Extreme weather – Townsville

Weather is not climate (climate is what you expect, while weather is what you get) but bizarre weather can be a sign of a changing climate. In fact, Hansen showed a while ago (see my discussion here) that if the climate is warming, which no reasonable person seriously doubts any more, then we will get more extreme weather events – and you can read ‘more extreme weather events’ two ways, because they will individually be more extreme and there will also be more of them.

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Green movies

This list of green movies – movies with environmental themes – is a spin-off from an article about fiction with environmental themes, Green and Good, which I wrote for Viewpoint on books for young adults earlier this year (Vol 20, Nr 2, Winter 2012).

The movies I found fall neatly into four groups: drama/entertainment, activist documentaries, nature documentaries and (for want of a better term) inspirational ‘art’ documentaries. This post covers the first two categories; the others are here.
I haven’t said much about any of the movies but have linked to their pages on two great movie review sites, Rotten Tomatoes (RT) and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Drama

Silent Running 1972 (RT) (IMDb) Saving the last of Earth’s plants in an interplanetary ark.

Soylent Green 1973 (IMDb) (RT) Dystopian police procedural set in an overcrowded, resource-poor future.

Dune 1984 (RT) (IMDb) Ecology was a central theme of Dune in its original conception, the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert, although it was less important to most of the rest of the series and nearly invisible in the movie, TV series and computer games spawned from it. Wikipedia/Dune franchise provides the best way to navigate the maze of Dune books, movies and games. Star Wars, incidentally, took a lot of ideas from Dune (without admitting to doing so) but the ‘green’ elements were lost in transit.

The Day after Tomorrow 2004 (RT) (IMDb) is a very bad movie and one that got its science ludicrously wrong, but it has to be included here because of its catastrophic-climate-change plot.

Avatar 2009 (RT) (IMDb) borrowed heavily from some very good old SF books (without admitting to it) and dumbed them down in the process but the visual effects are great and its heart is still in roughly the right place.

Activist Documentaries

An Inconvenient Truth 2006, concurrently with the book (RT) (IMDb)

Gasland 2010 (RT) (IMDb) Fracking for CSG in the USA. One of the scariest nonfiction movies I have ever seen, and should be compulsory viewing in CSG exploration areas in Australia.

Who Killed the Electric Car 2006 (IMDb) (RT) General Motors’ sleek EV1 (the electric car whose demise it laments) now looks more like a false start than a unique opportunity lost, but there are several lessons to be learned from the movie.

Bag It 2010 (IMDb) The perils of plastic. Entertaining and instructive.

The Cove 2008 (IMDb) (RT) Dolphin slaughter in Japan; confrontational on the ground and in the viewing.

The Hungry Tide 2011 (home page)  Sea-level rise and its effects on low-lying Pacific islands as seen through the eyes of residents. I wrote about it at greater length here.

More please: please send me your suggestions and I will add them to the list.

Climate Change – Picturing the Science

Cover of Climate Change – Picturing the ScienceClimate Change – Picturing the Science
Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, Norton, 2009

This is the perfect book to give someone who doesn’t know much about climate change but  is interested in knowing more. It is authoritative but non-technical, uncompromising but never shrill or aggressive, and lucid but not simplistic.

Schmidt is a climate scientist at NASA and co-founder of RealClimate, and in the latter role he has patiently explained climate science to all comers from school children to fellow experts, for years. He is very, very good at it and here he has recruited similarly well-qualified people to write on specific topics. Any single chapter can stand alone, making the book simultaneously very browsable and a useful fill-the-gaps reference.

Schmidt’s over-arching metaphor for the book is the health of our planet: Symptoms, Diagnosis and Cure. It’s a good metaphor (the Buddha used it 2500 years ago, so it has a good long track record!) and it lets him organise a complicated mass of material into a coherent story about how we know what’s going on around us, why it’s happening and what’s likely to happen, and how we might avert the worst of the likely consequences.

So far, so much better than most books on the subject, but it gets better still. His co-author is a photographer and the book is copiously illustrated with excellent photos – scientists at work, hurricanes, threatened species, Arctic houses subsiding into thawing permafrost, air pollution in Beijing … all sorts of images, and all relevant and memorable.

Longer reviewsNature and Daily Kos.

Our very own hockey stick

Everyone with even the slightest interest in climate change has heard of the ‘hockey stick’ which showed in 1998 that recent warming is unprecedented in human history (the background is here, on wikipedia, if you want it).

What we may not have been particularly aware of was that it was based primarily on Northern hemisphere data. In hindsight, that meant there was the ghost of a hope that the temperature trend didn’t apply to Australia, but a team led by Joelle Gergis of Melbourne University has just laid that phantasm to rest: we now have our very own hockey stick.

Temperature reconstruction graph
Fig. 4 from Gergis et al.

The temperature reconstruction uses 27 proxy records, relying equally on tree rings and coral cores, and concludes that summer temperatures in the post-1950 period were warmer than anything else in the last 1000 years at high confidence, and in the last ~400 years at very high confidence.

RealClimate introduces the study here (that’s where I found out about it, in case you hadn’t guessed).

Update, 25 March 2013: A reader recently alerted me to the fact the Gergis et al’s paper was withdrawn before publication. It appears that there were technical flaws in it which meant it didn’t meet the expected standards of proof.

As far as I can determine, however, its conclusions were still probably correct – as one would expect, given that it was only extending northern hemisphere records into the southern hemisphere and one would not expect to find any great north-south difference.

Update 2, June 2020: The original paper seems to have been replaced in 2016 by another by the same authors, Australasian Temperature Reconstructions Spanning the Last Millennium.  Their conclusions are essentially the same:

Regardless, the most recent instrumental temperatures (1985–2014) are above the 90th percentile of all 12 reconstruction ensembles (four reconstruction methods based on three proxy networks—R28, R3, and R2). The reconstructed twentieth-century warming cannot be explained by natural variability alone using GISS-E2-R. In this climate model, anthropogenic forcing is required to produce the rate and magnitude of post-1950 warming observed in the Australasian region.

 

The environmental cost of meat

This is the remainder – and perhaps the more important part – of the article by Diane Alford which I quoted from in my previous post. (Please return to that post for a description of ‘Rainsby’ and her family’s life there if you haven’t already seen it.) I have added a couple of links and some more of the photos I took during our visit but the words are hers.

“Shun meat,” says UN climate chief. The article by BBC Environmental reporter Richard Black raises my hackles while sending a chill of despair through my body. I read further, “People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN’s top climate scientist.” I trawl through the article then, in frustration, pound the keyboard.

Obviously a redneck climate-change sceptic, you think. Well actually, no – at least, I like to think not. Simply a grazier, and one who’s battling to survive in an environmentally sustainable and responsible way at a time when primary production seems to be a dirty word. So … welcome to my world.

Rainsby house and garden
Rainsby house and garden

With my husband Bill, I live and work on Rainsby, a 23 000 hectare beef cattle property in central western Queensland. Rainsby is managed and worked mostly by Bill. He is hard working, determined and persistent. The hours are long and mostly he works alone. In mustering times we employ two men for a month, three times a year. We muster on horseback.

When we purchased Rainsby it was previously droughted and had areas devoid of grass. Fortunately seasons improved, and with Bill’s hard work we now operate a rotatational grazing system, monitoring grass usage and leaving a lot of our country unstocked during the wet season to maximise pasture growth. We neither clear country, fertilise, grow crops for fodder nor dam watercourses.

Cattle in grassland
Rainsby cattle with Black Gidgee in the background

Our cattle are fattened on native pastures alone. We restrict the number we carry – about one beast to 16 hectares (40 acres), maintaining grass cover by stocking at 70% of the recommended rate. Our aim is to pass on our pastures in better condition than when we bought them and, seasons allowing, we believe we will. We have photo monitoring sites that prove the increase in pasture cover and species diversity. Land care is integral to our livelihood. We belong to a local Landcare group, and attend Grazing Land Management Field Days. We believe we are prudent and responsible custodians – in spite of the fact that every media release paints our industry as the very opposite.

Our profit margins are small and in decline – as is our morale, since we are continually painted as environmental vandals.

Concerned citizens are urged to eat less meat and reduce emissions by stopping the clearing of rainforests (which we do not have), and to save the emissions caused in growing, fertilising and harvesting crops to fatten stock (which we do not do). Almost every mainstream media article mentioning the carbon cost of ‘meat production’ does so on the basis of the typical US and European production methods – grain-fed beef on feedlots, factory farming in fact – which are far different from our own rangeland grazing..

If you read far enough into the studies (which no-one does) you find that “Over two-thirds of the energy is spent on producing and moving cattle feed,” which we do not do, and “a Swedish study conducted in 2003 claimed that raising organic beef on grass rather than feed,” as we do, “reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 40% and consumed 85% less energy.”

Furthermore, studies (and headlines) often assume that the land used to feed animals could be used to grow grain instead and feed people directly, producing two to ten times as many calories of food per hectare. That is not true here, either. Right across Western Queensland and the Top End, the soil is too poor and fragile and the rainfall too low and unreliable for any use except grazing. We are, in fact, using the land as productively as possible. And at the same time we are maintaining it far closer to its original condition than agriculture could possibly do.

Yes, our cattle do emit methane, but the science is still incomplete as to how much carbon uptake there is in open rangeland grazing. On Rainsby alone, with 16 hectares of grass and many hundred trees to each beast, it would be fair to assume that there would be at least some uptake. (Why is it that tree planting, elsewhere, is seen as an acceptable form of carbon abatement but existing trees are not considered when calculating carbon emissions from grazing land?)

If grazing is eventually included in Australia’s carbon tax, without allowance for any uptake of carbon, it will be the death of family-owned grazing enterprises, as we couldn’t support the extra taxation burden and have no way of passing on the costs.

Should our grazing industry become totally unviable and people still want to eat beef, it will be up to the overseas investors and the large companies to continue the buy-up of grazing land or to import meat. But I guess the food miles of imported meat will be seen as okay, since only the emissions from fossil fuels used in transportation will be counted on Australia’s ledger, and a whole lot of production practices which the majority of Australian graziers do not incorporate, will be assumed to have been removed. Farcical, I know – but not too far from the truth.

Please think about grass-fed beef more carefully, because there are not the inputs you may have assumed.

Yellow acacia flowers
Black Gidgee in flower

The issue which justifiably concerns Diane is not an easy one to clarify to the general public because, unfortunately, most beef (globally) is indeed produced in environmentally expensive ways. That means any study or article which takes a global perspective (here is another recent one) is reasonably justified in ignoring situations where beef production is actually environmentally cheap and, as Diane says, the most productive use of the land; but ignoring the good producers slams the door not only on the producers but on a more nuanced approach to something we desperately need to do: making the most sensitive possible use of all parts of our environment.