Sea-Level Rise

 

Honolulu Files Suit Against Fossil Fuel Corporations Over Mounting Costs Of Climate Change. According to Honolulu Star Advertiser, “The City and County of Honolulu filed a lawsuit today against a long list of oil corporations in state Circuit Court, seeking damages for the mounting costs of dealing with climate change. In doing so, Honolulu joins more than a dozen other cities and jurisdictions, including San Francisco, New York, and Baltimore, Md. ‘This case filed this morning is about infrastructure and it’s about the damages and costs associated with climate change to our city,’ said Josh Stanbro, the city’s chief resilience officer, at a news conference this morning outside of the courthouse. ‘We have seen over a dozen cities and counties file complaints about the costs they are unjustly having to bear around climate change and its impacts due to the information that’s been withheld over time by the fossil fuel corporations.’ Stanbro said similar to the tobacco industry and pharmaceutical companies, oil corporations withheld information from the public while continuing to sell dangerous products, and that this suit was about holding them accountable. ‘It’s about making sure that corporations play by the rules, disclose known problems with their products and when they don’t do that — that they’re held accountable to cover the costs that the rest of society is having to bear, including cities and local government,’ he said.” [Honolulu Star Advertiser, 3/9/20 (=)]

 

Honolulu Sues Petroleum Companies For Climate Change Damages To City. According to InsideClimate News, “Honolulu city officials, lashing out at the fossil fuel industry in a climate change lawsuit filed Monday, accused oil producers of concealing the dangers that greenhouse gas emissions from petroleum products would create, while reaping billions in profits. The lawsuit, against eight oil companies, says climate change already is having damaging effects on the city’s coastline, and lays out a litany of catastrophic public nuisances—including sea level rise, heat waves, flooding and drought caused by the burning of fossil fuels—that are costing the city billions, and putting its residents and property at risk. ‘We are seeing in real time coastal erosion and the consequences,’ Josh Stanbro, chief resilience officer and executive director for the City and County of Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, told InsideClimate News. ‘It’s an existential threat for what the future looks like for islanders.’ The lawsuit puts it simply: The industry has known for decades that those impacts could be catastrophic, yet did nothing. Fossil fuel companies have ‘promoted and profited from a massive increase in the extraction and consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas, which has in turn caused an enormous, foreseeable, and avoidable increase in global greenhouse gas pollution,’ the suit states. ‘Defendants had actual knowledge that their products were defective and dangerous and were and are causing and contributing to the nuisance complained of, and acted with conscious disregard for the probable dangerous consequences of their conduct’s and products’ foreseeable impact upon the rights of others, including the City and its residents,’ according to the 119 page lawsuit filed in in the First Circuit Court of Hawaii.” [InsideClimate News, 3/9/20 (=)]

 

Ocean Health & Management

 

Indian Ocean System That Drives Extreme Weather In Australia Likely To Worsen With Global Heating. According to The Guardian, “Indian Ocean surface temperatures that helped drive hot and dry conditions in eastern Australia last year were more clearly influenced by climate change than previously thought and are likely to worsen in future, researchers have found. Scientists studying a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole say their observations suggest Australia could experience future conditions even more extreme than those that elevated the bushfire risk during the 2019-20 fire season. The work, led by the Australian National University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, used coral records from the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean to examine the occurrence of ‘extreme positive’ Indian Ocean Dipole events over the past millennium. The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is the difference in temperature between the western and eastern Indian Ocean. When the IOD is in positive mode, warmer waters develop off the Horn of Africa and cooler waters develop off Indonesia. This leads to hotter and drier weather in Australia. An ‘extreme positive’ event is when these conditions are particularly severe. Last year, an extreme positive IOD played a role in bushfires in Australia and floods in Africa. … Lead author Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at the Australian National University , said four of the extreme positives were in the past 60 years. ‘We’ve seen these events becoming more frequent and our climate models suggest that’s a response to human-caused climate change,’ she said. … ‘We expect these events to continue becoming more frequent in future,’ she said.” [The Guardian, 3/9/20 (=)]

 

 

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