Climate strategy up in smoke

Lenore Taylor

The Age, June 16, 2012   

IT WAS the technology that was going to help underpin the nation's climate change strategy. In 2009, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, pledged to ''lead the world'' in carbon capture and storage technology, which traps carbon dioxide emissions, permanently storing them deep underground.

The Rudd and Gillard governments allocated almost $2.5 billion to push the idea, which would be used to ''clean up'' coal-fired power stations in Australia and in the countries to which we will export $44 billion worth of coal this year. But so far there is almost nothing to show for their effort.

Instead, the fledgling technology is struggling. Critical assumptions about when it will be available could be wrong, with dire consequences for efforts to slow climate change and for Australia's revenue base as the world's largest coal exporter.

So far, not one industrial carbon capture and storage project is running in Australia, and even the technology's most enthusiastic backers say that without big changes to government subsidies and policy there won't be one for many decades.

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The only operating project in Australia is at Western Australia's Gorgon gas fields, where carbon dioxide is injected directly back underground. It is the world's largest CCS project, generating much international interest. But it is a long way from proving the capture, piping and storage of carbon dioxide from a power station.

Meanwhile, everyone appears to be blaming everyone else for the failure.

The government says coalminers should be investing more in the technology crucial to the future of their industry. The industry blames the influence of the Greens for blocking crucial subsidies for CCS. The Greens say CCS is a dud, and was only ever advanced as a ''fig leaf'' to justify the ridiculous ''obscenity'' of the ALP's policy to reduce greenhouse emissions at home while approving a massive expansion in coal exports. Whatever the reason, the lack of progress means Australia's climate change policy - and the future of its second largest export industry - is based on an assumption that may prove incorrect.

''It's the big problem at the centre of the policy, which no one wants to acknowledge,'' says Tony Wood, energy program director at the Grattan Institute and a former executive at Origin Energy.

Treasury modelling assumes power plants fitted with carbon capture and storage will provide one-third of Australia's power by 2050. It says if CCS is not used, we will not be able to reduce domestic emissions reductions as much as we have pledged, or only at significantly higher cost.

The International Energy Agency has said carbon capture and storage should account for 25 per cent of global emission reductions by 2050, and that without it, the cost will be 70 per cent higher. But most of the $1.7 billion allocated to kick-start the technology in Australia through the government's carbon capture and storage flagships program is unspent. The fund was supposed to ensure Australia had at least one large working CCS plant by 2015.

Dick Wells, the chairman of the government's expert advisory council on the technology, says that goal was never realistic. Ultimately, he says, no amount of upfront government assistance can make up for the fact that carbon capture and storage is excluded from the renewable energy subsidies without which the business case for any power source in Australia other than cheap coal simply does not add up. A deeply frustrated Wells wrote to Prime Minister Julia Gillard late last year warning bluntly that the government would fail to meet its goals for CCS without some policy to ''bridge the gap'' between Australia's $23-a-tonne carbon price and the $80 or so needed for CCS, in the same way that the renewable energy target and the new $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation give a ''leg up'' to wind power and other renewables. CCS is excluded from both.

Wells has no doubt the reason operational subsidies for carbon capture and storage have not been forthcoming is because of the influence of the Greens. ''I presume they have put pressure on the Prime Minister to exclude CCS … I wrote to the Prime Minister expressing concern and disappointment that it was excluded [from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation].''

Dr Peter Cook, former head of the CO2CRC and now professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, says progress is being made, particularly in understanding how carbon dioxide can be sequestered.

But he agrees with Wells that ''a $23 carbon price will not drive this investment - you need $100 a tonne or something of that sort to drive it. Other low-emissions technologies get effective support of that order.''

And Brad Page, the new chief executive of the government's ''global carbon capture and storage institute'' says the lack of operational subsidy is hobbling the technology worldwide.

''There has been very substantial sums made available by governments, around $25 billion globally, for first-of-a-kind deployment, usually though capital subsidies,'' Page says. ''But usually there is no assistance when the plants are operating in the market … it costs them more to compete in the market, but the operating costs are almost never recognised, and that's the great gap. Wind has a renewable energy target delivering the equivalent of $90 a tonne. Therein lies the problem.''

He says governments are going to have to face up to the problem some time. The world, he says, cannot meet its ambition for limiting global warming to 2 degrees without CCS. ''There is so much coal and gas that will be burnt,'' he says. ''There is no point saying the world should go renewable - in the medium run that won't happen. So at some point many countries, including Australia, are going to have to come to grips with this serious policy question. You can't roll these things out without serious policy intervention … it can't work.''

But the Greens say carbon capture and storage does not deserve funding because it does not work. They say renewable energy has ''won the race''.

''It was never going to be viable,'' Greens leader Senator Christine Milne tells The Saturday Age. ''You are never going to be able to find the areas to store it at scale, nor are you going to be able to afford the pipes to take it from one end of the country to another. So the fact is it is not going to work … it's too expensive, it's last century and we don't need it because we have got renewables … Why would you stick with the horse and buggy era when you can move on?''

Asked about the assumptions made in the carbon pricing scheme that carbon capture and storage would be available, Milne says that is Labor's problem. ''It's a problem for the government because it is all about legitimising ongoing coalmining and expansion and coal exports overseas … If you admitted in Australia that CCS is a complete failure and is not going to continue, then how can you justify a position which says I am serious about addressing climate change, however, I am digging up coal and I am exporting it in larger and larger amounts to other countries to keep polluting the atmosphere?

''Carbon capture and storage is the fig leaf that covers for the government the complete obscenity of saying, on the one hand, we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and … on the other, we want to ratchet up coal exports, have them burnt overseas and make the situation worse.''

But some climate advocates agree carbon capture and storage has to be part of the climate change fight. ''It has to be one of the clean energy options available,'' says Climate Institute chief executive John Connor. ''All the modelling says that to avoid temperature rises of more than 2 degrees Celsius we have to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere … and for CCS that might mean some kind of subsidy is necessary.''

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says it is coalminers themselves who should ''quite significantly lift their game'' in investing in the technology.

''I would hope companies in the fossil fuel sector see the commercial desirability of it. If you are sitting there investing in a coalmine that might have a life of 40 or 50 years, and you are not taking into account the development of carbon pricing internationally, the development of legally binding [greenhouse gas reduction] obligations on all countries, including China and the US, from 2020, and not recognising that has implications for the fossil fuel sector … then you are not being a very sensible business person,'' he says.

''I think it would be wise for them to do so. Coal is their product. If they are thinking about the future market of their product … I think they could lift their game quite significantly.''

The coal industry imposed a 20¢-a-tonne levy on miners in 2006 to establish what it said would be a $1 billion fund over 10 years to help develop the technology. So far $289 million has been committed.

Australia is not alone in its lack of progress. The British government recently relaunched a £1 billion competition to try to revive its carbon capture and storage industry, after its first try failed to find a successful bidder. The US has some operating projects that inject CO2 in order to retrieve more oil reserves, but US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said recently that without a carbon price, US companies were unlikely to invest in regular CCS projects.

In Australia, Tony Wood agrees it is fair for the industry to demand government policies to underpin carbon capture and storage, as they do for other low-emission technologies, but he also says the industry should be doing more.

''If you accept the science of climate change, there is no future for coal without CCS … If the industry took this seriously they would be out there clamouring for carbon pricing and for support for carbon capture and storage, but instead they take the short-term position of not supporting a carbon price at all,'' he says.

The experience of the $1.7 billion CCS flagships program - one of Labor's biggest funding allocations for carbon capture and storage - suggests something needs to change. The program, begun in 2009 with $2 billion (it was cut by $250 million after the Queensland floods) initially selected four domestic projects, Queensland's ZeroGen (which went into liquidation in 2011), the Wandoan power plant (now deferred), the Collie Hub south-west of Perth (still in the early stages) and a Victorian project called CarbonNet (also still at ''feasibility stage'').

Experts hold out little hope the two remaining projects will do much more over the next few years than try to ''prove up'' the underground storage sites for CO2 injection. Another Queensland demonstration project, Callide Oxyfuel, is expected to be operational next year.

But without big changes in policy, Australia will not be able to use carbon capture and storage as planned. That means it will need to rework the assumptions underpinning its crucial carbon tax reform - among them the role of coal-fired electricity generation in Australia, the cost of emission reductions, and the idea that we can be part of a global effort to limit global warming while continuing to export billions of dollars worth of coal.

Climate research has a ring of truth

Adam Morton 

The Age, May 19, 2012   

VISITING the giant kauri trees of Northland, on New Zealand's north-west coast, is like stepping back in time. Ancient conifer pines that over centuries have escaped damage from fire and forestry, the surviving kauris are up to 50 metres tall and five metres across - as wide as a 12-seater mini-bus is long.

Scientists estimate some have survived for two millennia and consider them the southern hemisphere's answer to California's redwoods, the world's biggest trees. Like the redwoods, age has transformed the kauris into a time capsule. Their tree rings - inner markings that reveal growth patterns through centuries - carry precise insights into changes in the world's climate conditions stretching back long before the advent of modern scientific measurement.

Since the 1970s, scientists have been extracting this knowledge using increment borers - giant corkscrews that collect long slivers of timber thin enough to slide inside a drinking straw. A decent sample will include hundreds of tree rings spanning centuries. When scientists get really lucky, they find a preserved dead tree that collapsed into a swamp and fossilised, allowing them to stitch together a picture dating back millennia.

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On each data collection trip at least three samples of tree ring information are removed from each pine examined and a minimum 10 trees sampled across a tract of forest. The goal is to get a clear climate signal unaffected by natural variation between individual trees.

''Tree research is all about replication. You are looking at the growth patterns and trying to figure out whether the tree is responding to temperature or rainfall,'' says Dr Joelle Gergis, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences, who spent two years collecting and analysing kauri data. Early last decade, data collected at Northland led to a peer-approved study that named the years over the past four centuries in which the climate had been most influenced by strong El Nino events over the Pacific.

This week the north New Zealand tree ring data was used to help paint a much bigger picture: what scientists say is the most complete climate record available for Australasia covering the past millennium.

The first study of its kind, it drew on 27 biological and geological records, including 12 tree ring data sets, mainly from New Zealand, 13 coral sets from Indonesia, the south-west Pacific and Western Australia and two ice cores from Antarctica. Scientists used the data to produce a long-term temperature record, and found the past five decades were very likely to have been the warmest since 1000AD.

Published in the Journal of Climate and drawing on decades of work by 30 scientists, it will help form the basis for the Australasian palaeoclimate section of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due in 2013-14.

According to Gergis, the study's lead author, rigorous analysis had confirmed the reconstruction was robust. The numbers were crunched in 3000 different ways.

"The take-home message here is that 95 per cent of our 3000 reconstructions show that there are no 50-year periods in the past 1000 years that match or exceed the post-1950 warming," she says.

Co-author and University of Melbourne climate science professor David Karoly says the study for the first time establishes that claims there was a substantial mediaeval warm period hotter than today had no basis in Australasia. The study uses climate proxies - surrogates for the record of observed temperatures that date back to only the early 20th century.

Initially, the data from tree rings and other sites was tested for its ability to reconstruct temperatures between 1921 and 1990. The palaeoclimate records from 50 sites were compared to the actual temperature record for these years. The palaeoclimatic data that did not display a statistically significant temperature signal, but was found to have been more strongly influenced by other climate factors such as rainfall, was excluded. But the data from the 27 sites that remained collectively matched the actual temperature increase with a high correlation coefficient of 0.83, and were considered suitable for use as a proxy for the real thing to reconstruct temperatures over previous centuries.

The results matched what was known about certain historical periods. It was found early European settlers would have suffered through the coldest period of the past millennium in the 1830s and 1840s - the peak of what is known as the global little ice age. In pre-industrial times, the warmest lengthy stretch was found to be between 1238 and 1267, which the study estimates was 0.09 degrees cooler than the mid-to-late 20th century average.

But the warmest decades were found to be the last three examined: the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Instrumental temperature records show the first decade of the 21st century was hotter again.

The study is considered a step towards filling a gap in the long-term temperature record. To date, data from the southern hemisphere has been sparse compared with the north, in part because ocean cover is greater and also because scientific measurements on what land there is began later.

In the northern hemisphere, an earlier study had already found the second half of the 20th century was very likely to be the warmest in the past 500 years, and likely to be the warmest for the past 1300 years.

The historic reconstructions are being used as part of an international collaboration known as Past Global Changes, or PAGES. Its backers aim to improve the accuracy of future climate projections by reconstructing the past 2000 years of climate across the world. Those projections come from computer model simulations. These were also used in the PAGES work.

Dr Steven Phipps, a research fellow at the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, used three climate models to simulate the temperature patterns of the past millennium, at different times factoring in natural drivers of temperature such as volcanic eruptions and the sun and the human influence of greenhouse gas emissions.

Examined side by side, neither the average of the three climate model simulations nor the reconstructed temperature record shows any long-term trend before about 1850. In both, regional temperatures fall in line with known events, such as the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Otherwise they bounce up and down independently. "What this demonstrates is that these variations are likely to be due to natural climate variability, which is a random process," Phipps says.

After 1850, both the model simulation and reconstruction show an unprecedented leap in warming. Phipps carried out three simulations in a bid to explain the warming, variously excluding known natural and human influences. He found the warming could only be produced through the inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions - clear evidence, he says, of human impact on Australasian temperature.

The veracity of the proxy methods used is not universally accepted. Professor Graham Farquhar, a biophysicist at the ANU's Research School of Biology, says the use of surrogates is problematic. For example, he says trees are likely to have grown faster between 1921 and 1990 due to the increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, not just the rise in temperature. ''It is obviously very useful to have such data, but I can't see it as being definitive,'' he says.

The authors dismiss this concern. Karoly says that nothing is certain in science, but the results draw from a range of sites and using state-of-the-art statistical methods can be accepted with high confidence: ''It is reinforcing that barrage of scientific information that confirms that the climate is warming and increasing greenhouse gases are the major cause.''

Ocean temperature made Queensland floods worse: study

Nicky Phillips 

The Age, May 16, 2012

Abnormally high ocean temperatures off the coast of northern Australia contributed to the extreme rainfall that flooded three-quarters of Queensland over the summer of 2010-11, scientists report.

A Sydney researcher, Jason Evans, ran a series of climate models and found above average sea surface temperatures throughout December 2010 increased the amount of rainfall across the state by 25 per cent on average.

While the study did not look at the cause of ocean warming in the region, a physical oceanographer, Matthew England, said climate change could not be excluded as a possible driver of this extreme rainfall event.

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Between December 23 and 28 many places experienced up to 400 millimetres of rain in a few days. "That [means] 100 millimetres of rain was attributable to sea surface temperatures," said Dr Evans, a future fellow at the University of NSW's Climate Change Research Centre.

While the flooding occurred during one of the strongest La Nina events on record it was insufficient to produce the extreme rainfall recorded, he said.

The effect of the high sea surface temperatures coupled with the impact of a La Nina, both of which are associated with above average rainfall over eastern Australia, plus tropical cyclone Tasha, combined to create an extreme weather event, he said.

The resulting floods stretched across 1.3 million square kilometres all the way to Brisbane, caused billions of dollars in damage and killed 35 people.

Matthew England, who was not involved in the study, said ocean temperatures off northern Australia were the highest on record at the time of the Queensland floods.

"While the La Nina event played a big role in this record ocean warmth, so too did the long-term warming trend over the past 50 years," Professor England, the co-director of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre, said.

To measure the extent high sea surface temperature contributed to the rainfall, Dr Evans used a regional climate model to compare the effect of the 2010 December sea surface temperatures with the sea surface temperatures from previous La Nina events.

"All the simulations produced high rainfall, but only the simulations with the high sea surface temperatures [from December 2010] were able to produce extreme precipitation," said Dr Evans, whose findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Warmer sea surface temperatures increase the amount of moisture transferred from the ocean to the atmosphere.

"If you've got the right winds they carry this moisture to land, and [because] land is hotter than the ocean during the day it will cause convection and rain," Dr Evans said.

While both simulations underestimated the amount of rain that fell in Queensland in December 2010, the model that used the higher sea surface temperatures came closest to the rainfall recorded in the region.

"The model doesn't replicate the observations perfectly but it clearly shows what we saw, which was from Cairns to south-east QLD all [regions] received abnormally high precipitation," he said.

If increases in sea surface temperatures can be attributed to global warming, the probability of La Nina events producing extreme rainfall in the future would also rise, he said.

Last 50 years were Australia's hottest: study

By Matthew Carney 

ABC Online, May 17, 2012

Audio: 1000 years of climate data points to a warming Australia

For the first time scientists have provided the most complete climate record of the last millennium and they found that the last 50 years in Australia have been the warmest.

The researchers from Melbourne University used 27 different natural indicators like tree rings and ice cores to come to their conclusion, which will be a part of the next United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change report.

The findings show that no other period in the last 1,000 years matches the temperature rises Australia and the region has experienced in the last 50 years.

Report co-author Joelle Gergis says the findings are significant.

"It does show that the post-1950 warming is unusual in the Australasian region," she said.

"A lot of these sorts of studies have come out of the northern hemisphere and for the first time we have been able to say 'well we have collected all of our natural records from our region and this is what it shows and the warming is real and it is in the Australian region. It is not in some far away place'," she said.

Dr Gergis says the study used decades of work from 30 scientists who had been collecting natural data to reconstruct temperatures before human records started in 1910.

"So really what these are are climate proxies. They are not direct temperature records but we use them as stand-ins or surrogates for temperature records," she said.

"What we do is compare these natural records with the observed temperature records and then develop a statistical relationship and take that relationship back centuries into the past."

Co-author Professor David Karoly says the strength of the study is that it relied more on direct observations and measurements than climate modelling.

"Nothing is absolutely certain in science, but we say with very high confidence because we have repeated the analysis alone for the uncertainties that the warming in the last 50 years is very unusual and very likely cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone," he said.

Dr Gergis says the scientists have minimised the variability in their model by crunching the data 3,000 different ways.

"What we were able to see is that in 95 per cent of the reconstructions, we actually see that the post-1950 warming observed in the region is unprecedented in the context of the last millennium so it is not dependent on a loss of records back in time or the different combination of record," he said.

The government-funded study will be Australia's contribution to the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report due in 2014.