Is Catherine King’s third Tullamarine runway approval valid? No, if climate impacts are included

Air travel is just about the fastest-growing source of climate-heating greenhouse gas emissions.  So the Australian government would be stopping the planned worsening of these emissions, due mainly to optional, conspicuous consumption? Well, no actually.

 by Mark Carter, first published at Pearls&Irritations

On 10 September 2024, federal aviation minister Catherine King gave Melbourne Airport the go-ahead to build a third runway.

Eighteen months earlier, on 10 February 2023, Melbourne Airport’s owner, Australia Pacific Airports Melbourne (APAM) submitted its draft Third Runway Major Development Plan to the Minister, for her approval. 

The federal Airports Act specifies what APAM needed to include in its Plan, along with the procedure the Minister is required to follow in assessing the Plan. 

Climate and security risks? Shhh, says the Albanese Government

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

The Los Angeles fires have again demonstrated the need for a steely-eyed approach by governments to climate risks, ensuring that the assessment of those risks is up-to-date, considers the plausible worst-case scenarios, and is made widely available so the public understands what we are facing.

But the Australian Government’s work-in-progress National Climate Risk Assessment appears to be sinking fast, leaving us ill-prepared.

You can’t get to the solution to a problem if you don’t first elaborate the question. That is why risk assessments have become such a big thing in business, at all levels of government, for community-based organisations… and even at my local tennis club, where one is to be done yearly.

But not if you are the Albanese Government, which has blithely set about its climate policy agenda — renewables, batteries, EVs and the grid, all well-mixed with a large expansion of Australia’s coal and gas industries — without ever understanding, or explaining to Australians, the basic question: what is the nature of the threat to be mitigated, and how does their policy contain that threat?

Mobilise as if our lives depend on it

by David Spratt

This article appears as the concluding section of Collision Course: 3 degrees of warming & humanity's future, recently published by Breakthrough.

“The problem is that the status quo is a suicide. Those (Paris) commitments, even if fully met, would lead to an increase in temperature […] above 3 degrees which would mean a catastrophic situation.”
— UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, May 2019

Download the report

In 2005 James Hansen, sometimes dubbed the “godfather” of modern climate research, warned that humanity was “on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption”. Nineteen years later, we are heading for eye-watering social and ecological disruption, and civilisational collapse.  Cities and regions and nations will drown and desertify. There will be an unrelenting global food crisis. Billions will be displaced and the global economic and governance systems of contemporary society will not work. 

In practical terms, the world has reached 1.5°C of global heating, the rate of warming is accelerating and will likely continue on that path for several decades, especially given the failure so far to bend the emissions curve down fast. That means 2°C by 2040 or shortly after, and the emergence of vast zones of unlivable heat two decades after that on the present course of grossly inadequate action. Tipping points have been passed or are close at hand for some of the biggest elements of the climate system, including polar ice sheets and vast forest and permafrost carbon stores; and system inertia and hysteresis make preserving and restoring those systems very challenging. Scientists are increasingly alarmed that we may be heading towards AMOC collapse by mid-century.

A(nother) year of scientific shock and awe

Aftermath of Cyclone Chido, Mayotte

 

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

If an unexpected leap in the global average temperature in 2023 was described by one scientist as “gobsmackingly bananas”, are there even words to talk about 2024?

This year, Death Valley hit 54.5°C and India 48.9°C during an April–May heatwave. More than 1,300 Hajj pilgrims died in Saudi Arabia as Mecca reached 51.8°C. September brought record-breaking rainfall to central Europe, with disruption costing billions of euros. Devastating floods hit Brazil and Kenya.  2024 ended with a tropical cyclone demolishing the French colony of Mayotte, completely or partly destroying over 35,000 houses.

It was a year when the global average temperature record was broken (again!), and the international climate policy-making charade suffered its own breakdown in Baku.  Here are some of the big stories.