The Emissions Trading Scheme Review committee has released the first batch of submissions it has received — those made by organisations and individuals who have already made their presentations to the committee. There are some heavy hitters in there: from New Zealand’s science and policy community there’s the Climate Change Centre (a joint venture between the University of Canterbury and Victoria University of Wellington, plus all the Crown Research Institutes – from NIWA to AgResearch), VUW’s Climate Change Research Institute, and GNS Science, and from the world of commerce, we have the Business Roundtable‘s “evidence”. Why the quote marks? Because the Roundtable’s submission is a fact-free farrago of nonsense.
Tag: NZ
Melting Point
Eric Dorfman is an ecologist. He has been aware of the science of climate change since his doctoral student days in the 1990s but he credits Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth with inspiring him to make a larger contribution towards addressing the issue. Hence his book Melting Point: New Zealand and the Climate Change Crisis, published last September.
The book is not long, and is written in a relaxed style accessible to the general reader. He begins with a brief overview of the global science, centring particularly on carbon sinks, carbon pumps and feedback loops as keys to understanding climate change. Debating whether climate change is real is senseless. Credible scientific opinion is unequivocal. The risk of doing nothing in the face of the predicted consequences is foolhardy, and the problem is not beyond us.
Turning his focus to New Zealand he begins with the climate, pointing out that unlike Europe which is experiencing unprecedented weather patterns we are likely to see an intensification of the weather patterns we already have, much of it driven by an an intensification of the pattern of westerly winds and warmer sea surface temperatures. He considers the effects of rising sea levels and details some of them; even one metre will cause an enormous and costly mess for the country – farmland around Invercargill inundated, salt water intrusion in many agricultural areas, water seep on to Wellington airport, Tamaki Drive under water, and much more.
He ranges through several aspects of New Zealand life explaining how they may be affected by the coming changes. Primary production, human health, natural ecosystems and socio-economic impacts are the main areas considered. He offers something of a plug for organic farming as a goal, and has an intriguing look at farm animal alternatives such as beefalo, ostriches and emus, and angora goats. He explains the habitat constraints likely to be experienced by species both on land and in the sea, and the extinctions which may result. Human health is also likely to be affected, though less severely than in developing countries. Mosquito-borne and water-borne diseases are surveyed and psychological health considered. Likely impacts on the economy conclude with a positive reference to the previous government’s stance on carbon neutrality and emissions control.
Comparatively speaking we will fare better than most countries, though this is scant reassurance in a world mostly worse affected. For instance, Dorfman asks at one point how NZ will react to the arrival of most or all of the populations of small Pacific Islands such as Tuvalu as rising sea levels make their islands uninhabitable. A chapter on choices covers a familiar range from making personal emission reductions to engaging in political pressure.
The book is a reasonable and relatively gentle discussion around what may already lie ahead for New Zealand in the uncertain future into which climate change is launching us. That very uncertainty makes it difficult to be precise or trenchant, but it is important to be thinking ahead and realising that we are preparing a different world by our greenhouse gas emissions. Hopefully Dorfman represents a wide group of people who are doing just that. Not that he is happy for us to continue along our present path. Far from it. He rests what hope he can muster for the future on the decisions of international forums and the actions of superpowers and the author sees an important lobbying function for New Zealand in these arenas. One hopes he is not being too optimistic about New Zealand’s readiness to lobby. We are getting mixed messages from government at present
Flying high
NZ glacier experts are flying round the Alps at the moment shooting glaciers (with cameras and GPS units), conducting their annual ice mass balance audit. TV One sent a reporter to see what Trevor Chinn and Jim Salinger were up to, and on Sunday broadcast a nice little item about the process. Highlights: Jim Salinger rolls out his new favourite measure of volume, the Rangitoto, and Trevor Chinn can be heard commenting “They’ve bloody wrecked a glacier”… Last year’s survey results here, with link to background article.
Immigrant song
According to the Washington Post, “Climate fears are driving ‘ecomigration’ around the globe” [reg req’d, full text at Climate Ark, extracts at the ODT], and the example the paper chose was NASA computer expert Adam Fier and his family, who have moved to New Zealand:
…a place they had never visited or seen before, and where they have no family or professional connections. Among the top reasons: global warming.
The Post goes on to examine the phenomenon in some detail:
Five feet high and rising!
Yesterday, while dissembling, I had what I might loosely describe as a “bugger” moment. Yale’s Enviroment360 web site (which I plugged on its introduction last June) currently features an interview with Robert Bindschadler, a NASA ice expert who is working on the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in West Antarctica. The “bugger” moment?
e360: And in the theoretical case that Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers completely dump into the ocean – obviously it’s not going to happen in the near-future – what kind of sea level rise would they contribute to?
Bindschadler: That portion of West Antarctica, that third that flows northward primarily through those two glaciers, has the potential to raise sea level 1½ meters. That’s sort of an upper bound, a worst case. But the time scale is what really matters. Some say that we won’t see these ice shelves disappear in our lifetime – I’m not so sure. I think we might well.
e360: Are you kidding?
Bindschadler: No, no at all.
Bindschadler looks to be about my age. He reports that the ice shelf is melting from the underneath at a rate of about 50 metres per year at the grounding line. And then, a little later, just to make me spill my tea on the keyboard:
e360: I know that the IPCC was saying maybe 1 ½ feet or a half-meter of sea level rise in the 21st century. Is it your opinion that we could be looking at significantly larger sea level rise?
Bindschadler: Yeah, I think there’s sort of an unspoken consensus in my community that if you want to look at the very largest number in the IPCC report, they said 58 centimeters, so almost two feet by the end of the century. That’s way low, and it’s going to be well over a meter. We may see a meter by the middle of the century.
e360: Oh my gosh.
Bindschadler: And if this behavior that we’re seeing in Pine Island, and even Greenland continues – and we don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t continue – well, over a meter by the end of the century, I think is almost certain.
How notably prim the interviewer is. I think I might have managed something a little more Anglo Saxon. A “meter by the middle of the century” is a very long way above most people’s worst case (though not, perhaps, Hansen’s), but it makes our vulnerability to sea level rise much more of a near-term danger than a comfortable reading of AR4 might suggest. It’s a fascinating article — goes into more detail about the WA ice sheet and PIG (yes, that’s what they call it) than anything else I’ve seen in the last few years. Recommended, but not if you have beachfront property.
Meanwhile, a workshop being held at VUW in Wellington is looking at Andrill results, and finding that the WA ice sheet shows signs of repeated meltbacks over the last five million years [Stuff]:
Professor Tim Naish, director of Victoria University’s Antarctic Research Centre […] is co-science leader of the $30 million Andrill project on the ice, with Professor Ross Powell from Northern Illinois University in the United States.
“Antarctica’s ice sheets have grown and collapsed at least 40 times over the past five million years,” Prof Naish said.
“The story we are telling is around the history and behaviour of the ice sheet … as an analogue for the future,” he said.
Not good news, it seems. Expect a rush of papers covering Andrill work over the next few months.