Climate Change and the End of Australia
Want to know what global warming has in store for us? Just go to Australia, where rivers are drying up, reefs are dying, and fires and floods are ravaging the continent

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003#ixzz1fmp6R7Vh

By Jeff Goodell
October 3, 2011 5:43 PM ET
floodwaters environment disaster australia rolling stone 1141
The floodwaters of the Castlereagh River surround the township of Coonamble in Central West NSW.
Wolter Peeters/The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

It's near midnight, and I'm holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the northeast coast of Australia. Yasi, a Category 5 hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds that's already been dubbed "The Mother of All Catastrophes" by excitable Aussie tabloids, is just a few hundred miles offshore. When the eye of the storm hits, forecasters predict, it will be the worst ever to batter the east coast of Australia.

I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. "Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."

As Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year's disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country's breadbasket, has suffered a dec­ades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming dec­ades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.

With Yasi approaching fast, disaster preparations are fully under way. At the airport, the Australian Defense Force is racing to load emergency supplies into Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters. Entire cities have shut down, their streets nearly empty as I drive north, toward the center of the storm, through sugar plantations and ranch land. Dead kangaroos sprawl by the side of the road, the victims of motorists fleeing the storm.

With the winds hitting 80 miles per hour, I'm forced to stop in Proserpine, where the windows are taped and sandbags are piled in front of doors. Palm trees are bent horizontal in the wind, and the shingles of a nearby roof blow off and shoot into the darkness. It's as if civilization is being dismantled one shingle at a time.

"Welcome to Australia, the petri dish of climate change," an Aussie friend e-mailed me the day before. "Stay safe."

In the past year – one of the hottest on record – extreme weather has battered almost every corner of the planet. There have been devastating droughts in China and India, unprecedented floods and wildfires in the United States, and near-record ice melts in the Arctic. Yet the prosperous nations of the world have failed to take action to reduce the risk of climate change, in part because people in prosperous nations think they're invulnerable. They're under the misapprehension that, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Tom Schelling puts it, "Global warming is a problem that is going to primarily affect future generations of poor people." To see how foolish this reasoning is, one need only look at Australia, a prosperous nation that also happens to be right in the cross hairs of global warming. "Sadly, it's probably too late to save much of it," says Joe Romm, a leading climate advocate who served as assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration.

This is not to say that the entire continent will sink beneath the waves anytime soon. What is likely to vanish – or be transformed beyond recognition – are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources. Instead, Australia is likely to become hotter, drier and poorer, fractured by increasing tensions over access to water, food and energy as its major cities are engulfed by the rising seas.

To climate scientists, it's no surprise that Australia would feel the effects of climate change so strongly, in part because it has one of the world's most variable climates. "One effect of increasing greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere is to amplify existing climate signals," says Karoly. "Regions that are dry get drier, and regions that are wet get wetter. If you have a place like Australia that is already extreme, those extremes just get more pronounced." Adding to Australia's vulnerability is its close connection with the sea. Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.

How bad could it get? A recent study by MIT projects that without "rapid and massive action" to cut carbon pollution, the Earth's temperature could soar by nine degrees this century. "There are no analogies in human history for a temperature jump of that size in such a short time period," says Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at Australian National University. The few times in human history when temperatures fell by seven degrees, he points out, the sudden shift likely triggered a bubonic plague in Europe, caused the abrupt collapse of the Moche civilization in Peru and reduced the entire human race to as few as 1,000 breeding pairs after a volcanic eruption blocked out the sun some 73,000 years ago. "We think that because we are a technologically sophisticated society, we are less vulnerable to these kinds of dramatic shifts in climate," McMichael says. "But in some ways, because of the interconnectedness of our world, we are more vulnerable."

With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production. Rising sea levels will wipe out large parts of major cities and cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to coastal homes and roads. The Great Barrier Reef will be reduced to a pile of purple bacterial slime. Thousands of people will die from heat waves and other extreme weather events, as well as mosquito-borne infections like dengue fever. Depression and suicide will become even more common among displaced farmers and Aborigines. Dr. James Ross, medical director for Australia's Remote Area Health Corps, calls climate change "the number-one challenge for human health in the 21st century."

And all this doesn't even hint at the political complexities Australia will face in a hotter world, including an influx of refugees from poorer climate-ravaged nations. ("If you want to understand Australian politics," says Anthony Kitchener, an Australian entrepreneur, "the first thing you have to understand is our fear of yellow hordes from the north.") Then there are the economic costs. The Queensland floods earlier this year caused $30 billion in damage and forced the government to implement a $1.8 billion "flood tax" to help pay for reconstruction. As temperatures rise, so will the price tag. "We can't afford to spend 10 percent of our GDP building sea walls and trying to adapt to climate change," says Ian Goodwin, a climate scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney.

With so much at risk, you might expect Australia to be at the forefront of the clean-energy revolution and the international effort to cut carbon pollution. After all, the continent's vast, empty deserts were practically designed for solar-power installations. And unlike the U.S. Congress, the Australian Parliament did ratify the Kyoto Protocol, pledging to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent by 2050. But it was an empty gesture. Australia remains deeply addicted to coal, which not only provides 80 percent of its electricity but serves as its leading export. Perhaps more than any other nation on earth, Australia is trapped by the devil's bargain of fossil fuels: In the short term, the health of the nation's economy depends on burning coal. But in the long term, the survival of its people depends on quitting coal. Australia's year of extreme weather has reawakened calls for a tax on carbon pollution, but it is far from clear that the initiative will pass, or, in the big picture, whether it will matter much. "What we are ultimately talking about is how climate change is destabilizing one of the most advanced nations on the planet," says Paul Gilding, an Australian climate adviser and author of The Great Disruption. "If Australia is vulnerable, everyone is vulnerable."

The morning after Yasi, I emerge from my hotel to find a few broken windows and downed trees. The flooding isn't as bad as had been feared, but the hurricane has still turned the region upside down: roofs blown off houses, trees down, sailboats in the streets, traffic backed up for miles. "This is bringing a world of hurt to people," one trucker tells me as we wait in line for the road to open.

In the following days, there is much speculation in the Aussie press about whether or not Yasi was "caused" by global warming. Most media outlets gloss over the complexities of the science – an unsurprising omission, given that Australia is home to Rupert Murdoch's media empire – and instead reassure readers that hurricanes have been hitting Queensland for thousands of years. One of the major drivers of the storm, they insist, was a particularly strong La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific.

Read the rest of this article at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003#ixzz1fmpE5OOk

At Durban Summit, Leading African Activist Calls U.S. Emissions Stance "A Death Sentence for Africa"

Full story and video at http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/6/at_durban_summit_leading_african_activist

We continue our week-long coverage from the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 17, in Durban, where negotiators from more than 190 nations are in their final week of key talks on fighting climate change. The future of the Kyoto Protocol is in doubt, as is the formation of a new Green Climate Fund. With the talks taking place in South Africa, special interest is being paid to how the continent of Africa is already being heavily impacted by the climate crisis. We speak to Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International. He is author of the new book, "To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and Climate Crisis in Africa." "We’re seeing a situation where the negotiation is being carried out on a big platform of hypocrisy, a lack of seriousness, a lack of recognition that Africa is so heavily impacted," Bassey says. "For every one-degree Celsius change in temperature, Africa is impacted at a heightened level. So this is very much to be condemned." [includes rush transcript]

Earth Likely to Become Increasingly Hostile to Agriculture

Drought frequency is expected to triple in the next 100 years. The resulting variability and stress for farmers could prove regionally disabling without new policy

By Douglas Fischer and DailyClimate.org | December 6, 2011 |

SAN FRANCISCO - To get a glimpse of the future, look to East Africa today.

The Horn of Africa is in the midst of its worst drought in 60 years: Crop failures have left up to 10 million at risk of famine; social order has broken down in Somalia, with thousands of refugees streaming into Kenya; British Aid alone is feeding 2.4 million people across the region.

That's a taste of what's to come, say scientists mapping the impact of a warming planet on agriculture and civilization.

"We think we're going to have continued dryness, at least for the next 10 or 15 years, over East Africa," said Chris Funk, a geographer at the U.S. Geological Society and founding member of the Climate Hazard Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Funk and other experts at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco cautioned that East Africa is just one example. Many recent events - discoveries from sediment cores in New York, drought in Australia and the western United States, data from increasingly sophisticated computer models - lead to a conclusion that the weather driving many of the globe's great breadbaskets will become hotter, drier and more unpredictable.

Even the northeastern United States - a region normally omitted from any serious talk about domestic drought - is at risk, said Dorothy Peteet, a senior research scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

A series of sediment cores drilled from New York marshes confirm that mega droughts can grip the region: One spanned from 850 to 1350 A.D., Peteet said. And shorter, more intense droughts have driven sea water far up the Hudson River, past towns such as Poughkeepsie that depend on the river for drinking supplies.

"We're just beginning to map the extent, but we know it was pervasive," she said. "There are hints of drought all the way up to Maine."

Of course, climate change can't be blamed for all the food shortages and social unrest, several researchers cautioned. Landscape changes such as deforestation can trigger droughts, while policy choices exacerbate impacts.

Some hard-hit African countries have the highest growth rates on the planet, and gains in agricultural productivity simply have not kept up with those extra mouths. Per capita cereal production, for instance, peaked worldwide in the mid-1980s, Funk said, and is decreasing everywhere. But no place on the globe is decreasing faster than East Africa.

Simple policy decisions can blunt a crisis. Malawi, in southeastern Africa, gave farmers bags of seed and fertilizer and saw food prices fall and the percentage of its population classified as undernourished drop by almost half over a decade, Funk added. Kenya, in contrast, saw its policies stagnate; prices and malnourishment rates both rose.

Meanwhile, researchers probing the climate in pre-Columbian Central America figure that widespread deforestation had a hand in the droughts thought to have toppled the Mayan, Toltec and Aztec civilizations.

More than 1,000 years ago, "significant deforestation" throughout Central America suppressed rainfall upwards of 20 percent and warmed the region 0.5ºC, said Benjamin Cook, a NASA climatologist.

The forest - and local moisture - rebounded with the population crash that followed European contact, he added. But today the region is even more denuded than during its pre-Colombian peak.

But with the frequency of droughts expected to triple in the next 100 years, researchers fear the resulting variability and stress to agriculture and civilization could prove destabilizing for many regions.

"We should take it seriously," Peteet said.

Experiment 626 wrote:Sure humans are doing a great job screwing things up big time! But eventually the planet will heal itself like it always has...

BrassScorpion wrote:Two serious updates on how climate change is impacting two continents.

Climate Change and the End of Australia
Want to know what global warming has in store for us? Just go to Australia, where rivers are drying up, reefs are dying, and fires and floods are ravaging the continent
"What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."

Australia is likely to become hotter, drier and poorer, fractured by increasing tensions over access to water, food and gasoline as its major cities are engulfed by the rising tide of barbarism.

To climate scientists, it's no surprise that Australia would feel the effects of climate change so strongly, in part because it has one of the world's most variable climates, and in part because they had just got done watching the Mel Gibson 'Road Warrior' trilogy.

Easy E wrote:Whether Global Warming is real or not, can we at least all agree that it is not a good idea to pump a bunch of crap into the air we breath?

You do know what you're exhaling - in effect breathing - is that "crap."

ShumaGorath wrote:

You do know what you're exhaling - in effect breathing - is that "crap."

Are you aware that the stuff you breathe out is actually poisonous? No? Well then put a plastic bag over your head. You'll be fine. Go ahead and try it at home.

BrassScorpion wrote:

ShumaGorath wrote:

You do know what you're exhaling - in effect breathing - is that "crap."

Are you aware that the stuff you breathe out is actually poisonous? No? Well then put a plastic bag over your head. You'll be fine. Go ahead and try it at home.

You are my hero. But you'll never win arguing with the extreme right, facts and science don't matter, only how they "feel". The idea that something that is tolerable in certain quantities and catastrophic or deadly in excess is lost on that audience.

Your personal opinion does not trump scientific studies
http://www.blaghag.com/2010/05/your-personal-opinion-does-not-trump.html

Experiment 626 wrote:

BrassScorpion wrote:

ShumaGorath wrote:

You do know what you're exhaling - in effect breathing - is that "crap."

Are you aware that the stuff you breathe out is actually poisonous? No? Well then put a plastic bag over your head. You'll be fine. Go ahead and try it at home.

You are my hero. But you'll never win arguing with the extreme right, facts and science don't matter, only how they "feel". The idea that something that is tolerable in certain quantities and catastrophic or deadly in excess is lost on that audience.

Your personal opinion does not trump scientific studies
http://www.blaghag.com/2010/05/your-personal-opinion-does-not-trump.html

And the extreme left would have us believe that global warming is caused purely by humans and we're all going to die if we don't stop... (total BS considering the last couple ice ages have been naturally occuring events)

Point is, our lovely little planet has endured near-extinction in the past and life has found a way to always carry on. Humans survived the last ice age, I'm sure that come another ice age, a percentage of us will survive again. (and likely go on to make the same stupid feth-ups yet again!)

The only way we'll truely off ourselves completely is if we're dumb enough to start a worldwide nuclear armageddon or a massive asteroid wipes us all out!

And the extreme left would have us believe that global warming is caused purely by humans and we're all going to die if we don't stop... (total BS considering the last couple ice ages have been naturally occuring events)

Easy E wrote:

Experiment 626 wrote:

BrassScorpion wrote:

ShumaGorath wrote:

You do know what you're exhaling - in effect breathing - is that "crap."

Are you aware that the stuff you breathe out is actually poisonous? No? Well then put a plastic bag over your head. You'll be fine. Go ahead and try it at home.

You are my hero. But you'll never win arguing with the extreme right, facts and science don't matter, only how they "feel". The idea that something that is tolerable in certain quantities and catastrophic or deadly in excess is lost on that audience.

Your personal opinion does not trump scientific studies
http://www.blaghag.com/2010/05/your-personal-opinion-does-not-trump.html

And the extreme left would have us believe that global warming is caused purely by humans and we're all going to die if we don't stop... (total BS considering the last couple ice ages have been naturally occuring events)

Point is, our lovely little planet has endured near-extinction in the past and life has found a way to always carry on. Humans survived the last ice age, I'm sure that come another ice age, a percentage of us will survive again. (and likely go on to make the same stupid feth-ups yet again!)

The only way we'll truely off ourselves completely is if we're dumb enough to start a worldwide nuclear armageddon or a massive asteroid wipes us all out!

Can we all agree that making the very air we need to breath less safe to inhale is a bad idea?

So, is that a NO then?

Whether Global Warming is real or not, can we at least all agree that it is not a good idea to pump a bunch of crap into the air we breath?

They also took thousands of years, not 100. The human race also nearly went extinct during the last one and wasn't utterly dependent on weather cycles for agriculture to feed the entire planet. Please just stop, you have absolutely no conception of climate history and vague similarities between pre historic ice ages and current climate change does not invalidate the opinions of 95% of all scientists just because you fething want it to.

The answer will always be no. They have no idea what they are talking about so finding a middle ground won't work.

How unfair of you Pyriel, those 30,000 scientists are lying. The ice caps are melting, new York will soon be underwater.

Easy E wrote:Yes, CO2 is what we breath out, and it is what trees breath in. A great system, until you are putting out more human breath waste then the trees can absorb Fraz. Then it becomes dangerous to the whole system we need to live.

Plus, let's not pretend that we are ONLY pumping out CO2 into the air that we breath.

Again, can we all agree that making the very air we need to breath less safe to inhale is a bad idea?

Pyriel- wrote:

Whether Global Warming is real or not, can we at least all agree that it is not a good idea to pump a bunch of crap into the air we breath?

Spot on my man, spot on!

They also took thousands of years, not 100. The human race also nearly went extinct during the last one and wasn't utterly dependent on weather cycles for agriculture to feed the entire planet. Please just stop, you have absolutely no conception of climate history and vague similarities between pre historic ice ages and current climate change does not invalidate the opinions of 95% of all scientists just because you fething want it to.

And you have? Please show me your credentials or just hold your breath because you know, you are polluting the earth with your exhaled CO2.

The answer will always be no. They have no idea what they are talking about so finding a middle ground won't work.

Again and the extreme left have?
Insert the word "green" in front of quick silver and they will gakking drink it because it´s "healthy".

30,000 Scientists are charging Al Gore with fraud in Global Warming Scam, 9000 of which are PHD researchers. None are a part of the goverment paid biased climate panel but I guess they must all be evil rightwing extremists who hate plants and animals and who refuse to believe in the utter bullgak Gore lied about.

Frazzled wrote:

Easy E wrote:Yes, CO2 is what we breath out, and it is what trees breath in. A great system, until you are putting out more human breath waste then the trees can absorb Fraz. Then it becomes dangerous to the whole system we need to live.

Plus, let's not pretend that we are ONLY pumping out CO2 into the air that we breath.

Again, can we all agree that making the very air we need to breath less safe to inhale is a bad idea?

So what you're really arguing is that we need to exterminate humanity until we get it in line with tree output?

Are you guys denying that global warming is happening or are you denying that it's caused by humans? Or mostly caused by humans?

Because denying that it's happening...that's...well, wrong. The others, are okay as disagreements I suppose. But don't dispute the first.

You do realize that two years later that never happened and that most of the scientists were found to be either fake names on paper or people holding degrees in unrelated fields and who were for the most part not even working in those fields? Of course you don't, you somehow managed to pull out a time machine to a fox news talking point where they made gak up and pushed a story the memo told them to until it was unpopular. Fast forward two years the whole thing was a scam.

AustonT wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

Easy E wrote:Yes, CO2 is what we breath out, and it is what trees breath in. A great system, until you are putting out more human breath waste then the trees can absorb Fraz. Then it becomes dangerous to the whole system we need to live.

Plus, let's not pretend that we are ONLY pumping out CO2 into the air that we breath.

Again, can we all agree that making the very air we need to breath less safe to inhale is a bad idea?

So what you're really arguing is that we need to exterminate humanity until we get it in line with tree output?

Alls fair in love war and global warming.

Pyriel- wrote:

Are you guys denying that global warming is happening or are you denying that it's caused by humans? Or mostly caused by humans?

Because denying that it's happening...that's...well, wrong. The others, are okay as disagreements I suppose. But don't dispute the first.

I´m saying this:
Why is it wrong?
Where were you when they had the mini ice age in London some hundreds years ago? Was that also human caused warming or cooling? What did you say? It passed and was natural? hmm...

You do realize that two years later that never happened and that most of the scientists were found to be either fake names on paper or people holding degrees in unrelated fields and who were for the most part not even working in those fields? Of course you don't, you somehow managed to pull out a time machine to a fox news talking point where they made gak up and pushed a story the memo told them to until it was unpopular. Fast forward two years the whole thing was a scam.

Emails being repeatedly manipulated in the global warming camp to exaggerate the warming and push the warming agenda?
There has been like what, two such scandals so far?

Emails being repeatedly manipulated in the global warming camp to exaggerate the warming and push the warming agenda?
There has been like what, two such scandals so far?

Frazzled wrote:

AustonT wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

Easy E wrote:Yes, CO2 is what we breath out, and it is what trees breath in. A great system, until you are putting out more human breath waste then the trees can absorb Fraz. Then it becomes dangerous to the whole system we need to live.

Plus, let's not pretend that we are ONLY pumping out CO2 into the air that we breath.

Again, can we all agree that making the very air we need to breath less safe to inhale is a bad idea?

So what you're really arguing is that we need to exterminate humanity until we get it in line with tree output?

Alls fair in love war and global warming.

Well, if its being argued that if we don't do something moether nature will change such that large numbers of humans will be killed off, isn't Mother Nature already taking care of the problem? Or is the argument that we need to get ahead of Mother Nature and beat it to the punch? I believe certain guys in the Twentieth Century tried to help that process along already...