ONLINE BRIEFING –  Thursday May 17, 12.30pm AEST

In the first study of its kind in Australasia, scientists have used 27 natural climate records to create the first large-scale temperature reconstruction for the region, over the past 1000 years.

 The study, led by researchers at the University of Melbourne, used a range of natural indicators including tree rings, corals and ice cores to reconstruct Australasian temperature over the past 1000 years. The results show that there are no other warm periods in the last 1000 years that match the warming experienced in Australasia since 1950.

Comparison with climate model data reveals that the warming cannot be explained by natural factors alone, suggesting a strong influence of human-caused climate change in the region.

This study gives an insight into the next IPCC report, as it will form the Australasian region’s contribution to the chapter on past climate of the last 1000 years. The research is published in the Journal of Climate:

UniMelb media release

Paper

Briefing powerpoint presentation

The briefing will discuss the following issues:

• Natural variability in Australasia over last 1000 year

• How does modern climate change compare to the ‘little ice age’ and ‘medieval warm period

• How unusual is recent climate warming?

 SPEAKERS:

• Dr Joelle Gergis is an ARC Research Fellow at the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is leader of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) working group on Australasian climate of the past 2000 years (Aus2K) and lead author of the study

•  Professor David Karoly is a Professor of Climate Science and leader of the Climate Change theme in the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne 

• Dr Steven Phipps is a research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales

 BRIEFING DETAILS:

DATE: Thu 17 May 2012

START TIME: 12.30pm AEST

DURATION: 30 min

VENUE: Online

For further information and instructions for logging into the event, please contact us on 08 7120 8666 or by email.

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As wind farms spring up across the country in a bid to generate more renewable energy, new research from the US suggests that the wind farms themselves may be having a local warming effect on the climate. The researchers found that wind turbines can modify the local climate by producing a warming trend of up to 0.72⁰C per decade, particularly at night-time. The wind-farms modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and the transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. The researchers suggest this finding helps us to understand more about the impacts of wind farms to ensure the long-term sustainability of wind power.

 Feel free to use these quotes in your stories.  Any further comments will be posted here. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 7120 8666 or by email.

The paper and media release are available on the registered area of our website.

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Professor Steven Sherwood is co-Director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales

“The result in the paper looks pretty solid to me, and shows that night-time temperatures went up by about a half a degree in the summer where the wind farm is. Daytime temperatures do not appear to be affected. This makes sense, since at night the ground becomes much cooler than the air just a few hundred meters above the surface, and the wind farms generate gentle turbulence near the ground that causes these to mix together, thus the ground doesn’t get quite as cool. This same strategy is commonly used by fruit growers (who fly helicopters over the orchards rather than windmills) to combat early morning frosts.”

 *Note: Steven is currently in Austria and so will have limited availability, however the AusSMC has other experts available who are also able to comment

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*Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature, Zhou et al., Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1505

On Thursday the ABC will be airing the documentary I can change your mind about … climate (26 April, 8:30pm AEST) which tells the story of two diametrically opposed protagonists: A conservative politician, former Senator Nick Minchin, who is well known for his opposition to climate science and also for opposing the notion that second-hand tobacco smoke is detrimental to your health, and a young climate activist, the founder and chair of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition Anna Rose, who heads a grassroots organization of 57,000 members.

The narrative of this documentary is that Anna seeks to change Nick’s mind about climate change, whereas Nick is trying to change hers. They travel around the world together, meeting up with supporters of their respective positions, discussing the scientific evidence and challenging each other’s positions.

The documentary will be followed by a “Q&A” panel, consisting of the two main protagonists (antagonists?) Nick and Rose, and no—not climate scientists, but mining magnate Clive Palmer, and social researcher and writer Rebecca Huntley, and the Chief executive of the CSIRO Dr Megan Clark. This ought to make for some lively coverage, given that Clive Palmer has recently alleged that the CIA funded Greenpeace to harm Australian industrial interests.

So where is the science in all that entertainment?

This question is difficult to answer ahead of the airing of the documentary, although it is perhaps unsurprising that Nick Minchin’s supporters primarily comprise political operatives and bloggers without any formal scientific training, let alone peer-reviewed publications.  What is more concerning is that the world’s foremost historian of the organized manufacture of doubt that currently masquerades as “skepticism”, Professor  Naomi Oreskes, did not make it into the documentary despite being on Anna Rose’s list of experts. (Although her footage is online here).

One can cite other concerns about the documentary, for example that the ads refer to camps of “believers” and “skeptics”, which ignores the fact that science is skepticism and that scientific knowledge is a matter of evidence rather than belief. It is also concerning that Anna and Nick were each given the same number of experts to choose from when in fact 97 out of 100 climate scientists know that the Earth is warming because of human greenhouse gas emissions. A “balanced” documentary would therefore invite 97 experts for Anna compared to 3 for Nick Minchin.

Nonetheless, this documentary might be a good opportunity for the public to recognize the so-called “skeptics” for who they are—and to facilitate that recognition, Australian climate experts will run a twitter feed and a live expert blog during the broadcast of the documentary and the subsequent Q&A panel.

So, viewers who want some science with their entertainment can tune into the Twitter feed by #qandascientists and can follow a live blog here.

Stephan Lewandowsky is an Australian Professorial Fellow and Winthrop Professor at the University of Western Australia. He is a cognitive scientist who has published more than 120 papers, chapters, and scholarly books on how people remember and think, with a particular emphasis on the role of skepticism in the updating of memories and acquisition of knowledge.

Previous posts

16 April 2012 - The trouble with conflicts of interest

2 April 2012 – The paper is mightier than the press release

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Professor John Quiggin is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow at the School of Economics, University of Queensland

“A striking feature of the data is that aggregate emissions have remained unchanged since 2008, although GDP has increased by 15 per cent in that time. The fact that the link between GDP growth and emissions has been broken is encouraging evidence that we can achieve substantial reductions in emissions without damaging living standards.”

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Professor Kevin Parton is from the School of Management and Marketing at Charles Sturt University. He is a Strategic Professor in the Institute for Land, Water and Society

“The National Greenhouse Accounts reveal that the total greenhouse gas emissions in Australia rose by 0.6 per cent over the last year and Australia remains on track to meet its Kyoto Protocol target. This result is just about what was expected, and indeed is ‘no big deal’. This target itself is a straw man, given that it involves an increase in emissions, when we actually need to reduce them.

What is much more important is what is likely to happen in the future. The carbon pricing under the government’s ‘carbon tax’ policy should assist the effort to contain the growth in emissions. However, even with the carbon price, it is unlikely that there would be a fall in emissions during 2012 unless there is a dramatic fall in economic activity in the remainder of the year (which none of us want).

To reduce Australia’s carbon emissions significantly will need a change in the way the economy works and a transition, as soon as possible, to a low carbon technology. However, there is currently not great optimism about the rate of progress. Electricity generation is the sector with the largest emissions. The best renewable prospect in this sector is wind power, but we are at an embryonic stage when it comes to the roll-out of this technology. Coal will be king for many years to come. Even with the carbon price regime implied by the introduction of the government’s ‘carbon tax’, there will be little incentive for generators to replace coal fired power stations.”

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Adjunct Professor Rob Fowler is Chair of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law at the University of South Australia

“I note that whilst these latest accounts indicate we appear likely to meet our 2012 Kyoto target, Australia continues to increase the rate of its national GHG emissions, especially from electricity generation. The broad international consensus is that reductions in the range of 25-40% by 2020 are needed to avoid significant climate change, so we are a long way behind the chase. That objective also makes the current nationalcarbon tax goal of a 5% reduction by 2020 look pretty lame.

The immediate, key question is what target for GHG emissions  reductions by 2020 will Australia indicate to the Climate Change Convention meeting in December this year, when the next commitments beyond the Kyoto protocol targets will need to be defined. A target of 5% will not put us anywhere near the level of reductions expected of us by the international community.”

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Professor Graeme Wines is a Professor in Accounting in the School of Accounting, Economics and Finance at Deakin University

“The release of the National Greenhouse Accounts assists in putting into perspective the magnitude of the task facing Australia in its attempts to reduce emissions from 1990 levels. It also highlights the specific areas in which major reductions are required.

The Greenhouse Gas report reveals that total net emissions are now 13.6 percent higher than in 1990. But the percentage change over that period varies greatly between sectors, with some sectors actually exhibiting decreased emissions. The land use (including land use change and forestry) sector has emissions 59.2 percent lower than 1990 levels, although the decreasing trend here has mainly been driven by declines in the conversion of forest land to cropland and grassland. Decreased emissions are also recorded for the agriculture and waste sectors (down 8.1 and 19.1 percent respectively).

While these percentage decreases appear significant, they need to be put into perspective by comparison with the sectors exhibiting increases. The three sectors noted above exhibiting decreases represented reductions of 65.3 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, down from 196.9 tonnes in 1990 to 131.6 tonnes in 2010. The energy sector, though, recorded the greatest increase in emissions, with a 44.2 percent increase from 1990 levels. But this increase amounted to an additional 127.9 tonnes of emissions, an increase roughly twice the magnitude of the decrease in the three decreasing emissions sectors.

This highlights the magnitude of the task facing the energy sector in attempting to substitute renewable energy sources for current ones.”

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ONLINE BRIEFING – Thursday March 29 at 9.30am AEDT

Note: The State of the Planet declaration from the conference was released on 29th March. Download the declaration here.

More than 80 Australian scientists are in London this week attending a major international conference on the state of the planet and the most pressing issues faced by humanity – and climate change is only one of them! The relatively new field of Earth System Science takes a holistic view of the planet as a complex system, somewhat analogous to a human body. It may sound esoteric but the field is taken very seriously by scientists, who are concerned about the implications for life on earth if any part of the system is stressed or begins to fail. More than 3,000 of them have congregated in London to alert the world to trends and to discuss solutions. They monitor everything from the acidity of the oceans and the state of global fisheries to worldwide trends in deforestation and urbanization and the condition of the world’s rivers and try to understand the connections between them.

Two Australian scientists will stay up late in London to brief Australian journalists on the key findings of the conference and what politicians and the public need to consider in the lead up to the UN Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in less than three months.

Topics for discussion include:

• What are the pressure points on the Earth and why does it matter?
• Are we getting close to tipping points that, once reached, could trigger dramatic changes?
• What can be done to reduce pressure on the planet?
• What key scientific messages need to be heeded at Rio+20?

SPEAKERS:

• Dr Mark Stafford Smith, Conference co-chair and Scientific Director at CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship
• Professor Will Steffen, Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute

BRIEFING DETAILS:

DATE:  Thu 29 March 2012
START TIME: 9.30am AEDT
DURATION: 35 min
VENUE:  Online

Follow the full briefing here

*NB:  The AusSMC generally runs two different types of media briefings:
NEWS BRIEFINGS – Where new research or data will be released as part of the briefing
BACKGROUND BRIEFINGS – Where experts discuss an issue which is in the news or an issue we consider newsworthy, but no new research or data is being released