environment – Page 3 – ANGFA Queensland

Time running out to meet global warming target: U.N. report

community, environment, government, research

Apr 072014

Original story by Alister Doyle, Reuters

World powers are running out of time to slash their use of high-polluting fossil fuels and stay below agreed limits on global warming, a draft U.N. study to be approved this week shows.

Smoke rises from chimneys of a thermal power plant near Shanghai March 26, 2014. Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Government officials and top climate scientists will meet in Berlin from April 7-12 to review the 29-page draft that also estimates the needed shift to low-carbon energies would cost between two and six percent of world output by 2050.

It says nations will have to impose drastic curbs on their still rising greenhouse gas emissions to keep a promise made by almost 200 countries in 2010 to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times.

Temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 C (1.4F) since 1900 and are set to breach the 2 C ceiling on current trends in coming decades, U.N. reports show.

“The window is shutting very rapidly on the 2 degrees target,” said Johan Rockstrom, head of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and an expert on risks to the planet from heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising seas.

“The debate is drifting to ‘maybe we can adapt to 2 degrees, maybe 3 or even 4’,” Rockstrom, who was not among authors of the draft, told Reuters.

Such rises would sharply raise risks to food and water supplies and could trigger irreversible damage, such as a meltdown of Greenland’s ice, according to U.N. reports.

The draft, seen by Reuters, outlines ways to cut emissions and boost low-carbon energy, which includes renewables such as wind, hydro- and solar power, nuclear power and “clean” fossil fuels, whose carbon emissions are captured and buried.

It said such low-carbon sources accounted for 17 percent of the world’s total energy supplies in 2010 and their share would have to triple – to 51 percent – or quadruple by 2050, according to most scenarios reviewed.

That would displace high polluting fossil fuels as the world’s main energy source by mid-century.

CARBON CAPTURE

Saskatchewan Power in Canada will open a $1.35 billion coal-fired electricity generating plant this year that will extract a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from its exhaust gases – the first carbon capture and storage plant of its type.

Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group meeting in Berlin, will help governments, which aim to agree a deal to slow climate change at a Paris summit in December 2015. Few nations have outlined plans consistent with staying below 2 degrees C.

Another report by the IPCC last week in Japan showed warming already affects every continent and would damage food and water supplies and slow economic growth. It may already be having irreversible impacts on the Arctic and coral reefs.

The new draft shows that getting on track to meet the 2C goal would mean limiting greenhouse gas emissions to between 30 and 50 billion tonnes in 2030, a radical shift after a surge to 49 billion tonnes in 2010 from 38 billion in 1990.

The shift would reduce economic output by between 2-6 percent by 2050, because of the costs of building a cleaner energy system based on low-carbon energies that are more expensive than abundant coal, the IPCC said. Capturing carbon dioxide is also expensive, it added.

China and the United States are the top emitters.

One option is to let temperatures overshoot the 2C target while developing technology to cool the planet by extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, the draft says. The draft that would add to risks of warming and push up costs.

Extracting carbon from nature includes simple measures such as planting more trees, which soak up carbon as they grow, or capturing and burying greenhouse gases from electricity-generating plants that burn wood or other plant matter.

A problem is that markets for trading carbon dioxide focus on cuts in emissions at power plants and factories burning fossil fuels, not renewable energies which are viewed as green.

“In Europe there is no incentive” said Jonas Helseth, director of environmental group Bellona Europe who chairs a group of scientists and industry experts looking at burying emissions from renewable energy.

The IPCC draft report is the third and final study in a U.N. series about climate change, updating findings from 2007, after the Japan report about the impacts and one in September in Sweden about climate science.

The September report raised the probability that human actions, led by the use of fossil fuels, are the main cause of climate change since 1950 to at least 95 percent from 90. But opinion polls show voters are unpersuaded, with many believing that natural variations are the main cause.

Facial scrubs causing damage to environment

community, environment, fisheries, waterways/wetlands

Apr 062014

Original story by Neil McMahon, Brisbane Times

Vanity – and our vulnerability to the power of advertising – are changing consumer habits from breakfast to bedtime, and contributing to an almighty environmental mess. The culprit: microbeads.

In a lather: Minute plastic beads from toiletries are making their way into the marine environment.

These are minute bits of plastic that have been inserted into everyday products from facial creams to toothpaste, proclaimed in advertising as a healthy advance but which are turbo-charging an already dire problem – the global pollution of oceans, lakes and rivers by cast-off plastic.

What makes microbeads especially threatening is that they enter the environment – washed down our bathroom drains – already broken down into all-but invisible microplastics, defined as 0.1 to 0.5 millimetres in size.

Tiny and buoyant, and not filtered by sewerage systems, they are swiftly ingestible by marine life, making them more immediately dangerous than a discarded drink bottle. They are likely to have entered the food chain – so while you wouldn’t eat your facial scrub from the jar, you might be consuming it if you eat fish.

And for what benefit to ourselves – to our skin?

Almost none. According to Associate Professor Greg Goodman, a fellow of the Australasian College of Dermatologists, our modern obsession with scrubbing our skin is, for most people, doing more harm than good.

“People are exfoliating everything,” he says. “But we’re not floorboards. We don’t need to be polishing and buffing and scrubbing. Most science dermatologists don’t like exfoliation because the barrier functions of the skin get exfoliated and that’s a negative thing for your skin. Exfoliating takes out the top layer that keeps your skin in good nick.”

The use of microbeads in cosmetics is recent – Dr Goodman says most patents date only to the middle of the last decade – but there is already a backlash against the harm they are doing. The 5 Gyres Institute in the US found such significant microbead pollution in the Great Lakes region last year that it launched a campaign to have them banned.

In Australia, there has been little study of the harm caused by microbeads. But Dr Scott Wilson, a coastal management expert from the Central Queensland University Gladstone, says harm is being done to marine life and potentially to humans.

“It’s an area we’re just touching on now, trying to find out what the potential harm is,” he says. “We know they’re being ingested – there’s a whole gamut of species that we now know have these microplastics in their guts, and some are being incorporated within the tissues as well … so there’s this trophic transfer of the plastics through the food chain. If you take it to its fullest [conclusion], if we’re consuming fish or other sea life there’s potentially a transfer. We need to find out what risks there are to humans as well as to the organisms.”

Dr Erik van Sebille, of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, says the impact of microbeads will be felt in heavily populated urban centres.

“We know from a food source point of view that the smaller the plastic, the more harm it does. My suspicion with something like microbeads is the harm is done right where our sewerage systems hit the ocean.”

Major cosmetics manufacturers say they will phase out the use of microbeads over the next three to five years. The Body Shop is leading the way, with a spokeswoman telling Fairfax Media its products would be microbead-free by the end of this year. For consumers, Dr Goodman says there is a quicker solution: use something natural – an oatmeal soap would do the job – or don’t exfoliate at all.

“We mix up the squeaky feel of skin as being something healthy and it’s really not – it’s actually impending dry, terrible skin,” he says. ”They’re not understanding what healthy skin is.”

Queensland Government under fire over land clearing permits

community, environment, government, wildlife

Apr 042014

Original story by Rachel Carbonell, ABC News

The Queensland Government is under fire from conservationists over the granting of new land clearing permits in the north of the state.

The Wilderness Society says weakening of vegetation management laws last year has led to large-scale clearing applications.

Campaigner Gavan McFadzean says the biggest example is a permit granted to Strathmore Station, a big cattle station in the gulf savannah country near Georgetown.

Queensland land clearing legislation, the Government says the legislation changes are part of its vision to expand Queensland’s agricultural economy. Photo: ABC News

“We’ve discovered through a tip-off that [land clearing] is now broadscale and at an alarming rate,” he said.

“One of the biggest examples of that we’ve discovered is in the Gilbert catchment at Strathmore, where an application for 30,000 hectares of clearing – that’s about 134 Brisbane CBDs of clearing – has been granted.”

Mr McFadzean says the legislative amendments are undermining the land clearing legislation introduced in Queensland nearly 20 years ago.

“During the 1980s and 1990s Queensland was clearing at an alarming rate, it was actually an emerging environmental crisis,” he said.

“If Queensland was a country, in the early 90s it would have been one of the worst land clearers in the world, on par with Brazil, the Congo Basin, Borneo and Indonesia.

“It was through the 1996 native Vegetation Act introduced by the Beattie government that land clearing was brought under control.”

Queensland Minister for Natural Resources and Mines Andrew Cripps says the legislation changes are part of the Government’s vision to expand the state’s agricultural economy.

“What the amendments to the vegetation framework that the Queensland Parliament passed last year are doing is providing opportunities for the sustainable expansion of agriculture in Queensland,” he said.

“The Queensland Government went to the last state election with a commitment to build a four pillar economy here in this state and that included agriculture, and we’re changing the regulatory environment to provide for those opportunities.”

Mr Cripps says it is this kind of agricultural development the Queensland Government is keen to support.

“I think the opportunities for Strathmore Station to undertake an expansion of their existing grazing enterprise by taking into account some cropping agriculture on their property, is a great example of the opportunity that the Queensland Government is providing to grow sustainable communities in Cape York Peninsula,” he said.

“Strathmore Station is in fact growing sorghum at the moment under the high value agriculture framework to improve the sustainability of the existing grazing operations, and I think that is going to be a tremendous thing for communities in Cape York Peninsula.”

Land clearing will create opportunities, says station owner

Strathmore Station owner Scott Harris says his permit to clear 28,000 hectares is aimed at improving the environmental health of the land, as well as making it more productive.

He says it will be done in an environmentally sensitive manner.

“The environmental aspects of Strathmore Station, the land there, historically has been very degraded,” he said.

“It is chock-a-block full of weeds, rubber vine, there’s feral animals there.

“This is more about not clearing pristine wilderness that everyone thinks this is about, trying to return the environment back to somewhere like before white man settled there.”

Mr Harris says the application is part of a plan to expand his operation, that will create up to 200 jobs, and economic opportunities for others in the region, including Indigenous communities further north.

“With it there is a big opportunity for the landholders in Cape York to be able to become a person that can purchase cattle, which is a great help to the Indigenous communities up there, because at the moment they’re quite hamstrung in the respect that they’ve got nowhere to sell their cattle.”

But Mr McFadzean questions the economic argument behind the proposal.

“The so-called high value agriculture that’s allowed at Strathmore is for fodder cropping which even the CSIRO has stated, earlier this year in its report, would only be viable in two to three years out of every 10,” he said.

“So if the bar is set so low for high value agriculture agriculture in Queensland, we’re very concerned that rampant land clearing will return to this state.”

He says there is no public scrutiny of permit applications or approvals.

“We fall on those incidents of land clearing by accident but god only knows how much land clearing is happening in Queensland, and at an increasing rate, and that’s what we’re extremely concerned about.”

The Queensland Government says all applications for land clearing must meet strict environmental and economic criteria.

Back from the brink – Issue 6, March 2014

community, environment, government, research, threatened species, wildlife

Apr 022014

Back from the brink is a periodical publication produced by EHP’s (the Department of Environment and Heitage Protection) Threatened Species Unit.

The publication provides information about what is happening in threatened species recovery around Queensland.

In this issue

Concern for Raine Island turtles
Counting koalas and creating habitat in South East Queensland
Family fun day at Daisy Hill
Woongarra Coast turtle conservation work
Keeping track of flatback turtles
Spring has sprung: launch of a new species database
Summer loving: monitoring little tern breeding success
Science or Art? A jump in the mistfrog population
Find your calling: the search for the rufous scrub-bird
Forestry and threatened species: guiding practices for species conservation

Climate change exacerbates the exotic invasion of waterways

community, environment, pest species, research, waterways/wetlands

Mar 272014

News release from Queen’s University, Belfast

One of the most serious threats to global biodiversity and the leisure and tourism industries is set to increase with climate change according to new research by Queen’s University Belfast.

Researchers at Queen’s have found that certain invasive weeds, which have previously been killed off by low winter temperatures, are set to thrive as global temperatures increase.

The team based at Quercus, Northern Ireland’s centre for biodiversity and conservation science research, predicts that invasive waterweeds will become more widespread over the next 70 years.

Floating pennywort – Comber. Photo: John Early

The researchers say that additional management and legislation will be required if we are to stop the spread of these pest species.

Four species in particular could establish in areas on average 38 per cent larger than previously thought due to projected climatic warming. The water fern, parrot’s feather, leafy elodea and the water primrose, are already highly problematic throughout warmer parts of Europe. Invasive species are considered to be one of the most serious threats to global biodiversity, along with climate change, habitat loss and nutrient addition.

The estimated annual cost of invasive species (plants and animals) to the UK economy is £1.8 billion, with £57 million of impact on waterways including boating, angling and waterway management.

Funded by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA), the research has been published in the journal Diversity and Distributions. It looked at the global distributions of 15 invasive plant species over a 69 year period.

Dr Ruth Kelly, from the School of Biological Sciences at Queen’s, who led the study, said: “Traditionally upland areas have been protected by low winter temperatures which kill off these invading weeds. Now these are likely to become increasingly vulnerable to colonisation.

“On the island of Ireland currently about six per cent of the island is unsuitable for these invasive species but we think this will drop to less than one per cent by 2080. This type of research from Queen’s is an example of how we are creating a more sustainable future and shows how monitoring the impact climate change is having is important for many reasons. This project will allow the NIEA and other agencies to begin their planning on how to address future issues and ensure our waterways remain a valuable economic and recreational resource.”

Dr Kelly added: “It’s not all bad news, however, as our most common invasive waterweed, the Canadian pondweed, is likely to become less vigorous perhaps allowing space for restoration of waterways and native plant communities.”

Dr Michael Meharg, from the NIEA, said: “Invasive waterweeds can be a major problem in lakes and rivers throughout Britain and Ireland. Such plants are fast growing and often form dense mats of vegetation which may block waterways and cause problems for boating and fishing, and, therefore, to the leisure and tourism industries. Dr Kelly’s research is crucial in planning for the future as we know invasive waterweeds will also out-compete native aquatic plants species and alter habitats for insects and fish.”

The full research paper is available here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ddi.12194/abstract

IPCC preview: deep trouble brewing in our oceans

community, environment, fisheries, government, research, waterways/wetlands

Mar 262014

By Ove Hoegh-Guldberg at The Conversation

Scientists are meeting this week in Yokohama, Japan, to finalise and approve the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group II – the part of the IPCC process that seeks consensus on the likely impacts of climate change, as well as how it might change the vulnerability of people and ecosystems, and how the world might seek to adapt to the changes.

Rousing the Kraken: climate change could make life in the ocean much harder. Image: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy/Wikimedia Commons

The oceans are a new focus of this latest round of IPCC assessment, and while one cannot preempt the report to be delivered next week, there are likely to be some important ramifications for our ability to deal with the growing impacts from non-climate-related stresses such as overfishing, pollution, and habitat destruction, as well as ocean warming and acidification.

To put it simply, a failure to deal with our changing climate will make it far more difficult to deal with the many other threats already faced by our oceans.

If you’ll pardon the pun, the ocean is in deep trouble, and that trouble will only get deeper if we don’t deal decisively with the problem of climate change.

Ecosystems already under stress

I am deeply concerned about the state of the world’s oceans, as I believe we all should be. The argument is pretty simple. Human activities are increasingly affecting the oceans, which are the cornerstone of life on our planet. These impacts are causing the decline of many ecosystems and fisheries. As a result, the risks to people and communities are rapidly expanding.

Throw in ocean warming and acidification, and you have many scientists predicting the dangerous and unprecedented decline of ocean processes and ecosystems.

Not only is this decline tangible and measurable, but models (from simple to advanced) show future projections of sea temperature rising above the known tolerance of many organisms and ecosystems.

The pace of this change now has many world leaders concerned about the future of the world’s oceans and their dependent people and businesses. This is led to an increasing number of past and future conferences focusing on how we can tackle the scale and rate at which marine ecosystems and resources are deteriorating and changing.

This concern has led to commitments such as the Global Partnership for Oceans. In a dramatic 2012 speech, outgoing World Bank President Robert Zoellick positioned the partnership to galvanise resources and take real action on reversing the decline of the world’s oceans. Soon afterwards, the partnership – which involves more than 150 governments, companies, universities and non-government organisations – declared a set of objectives to meet by 2022, including to:

Halve the current rate of natural habitat loss, while increasing conservation areas to include 10% of coastal and marine areas;
Reduce pollution and litter to levels that do not harm ecosystems;
Increase global food fish production from both sustainable aquaculture and sustainable wild-caught fisheries.

This sounds like a tall order. However, under a stable climate, I have few doubts that we could come close to achieving these broad objectives. It might take some time, but I think we would get close.

Unfortunately though, we are not in a stable climate.

Climate poses an extra layer of threat

Over the past 50 years, increasing amounts of energy and carbon dioxide have been flooding into the ocean through the burning of fossil fuels and changes to land use. Initially, the ocean was fairly inert to these changes because of its large volume and thermal mass.

However, just like the eponymous monster in John Wyndham’s apocalyptic novel The Kraken Wakes, the ocean is now stirring and big changes are beginning to happen. Ocean temperatures and acidity are increasing in lockstep with average global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide content. Many of these changes are unprecedented in 65 million years.

While some changes, such as the extent of mixing of heat into the deep ocean, have been relatively unexpected, the energy content of the ocean has been increasing steadily. In reality, the widely proclaimed “hiatus” in surface warming simply represents heat being driven into the oceans.

Heat content of the ocean, atmosphere and land since 1960. Figure 1 Church et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. (2011)

The problem with climate change in the context of dealing with the growing threats from overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction is that the goalposts are constantly shifting. If we continue to push sea temperature upward by 0.1-0.2C per decade, we begin to shift species, and hence fisheries – some are already moving at up to 200 km per decade. Trying to manage a fishery or protect an ecosystem, when the best conditions for the organisms involved are moving polewards at such a rate, may well become impossible in many circumstances.

Future goals

This means that if the Global Partnership for Oceans is to meet its ambitious goals, we must deal decisively with the problem of emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and land-use change.

If we don’t, then with all due respect to the partnership’s efforts, we are set to waste billions of dollars trying to address problems that will only get swamped by a fast-changing climate.

As outlined in last September’s IPCC Working Group I Report, stabilising the climate will require world carbon dioxide emissions to be brought onto a trajectory far below what governments and companies are set to emit over the next 20 years if business is allowed to continue as usual.

A lack of such decisive action will indeed wake the Kraken – committing us to ocean, and indeed planetary, impacts that are likely to last for many thousands of years.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg receives funding from the Australian Research Council and carries out research on coral reefs and the impacts of climate change. He is affiliated with the University of Queensland, AIMS, Stanford University and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. He is a Coordinating Lead Author for the AR5 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Scientists predict Australia will continue to get hotter

community, environment, In-Stream, research, threatened species, waterways/wetlands, wildlife

Mar 242014

Original story by Jeanavive McGregor and Jake Sturmer, ABC News

The latest United Nations report card on the impacts of climate change predicts Australia will continue to get hotter.

Sunset over Adelaide. Scientists believe the world is still on track to become more than two degrees Celsius warmer. Photo: Ching-Ling Lim

The ABC has obtained drafts of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Scientists believe the world is still on track to become more than two degrees Celsius warmer – and that potentially means whole ecosystems could be wiped out.

Chapter 25 of the IPCC’s report has identified eight potential risks for Australia:

The possibility of widespread and permanent damage to coral reef systems – particularly the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo in Western Australia.
Some native species could be wiped out.
The chance of more frequent flooding causing damage to key infrastructure.
In some areas, unprecedented rising sea levels could inundate low-lying areas.
While in others, bushfires could result in significant economic losses.
More frequent heatwaves and temperatures may lead to increased morbidity – especially among the elderly.
And those same rising temperatures could put constraints on water resources.
Farmers also could face significant drops in agriculture – especially in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Worst-case scenario could see 40 per cent drop in production

The report said the worst-case scenario for the Murray-Darling Basin, south-east and south-west Australia would mean a significant drop in agricultural production.

The rigorous report process

The upcoming report includes 310 lead authors from 73 different nationalities.

Australian scientists are heavily involved as authors and reviewers of the Working Group reports.

Lesley Hughes, the lead author of the paper on Australasia, says Australia “punches above its weight”.

“We are disproportionately a larger group than you might otherwise think based on our population in the IPCC authorship team,” she said.

“We have a lot of scientists working on climate change issues and that is because we see Australia as being particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.”

The reports take up to five years to produce, undergoing a rigorous review process.

For example, 48,000 review comments were received on the upcoming report.

Professor Hughes says the process is not really a matter of achieving consensus, but rather is about evaluating the evidence.

The Australasia chapter alone has 1,000 references.

“They are certainly the largest reports ever produced on climate change and its associated risks but I think probably some of the most careful documents put together anywhere,” she said.

“I rather naively thought that eight people and 25 pages to write, how long can it possibly take to write three-and-a-bit pages?

“The answer to that is about three years. There is much discussion about the weight of evidence so it’s a very long, detailed and careful process.”

CSIRO chief research scientist Mark Howden said the latest science predicts production could drop by up to 40 per cent under a severe drying scenario.

“At current rates of emissions, we are likely to go past two degrees,” Dr Howden said.

“There are various analyses that indicate it’s highly unlikely that we’ll stay below two degrees in the absence of major activities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The longer we delay activities to reduce those … emissions, the more likely it is we’re going to go above two degrees.

“Higher degrees of temperature change also carry with them higher degrees of rainfall change, both in terms of their average rainfall and likely increases in rainfall intensity.

“Both of those have implications for agriculture and both of those aren’t necessarily good.”

Despite forecasts of less rain and hotter temperatures, irrigators maintain they have a central role to play in the nation’s future.

“That is why you have irrigation. It evens out those severe weather events such as a drier climate,” National Irrigators Council chief executive officer Tom Chesson said.

“People forget that Australia is so far ahead when it comes to water management. We are the cutting edge of water management in the world.

“It would be a [mistake] to think that we have been sitting on our hands and doing nothing. Necessity is the mother of all invention.”

Concerns about future of coral reefs

The final draft of the Australasia chapter raises serious concerns about the future of the the nation’s coral, finding there is likely to be “significant change in community composition and structure of coral reef systems in Australia”.

University of Queensland marine scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg says there are already concerns about the rate of change.

“We’re seeing changes which haven’t been seen since the dinosaurs,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“If we continue on this pathway, corals continue to plummet and places like the Great Barrier Reef may no longer be great.

“If we keep on doing on what we’re doing – and that’s ramping up local and global stressors – coral reefs will disappear by the middle of this century or be in very low amounts on reefs around the world.”

Ocean temperatures continue to rise

Three years ago during a plenary session in Venice, the member nations of the IPCC resolved for the first time to include a separate chapter on oceans for the Working Group II report.

Oceans cover 71 per cent of the planet’s surface and changes to the ocean’s environment are playing a central role in the management of climate change.

Scientists agree that the ocean’s surface temperatures have continued to increase throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

IPCC drafts indicate the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans have warmed by as much as half a degree, which has profoundly altered marine ecosystems.

Rising water temperatures and some levels of ocean acidification mean species are on the move.

Changed migratory patterns of fish and other catch pose significant risks to commercial fishers and other coastal activities.

Sea urchins once found only as far south as New South Wales have made their way to Tasmania.

The CSIRO’s Elvira Poloczanska said the urchins could destroy kelp forests, which had flow-on effects for rock lobsters.

“Kelp forests, much like forests on land, provide a habitat for a huge number of species,” Dr Poloczanska said.

“So a number of fish, vertebrates – including commercial species such as the rock lobster.

“As the forests disappear, so these species will disappear from the particular area as well.”

But interestingly, scientists do see some benefits and opportunities for some commercial fishing and other aquaculture industries in line with these changing patterns.

Despite progress being made on mitigation and adaptation measures, land management practices including pollution, nutrient run-off and overuse of marine resources also pose risks to marine life.

The report calls for internationally recognised guidelines to assist adaptation strategies already in place.

The report is due to be released on March 31.

Facts won’t beat the climate deniers – using their tactics will

community, environment, government

Mar 142014

By Rod Lamberts, Australian National University at The Conversation

A colleague of mine recently received an invitation to a Climate Council event. The invitation featured this Tim Flannery quote: “An opinion is useless, what we need are more facts.”

Facts not enough: the climate message is still not getting through. Photo: Shutterstock

My first thought was that my colleague was taking the piss. Tim Flannery is an experienced science communicator, but that phrase made my jaw drop. It was apparently meant in earnest, but it’s wildly off the mark.

The quote is ludicrously, appallingly, almost dangerously naïve. It epitomises the reasons we are still “debating” climate science and being overwhelmed by climate skeptics/deniers/contrarians in the public space.

My intense frustration about the current state of the climate issue is shared by Climate Change Authority chairman Bernie Fraser, who says the public has been left confused and fed up because deliberate misinformation has been allowed to spread unchecked.

But the “more facts” solution is no solution at all. We have enough facts now and none of them are good. Yet here we are, in Fraser’s words, watching the “bad guys” win.

Communication without opinion?

Opinions are a cornerstone of human communication. They may be based on obvious, acceptable, objective evidence, or they may not. There will be opinions with which you agree, disagree, or don’t care. Regardless, they are intrinsic to the way humans interact – at work, chatting over dinner, everywhere.

By asserting that opinions are useless in climate change communications, Flannery might as well be saying we should stop using language at all.

It’s as disappointingly innocent as the cries I’ve heard regularly from scientists who want us to “leave the politics out of climate change”.

Like opinion, politics is not an “add-on”. It’s the way we decide things as a society. It’s unavoidable when more two or more people have competing plans for the same resource.

That’s why decrying the usefulness of opinions is simply irrelevant. Opinions just are. They exist. We use them all the time, and perhaps nowhere more vehemently than when bashing out positions in the world of politics, advocacy or activism.

To top it off, Flannery’s assertion about the uselessness of opinions is itself an opinion, so by his own logic, useless.

To facts

If there’s one thing decades of advertising, public relations, psychology research and science communication have taught us, it’s that throwing facts at opposing opinions with the hope of changing people’s minds is like playing golf with a pineapple: it’s not just useless, it’s actively counterproductive.

At best, presenting people with facts to counter their beliefs makes them ignore you; at worst, it drives them further away. How much more evidence do you need than the singular failure of scientific facts to convince deniers that humans are buggering up the climate?

It’s a bit like this classic caricature of old-school British colonialism:

Lord Ponsonby: “How do you speak to the natives?

Lord Snot: “In English, of course”

Lord Ponsonby: “What if they don’t understand?”

Lord Snot: “I speak louder”

Time for action

The fact is that the time for fact-based arguments is over.

We all know what the overwhelmingly vast majority of climate science is telling us. I’m not going to regurgitate the details here, in part because the facts are available everywhere, but more importantly, because this tactic is a core reason why climate messages often don’t resonate or penetrate.

If, like me, you’re convinced that human activity is having a hugely damaging effect on the global climate, then your only responsible option is to prioritise action.

Why, then, do so many who represent the experts, the science, and the evidence seem to prioritise their perceived moral standing as a scientist above all else?

What’s worse: being convinced bad things are happening and resorting to “unscientific” means that inspire real action, or watching things go to hell while taking comfort in the knowledge you were a worthy, well-behaved scientist who didn’t stoop to getting political?

Ultimately, we can only say “that’s not cricket” for so long. Eventually we have to stop tutting and accept that others aren’t even trying to play cricket – they’re boxing. We can decry climate deniers for their unfair, lowbrow tactics, but their tactics are getting them exactly what they want. Ours are not.

The continuing focus on gathering and presenting more and more scientific data to reinforce a position the vast majority already holds is not leading to the changes we need. Yes, scientists should keep monitoring, researching and reporting on the climate. But assuming that we want people to act according to the science, the focus must now be on influencing positive action.

So, what now?

There’s no profit in trying to change the position of deniers. Their values and motivations are fundamentally different to those of us who listen to what the weight of scientific evidence tell us. So forget them.

Forget the Moncktonites, disregard the Boltists, and snub the Abbottsians. Ignore them, step around them, or walk over them. Drown them not just with sensible conversations, but with useful actions. Flood the airwaves and apply tactics advertisers have successfully used for years.

What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.

The biggest impediment to climate action these days is not because of the human frailties that science is hell-bent on resisting – those alleged failings of opinion, belief and emotion. Ironically, it’s exactly because we are still trying to suppress them that we are now stalled.

Rod Lamberts has received funding from the ARC linkage program

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Constructed wetlands and ecosystem function

environment, research, waterways/wetlands

Mar 102014

Original story compiled by Kev Warburton, Freshwater Research News

A hybrid system using Flowforms in a treatment pond, in Norway. Photo: Aalang/WikiMedia Commons

The construction of wetlands has an important role to play in strategies to offset the loss of natural wetlands and treat wastewater. Typically, the effectiveness of constructed wetlands is assessed by comparing their levels of species abundance and diversity with those in natural wetlands. However, these structural indicators aren’t necessarily good measures of ecosystem function. In a study of riparian locations on the Ebro River in Spain, net ecosystem production (NEP, the balance between primary production and community respiration) was measured in matched sets of natural and constructed wetlands. Analysis revealed that water column NEP was significantly higher in natural than constructed wetlands. In the natural wetlands, NEP was highest in unvegetated habitats,while in the constructed wetlands NEP tended to be greatest in habitats dominated by submerged plants, particularly the branching alga Chara. Because previous work showed that invertebrate communities recovered rapidly in the same constructed wetlands, the new results suggested that ecosystem function recovered more slowly than ecosystem structure. Therefore, useful insights may be gained by including ecosystem function in the design and evaluation of new wetlands.

Reference: Espanol, C. et al. 2013. Is net ecosystem production higher in natural relative to constructed wetlands? Aquatic Sciences 75, 385–397.http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00027-012-0284-1#page-1

The endless summer? We have some bad news as surf fades away

community, environment, research, waterways/wetlands

Mar 102014

Original story by Damien Murphy and Amanda Hoh, The Sydney Morning Herald

Every surfer who pulled up at a beach to check the waves has known the universal disappointment that goes with being told ”you should have been here yesterday”.

The phrase became part of beach lingo in the first surf film to cross over into the mainstream, Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer.

Not what they used to be: Richie Vaculik at Maroubra. Photo: Dean Sewell

Fifty years later, ”you should have been here last century” looks like being the new reality for surfers who chase storm surf.

Latest findings by the Bureau of Meteorology predict big surf will increasingly become a thing of the past. Andrew Dowdy, lead author of a study for the bureau’s Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, said fewer large waves were projected for eastern Australia because storms were not going to be as hostile. But while bad news for big wave riders, there was a bright side: the wave research was carried out partly due to increased concern with coastal erosion and rising sea levels.

”Our study was focused on storm waves. We found increasing greenhouse gases will likely reduce the number of storm waves for central east coast of Australia for the end of this century,” Dr Dowdy said.

The bureau researchers took readings from wave observation buoys located six to 12 kilometres offshore from Coffs Harbour to Eden on the south coast and collated it with data and conditions high in the atmosphere about five kilometres above sea level.

”It was a new method that provided a really good indication of the risk of large waves occurring,” Dr Dowdy said. ”We used climate models that could represent those conditions … that [showed] us how that might change in the future. They proved more consistent than previous studies, as well as allowing the influence of greenhouse gases to be clearly shown.

”It all comes down to how much greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere. We had one scenario where greenhouse gases continue to rise towards the end of the century, and another where greenhouse gas emissions stabilised. For a higher emission scenario, we can expect a 40 per cent reduction in storm events. If emissions were stabilised, we can expect 25 per cent fewer storms in the region.”

Having endured the worst year for quality surf in 60 years, surfers living along the NSW coast, but especially around Sydney, are under little illusion that something has stopped sending surf onto their beaches, points and reefs.

Maroubra surfer Richie Vaculik said the past year had been the worst for surf in years. ”You look back [to] when you were a little kid and seem to think there was always big surf, but last winter hardly any of the big wave spots – Ours [Cape Solander], Fairy Bower [Manly], the bombies around Queenscliff and Ulladulla – fired at all,” he said.

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