While pensioners on talkback debate the impact of a mooted carbon tax on their household budget, Julia Gillard wears out her shoe leather, and Tont Abbott sniffs another dead fish, another kind of carbon conference has been rolling out.
Over the past three days, Australian and international experts have gathered at Melbourne University to consider “Four degrees or more: Australia in a hot world”. In opening the conference, keynote speaker Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute, and former climate adviser to the German Chancellor and the EU, asked rhetorically: “What is the difference between two degrees (of temperature increase) and four degrees ?” His answer was concise. “The difference,” he said, “is human civilisation”.
Previously, in March 2009, Schellnhuber had told the Copenhagen science conference that in a four-degree warmer world the population “… carrying capacity estimates (are) below 1 billion people”. Little wonder that the notion that humans might reasonably adapt to a four-degree warmer world seems absurd. Professor Tony McMichael, a world-leading authority on the impacts of climate change on human health, told the conference that “if we were to move to a world that was four five, six or seven degrees warmer, I think that what we imagine to be our adaptive strategies will become irrelevant.”
One reason is not just the world would be significantly hotter on average, but the extremes would be beyond the experience of most people and most nations.
So how hot will hot be? One answer comes from Andreas Sterl and 10 colleagues from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research at Utrecht University. In “When can we expect extremely high surface temperatures?”, they ask how extreme would temperatures be at end of this century if the global average temperature were to increase by 3.5 degrees by 2100 compared to 2000.
And 3.5 degrees warmer than 2000 is where we are presently heading. If all the commitments made by governments around the world to reduce greenhouse gas were honoured, and that is all, then temperatures by 2100 would likely be about four degrees warmer than 1900, or about 3.4 degrees warmer than at the start of the 21st century.
Sterl and his team project what the hottest that could be expected in a 100-in-a-hundred-year event, known at a T100 value. Or to be precise, “the annual-maximum 2m-temperature that on average occurs once in 100 years” (temperature two metres above the surface). Statistically, such an event may not happen in a 100 years, but it may also happen more than once, as we saw last summer in a series of “100-in-a-hundred-year” rain and flood events in eastern Australia.
Sterl’s findings are displayed on the map. The deep-red colouring most of Australia is the range between 48 and 52 degrees. The remainder in deep orange is 44-48 degrees. By way of comparison, Australia highest recorded temperature was 50.7 degrees on January 2, 1960 at Oodnadatta, South Australia. Extreme heatwaves across southern Australia during late January/early February 2009 set a Melbourne maximum temperature record of 46.4 degrees, and a state maximum temperature records for Victoria of 48.8 degrees at Hopetoun, and drove the Black Saturday bushfires, which were the worst on record.
As the authors note, “According to this figure, temperature extremes reach values around 50 degrees in large parts of the area equatorward of 30 degrees. This includes heavily populated areas like India and the Middle East … projected T100 values far exceed 40 degrees in Southern Europe, the US Mid-West by 2090-2100 and even reach 50 degrees in north-eastern India and most of Australia. Such levels receive much too little attention in the current climate change discussion, given the potentially large implications.”
Prof David Karoly of Melbourne University, in addressing future fire risk in Australia at Oxford’s “4 Degrees and Beyond” conference in September 2009, concluded: “We are unleashing hell on Australia.”
In Melbourne this week, that message was reaffirmed in an array of evidence from many of the leading researchers in their fields.
Three years back Prof Hansen at NASA gave compelling advice that if we trip over various tipping points:
– like release of massive methane stores in the frozen tundra;
– the ocean reaches saturation of CO2 storage;
– albedo effect of more dark surfaces from melted ice in West Antarctic; or
– God know what else (there was a list of about 10);
there is a real possibility of a 5 metre sea rise by end of the century.
Not along a constant increase, but exponential curve. So it will be low for decades, gradually increasing in rate (which is the critical indicator of a profound impact coming – like a 4WD in neutral at the top of a steep decline, it will end in tears), until by about 2070 or 2080 or so, when we get the big 1 and 2 metre jumps per decade and top the 5 m mark around 2100.
So the skeptics can run their politics for quite a while but the momentum for increased sea level will be in the system and then denial and limp policy will be like cancer patients on homeopathy.
If that happens, which it well could, all the Abbotts, all the Bolts, Jones, Carters, Lindzens and Moncktons today will be a hollow irrelevance in the clamour of desperation for survival. Amongst the cannibalism, the depravity, the murderous violence and cruelty. A world of dangerous slums and short brutal lives.
Legends will be told about these fools like street signs on the way to dystopia. Humanity will curse them in their flooded graves.
It’s also pretty clear that Abbott hates the Carbon tax policy because it integrates with global momentum for action with international offsets, which will sideline his multi national corporate mates pretty much forever.
Last but not least all of this means Abbott is a very bad Catholic in my Irish Catholic opinion. Will the Vatican take a view on the Australian Government policy? If they do it will be Abbott sans speedos.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
David Spratt thanks, and you are right, the fools are always at the bar ordering one last beer as the burning pub crashes down on them.
TOM McLOUGHLIN — Posted Friday, 15 July 2011 at 4:43 pm
Well written interesting piece.
Hey and, New medical discovery:- New Social Cancer – Name: RS Tony Abbott. Known Facts: no homeopathy cure known. Doesn’t respond to any known drugs.
It’s interesting that a T100 will be 50 degrees, but it doesn’t help the average person to understand how difficult, or otherwise, life will be most of the time. Presumably Black Saturday was one of the days at the top end of the current T100 range. It was 47 degrees at Macedon, where I lived at the time, and it was f**king hot, but it was livable, if scary. Luckily the fires didn’t come near me, and that was the case for most of the people in Melbourne and surrounds. And it was one day in an otherwise ordinary summer.
So what would a typical summer be like if temperatures are 3-4 degrees higher? Will Melbourne be like Adelaide, where 1.5 million people live reasonably comfortably, or will it be much worse?
Only two comments so far on the real issue; global warming, and up to now 49 on Bernard Keane’s piece about consequences of repeal of a carbon pricing scheme, and many of those consisting of ignorant insulting blather. It shows how easy it is to bury ones head in the sand of shallow denialism, and how challenging to confront reality. That stupid old woman who confronted PM Gillard in the shopping centre is a typical example.
What about, Crikey, starting a column inviting readers to report their personal experience of changing climate, and see what sort of responses come in. I will start with one of my own.
I presently live in Fremantle, Western Australia, and have now lived for some 40 years in the Perth area and the south-west of WA. This story is about Perth summers, which are becoming unbearable.
Historically Perth summer days consisted of morning easterlies, followed by dry, hot mid-days, followed by a cooling afternoon sea breeze off the ocean, the famous Fremantle Doctor. Well, I’ve noticed over the last handful of years that the pattern has changed. The sea breeze rarely comes in any more. Instead, day after day we have a slow-moving “trough of low pressure” along the west coast, essentially an belt of tropical air extending south from the tropics. It is overcast gray, gaspingly hot (mid-30’s), high humidity and deathly still. Years ago I used to get through hot nights with a fan only, but now have three air conditioners in the house, and need them to get through both day and night when this pattern is in place.
This last summer Perth installers could barely keep up with the demand for condensor-type air conditioners, as the cheaper evaporative models many people have do not function in high humidity. It might be informative to compile sales records for the last few years to see if there is a trend.
So this is one of my stories; there are others. Does any one else have theirs?
Iskandar,
I’d have to look back at the records, but I have a different experience of Perth weather. I don’t remember the last Summer as being particularly hot ( the record sales of air conditioners probably has more to do with the falling prices). Last Summer, I didn’t use the AC, just a fan. It’s my impression that the Winters are becoming warmer and also drier. I haven’t had to have any heating on for at least 10 years. 30 years ago, temperatures of 45C in Summer and 2C or less in Winter weren’t unusual.
Of course, Perth being on the coast, is going to have the AGW moderated by the ocean. I still aspire to ocean front living. A sea level rise of 25 metres should just about do it.