1. Arctic ice in trouble

It’s too early to say whether the 2012 record for Arctic summer ice loss will be beaten, but it’s shaping up so that it could. The NSIDC satellite is broken, but robertscribbler has been looking at the Japanese satellite. This is what it shows:

Ice has been disappearing at about 75,000 square kilometres for every day.

Ice volume is low, as reported by Neven, and scientists are worried about how thin it is.

Without drastic and immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the Arctic will be ice-free for seven months of the year by 2100, according to the IPCC, which warns that the meltdown will not only affect the immediate region, but could fundamentally alter Atlantic Ocean currents, which regulate the climate across much of the northern hemisphere.

2. Ocean oxygen levels are starting to drop

Oxygen levels in some oceans are beginning to fall. Widespread evidence of the trend should be evident from 2030 onwards.

As the atmosphere warms less oxygen is absorbed and there is less mixing, so oxygen is not carried so much to deeper levels. Deoxygenation poses a major threat to marine life and is one of the most serious side-effects from a warming atmosphere.

In the clever country we are cutting 13 jobs from the CSIRO unit that monitors the Southern Ocean.

3. Federal Labor will intervene in Queensland land clearing laws

Labor says former Queensland premier Campbell Newman’s land clearing laws amount to “vandalism”, and it won’t hesitate to use Commonwealth power to overrule them if it’s elected this year.

The Palaszczuk Labor Government currently has legislation before the Queensland parliament to reintroduce tighter restrictions on land clearing, which were wound back by former LNP premier Campbell Newman. However, the proposed laws have been held up by the cross-bench.

I have rellies and know people who suffered under the basically unjust and over-zealous laws introduced by the Beattie government in cahoots with greenies. Finding a balance requires the wisdom of Solomon and politics perpetrated by people who don’t understand the tropical and subtropical ecology is part of the problem. Still there have been excesses and the outcomes are relevant to the country’s overall greenhouse mitigation effort.

4. LNP senior politicians doubt climate science

This has been mentioned in comments, but I want to record it in a post for the record.

Attorney General and leader of the house in the Senate, George Brandis, made a goose of himself by questioning climate science in relation to the CSIRO cuts. His logic can be turned against himself, because if the science is not settled surely the CSIRO should be working on settling it.

Then he was half joined by Fiona Nash.

There’s been a new paper by 16 authors looking at the scientific consensus issue. As Dana Nuccitelli reports:

1) Depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it’s somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists.

2) The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.

5. ACT lifts 2020 target to 100% renewable energy

That’s in four years. They’ll do it by using their reverse auction process, a version of ‘direct action’.

And they say the ACT “would retain its ranking as having the lowest electricity prices in the country”.

Meanwhile at the national level Direct Action spends money to reduce CO2 while emissions rise. In effect we are paying $90 for each additional tonne, if you want to use the kind of costing used by Greg Hunt about his political opponents’ efforts.

6. Labor abandons ARENA

I’m more than a little shocked to find that Labor has abandoned ARENA, blaming NGO press releases that welcomed what I reported as Turnbull’s clean energy stunt.

I have to go to bed now, but will probably do a separate post over the weekend.