The year in which climate change gained momentum
Tuesday, 8 January 2019
OPINION: There's a climate change statistic that is particularly thought-provoking: if you were born after February of 1985, you haven't lived through a month in which global temperatures were colder than the 20th century average.
It's useful to think about, because it reveals a bias we have when thinking about our current climate.
Niwa announced on Tuesday that 2018 was New Zealand's second-equal warmest year since reliable records began in the early 1900s, with an overall temperature around 0.8C above average.
What is 'average'? In this case, it's the mean temperature of the 30 year period between 1981 and 2010.
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The climate had already started warming during that period. When you expand the timeframe to the entire 20th century, the global warming trend is undeniable - the climate has already changed, and the changes are gaining momentum.
This effect is sometimes called 'shifting baseline syndrome' - what we consider normal isn't actually normal, historically speaking.
You can see this effect in this graph, published by Niwa, which shows how relatively cold the first half of the 20th century was compared to today.
The fact that 2018 was New Zealand's second-equal warmest year since the beginning of the 20th century isn't as noteworthy as it may have once been, partly for that reason.
There is a strong likelihood that any given year will be among the warmest - the Earth, after all, is currently on a 407-month long warmer-than-usual streak. Four of New Zealand's hottest years in over a century happened in the last six years.
This will continue to make headlines each year, but it doesn't have the shock value it once did. Which is a good thing - acceptance is the final stage of grief.
If 2018 is to be remembered for anything in regards to climate change, it won't be that it was New Zealand's second-equal warmest year. It will soon be relegated to third, then fourth, and so on. 2018 will be the year climate change, when viewed as an issue to be solved, gained a momentum of its own.
A striking theme about climate change in 2018 was that many mainstream institutions in New Zealand took strong public positions, recognising it as not just an environmental threat, but an economic one.
The list of such actions is long, but a few that stand out.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand included a section on climate change in its latest Financial Stability Report, warning that the consequences of global warming pose a risk to the financial sector, particularly to insurers and banks. It then released its own climate change strategy, which recognised that - as an institution that manages risk - climate change was something it couldn't ignore.
Westpac commissioned a report which concluded climate change was a serious threat to the economy. Treasury commissioned research into the financial cost of climate change thus far, and committed to further work calculating those costs.
The Climate Leaders Coalition, comprising 60 chief executives, was formed, and committed to measuring and reporting their companies' greenhouse gas emissions and supporting the establishment of an independent climate commission. The companies - which are together responsible for around half of the country's emissions - include petrol retailer Z Energy, banks Westpac and BNZ, and milk producers Fonterra and Synlait.
It's also worth mentioning the growing political consensus around a Zero Carbon Act, including support for the concept by the pro-business National Party, even if views on what the Act should include differ.
That New Zealand's largest companies and their political representatives have publicly recognised climate change as a threat to their operations should tell us something. Any major business survives on its ability to calculate risk - If you don't believe the world's scientists, perhaps you'll respect the invisible hand of the free market, which clearly sees climate change as a problem.
It's significant because as plausible arguments against human-induced climate change have disappeared in the face of observable reality, some so-called skeptics have adopted the idea that global warming is a fraud perpetuated to impose socialist ideals on a global level.
Why capitalist institutions such as major banks, fossil fuel retailers, global insurance companies and centre-right political parties would voluntarily participate in such a fraud is unclear.
While 2018 was positive in that the need for climate change action became more mainstream, it was the year of the end of magical thinking when it came to what is possible.
The most stark example was the IPCC's report into limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which found that doing so was technically possible, but would require far-reaching changes across society to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate scientists have historically criticised such reports as being conservative. That's because they need to be signed off by countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States, which have a clear political interest in preserving the status quo. The report would have been seen as laughably apocalyptic two decades ago; In 2018, each of those countries signed off on it.
Not long after, 13 agencies within the US government released a joint 1600-page climate assessment, detailing the consequences of a warmer climate which included serious damage to the economy. Even the Trump administration realised that withholding such a comprehensive report was futile.
Research authored by 84 scientists found that Antarctica lost nearly three trillion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, the most complete picture of ice loss we've ever had. And while extreme weather events aren't caused by climate change, it does contribute to their severity: In 2018, such events included wildfires in California, flooding in India that killed hundreds, and a heat wave in Scandinavia that resulted in 30C temperatures near the Arctic Circle.
In New Zealand, it was the second costliest year for insurance payouts related to extreme weather, totalling $223m - the figure had reached $175m by the end of April. A marine heatwave early in 2018 fuelled powerful storms, and was linked to unprecedented ice loss in the Southern Alps, in which nearly 10 per cent of permanent snow on the Southern Alps disappeared into alpine rivers.
As the warming of the climate gains momentum - this year is likely to be among the hottest ever, unsurprisingly - it has finally reached a point where its response has gained momentum, too.
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