Excerpt:

In a desolate corner of northeastern Australia, about 100 miles from the nearest town, a grassy stretch of prime grazing land sits above a vein of coal so rich and deep that it could be mined for decades.

The Australian government is considering a proposal to build one of the world’s largest coal mines in this remote locale, known as the Galilee Basin, where acacia and eucalyptus trees grow wild between scattered creeks.

An Indian conglomerate, the Adani Group, has asked for a taxpayer-financed loan of as much as $800 million to make the enormous project viable, promising to create thousands of jobs in return.

But the plan has met intense opposition in Australia and abroad, focusing attention on a question with global resonance: Given the threat of climate change and the slowing global demand for coal, does the world really need another giant mine, especially at the public’s expense?

For many environmentalists, what happens in this mining case is a test of the world’s commitment to fighting climate change. Its failure would register as an unmistakable sign of an international shift away from the fossil fuels behind climate change. But if Australia agrees to subsidize the mine — even though several commercial banks have shunned it — the project would demonstrate the lasting allure and influence of the coal industry.

Why do so many environmental and climate problems arise in countries that were originally British colonies? Here we have coal dragged out of Australia and shipped to India. Both originally colonies of England. Then we always have the US which, under trump, is trying to be the leader of all countries to destroy the habitability of the Earth. But England, which started this mess, is boasting that it is going to be net carbon zero by 2050. All too ironic and weird.

Excerpt from this New York Times article:

Plans for a fiercely contested coal mine in northeastern Australia received a long-awaited government green light on Thursday, less than a month after conservative politicians who champion coal triumphed in national elections.

An environmental permit issued by the Queensland State government cleared the way for an Indian company, the Adani Group, to start work on the mine. The project had been tied up in court challenges and protests by environmentalists since it was first proposed eight years ago.

Adani, which is India’s largest importer of coal, had initially sought to extract 60 million tons of coal from the mine each year, but has since scaled back that target to around 10 million tons, at least in the initial phase of the project. All of the coal — to come from the vast,  remote Galilee Basin in Queensland — would be transported to a port 200 miles away, or 320 kilometers, for export to India.

Environmentalists assailed the decision to issue the final permit, which was linked to groundwater management. The Australian Marine Conservation Society called it “bad news for coral and wildlife” in and around the Great Barrier Reef.

Excerpt from this New York Times article:

The polls said this would be Australia’s climate change election, when voters confronted harsh reality and elected leaders who would tackle the problem.

And in some districts, it was true: Tony Abbott, the former prime minister who stymied climate policy for years, lost to an independent who campaigned on the issue. A few other new candidates prioritizing climate change also won.

But over all, Australians shrugged off the warming seas killing the Great Barrier Reef and the extreme drought punishing farmers. On Saturday, in a result that stunned most analysts, they re-elected the conservative coalition that has long resisted plans to sharply cut down on carbon emissions and coal.

What it could mean is that the world’s climate wars — already raging for years — are likely to intensify. Left-leaning candidates elsewhere, like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, may learn to avoid making climate a campaign issue, while here in Australia, conservatives face more enraged opponents and a more divided public.

Even for skeptics, the effects of climate change are becoming harder to deny. Australia just experienced its hottest summer on record. The country’s tropics are spreading south, bringing storms and mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue fever to places unprepared for such problems, while water shortages have led to major fish die-offs in drying rivers.

And yet the path to victory for Scott Morrison, the incumbent prime minister, will make agreeing on a response more difficult. He and his Liberal-National coalition won thanks not just to their base of older, suburban economic conservatives, but also to a surge of support in Queensland, the rural, coal-producing, sparsely populated state sometimes compared to the American South.

The coalition successfully made cost the dominant issue in the climate change debate. One economic model estimated that the 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions proposed by the opposition Labor Party would cost the economy 167,000 jobs and 264 billion Australian dollars, or $181 billion. Though a Labor spokesman called the model “dodgy,” Mr. Morrison and his allies used it to argue against extending Australia’s existing efforts to reduce emissions and invest in clean energy.

The message resonated strongly in Queensland, where the proposed Carmichael coal mine would be among the largest in the world if it is approved.

Excerpt:

Climate change is the single greatest security threat to the Pacific, and all countries must meet their commitments under the Paris climate agreement, the 18 countries of the Pacific Islands Forum said on Wednesday.

The first assertion of the strongly worded Boe Declaration says all Pacific nations, including Australia, “reaffirm that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific, and our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris agreement.

“Leaders reaffirmed the importance of immediate urgent action to combat climate change and … called on countries, particularly large emitters, to fully implement their … mitigation targets, including through the development and transfer of renewable energy, in line with committed timeframes.”

Leaders of the Forum Islands countries also called for the US to return to the Paris agreement and the commitments it made under President Barack Obama.

But the forthright declaration on climate is awkward politically for Australia, with its new prime minister, Scott Morrison, apparently at odds with his own government’s Energy Security Board over whether Australia will meet its Paris targets of a 26% reduction in emissions from 2005 levels.The government does not have any emissions reductions policies in place to achieve the target.

Morrison told a radio program on Wednesday that “the business-as-usual model gets us there [meeting the Paris targets] in a canter”. But the Energy Security Board said business as usual – and a failure to implement the now-discarded national energy guarantee – would mean the electricity sector would “fall short of the emissions reduction target of 26% below 2005 levels”.

The Australian government’s apparent ambivalence towards a low-emissions climate policy has disquieted its Pacific neighbours.

Excerpt from this story from InsideClimate News:

As extreme wildfires burn across large swaths of Australia, scientists say we’re witnessing how global warming can push forest ecosystems past a point of no return.

Some of those forests won’t recover in today’s warmer climate, scientists say. They expect the same in other regions scarred by flames in recent years; in semi-arid areas like parts of the American West, the Mediterranean Basin and Australia, some post-fire forest landscapes will shift to brush or grassland.

More than 17 million acres have burned in Australia over the last three months amid record heat that has dried vegetation and pulled moisture from the land. Hundreds of millions of animals, including a large number of koalas, are believed to have perished in the infernos. The survivors will face drastically changed habitats. Water flows and vegetation will change, and carbon emissions will rise as burning trees release carbon and fewer living trees are left to pull CO2 out of the air and store it.

In many ways, it’s the definition of a tipping point, as ecosystems transform from one type into another.

The surge of large, destructive forest fires from the Arctic to the tropics just in the last few years has shocked even researchers who focus on forests and fires and who have warned of such tipping points for years.

The projections were seen as remote, “something that would happen much farther in the future,” said University of Arizona climate scientist David Breashers. “But it’s happening now. Nobody saw it coming this soon, even though it was like a freight train.

"It’s likely the forests won’t be coming back as we know them.”

The following excerpt looks at forests globally, and discusses tipping points that may impact other forests as the forests in Australia are being impacted. This is disturbing.

“Global climate change is stressing vegetation much more than we realized. Stressed vegetation recovers more slowly and rapid changes from forest to non-forest are possible,” he said. “Increased fire frequency reduces the capacity of forests to bounce back after recurrent fires.”

Even without fire, trees are dying around the world at increasing rates because of global warming.

During extreme heat events and droughts, air bubbles can form in their moisture transport systems, essentially choking them to death. Warming also increases outbreaks of tree-killing insects. And logging, as well as land-clearing fires in the Amazon are threatening to push that critical forest ecosystem past a tipping point with global implications for carbon cycling.

“Why are these trees in all these different regions dying at the same time when they’ve been around for such a long time? It’s heartbreaking,” said Breshears. “Ten years ago, I didn’t think we’d be in this situation. I’m still kind of shocked myself at how much is occurring.”

There’s evidence that most tree species around the world already routinely operate near damaging thresholds of water stress, and that they are unable to cope with the rising frequency and intensity of heat extremes, Allen said.

Another recent study showed how a declining snowpack and rising summer temperatures combine to limit regrowth, which is clear evidence of the negative impact of human-caused climate warming on subalpine forests. Pine seedlings need cool and moist summers to thrive, but those conditions occur less frequently with global warming. As a result, some Rocky Mountain forests will pass a tipping point with “shifts from forest to non-forest vegetation types across a broad range of elevations in Front Range forests,” the study concluded.

Some tipping points may be less sudden than we think and already underway, said University of Montana forest entomologist Diana Six, who studies how global warming affects destructive ins