Graph that will dominate COP28 talks in Dubai
While the calls to quit fossil fuels are sure to be strident during COP28, don’t expect to see Australia join the chorus. See why.
Environment
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If a picture can tell a thousand words, the graph from the Copernicus Climate Institute could dish up millions.
It shows the average surface air temperature of the Earth every year since the 1940s, with 2023 accelerating away from the pack. It’s the outlier of all outliers – and already deemed a virtual certainty to be the hottest year on record.
This unsettling fact is set to pump unprecedented urgency into this year’s UN climate talks, COP28, which kicked off in Dubai on Thursday. (The ‘COP’ stands for Conference of the Parties; the ‘28’ denotes how many years climate experts and leaders have been meeting in an attempt to bring this issue to the world’s attention.)
This year a record number of delegates (70,000 – including, for the first time, the Pope) have come together to negotiate what can be done to reverse or slow down climate change, with fossil fuel industries (a massive component of Australia’s economy) in the firing line like never before.
But among the alarming statistics and the gloomy rhetoric of some activists, there are also signs of hope, as organisations including Australia’s CSIRO showcase their attempts to lock away carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
For Minderoo Foundation Chief Scientist Dr Tony Worby, who is attending COP28, said the 2023 weather data demands action, leaving “nowhere to hide”.
“This year has been off the charts in terms of global temperatures,” he said.
“There’s no reason to believe 2023 won’t be the hottest year for many many tens of thousands of years.”
While the increased temperatures have been felt by billions, another climatic shift has been observed by far fewer people – and yet it’s just as ominous, Dr Worby said.
“The evidence we’ve seen of decreasing Antarctic sea ice … (It) was almost the last climate indicator holding out against the odds, because we’ve seen slight increases in Antarctic sea ice over the last few decades. But we’re now almost at the point where everything is pointing in one direction, and we have to sit up and pay attention to that.”
The melting poles and the soaring temperatures will be catalogued, along with all the other climatic shifts, in a Global Stocktake at Dubai, expected to be one of the key outcomes of COP28.
Attending countries will also spruik their shift towards cleaner energy.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen will reiterate Australia’s goal of reaching 82 per cent renewables by 2030, while host nation the UAE will show off its new massive solar farm south of Abu Dhabi.
Twenty one square kilometres of desert sands are now covered by solar arrays, equivalent to one-fifth the size of Paris.
Renewables are the bright shiny things of the global climate change fight, bringing with them the promise of new jobs, new economic activity and cheaper power. (According to Mr Bowen, Australian households with rooftop solar are saving up to 57 per cent on their energy bills right now.)
The much tougher questions surround the future of fossil fuels.
At COP27, 80 countries called for a “phase down” of oil, coal and gas, while in April, the G7 countries agreed to hasten the phase-out of “unabated” fossil fuels.
But don’t expect to see Australia signing up to any “fossil fuel pledge” at COP28.
When asked what Australia’s position on any such initiative would be, a spokesperson for Mr Bowen sidestepped, saying our country’s delegation “will be arguing for strong action to bring global emissions down” as well as “spruiking Australia’s potential as a renewable energy superpower”.
While the calls to quit fossil fuels are sure to be strident during COP28, what Australia needs is a “sensible debate” about the energy transition, Australian Energy Producers Chief Executive Samantha McCulloch said.
“If gas was switched off today, the economic and environmental consequences would be devastating,” she said.
“Without Australia’s gas industry, there wouldn’t be 80,000 Australians employed in highly-skilled jobs, or over $16 billion in revenues delivered to state and federal governments like there was last financial year.”
The fossil fuel industry – both in Australia and globally – is pinning its future hopes on technologies that will remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.
Earlier this month, the first commercial facility designed to extract CO2 from the air opened near San Francisco; called Heirloom, its founders claim it will have the capacity to trap one million kilograms of carbon dioxide by fusing it with limestone rocks.
Australia’s CSIRO is investigating similar techniques; lead researcher Dr Andrew Lenton will be discussing some of his findings across 18 different carbon removal projects at COP28.
For Dr Lenton, using chemical techniques to fuse carbon dioxide with rocks and minerals has advantages over other proposed carbon capture techniques because rocks are so durable and stable.
“Some of the technologies are more mature than others,” he said.
“Part of the reason why we’ve gone with 18 different projects is because we simply don’t know the solution. We know we’re going to fail, we’re going to try things, we have to fast fail, we have to be innovating, testing and trying all the time. We don’t have anything yet that we think is the solution. We also don’t think that’s there’s going to be any one solution, it’s going to be a portfolio of solutions we’re going to need to reach net zero in terms of technologies that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.”
But he admitted to a sense of optimism that this is a problem science will solve.
“There’s a lot of exciting ideas, things that work at the bench scale,” he said. “But the really big challenge is how do we take these approaches and move them to the scales where we will need to be deploying them.”
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