NWR Climate change

[Saina Nieminen]

By far the most effective impact an individual can have is to not have children. It outweighs any other choices we might make. Has anyone taken climate change that seriously here? If not maybe you should consider it. if half the planet did it our emissions would significantly shift in a generation.

I have chosen to not reproduce. But that's not enough. Systemic change is key, not individual lifestyle or reproductive choices.

 

[Geordie Torr]

Yes but unless we are totally carbon neutral, you cannot workout the baseline. What is the leading indicator in terms of reduction of CO2 to reduction in temperature. One month, six years, decades? I am NOT a climate change (or more accurately man made climate change) denier. I am an analyst by nature, and I do not like incomplete data models and assumptions.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. There are lots of good proxies and other indicators of temperature and carbon dioxide levels giong back thousands of years and less good ones going back hundreds of thousands of yeras and, I believe millions of years. We know roughly what CO2 levels and tempertures were like before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - is that the sort of baseline you're after? We'er a long way from thinking about reduction in CO2 levels, however - emissions are still increasing. If we can reverse that trend we can at least hope to limit the temperature rise to something we can sort of live with and then we can start thinking about ways to actually reduce the atmospheric concentration. As it stands, we're locked into rises, no matter how good a job we do of reducing emissions.

I totally get that you're not a denier, but I don't really understand the need to have every last t crossed and i dotted. If you lay it out simply: CO2 is a greenhouse gas (ie it traps heat), man-made emissions of CO2 have been rising since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric concentration of CO2 has also been rising (thankfully not as quickly as the oceans have been sucking up a lot of CO2). Because of all of this, temperatures have also been rising (again, thankfully not as quickly as they might as the oceans have been sucking up a lot of the heat). So then you work backwards - if we don't want temperatures to keep rising, we need to slow emissions and suck as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as possible (either by planting trees or some other, likely technological, method). Sure, we may not be able to perfectly nail down everything in this equation - whether that be quantities or processes - the basic outline is there. So why wait for more data when it's obvious that waiting just makes things worse? How do we now if we've done enough? Well, we won't - we'll all be dead before things start to improve significantly - but our children or grandchildren would be able to point to atmospheric CO2 levels being back to something like they were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution or some other metric, to global average temperatures being back to historical average levels, to Arcitc sea ice extent being somewhere near to historical averages.

 

[Geordie Torr]

I'll probably get crucified for saying this, but much as I like to see people talking about how they're chaning their lifestyles to make things better, I think the best thing anyone can do is lobby their MP. We're not going to fix this with individual contributions. We need systemic government-level change - shut down coal-fired power plants, outlaw internal combustion engines, stop subsidising fossil fuels, support renewables.

I heard a story recently about a logistics company that was using diesel-powered vehicles to move stuf around its sites. Diesel used to be really cheap as it was government subsidised, so the system worked fine for them. Then the government removed the subsidy, so the company looked around and found a perfectly good electric alternative and swapped straight over. They could have done so years ago, but there was no incentive. And that's across the board - people and companies, with some exceptions, will just continue to do what they've always done because there's no incentive to change. You need governement regulation to force people's hands. Yes, there may be some economic or other hardship but it will pale in comparison to the economic and other hardship that's coming our way if we don't fix this problem soon - and I mean very, very soon.

Look around you and see the chaos that climate change is already wreaking - that's with not much more than a degree's change in average global temperature. We're currently pretty much locked into at least another degree, even if we drastically change our behaviour. If we don't, all bets are off - 3, 4, 5, 6 degrees? We're looking at vast swathes of the planet being actually unliveable and certainly far more being unfarmable. The Amazon will turn into savannah (we may already be locked into that happening), the Great Barrier Reef will be effectively gone, along with pretty much every other tropical reef in the ocean. No more penguins, no more puffins, no more polar bears, no more pandas...

 

[Ben Coffman]

It would be better if the media were trying to educate/explain rather than create panic through stimulating emotions. Most energy consumption we may have an impact on are:

- Home: very inefficient isolation responsible for energy consumption. Combination of isolation, heat pump and electricity should lead to huge improvement in energy efficiency

Not an impossible challenge if there is a will. The issue is not to suppress energy consumption but to optimise it.

Some of these objectives require very difficult decisions. There are a whole raft of energy inefficient end of Victorian terrace houses, esp in the north of England. Do we render and insulate the end walls to prevent massive heat loss then lose the heritage and beauty of the brick? Knock them down and build new? They are often too small to insulate on the inside.

 

[Thom Blach]

I don't really understand the need to have every last t crossed and i dotted.

Me neither. Thank you for articulating my ignorance so well.

We're not going to fix this with individual contributions.

We aren't going to fix anything with individual contributions. That is why governments exist.

 

[Jeremy Caan]

I've found this thread a bit reassuring.

When I was first having conversations about climate change ("global warming") 30 years ago it was perhaps a bit like the people trying to have a conversation about smoking being carcinogenic in the 1950s when tobacco companies, who already knew it, were deliberately fostering doubts about the evidence base.

As with greenhouse gases, the obfuscation has allowed tobacco companies to continue expanding their market even today. Deaths from smoking are declining in rich countries but have risen elsewhere (eg Current strategies are inadequate to curb the rise of tobacco use in Africa - PubMed )

"Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year, a number that will rise to nearly 2 million per year by the 2020s or 2030s, even if consumption rates decline in the interim."
The history of the discovery of the cigarette-lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll - PubMed (2012)

Smoking-related deaths among ex-smokers will continue - like greenhouse gases the harm continues for a long while after the cause stops so the sooner you stop the better. The less wriggle-room governments allow greenhouse gas emitters the better. They will exploit every nook and cranny in the legislation while it's in their shareholders' interest to do so.

The reason I'm a bit reassured is that there is broad agreement here about the nature of the problem.

The disagreement is about how much upfront pain people are willing to tolerate to tackle it.

 

[Geordie Torr]

Yeah, I must admit that in the past few years I've shifted from being resignedly (and frequently angrily) pessimistic to quietly optimistic (obviously, I do still get pretty angry...). There does seem to have a been a significant shift in people's attitudes and this is being mirrored by (some) governments and big corporations. I suspect it's probably all too little, too late, but it's certainly a hell of a lot better than things were even five years ago. The cost of renewables is coming down and the public distaste for coal is becoming increasingly difficult for (some) governments to ignore (China, India and Australia being the obvious counter-examples).

 

[Jeremy Caan]

Yeah, I must admit that in the past few years I've shifted from being resignedly (and frequently angrily) pessimistic to quietly optimistic (obviously, I do still get pretty angry...). There does seem to have a been a significant shift in people's attitudes and this is being mirrored by (some) governments and big corporations. I suspect it's probably all too little, too late, but it's certainly a hell of a lot better than things were even five years ago. The cost of renewables is coming down and the public distaste for coal is becoming increasingly difficult for (some) governments to ignore (China, India and Australia being the obvious counter-examples).

The Australian coal situation is odd given what a fantastic alternative resource they have in solar if they chose to prioritise it.

 

[Thom Blach]

It's a reflection of the utter weirdness of Australian politics, I fear.

 

[Simon Wheeler]

There’s a lot of litigation happening and pending in the US saying effectively that the oil companies have lied about the effects of fossil fuels for decades, burying their own research and sowing disinformation as a strategy to deflect criticism of the effect of their businesses, this could mark a seachange in US politics about climate change and the deniers of said change.
while I’m far from a fan of the litigate everything culture, ive heard a bit about using legal means as an effective way of making change against corporations and governments in this area, hopefully it will work as intended

 

[Saina Nieminen]

There’s a lot of litigation happening and pending in the US saying effectively that the oil companies have lied about the effects of fossil fuels for decades, burying their own research and sowing disinformation as a strategy to deflect criticism of the effect of their businesses, this could mark a seachange in US politics about climate change and the deniers of said change.
while I’m far from a fan of the litigate everything culture, ive heard a bit about using legal means as an effective way of making change against corporations and governments in this area, hopefully it will work as intended

Janne Korhonen's piece might be of interest to you: The possible anatomy of coming climate change trials

 

[Sean Howe]

It's a reflection of the utter weirdness of Australian politics, I fear.

It is a reflection of the power of Murdoch in the Australian media, and the corrupting power of coal miners.

Donald Horne's description of Australia is on the money , as ever.

I am in the process of planting in an area I would not have considered 20 years ago on a whole range of reasons, but at the root of it all is climate change.

 

[Jeremy Caan]

It is a reflection of the power of Murdoch in the Australian media, and the corrupting power of coal miners.

Donald Horne's description of Australia is on the money , as ever.

I am in the process of planting in an area I would not have considered 20 years ago on a whole range of reasons, but at the root of it all is climate change.

What are you planting, Sean? Is the grape choice different than you'd have otherwise made? Is the territory higher or resilient in some other way?

 

[Nayan Gowda]

I am in the process of planting in an area I would not have considered 20 years ago on a whole range of reasons, but at the root of it all is climate change.

I remember at Uni we did climate change modelling around what varieties could be planted where. I remember it didn't take much of an average temperature to essentially run out of room on the mainland.

 

[Geordie Torr]

It is a reflection of the power of Murdoch in the Australian media, and the corrupting power of coal miners.

Yes, I was giong to say something similar. The other topic guaranteed to get me frothing at the mouth is political lobbying/donations. It's pretty clear that the main thing stopping decisive action on climate change is greed - both for money and power. The fossil fuel companies buy politicians greedy for power so that they can satisfy their shareholders' and executives' greed for money. The mining lobby in Australia is particularly powerful and so coal mines continue to be approved, despite the fact that they bring very few jobs and very little in tax revenue and then, when all the coal has been dug up, the taxpayer is left with the bill for cleaning up the mess that the miners have left behind.

I wrote a feature a few years back about abandoned mines and the stuff I discovered was utterly horrifying. There are more than 50,000 abandoned mines in Australia, many of them leaking toxic substances into creeks, rivers and the groundwater. If you factor in the cost of rehabilitating most mines (and this is ignoring the climate costs of burning the coal), it would actually be cheaper to leave the minerals in the ground. Anyone interested in reading more can find the feature here:

https://geordietorr.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/mines-july.pdf

 

[Jeremy Caan]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/02/scientists-climate-crisis-big-oil-climate-crimes?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Othe

 

[G. W o l f f]

I remember at Uni we did climate change modelling around what varieties could be planted where. I remember it didn't take much of an average temperature to essentially run out of room on the mainland.

In the '90s, when studying horticulture at university, according to at least one of the texts I read, an average rise of 1.5C was then expected to be the point at which massive changes would commence for plant life, plant and pest growth ranges, horticultural management and biodiversity.

 

[jonathan points]

It scares me that the recent flash floods in London attracted so little attention- of course they’re partly related to the ever growing concreting over, basement building and so on that has been happening for years now. But still.....

 

[George Marshall]

Best not to be confused

UK and Global extreme events – Heavy rainfall and floods

Determining the likelihood and severity of extreme events for the past, present and future.

www.metoffice.gov.uk

 

[George Marshall]

It is known that short-duration (subdaily) rainfall extremes are intensifying as a result of climate change, resulting in increased flood risk,

Intensification of short-duration rainfall extremes and implications for flood risk: current state of the art and future directions | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences

royalsocietypublishing.org

 

[Sean Howe]

What are you planting, Sean? Is the grape choice different than you'd have otherwise made? Is the territory higher or resilient in some other way?

HI Jeremy, my thoughts on site selection were based on observing
1. In Victoria sites on the western slopes of the Great Dividing range (King Valley through to the Yarra) are experiencing regular smoke events, and this problem will increase rather than decrease in the future
2. Mornington is crazy expensive, as is anywhere near the coast to get a maritime moderating effect on the climate, so you have to go up.
3. Water, is as always critical, and surface flows to variable, so groundwater is the key, to secure droughtproofing
4. Strong soils, with good secure rainfall above 700mm a year to reduce irrigation dependence
5. Within 1 1/2 hours of Melbourne to attract the groovy young winemakers away from their Collingwood pads
6. Have a beautiful site, as it makes the working more pleasant
7. Mid weight reds and alternate whites are a premium, so Pinot Noir, Gamay and assorted Italians, ie things I like to drink (see point 6)

As always the plan is good on a spreadsheet, devil is in the detail, am about to start ripping 8 ha next week for planting this spring. The fruit is all committed. Ended up on an extinct volcano, north of Ballarat. Meets all requirements.

 

[Jeremy Caan]

HI Jeremy, my thoughts on site selection were based on observing
1. In Victoria sites on the western slopes of the Great Dividing range (King Valley through to the Yarra) are experiencing regular smoke events, and this problem will increase rather than decrease in the future
2. Mornington is crazy expensive, as is anywhere near the coast to get a maritime moderating effect on the climate, so you have to go up.
3. Water, is as always critical, and surface flows to variable, so groundwater is the key, to secure droughtproofing
4. Strong soils, with good secure rainfall above 700mm a year to reduce irrigation dependence
5. Within 1 1/2 hours of Melbourne to attract the groovy young winemakers away from their Collingwood pads
6. Have a beautiful site, as it makes the working more pleasant
7. Mid weight reds and alternate whites are a premium, so Pinot Noir, Gamay and assorted Italians, ie things I like to drink (see point 6)

As always the plan is good on a spreadsheet, devil is in the detail, am about to start ripping 8 ha next week for planting this spring. The fruit is all committed. Ended up on an extinct volcano, north of Ballarat. Meets all requirements.

What a great set of criteria Sean!

Maybe post on here how you're doing and what you're learning at major milestones - hopefully it won't be thought to constitute a commercial post, at least until there's wine in bottle!

 

[Nayan Gowda]

Ended up on an extinct volcano, north of Ballarat.

If memory serves me correctly, there are a few to choose from.

 

[Jeremy Caan]

Another thought, Sean, are you exploring possibilities for sustainable packaging/shipping?

I'm hoping at some stage there will be solutions out there with a smaller ecological footprint than glass (weight, manufacturing etc) yet not harmful to the wine's taste and maturation.

 

[Geordie Torr]

Amazon rainforest now emitting more CO2 than it absorbs

Be worried, be very worried.

Mostly, however, this just makes me very, very sad. Rainforest is by far and away my favourite habitat and the Amazon is the pinnacle. This is, almost certainly, the first big step along the road to the Amazon shifting from rainforest to savannah. So one of the world's most biodiverse ecosystems - "The eastern slope of the Andes and the adjacent Amazonian forests are home to the world’s highest diversity of birds, one-third of all freshwater fish species and more than 60,000 plant species, half of which are found nowhere else. By almost any measure, this region harbors some of the most important biodiversity found anywhere on Earth." - is on the brink of shifting from one ecotone to another, a shift that will surely be accompanied by the extinction of uncountable species. *Sigh*.