosphere in an accelerating feedback to climate warming.
New regional and winter season measurements of ecosystem carbon dioxide flux independently indicate that permafrost region ecosystems are releasing net carbon (potentially 0.3 to 0.6 Pg C per year) to the atmosphere. These observations signify that the feedback to accelerating climate change may already be underway. [my emphasis].
Note that (1) positive feedbacks can grow exponentially (i.e., into ‘explosions’), and (2) a significant proportion of the permafrost carbon is sequestered in the form of frozen methane hydrates. Methane in the hydrate form is inert, but under heating it ‘melts’ and decomposes into water and methane gas – where for the first 20 years of its life in the atmosphere is around 85 TIMES more potent per molecule than CO₂. Even after 100 years is more than 20x potent (IPCC AR5 via Wikipedia). Thus, if global warming triggers an abrupt thawing of Arctic permafrost the rapidly increasing greenhouse could drive global temperatures substantially higher than if CO₂ was the only concern.
To me, the bulk of the evidence in my 2021 Portents for the Future graphical essay as placed in context in my subsequent January 2022 essay “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong” suggest that our planet has already passed tipping points where the “natural” positive feedbacks will continue warming the Earth even if we instantly stopped human generated carbon emissions. Note stopping our emissions should at least slow the rate of warming to give us some more time to actually stop the warming – so this remains a vital task! In other words not only do we have to stop carbon emissions from human activities, but we have to implement global scale projects to stop and reduce global heating, e.g., by capturing and sequestering atmospheric carbon by fertilizing and farming ocean deserts. In any event, if we don’t stop the warming feedbacks while we still have the possibility, we will soon pass the point of no return where near term global mass extinction becomes virtually certain.
I am not a near-term climate ‘doomer‘, although I see doom as inevitable if we don’t stop warming. Based on more than a decade studies of the co-evolution of the human species and our technological capabilities, I think if it took us 150 years to burn enough fossil carbon to trigger runaway global warming, we should be smart and capable enough to put that carbon back into safe storage before it kills us. The conclusion of that study in 2016 led me to where I am now rather than trying to finish the book for an audience that probably would not be there to ever read it.
The deep cultural change needed to reach a sustainable future can only be achieved by political action to replace our puppet governments protecting their greedy puppet masters
Captain Humbug showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017)
In Australia the puppets, fools and knaves forming our LNP COALition government continue working assiduously to protect the fossil fuel and related industries’ abilities to burn fossil carbon and emit methane for unimaginable profits by doing everything they can to deny, delay, block, confuse, distract any effective action to stop these greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, to begin effective solutions for the climate emergency we must clearly recognize and act on the need to replace this government with capable and trustworthy representatives who if elected will put action on the climate emergency at the top of their Parliamentary agendas.
To do this we have to accept the facts that are enough to make any sane person panic. However, in the incredibly wise words of a 16 year old autistic child, Greta Thunberg, we need to recognize that the panic can be answered with prompt action.
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.
In other words, wake up, smell the smoke, see the reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. All Capt. Humbug and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about. In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hope. She wants you to panic enough to wake up and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ futures.
Help give them the bright future they hope for!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
by Bob Berwyn, 23/02/2022 in Inside Climate News Global Wildfire Activity to Surge in Coming Years: A new U.N. report says communities need to prepare for the growing threat by refocusing on prevention, rather than just reacting to fires as they happen.
