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Telstra says fires and floods may silence its phone towers, BHP expects hurricanes will shut down its Pilbara iron ore exports, while shopping centre owners are preparing for heatwave blackouts and empty malls.

Coca-Cola Amatil is worried about running out of water in Australia.

Wesfarmers wonders if its Coles supermarkets will be able to stock imported fruit and vegetables, and where Bunnings will source timber.

Crown is flood-proofing its casinos.

The climate change future is laid-out in dozens of company reports calmly describing real-world scenarios of disease, destruction and scarce resources.

At a time of obfuscation and denial around the effects and causes of climate change - and when major international organisations such as the OECD are accusing the Australian Government of inaction - these reports tell another story.

The corporate disclosures are collected by the CDP - a UK not-for-profit that asks major companies to report on the risks and opportunities presented by climate change.

That's right: climate change opportunities. Australian companies are also hoping to make money from the increase in disease associated with rising temperatures, or simply the demand for roof space to lay out solar panels. More on that later.

Although the reports are publicly available, (if a participating company chooses their report to be), they have not made Australian media up to now.

A Bloomberg story in January covered reports by American companies, and painted a future of abandoned heat-struck theme parks, of global pandemics and armed conflict causing a decline in tourism (a concern for credit card companies and foreign exchange revenue).

"The documents reveal how widely climate change is expected to cascade through the economy -- disrupting supply chains, disabling operations and driving away customers, but also offering new ways to make money," the report said.

More than 7,000 companies worldwide filed reports for 2018, including about 100 from Australia.

The future separately imagined by each of these Australian companies is similar to their US counterparts, and perhaps even more dire.

An HSBC report published last year found Australia was more vulnerable to climate change than the US, and predicted more people would die from the phenomenon in Australia than any other country in the developed world (relative to population).

Last month, the OECD (an economic organisation with 36 member countries, including Canada, the UK and the US) predicted Australia would not meet its 2030 emissions reductions targets if it stuck with its current energy and climate policies.

It found Australia was one of the few rich countries where greenhouse gas emissions (excluding land use change and forestry) have risen in the past decade.

A senior Liberal MP recently argued there is no need to tackle climate change because its impact had been grossly overblown. Last week, former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said the Liberal party was "divided" on the issue of climate change.

Most Australian companies that submitted publicly available reports identified "climate-related risks with the potential to have a substantial financial or strategic impact" on their business. 

They expected climate change to disrupt supply chains, cripple infrastructure, and generally threaten the way they currently make money.

Perhaps the scale of the catastrophe is best judged by the sober assessments of the banks and insurance companies.

Insurance Australia Group, QBE and NAB identify a "virtually certain" risk of "Increased severity of extreme weather events such as cyclones and floods."

QBE holds a quarterly "emerging risk" forum that considers something called "catastrophe modelling", and has partnered with a Silicon Valley start-up "to better predict and manage risks from weather and sea level rise, storm intensification and changing temperatures".

Increasing urbanisation, with the potential greater concentration of population in cities with increasing exposure to climate-related events, has been identified with the potential to have substantive financial or strategic impact on the business

National Australia Bank says it is "virtually certain" changes in weather patterns will cause loss of crops and livestock. "These climate impacts have the potential to cause significant financial loss and hardship for NAB customers," it says.

Dexus Property Group says insurers have upped the cost of insuring specific Far North Queensland properties 10-fold due to cyclone risk.

"The inherent financial impacts of tropical cyclones for 'high risk' properties climate-related events (wind and flood) via insurance deductibles is up to $100,000, against a typical insurance excess, which is $10,000 per event," it says.

Wesfarmers, which owns Coles, says natural disasters in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia and China may affect supplies of fruit and vegetables to Australia.

"There is added financial implications if a competitor is able to source the product from an alternative location," it says. 

"For example, after a significant flood in Queensland in 2001, some reports showed fruit prices increasing by 20-30 per cent because of the limited supply. Analysts predict Queensland supplies 28 per cent of the country's fruit and vegetable market and natural disasters can increase wholesale prices (e.g. broccoli increased from $6/kg to $10/kg immediately after the Queensland floods)."

To secure supply, Coles has signed long-term agreements with suppliers "who can invest in climate change resilient infrastructure". This dangles the prospect of sandbagged farms in the developing world exporting scarce food to wealthier countries, while the poor go hungry due to crop failure.

Telstra is particularly concerned about the bushfire risk to over 10,000 phone towers - about half of its national network: "Telstra's portfolio has over 22,000 structures with roughly 50 per cent of those structures listed as having towers located in remote areas that may be vulnerable to fire."

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/the-climate-change-future-a...

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Please note that "climate change" is not what is affecting the planet at the moment but anthropogenic global warming. It will get worse. 

By Brad Plumer — a reporter covering climate change, energy policy and other environmental issues for The Times's climate team. @bradplumer

Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Georgia, isn’t convinced that the president’s tweets about cold weather have staying power.

“I see Trump’s tweets as an opportunity to discuss the science,” he said. “To the 9 or 10 percent of the population that are going to be dismissive of climate science no matter what, there’s not much you can say to them. But a lot of people out there are legitimately curious” about how global warming can be real if it’s cold out today.

That raises the question of whether the messaging skirmishes around severe weather and climate change are swaying public perceptions, or whether each side is just preaching to those who are already converted.

There are some signs opinion is shifting. One recent survey by researchers at Yale and George Mason University found that 69 percent of Americans were “worried” about global warming, an 8-point increase from the previous spring. One possible explanation, the researchers suggested, was the spate of extreme weather disasters in 2018, from wildfires to hurricanes, along with increased efforts by scientists and even local TV weathercasters to put that in a climate context.

“For a long time, Americans saw climate change as a distant threat,” said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason who works on climate change communication. “But as of our most recent survey, I don’t feel I can say that anymore. We’re seeing a lot of movement on people understanding that climate change is already happening.” 

Others are more cautious about interpreting these trends. One 2017 study, for instance, found that people who experience extreme weather are, for a short period, more likely to support climate adaptation measures than they were before. But the effect was modest and diminished over time.

It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns quickly, updating their idea of what counts as normal. Politics may also play a role: In a polarized country, many Americans are already hardened in their beliefs about global warming.

Partly for that reason, David M. Konisky, an associate professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University and an author of that 2017 study, said he wonders whether better messaging can dramatically shift opinions. “It might be that climate has become so wrapped up in one’s identity and worldview that it’s not the sort of thing that’s susceptible to better messaging,” he said.

Wanyun Shao, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Alabama, lands in the middle. Her research has found that Democrats and Republicans do perceive severe weather differently: Democrats tend to see it as part of a broader pattern of climate change, Republicans as more of an aberration. But, she has also found, a consistent string of shifting weather — year after year of increasing summer heat, for instance — does start to chip away even at conservative doubt about global warming.

“For some people, it takes more time,” she said. “But eventually people start trusting their own experiences.” 

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Read more: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/climate/weather-climate-change.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

This is why I have said many times: "should you be able to gauge global warming by pointing a licked finger in the air, you would have about five years to kiss your arse goodbye". End of transmission.

Read also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

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An electricity pylon is floored by the severe weather in Alabama. Credit: NBC

Okay, this has to do with a picture in an article about tornadoes in Alabama killing at least 23 people a few days ago. Condolences. the beef here is that the picture is that of a transmission tower for telephones — not an "electricity pylon". No wonder, we think the media is run by kiddies who have no idea what they're doing — and by devious dudes who want us to believe the Russian fairies elected Trump — and that Amerikan aren't corrupt but sanely competitive by imposing unilateral sanctions to kill off what they don't like.

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A fossil fuel–backed industry group was able to influence the process behind the United Nations climate assessments for decades, using lobbyists and industry-funded scientists to manipulate international negotiations, a cache of recently discovered documents reveals.

The documents include hundreds of briefings, meeting minutes, notes, and correspondence from the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). They were released Thursday by the Climate Investigations Center in collaboration with DeSmog and Climate Liability News. The documents date from 1989 and continue through 2002, when the lobbying group disbanded as its fossil fuel industry backers succumbed to public pressure to disavow its tactics.

The documents show how the GCC influenced international negotiations, manipulated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) process, and undertook a disinformation campaign designed to cast doubt on mainstream climate science.

The GCC was initially part of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), before becoming its own entity in 1995. NAMhas a long history of defending portions of its membership, including tobacco companies that were facing an onslaught of liability litigation, with aggressive tactics that include discrediting science, attacking scientists, and misleading the public.

Founding members of the GCC were mainly fossil fuel producers and utilities, including oil majors Shell, Texaco (now a part of Chevron), and Amoco (now part of BP); oil refiner and retailers ARCO (now a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum) and Phillips Petroleum; coal miners BHP-Utah International and Peabody; and utilities American Electric Power and Pacific Gas and Electric.

Other companies, including Exxon, joined later — and the international oil giant would go on to be a key player in the group.

Revealed in the documents is a decades-long campaign that continued until 2002, intended to protect its members’ interests by denying and casting doubt on climate science. Internally, the group acknowledged the dangers of climate change and the scientific consensus that it is overwhelmingly driven by the burning of fossil fuels as early as 1995.

The campaign reached the highest levels of U.S. government, with the State Department giving the GCC credit for leading President George W. Bush to reject the landmark Kyoto Protocol in 2001. An internal State Department briefing, prepared for a meeting with the GCC later that year and included in the documents published Thursday, shows officials were instructed to tell coalition representatives that Bush’s decision was “in part, based on input from you.”

The Kyoto Protocol, agreed upon in 1997, was the first large-scale international agreement to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. was one of only three UN members that did not ratify the treaty (Canada later withdrew).

The GCC took a particular interest in the operations of the UN’s official scientific advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces the international climate assessments that form the basis for global climate policy and negotiations. 

GCC representatives regularly met with IPCC scientists to lobby the panel to accept industry language in its reports, the documents show. Tax returns show hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on an “IPCC Tracker Fund” to monitor and lobby the IPCC’s meetings.

In one instance detailed in the documents, the GCC boasted its suggested language was “accepted almost in its entirety”after intensive lobbying by its representatives and after “assistance from several countries.”

The GCC also publicly questioned the validity of the IPCC’s peer-review process and launched public attacks on its scientists, while simultaneously using the IPCC’s status as a respected scientific body to promote the credentials of its own climate science denial research.

The GCC went beyond targeting climate science. In 1995, Exxon gave a presentation to the GCC on how to counter the evidence linking climate change to human health impacts.

In 1997, the GCC wanted to expand its reach with a network of state and local committees that would educate the public about their views on climate change and serve as liaisons to other business and public interest groups with similar views. This plan was implemented, the documents show, with the help of Koch Industries, the U.S.’s largest private energy company, which is an infamous funder of climate science denial across the globe.

By the mid-1990s, however, the GCC’s aggressive tactics and continuing effort to cast doubt on accepted climate science had started to become a problem for some of its members. Nine corporations left the GCC from 1996 to 2000: two automakers, one chemical manufacturer, one utility, and five oil companies. 

BP was the first major oil company to leave in 1997, stating that “the time to consider the policy dimensions of climate change is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively proven, but when the possibility cannot be discounted and is taken seriously by the society of which we are part. We in BP have reached that point.”

The documents published Thursday on the Climate Investigation Center’s Climate Files archive, also show:

• The GCC stacked UN meetings with its members. Some attended meetings transparently, registering as GCC members, while others registered with other NGOs. Often GCC members outnumbered delegates from developing nations at the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings.

• The GCC coordinated to monitor IPCC meetings. After IPCC meetings, GCC notes reveal attendees met to discuss strategies for exploiting scientific uncertainties in IPCC climate models and amplifying scientific differences of opinion. On at least one occasion, a contractor for the Electric Power Research Institute planned to keep tabs on IPCCproceedings.  

• The GCC internally refuted climate deniers, yet continued to publicly cite their work: Exxon scientist Lenny Bernstein, who co-chaired the GCC’s committee on science and technology assessment, called the work of climate deniers Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels “not convincing” in a draft document in 1995. The final copy of that document included no mention of Bernstein’s comments and the GCC continued to cite the two — as well as other known deniers — through at least 1998.

• The GCC aggressively attempted to control media coverage of climate change: Press releases were sent to reporters praising media coverage featuring climate deniers and correcting those that did not. One document encouraged reporters to contact the GCC for “balance in the global climate change debate.”

Last week, the Heartland Institute was again trumpeting climate science denial at its 13th “International Conference on Climate Change” at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. But by a number of measures, the Chicago-based free market think tank's science denial doesn't exactly seem to be a growing — or cohesive— movement at this point.

That's even with more media coverage than five years ago, and with friends in high places. In early 2017, following the election of President Trump, attendees of the Heartland Institute conference were clearly excited to have a climate denier in the White House. Frontline reported that the mood at the conference was “jubilant.”

Even last year, the organization was projecting an air of optimism. Former Congressman Tim Huelskamp was still Heartland president and confidently declaring victory for the climate denial movement.

“It took a while, but we think we’ve won the battle — Al Gore was wrong,” Huelskamp said.

So, how are things going for Heartland these days?

The first big news out of the 2019 conference was the announcement that Heartland’s board had elected a new president after the sudden and unexplained resignation of Huelskamp from that position in June.

The new president is Frank Lasee, a former Wisconsin state legislator and member of Governor Scott Walker’s administration. Noticeably absent from the press release announcing his new position — at Heartland’s climate science denial conference — was any mention of climate denialism.

Not exactly what you would expect from the group who not long ago claimed it had “won the battle” about the purported reality of climate change.

In 2008, Heartland’s climate conference was a three day affair. Over a decade later, it is down to a single day. In 2008, the event drew over 50 co-sponsors. This year’s conference pamphlet listed only 16. And as it turns out, one of those was fake.

Heartland's conference pamphlet lists Fidelity Charitable as a co-sponsor for the 2019 event, but there was a slight problem with that. It wasn't true.

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/07/29/hard-times-climate-denial-heartlan...

The hearland Institute will soon be defunct... as it should...

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