Not good, I’d wager.
When we looked at polar bears recently I was left with the feeling that their future was very much bound up with the future of the Arctic ice. They at least have the prospect of meeting the grizzly bears being forced further north and producing lots of little grolar bears - hybrid offspring of the polar bear and the grizzly.
No such luck for the koala bear which is highly specialised to a diet of gum leaves, which, it seems are tuning sour.
Prof Hume [University of Sydney] will present new research at a major science conference in Canberra showing that increases in CO2 decrease levels of “good” nutrients and increase toxic nutrients in eucalypt leaves.
It gets worse.
The team believes the eucalypt will also be affected by rising temperatures, with some so sensitive to heat that even a one-degree shift will affect their growth.
My wife tells me that as a young person when she returned from two years overseas she literally did go out and hug a gum tree.
Other species will also be affected. In an article several days earlier we are told:
Scientists have reported mysterious declines in populations of greater gliders and brushtail possums in parts of Queensland in areas where the bushland remains in pristine condition, and where there are no apparent pressures from hunting, disease or other factors.
Greater gliders have disappeared from places where they were numerous 20 years ago.
Changes in gum leaf chemistry are suspected.
Furthermore “numerous insect species feed exclusively on eucalyptus leaves.”
Ken Caldeira tells us that what we do in the next ten years or so will affect biodiversity for 10 million years. He studied the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event of 65 million years ago and found that after the mass extinction it took 10 million years for the same level of biodiversity to develop.
One of Caldeira’s main concerns is the looming destruction of reef ecologies, which took two million years to re-establish after disappearing with the dinosaurs. Yet reefs are amongst the first to go. Stern for example in Figure 2 of the Executive Summary of his Review (pdf) has the reefs disappearing with a 2C temperature rise. Yet he recommended stabilising at 550 ppm of CO2e which would give a 50% chance of going above 3C. Garnaut pulled this back to 450 ppm which according to the science he was following would give a 50% chance of staying below 2C.
The reefs would still go and no-one raised a peep in protest.
But then in early April we had headlines warning of pubs with no beer again because of climate change. That should have produced an emergency Cabinet meeting, rapidly followed by COAG and a summit or two.
But it didn’t.
There was an article in Science in December from a team from UQ
“Coral Reefs Under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification”
Science. Vol. 318. no. 5857, pp 1737-1742. (14 Dec 2007)
The concluding paragraph:
“It is sobering to think that we have used the lower range of IPCC scenarios in our analysis yet still envisage serious if not devastating ramifications for coral reefs. Emission pathways that include higher [CO2]atm (600 to 1000 ppm) and global temperatures of 3° to 6°C defy consideration as credible alternatives. Equally important is the fact that IPCC scenarios are likely to be cautious given scientific reticence and the inherently conservative nature of consensus seeking within the IPCC process (53). Consequently, contemplating policies that result in [CO2]atm above 500 ppm appears extremely risky for coral reefs and the tens of millions of people who depend on them directly, even under the most optimistic circumstances.”
Hey, look on the bright side. I’ve always wanted to go surfing along the FNQ coast…
The other point is that ocean acidification is also like to devastate the reefs. They get a double whammy from our greenhouse gas emissions.
Check out the critical situation of the Northern hairy-nosed Wombat in Qld..
About 75 animals still left, perhaps a few more.
One natural or human induced problem eg bushfire or disease and that’s it, thanks for the fish.
As it is the genetic bottleneck resulting from such a small population will probably result in longer term demise anyway.
Yes, Robert, I think Howard must have had that in mind when he saw the necessity of defending coal miners’ jobs in Queensland and totally ignored the impact on the tourist industry. Obviously the nature of the tourist industry simply changes to surfing.
Kwakpwns, do you have a link? If not I’ll look for one when I get home tonight.
It’s not just coral reefs that are in danger with ocean acidification. Last year in a study led by Caldeira they found that concentrations of 500 ppm would be dangerous generally for marine life.
If you consider this against the risks implicit in our Government’s policies, not to mention Garnaut’s claim that he has taken account of recent scientific developments we are looking at gross irresponsibility here.
I should have highlighted that CO2 emissions of 500 ppm would violate EPA ocean-quality standards.
Maybe the koalas can cross breed with drop-bears.
Brian, great post, thanks.
Quick question - your point:
I’ve been looking for a good ref for that for ages and for some reason it has slipped past me. Do you have one you’d pass on?
Ta
Tim
Every day now, almost , one hears of some environmental disaster or near extinction.Apart from the Burmese cyclone, this week its koalas, wombats and sharks. I despair. I see us going inexorably down a long road, not only to mass extinctions of flora and fauna, but our own extinction. I know I’ll be well and truly dead before the worst of it kicks in sometime in the next 20 years, but knowing I’ll miss the worst of it doesn’t make me feel just that much better. I just despair more.
Stop eating meat and dairy if you want to reduce CO2 emissions.
All of this is why the Greens deserve much more media coverage and general support for pushing hard for Australia to sign on to doing its bit to keep the temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees.
Perhaps Tim can provide the link, but the exchange during Senate Estimates between Christine Milne and Penny Wong, with Christine pressing Penny to outline analysis and the goal temperature range that Labor is aiming for with its CC approach, and Wong floundering, is very informative - and worrying.
Hrm - was it only a couple of years ago that they were talking about culling koalas in South Australia because there are too many?
myriad, the point I’m making is that 2C is far too much. James Hanson has more recently suggested 1.7C as the threshold for dangerous climate change. With 0.7C (when he said this) and 0.6C in the system as it were, it doesn’t give us much room to manouvre.
BUT Hansen is stressing the importance of albedo changes in the Arctic ice. There are estimates that this alone is worth 0.3C globally. Hansen is also suggesting that there is 2C in the system with the albedo stuff and other long term factors, not included in the models of climate sensitivity. That is the temperature will go up 2C even if we stop emitting now.
That’s why he is now suggesting that we need to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. Garnaut (and Stern) ignore this more recent science, I think because it would wreck there narrative that we can fix things at little cost to GDP. But it would also play them out of the game in government policy terms, and I think this is the best construction on the game they are playing.
tim, gotta go, I’ll have a look tonight after we flog the Kiwis.
Yes indeed Laura. If everyone ate koala instead of beef, it’d use far less water and arable land.
Chris at #11, that was a different issue entirely — the koala-culling controversy is specifically about Kangaroo Island, a sparsely populated island off the coast of SA and sufficiently isolated that it contains the only pure strand of a certain kind of bee left in the entire world. That is, it has its own micro-ecology. The koalas were killing off their own local habitat. It’s a highly specific set of problems that has little or nothing to do with the climate-change-triggered issues — except that the island had its worst-ever bushfires over the summer, which will have changed the whole balance again, I should think.
And the little buggers aren’t even native to the island. It’s all the Victorians’ fault. As usual.
God I love teh Interwebs.
The next question, of course, is ‘WTF is an anacando?’
It’s what happens when you stick Obama’s marketing folks onto the task of selling koala as a healthy meat.
Gotta hand that one to you, Liam. Awesome comment. I nearly fell off my chair and choked on my apple.
myriad, the exchange between Christine and Penny is linked off this post. Brian, the point Christine was making is that the government are so far behind that they haven’t even thought about, it seems, the first step of setting temperature target.
We know now that 2C looks to be too much, although we also know that the likelihood of being able to come in below 2C, given how much warming is locked in now, is very slim indeed. Drawing down carbon has got to be part of the game and quick smart, whether that’s through agrichar or something else (what??? Not carbon-muncing bacteria, I hope, for anyone who’s read either Zodiac or Kim Stanley Robinson’s science in the capital series).
And then there’s the Tasmanian devils, decimated by facial cancer originating from some virus. The ongoing destruction of forest habitat there, of course, isn’t helping. I don’t know if they have found out where the virus came from.
Here the abstract of the article i was referring to, but unfortunately to view the full text u need a subscription through a university or something.
This is relevant.
Recent findings aired on the ABC TV Science programme on Thursday nightsa (I think) suggtest the face-earing cancer attacking Tassie Devils is from some frequently used herbicide or chemical. (Thi was a few months ago.)
You mock, Mercurius. But when you see Bono offering koala steak to a starving Eritrean village you’ll change your tune.
I’m off to meet with him about it now.
myriad, the point I’m making is that 2C is far too much. James Hanson has more recently suggested 1.7C as the threshold for dangerous climate change. With 0.7C (when he said this) and 0.6C in the system as it were, it doesn’t give us much room to manouvre.
Agree and entirely get your point Brian, sorry should have made that clearer. I just wanted to point out that the Greens are the only Party who have policy and objectives in remotely the right ball-park, and who also respond to the science by updating their policy.
If the media paid any attention to this, that alone would generate a much-needed nationwide debate about what temperature rise Australia can afford -both from a national interest perspective (ie impacts of 1 degree, 2degrees rise or greater on us) and thus also in terms of what we can contribute towards stabilising the global temperature rise…
Instead we are stuck with perfectly intelligent people like Wong saying they won’t review for eg their 2050 60% reduction target because “it was an election promise” fer chrissakes.
Liam, can’t you just feed Bono to the eritreans instead? “Datsa Mor Beddah!” as Mr Yuniochi would say.
I’ve got some recently completed research in front of me that says pretty starkly that Victorian highland forests wont be able to regenerate after about 2040. All of the current cool climate species will disappear off the tops of the not very high mountains sometime in the period between 2040 and 2080. They will have to be replaced by warmer inland species, or it will be pure acacia woodlands.
According to this modelling, the climate part of which is based on recent CSIRO prediction models, none of the species assemblages we currently know will survive past this century..
wilful, that’s depressing.
myriad, that’s about the size of it, I think.
Myriad and tim, Wong gives the impression that this is just another job. She doesn’t show any passion or interest in the detail. She wasn’t in the position when the election policies were set. Whether Garrett is really on top of the issues is also yet to be demonstrated.
Quiggin has an interesting post on core promises and whether changes should be made in the light of changed circumstances.
Also, I suspect Wong would have some difficulty in dealing with Martin Ferguson.
The ALP only got up to speed very recently when they saw that they could outrun Howard on the issue. It’s very much all still news to them in the main.
If Wong were serious about the issue she’d be talking about it to the public. She’s not. Shuffle time. Garrett was kept out of the job because he’s not an able politican - but this is an issue where there’s no point treading the fine line of electoral compromise. Every month that passes there is less and less politics in it as the urgency increases. Let him do it.
tim you want a reference for:
In the Interim Garnaut Report Section 3.1, p24 he says:
In the next paragraph he says:
He footnotes this with
I haven’t checked the IPCC, but the Stern Review Executive Summary at Figure 2 you can read the values in the lines at the top of the chart where the vertical lines represent the 50th percentile point. He gives his various sources, but I suspect the chart is a lift out of Meinshausen which I haven’t seen.
Stern in a recent paper (Section 2.1, p9) makes reference to this material and says in a footnote:
These risks are simply outrageous, but it’s worth checking out the Stern reference, where you’ll find nothing much on p220. The place to go is Chapter 8 Box 8.1, especially the chart on p195.
I’ve figured out that the generalised quotes we started with are the average of a range of studies, probably of varying quality. If you look at the Hadley predictions it will scare the pants off you. For example, at 550 ppm they give 99% chance of exceeding 2C, a 69% chance of exceeding 3C and a 24% chance of exceeding 4C.
Even at 400 ppm, the Greens’ favoured number, you have a 33% chance of exceeding 2C and 1% chance of frying the planet at 1C. Again these numbers are unacceptable.
Remember that Garnaut notes that these figures are based on climate sensitivity of 3C. So it is the Charney climate sensitvity concept we are dealing with, which is based on quick feedbacks only, not the long feedbacks that Hansen reckons are beginning to surface.
People like Garnaut and Stern are smart enough to know what they are telling us and more importantly what they are not telling us. I can’t say the same yet for Wong and Garrett.
An Australia with no Koalas could happen in our lifetime. What an amazing sight to behold seeing one up a tree usually asleep, or eating leaves. The Govt should do more to help these creatures or else they will be gone for ever.
Kwakpwns at 1 and 19, I remember hearing Prof Hoegh-Guldberg being interviewed when that article came out. I’ve found a more extended summary. One of the points he makes is that 100 million people around the world depend on reef ecologies for their main source of protein.
Charlie Veron a former Chief Scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville did a piece at Online Opinion. He says:
But ocean acidification is an even worse threat:
It must be said that Online Opinion followed Veron’s article with a debunking piece from Walter Starck as they do. Starck is from the AGW denialist paradigm and I don’t propose to comment point by point on his article. He does have a point, I think, in criticising this statement from Veron:
I think the reference here was to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) which Wiki says occurred over 20,000 years. James Zachos reckons we are putting a similar amount of carbon up there, but thirty times faster. He thinks the time frame was 10,000 years.
The point is that the PETM was not a great extinction event although the temperature spiked, Wiki says 6C.
I’ve heard Veron talking at length on the radio. From memory he was emphasising that reef ecologies are always evolving. I think his point here is that it had time to adapt. Now it doesn’t.
In general, I think I’d back Veron and the the 17 authors of the Science Magazine article rather than Starck, professor though he may be.
Hannah’s dad, the population of the northern hairy nosed wombat is now 115. It had been as low as 35. A second colony is about to be established near St George according to Qld Stateline last Friday.
So good news, but we are unlikely to spend the same amount of time and money on all species.
Laura, yes less (if not no) meat and dairy, but who is going to tell the Chinese?!
Paul at 8 I think we’ve had the best of times. It’s our grandchildren I really feel for.
wbb at 27 it would be good to see Garrett given his head. But I suspect the Wong is there to deal with Martin Ferguson.