Has Kevin Rudd taken "a significant step forward on climate change"?

Kevin Rudd's announced changes to the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme has again split the climate movement, and this time it's very serious, with three large, rusted-on-to-Labor groups running cover for an appalling policy that won't guarantee a reduction in Australian emissions for decades.

The grassroots movement, which gathered in Canberra in January with 500 people and 150 groups for the first national Climate Action Summit and unanimously opposed the CPRS legislation, appears uniformly angry. 66 climate action groups have written to the Prime Minister saying that: “We believe that you have abandoned your duty of care to protect the Australian people as well as our species and habitats from dangerous climate change.”

The re-worked proposals for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme announced on 4 May by Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd were described by The Greens as "making the 'worse than useless' scheme even worse and giving another $2.2 billion to big polluters. It also fails on voluntary action" and has an "almost irrelevant green distraction of a hypothetical 25% target to undermine criticism".

John Hepburn of Greenpeace said: "It's clear that Rudd has been listening to the big polluters and this is another shift towards the interests of polluters rather than climate action. We're rapidly running out of time and we'd like this scheme to go back to the drawing board until Kevin Rudd can stand up to the big polluters and take action in the interests of the Australian people."

Friends of the Earth "criticised the raising of the government's hypothetical target range as an exercise in “smoke and mirrors”, aimed at hiding the further windfall for polluters."

But the three climate advocacy groups that have acquiesced or actively supported the government's "clean coal" policies — ACF, the WWF and Climate Institute — again lined up to support Labor, together with the ACTU and ACOSS. Michelle Grattan in The Age noted that "the biggest concessions are the brown ones" and that "Kevin Rudd has stitched key groups in behind a revised emissions trading deal — both browner and greener than before — to put maximum pressure on Malcolm Turnbull".

John Conner of the Climate Institute on behalf of the Southern Cross Climate Coalition (ACF, ACTU, ACOSS and Climate Institute) said it was now time for all parties to pass the scheme.

Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Don Henry told staff:

We have achieved a significant step forward on climate change. The Government has just announced that it will take on a target of reducing Australia’s emissions by 25% by 2020 in the context of a Copenhagen agreement that has the effect of stabilising emissions at 450ppm or lower.

[That is wrong in science, of which more later.]

ACF climate campaigner Owen Pascoe added:

This is good step forward and the positives outweigh the negatives. However there’s a lot more to be done and we’ll keep pushing for our ask of 30 to 40% cuts.

For the record, the changes to the proposed scheme also:

• delay its introduction for a year to 1 July 2011 and set a nominal price of $10 a tonne with unlimited number of permits till 1 July 2012, so there will be NO effective action for another three years;
• increase the permits to the biggest polluters in the first year from 90% to 95% and from 60% to 70% (so that in the first year the biggest polluters will be effectively paying 50 cents per tonne to pollute, as Environment Victoria noted);
• keeps the provision for unlimited outsourcing of Australia's national responsibilities by allowing the purchase of permits from overseas without limit, so that the scheme has no mechanism for ensuring that Australia's emissions (as opposed to domestic permits) will drop by even one tonnne by 2050;
• fails to deal adequately with the question of additionality / voluntary action. As Environment Victoria notes: "The fix to recognise household and business voluntary action through GreenPower is welcome, but the mechanism is awful. By only recognizing additional GreenPower purchases above 2009 levels the Government is guaranteeing the collapse of existing GreenPower customer purchases and therefore jeopardizing the whole program. Furthermore the Rudd Government has failed to recognise the benefit of all other types of voluntary emissions reductions or additional action, which, like GreenPower, can be accounted for."
• • will not, contrary to back-slapping comments by the ACTU, produce an avalanche of "green jobs" because it is not designed to close down the brown jobs. Instead of building a clean, renewable-energy economy and technological capacity, Australia will continue to stumble at the back of the pack.

So why are some of the big climate advocacy groups so keen on this disaster? Is their public position supported by the evidence? Here's a look at the views expressed by ACF and others, and whether it is justifiable.

ISSUE 1. Passing the CPRS is necessary for Australia to be credible at Copenhagen.

No, quite the opposite. If there were no legislation, Australia's position would not be tied by law to Rudd's poor target and pressure would be maintained to catch up with the leading bunch. The targets in the proposed CPRS legislation are out of whack with the major players such as the UK, US and EU, who have agreed to unconditional cut emissions of 34-46%, 20% and 20-30% from 1990 levels respectively. Let's be honest, what happens at Copenhagen depends more than any other factor on what the G2 – the USA and China — strike by way of a climate deal, and what Australia puts in the table has little relevance to that. They are used to Australia behaving badly.

ISSUE 2. If there is a reasonable outcome in Copenhagen, Australia will be committed to a 25% cut by 2020.

As Adam Morton reported in The Age on 5 May: "Kevin Rudd says he now has an ambitious greenhouse target on the table for 2020. And he does: cutting emissions to 25 per cent below 2000 levels will require hard work across the economy. But we know the Government also thinks this almost certainly won't happen. Why? Because Penny Wong told us so in December. Ignore yesterday's spin about recent progress in international climate talks. The Government believes that a new deal won't meet the strict conditions it has put in place for Australia to sign up for a 25 per cent cut. If it is right — and there are plenty familiar with the climate talks who believe it is — Australia's ultimate target will be in the range it was before yesterday: between 5 and 15 per cent. No change, then."

ISSUE 3. The CPRS can reduce Australia's emissions by 25% by 2020.

This is complete bull, regardless of what happens at Copenhagen. By allowing an unlimited number of permits to be bought from overseas, through such dubious schemes as REDD and the CDM, the CPRS cannot guarantee that even one tonne of Australian emissions (as opposed to domestic permits) will be cut. The Treasury modelling assumes no drop in Australian emissions for another 25 years (see Tim Colebatch, "One little word undoes the PM's claims on greenhouse gases", The Age, 23 December 2008).This provision alone should be enough to scuttle the whole scheme. How can this be "a significant step forward on climate change" when it won't guarantee to cut one tonne of domestic emissions? In fact, what the CPRS is doing is locking in, through legislation, for decades to come, a high-pollution economy dominated by high-pollution industries and brown jobs.

ISSUE 4. If the high-polluting nations such as Australia adopted a policy of reducing emissions to 25% below 1990 by 2020 this would likely lead to an international agreement that would stabilise emissions at 450ppm or lower.

Here is a case of "if you say something often enough, you'll end up believing it". Too many climate groups and climate scientists have been saying this so long and so often, yet it is so untrue.

The 2007 IPCC report found that Kyoto Annex 1 countries would need to reduce their emissions by 25-40% by 2020 for a 450ppm target. Note how everybody has dropped the 40% end of this formulation, as if it never existed. Australia, as the highest per capita polluter of the Annex I members, would certainly be at the 40% end of the range, but this is rarely mentioned.

But as I have noted elsewhere the target range of 25-40% by 2020 does NOT include "slow feedbacks" which increase climate sensitivity and require lower targets. Even the IPCC 2007 synthesis report noted that “emissions reductions... might be underestimated due to missing carbon cycle feedbacks” (page 67) and this may require the cumulative emissions budget for the 21st century (the total amount of GHGs than can be emitted for a stabilisation level) to be “about 27% less” than is assumed. But the 25-40/2020 target and other IPCC emission reduction scenarios do not include this consideration!

New research published last week and discussed in more detail here found that to restrict warming to 2C the total carbon budget available to the world is 190 billion tonnes of carbon emissions. Even if the world starting cutting emissions by 2% each year, that budget will run out by 2030 and we need zero emissions from 2030 on to keep to 2 degrees.

ISSUE 5. That 450ppm would reasonably limit global warming to 2 degrees.

No, it won't. Analysis for the 2006 Stern report (p. 195) shows that a 450ppm CO2e target has:
• A 26–78% probability of exceeding 2c relative to pre-industrial
• A 4–50% probability of exceeding 3C
• A 0–34% probability of exceeding 4C
• A 0–21% probability of exceeding 5C

450ppm has a 4 to 50% probability of exceeding 3 degrees!!!! That is not defensible and I can't understand how any body who works professionally on climate change could ever think for one second that it is a reasonable target to utter in public. What are they thinking?

After a careful reassessment of climate sensitivity and climate history data, James Hansen and his co-authors in Target atmosphere CO2: Where should humanity aim concluded that the tipping point for the presence, or absence, of any substantial ice-sheets on Earth is around 450 ppm (plus or minus 100 ppm) of CO2. This means that the CO2 levels often associated with a 2C rise – 450ppm – may just be the tipping point for the total loss of all ice sheets on the planet and a huge sea-level rise.

If you are silly enough to want to talk about a 2C target, then to have a 2 in 3 chance of holding to 2C, atmospheric carbon needs to be held to 400ppm CO2e and that requires a global reduction is emissions of 80% by 2050 (over 1990) and negative emissions after 2070. And with high climate sensitivity, a risk-averse target for 2C is around 350ppm CO2e – just to meet a 2C target that is actually dangerous.

The big groups know privately that 350 ppm and lower should be the target. John Connor of the Climate Institute told Crikey recently that the science leads us to 350ppm, and ACF Council has adopted a 350 ppm target, but this has not yet seen the light of day in ACF's public advocacy.

ISSUE 6. That 2 degrees is a reasonable target to avoid dangerous climate change.

No, it will ensure that climate change is dangerous. A rise of 2C over pre-industrial temperatures will initiate large climate feedbacks in the oceans, on ice-sheets, and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points. Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheet; the extinction of an estimated 15– 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification; increasing methane release; substantial soil and ocean carbon-cycle feedbacks; and widespread drought and desertification in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA. If you don't believe me, read Mark Lynas's book, "Six Degrees".

450ppm is roughly the current greenhouse gas level, and in 2008 two scientists. V. Ramanathan and Y. Feng in On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead found that if greenhouse gases were fixed at their 2005 levels the inferred warming is 2.4˚C (range 1.4˚C to 4.3˚C) and that would be sufficient to result in the loss of Arctic summer sea-ice, the Himalayan–Tibetan glaciers and the Greenland ice-sheet . The loss of Greenland ice sheet produces about a 7-metre global sea-level rise. One conclusion is that advocacy of the 25-40/2020 target, for example by the ACF in its 2008 "Special Places" campaign, will result in the destruction of many of Australia’s “special places” ACF wants to protect; Kakadu, for example, will salinate with a sea-level rise of less than a metre.

NASA climate science chief James Hansen told the US Congress in testimony last year that: “We have reached a point of planetary emergency… climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled… the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than +2 degrees Celsius is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.” But ACF says the government announcement of "a target of reducing Australia’s emissions by 25% by 2020 in the context of a Copenhagen agreement that has the effect of stabilising emissions at 450ppm or lower" is a "significant step forward on climate change".

Take your pick, but I'd rather go with the climate scientist. As Ken Ward, the former deputy Director of Greenpeace USA and an environmental strategist has so acutely observed, we must “stop seeking and celebrating dinky achievements” because “nothing that we are doing, nor even seriously contemplating, comes anywhere near such a massive transformation [as is necessary], yet every actor on the political stage …downplays the terrible realities and trumpet small-scale solutions wrapped in upbeat rhetoric.... We are racing toward the end of the world and have no plan of escape, but it is considered impolite to acknowledge that fact in public.”

ISSUE 7. That if this legislation is passed, it is reasonable to expect that the government will do more and go further than its own legislation.

Pull the other leg.

It appears the strategy of the groups who have endorsed the CPRS is to pretend that we don't face a climate crisis that requires emergency action, so they endorse incremental policies and never talk about the elephant in the room. Which is this: we only get one shot at this, and a trial run (read: locking in bad policy for decades) is not an option.

Today at just less than 1C of global warming we are witnessing of the destruction of the Arctic ecosystem. Eight million square kilometres of sea ice is disappearing fast each summer and may be entirely gone within a few years. Already 80% by volume of summer sea-ice has been loss, and regional warming of up to 5 degrees Celsius may have already pushed the Greenland ice-sheet (eventual sea-level rise of 7 metres) past its tipping point.

Do ACF and the Climate Institute and WWF tell the government this?

We know that the present level of greenhouse gases is enough to increase temperatures by more than 2 degrees Celsius over time. We have already gone too far, there is already too much carbon in the air. At less than 1 degrees Celsius we are on the way to triggering a multi-metre sea level rise than will devastate coastal infrastructure, delta peasant–farming communities and some of the world's biggest cities. Our only choice is to head back to zero degrees Celsius of warming, to halt all emissions and drawdown atmospheric carbon to return the planet to a safe-climate zone.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute and Europe's leading climate scientist, says that “we are on our way to a destabilisation of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realise”, so “our survival would very much depend on how well we were able to draw down carbon dioxide to 280 parts per million”, compared to the present level of close to 390 parts per million.

Do ACF and the Climate Institute and WWF tell the government this?

Put starkly, we either keep warming under the range where carbon feedbacks become sufficiently pervasive as to make further human action futile, or we do not. We have a safe climate or we have a global catastrophe. There are no middle-of-the-road compromises. We must head back towards zero. At 1 degree Celsius the genie is out of the bottle, at 2 degrees Celsius the bottle is broken.

One of the great powers of the climate action movement is our capacity to withhold support from, and actively campaign against, actions of governments that are designed to fail, as the CPRS will. Presently there is political denial, even an arrogance of power that leads governments to believe that they can negotiate with the climate and the laws of physics and chemistry, a land of tradeoffs, where climate is just another issue, the politics partisan, the action slow, all embedded in a culture of compromise and failure. Monday 4 May was a great example.

It is a tragedy that some should glowingly support such failure.

David Spratt
5 May 2009

A new reality check on the global carbon emissions budget

Two new research papers published this week in Nature on emissions targets have been widely reported, including Humanity's carbon budget set at one trillion tonnes, Hit the brakes hard and How The '2 Degrees Celsius Target' Can Be Reached.

And the result: if emissions keep growing at the present rate, the carbon emissions budget for the 2 degrees target will run out in 2021! Call that a climate emergency!

The two articles (by Allen et al, and Meinshausen et al ) asked the same question: how many more tonnes of carbon can humans pour into the air before a 2-degree temperature increase is the result? A commentary by both sets of authors is The exit strategy .

Ignoring, for the moment, the fact that 2 degrees is a really bad target (as is discussed in Climate Countdown), the articles were accompanied in the same issue of Nature by an enlightening summary by Gavin Schmidt and David Archer, Climate change: Too much of a bad thing:

Meinshausen and colleagues (page 1158) take a comprehensive probabilistic approach, combining the uncertainties in climate sensitivity and carbon-cycle feedbacks, and integrating the two over a large range of potential emission pathways. Their target is to avoid a peak global mean warming from the preindustrial level of more than 2C (equivalent to a further rise of about 1.2 C from today). We must note here that there is nothing special about 2C that would make warming of less than this magnitude ‘safe’. It is more analogous to a speed limit on a road, and is a guide to the scale of the problem. With 2 C of global warming (more over land and at the high latitudes), Earth would probably be warmer than it had been in millions of years — a huge change.

Meinshausen et al. find that the maximum temperature that Earth will experience to the year 2100 depends most reliably on the total amount of CO2 emitted to the year 2050, rather than on the final stabilized CO2 concentration. Their base-case estimate is that the total emissions from today (2009) to 2050 need to stay below 190 GtC (equivalent to 700 GtCO2; 1 GtC = 1012 kg of carbon) for us to have a good chance (75%) of staying below 2C (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: The 2C lottery. The black line shows the probability of the peak global mean temperature exceeding 2C above pre-industrial levels before the year 2100 as a function of the integrated emissions from 2009 to 2049. The graph is adapted from the base case of Meinshausen et al., including uncertainty ranges. Also shown are the cumulative emissions under various scenarios. Red, emissions constant at 2008 values until 2050. Light blue, growth in emissions continues at 1% per year until 2050 and then falls rapidly. Green, growth in emissions continues at 2% per year until 2050 and then falls rapidly. Purple, an 80% cut in emissions by 2050 (linearly applied, starting in 2010) from developed countries only, while developing-country emissions continue to grow at 1% per year. Dark blue, an 80% cut in emissions by 2050 from all countries.

And what does a total future carbon emissions budget to 2050 of 190 billion tonnes of carbon mean, when we are presently doing about 10 billion tones a year??

I did some quick figures with three scenarios: emissions keep growing as they have been since 2000 at around 3.5 per cent per year; and emissions are reduced by 2 per cent and 4 per cent a year. And this is based on only a 75% chance of not exceeding 2 degrees!

Here's the conclusions:

• If emissions keep growing at 3.5 per cent a year, then the carbon budget for 2 degrees runs out in 2021. That is, after that time, emissions would need to drop to zero immediately to have a 75 per cent chance of not passing 2 degrees.
• If global emissions reduce 2 per cent a year from now, the carbon budget will run out in 2030 for 2C, and
• With a 4 per cent annual reduction in global emissions, it will run out in 2040.

And that for a target that will that initiate large climate feedbacks in the oceans, on ice-sheets, and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points. Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheet; the extinction of an estimated 15– 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification; increasing methane release; substantial soil and ocean carbon-cycle feedbacks; and widespread drought and desertification in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

So even those folks who want a 2-degree target will need to argue for a 4 per cent annual global emissions reduction (and more in Australia) with zero emissions by 2040!!

Given Australia's emissions are increasing 2 per cent a year, that would be a 6 per cent turn-round on current practice in this country. That is going to require what we don't have now: transformative leadership and action at emergency speed and depth.

As NASA's Jim Hansen testified to US Congress last year:

We have reached a point of planetary emergency… climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled… the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than +2 degrees Celsius is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.

David Spratt
3 May 2009

Background note: Mienhausen et al have also circulated a "Informal Background Q&A on Meinshausen et al. “GHG targets & 2°C" which is here. They canvas questions including a "Why do you start your analysis from a 2°C target?" and "Why did you not focus on the target by Small Island States and Least Developed Countries of 1.5°C?". And this:

Q. If you had included in your emission pathways substantially net negative emissions after 2050, the probabilities of exceeding 2°C were lower?
A: True, substantially negative emissions post‐2050 would somewhat decrease the peak warming expected during the second half of the 21st century. However, temperature levels in year 2050 could obviously not be reversed. For very low mitigation pathways, 2050 temperature levels are already close to their maximum, so that negative emissions could only influence how quickly temperatures decrease after the peak, but not the temperature peak level itself.
Background: In most of the lower emission pathways analyzed in Meinshausen et al., global emissions are only turning to near‐zero levels, with the exception of lower MESSAGE or IMAGE17 scenarios, that exhibit substantial negative emissions by 2100. On the one hand, it is comforting that large net negative emissions could somewhat reduce the probabilities of exceeding 2°C for the medium‐low and high scenarios. On the other hand, large net negative emissions pose an enormous challenge for the involved technologies, and the safety, liability and permanence of stored underground carbon. Furthermore, one technology to achieve net negative emissions, the combination of biomass burning and carbon sequestration and storage, could have large implications to our land use patterns.

The relevant papers are:

• Meinshausen et al. Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C. Nature, 2009; 458 (7242): 1158 DOI: 10.1038/nature08017
• Allen et al. Warming caused by cumulative carbon emission: the trillionth tone. Nature, 458, 1163-1166 DOI: 10.1038/nature08019
• Allen et al. Nature Reports Climate Change. The exit strategy: Emission targets must be placed in the context of a cumulative carbon budget if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. Nature Reports Climate Change, 2009 DOI: 10.1038/climate.2009.38
• Schmidt and Archer, Too much of a bad thing. Nature, 2009,: 458: 1117. DOI: 10.1038/4581117a
• Washington et al. How much climate change can be avoided by mitigation? Geophysical Research Letters, 2009; 36 (8): L08703 DOI: 10.1029/2008GL037074:

Climate countdown

Last night, Monday 20 April 2009, I had an opportunity to debate the topic "Climate Change: What Should the Federal Government Be Doing?" with Kelvin Thompson, the Labor member for the federal parliamentary seat of Wills at a public meeting organised by the newly-formed Moreland Climate Group. The meeting was recorded and a DVD will be made available. Here are the comments I made in the opening half of the meeting. The two speeches were followed by almost an hour of energetic comments and Q and A. Thanks to Moreland Climate Group for putting on a great event, with more than 150 attending.

Thank you to Kelvin for engaging in this public conversation on climate between electors and their member of parliament. It is important to make this happen in electorates across the nation, for the conversations to be public rather than private.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a 2-to-6 degree Celsius temperature rise by 2100. But emissions are going up at an increasing rate and tracking on or above the IPCC's worst scenario, so we are headed for the high end if we keep on going as we are.

Yet neither major political party has a policy as to what the maximum safe temperature rise would be.

The Australian government has a "business as usual", high-emissions plan.
The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme outsources our responsibility, rewards the biggest polluters, and plans no sizeable reduction in national emissions in the next 40 years.

According to resources minister Martin Ferguson:

…although greenhouse gas reduction targets may be necessary, any frank review must conclude that the world’s greenhouse emissions are not going down in the short term: they are simply being shifted from one country to another.

Dr. Vicky Pope, head of climate change predictions at the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre says that:

In a worst-case scenario, where no action is taken to check the rise in Greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures would most likely rise by more than 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

So let's count down from 5 degrees.
.
5 DEGREES: In 2007, former PM John Howard told an ABC interviewer that an increase of 4–6 degrees Celsius would be "less comfortable for some than it is now" but "it's very, very hard for us... to sort of extrapolate what things might be".

Well, it's not that hard.

Five degrees of warming occured 55 million years ago: breadfruit trees grew on the coast of Greenland, while the Arctic Ocean saw water temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius. There was no ice at either pole (today that means a 70-metre sea-level rise), and much of the world would have been desertified.

Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnuhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute and adviser to the European Union and to the German Chancellor, told the Copenhagen science conference in March that a rise to 5–6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial would reduce "the carrying capacity of the planet (to) below 1 billion people".

4 DEGREES: Sussan Ley, the federal liberal shadow for customs and justice told one of her constituents in a recent letter that "I agree with my colleagues that an acceptable increase in the mean temperature would be 1.8–4 degrees C." (see correction by Sussan Ley in comments)

At 4 degrees Celsius hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon locked up in Arctic permafrost – particularly in Siberia – would melt, releasing methane and carbon dioxide in immense quantities, and make further human action to mitigate emissions futile.

In Europe, new deserts would be spreading in Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey: the Sahara will have effectively leapt the Straits of Gibraltar. In Switzerland, summer temperatures may hit 48 degrees Celsius. The sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech will be experienced in southern England. Europe’s population may be forced into a “great trek” north.

3 DEGREES: 3 degrees Celsius is the cap effectively being advocated by Australia’s Labor government. Labor policy is a 60 per cent reduction in Australian emissions by 2050. Sir Nicholas Stern says explicitly that for developed nations this is a 3 degrees Celsius target, telling the National Press Club in Canberra it would be "a very good idea if all rich countries, including Australia, set themselves a target for 2050 of at least 60 per cent emissions reductions" and this would leave us with "roughly a fifty-fifty chance of being either side of 3 degrees above pre-industrial times".

This is the target that both Stern and Garnaut advocated, but Stern now says that “We haven't seen 3 degrees Celsius for a few million years, and we don't know what that looks like”. But from the Pliocene 3 million years ago we know what a 3 degrees Celsius world would likely be: a northern hemisphere free of glaciers and icesheets, where beech trees grew in the Transantarctic mountains, sea levels were 25 metres higher, and probably permanent El Nino conditions.

NASA climate chief Dr James Hansen (PDF) has warned that a 3 degrees Celsius warming "threatens even greater calamity, because it could unleash positive feedbacks such as melting of frozen methane in the Arctic, as occurred 55 million years ago, when more than 90 per cent of species on Earth went extinct".


2 DEGREES: I understand that Kelvin has suggested Australia should set a 2 degrees Celsius or 450ppm target.

2 degrees Celsius has been a target of convenience in international negotiations, but is now losing consensus as the politicians head to 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, and the scientists towards zero.

To have a 2 in 3 chance of holding to 2 degrees Celsius, atmospheric carbon needs to be held to 400ppm CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) and that requires a global reduction is emissions of 80% by 2050 (over 1990) and negative emissions after 2070. For Australia, a 2 degrees Celsius target means a more than 95% cut by 2050.

A rise of 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures will initiate large climate feedbacks in the oceans, on ice-sheets, and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points. Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheet; the extinction of an estimated 15– 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification; increasing methane release; substantial soil and ocean carbon-cycle feedbacks; and widespread drought and desertification in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

Hansen told the US Congress last year that: “We have reached a point of planetary emergency… climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled… the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than +2 degrees Celsius is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.”

1 DEGREE: Today at just less than 1 degree Celsius of global warming we are witnessing of the destruction of the Arctic ecosystem. Eight million square kilometres of sea ice is disappearing fast each summer and may be entirely gone within a few years. Already 80% by volume of summer sea-ice has been loss, and regional warming of up to 5 degrees Celsius may have already pushed the Greenland ice-sheet (eventual sea-level rise of 7 metres) past its tipping point.

At less than 1 degree Celsius there is more frequent and intense heatwaves, ongoing drought in Australia, sub-Saharan Africa and the western US, and the swift retreat of river-feeding mountain glaciers. The eastern Amazon is drying (some tributaries ran dry in the 2005 drought), low-lying island states are on the edge of a precipice, as are coral reefs. Britain’s Hadley Centre calculates that warming of just 1C would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world’s land surface by 2100.

ZERO DEGREES: Yet we know that the present level of greenhouse gases is enough to increase temperatures by more than 2 degrees Celsius over time. We have already gone too far, there is already too much carbon in the air. At less than 1 degrees Celsius we are on the way to triggering a multi-metre sea level rise than will devastate coastal infrastructure, delta peasant–farming communities and some of the world's biggest cities.

Our only choice is to head back to zero degrees Celsius of warming, to halt all emissions and drawdown atmospheric carbon to return the planet to a safe-climate zone.



Schellnhuber, Europe's leading climate scientist, says that “we are on our way to a destabilisation of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realise”, so “our survival would very much depend on how well we were able to draw down carbon dioxide to 280 parts per million”, compared to the present level of close to 390 parts per million.

Put starkly, we either keep warming under the range where carbon feedbacks become sufficiently pervasive as to make further human action futile, or we do not. We have a safe climate or we have a global catastrophe. There are no middle-of-the-road compromises. We must head back towards zero. At 1 degree Celsius the genie is out of the bottle, at 2 degrees Celsius the bottle is broken.

WHAT HAS TO BE DONE: Presently there is political denial, an arrogance of power that leads governments to believe that they can negotiate with the climate and the laws of physics and chemistry, a land of tradeoffs, where climate is just another issue, the politics partisan, and where the biggest polluters are appeased, all embedded in a culture of compromise and failure.

We are treating climate in the business as usual mode rather than the emergency mode with which we respond to fires and natural disasters. We faced by an overwhelming, human-caused "natural" disaster — global warming — yet our government fails to recognise this emergency.

An emergency exists when:

• events threaten to overwhelm
• when the outcome is often, like an election, binary (you either win or lose big time)
• when delay in action comes at a great price, even tipping the system into a different state
• when the imperative is to apply large amounts of resources quickly

This precisely describes the climate threat today.

We need an emergency transition plan, a whole-of-society plan, a vast remaking of how we live that is zero-carbon and sustainable; a just transition, a vast restructuring of jobs and skills and industry and economy. The obstacles to such a plan are not primary economic or tecnological, but political and social.

We have the technologies or they are within grasp. We have the economic capacity: $50 billion has just been spent on two stimulus packages, but not with a climate focus.

We have a Future Fund. Should we use it wisely now to make sure we have a future?I am sure governments do not want to go down in history as having saved the banks but not the planet.

Ian Dunlop, formerly a senior oil, gas and coal industry executive and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, says:

Honesty about this challenge is essential, otherwise we will never develop realistic solutions. We face nothing less than a global emergency, which must be addressed with a global emergency response, akin to national mobilisations pre-WWII or the Marshall Plan… This is not extremist nonsense, but a call echoed by an increasing numbers of world leaders as the science becomes better understood… In the face of catastrophic risk, emission reduction targets should be based on the latest, considered, science, not on a political view of the art-of-the-possible.

WHAT GOVERNMENT MUST DO

1. Be honest about the science, rather than the present approach of downplaying the severity of the problem and celebrating dinky achievement wrapped in delusional, up-beat rhetoric. Remember, Australia's emissions are still rising and the extra volume of coal flowing through two new export facilities, approved by Labor, will increase global carbon pollution by more than Australia’s total greenhouse gas output .
2. Government must have a frank conversation with the Australian people about the problem and how we can solve it together. Contrast the approach of the Australian and US energy Secretaries. US energy secretary Stehen Chu recently told Californians "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California (and) I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going" either, saying the need was billions of dollars for alternative energy research and infrastructure. Then look at Australian energy minister Martin Ferguson's love affair with coal, and his opposition to feed-in tariffs because "it is too early to be picking winners", when the government's "clean coal" initiative is precisely about "picking winners".
3. Start planning and implementing a rapid transition to a post-carbon economy. This requires:
   * Serious funding for safe climate innovation and scaling up of technologies, the drivers of change.
   * A large-scale national, all-sector energy efficiency and plan: many of the actions that can be taken today actually save money in the long-term. And an efficiency programme reduces the amount of new generating capacity to be built.
   * Constructing a smart grid for demand management and a new high-efficiency national grid to effectively hook renewables into the system. Even Garnaut recognise the need for such grids as a public responsibility due to market failure.
4. Plan and implement the rapid phase-out of the coal industry. The coal industry is a toxic asset. Carbon capture and storage is a cargo cult that cannot deliver in the relevant time frame and may not deliver at all. As Guy Pearce notes in his Quarterly Essay "Quarry vision", McDonalds employs twice as many people as the coal industry. We can have a coal industry or we we can have a planet fit for succeeding generations, but we cannot have both.
5. Spend the annual $9 billion subsidy the fossil fuel industry receives to start constructing some of the big building blocks of the post-carbon economy; for example an all-scale gross feed-in tariff to drive the construction of renewable capacity. Spend on public transport infrastructure what we spend on road infrastructure. Since 1996 the Victorian government has allocated more than $9 billion on road network expansion, and less than $2 billion on public transport infrastructure. Letss swap the columns.
6. Provide transformative political leadership. An opportunity exists within the Labor caucus, if not yet in the Cabinet, to stand with the climate action movement, to link people power with a courageous moral stance by parliamentarians. Recently I asked a former senior federal minister what it would take for a group of Labor parliamentarians to publicly argue that the scientific imperatives should be put first and campaign for a rapid transition to a post-carbon economy. The answer was simple: "Some people, including in cabinet, are going to have put their their career second".

What's up with emisions reductions of 25-40% by 2020?

The “25-40/2020” scenario was published in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report Working Group III report, in Box 13.7 on page 776, “The range of the difference between emissions in 1990 and emissions allowances in 2020/2050 for various GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations for Annex I and non-Annex I [Kyoto] countries as a group”, where targets were given for stabilisation at 450, 550 and 650 ppm CO2e.The targets for 450 CO2e were:

Region: Annex 1 countries
2020: –25% to –40%
2050: –80% to –95%
Region: non-Annex 1 countries
2020: Substantial deviation from baseline in Latin America, Middle East, East Asia and Centrally-Planned Asia
2050: Substantial deviation from baseline in all regions

25-40/2020 subsequently became a focus of debate at the COP 13 (Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC) meeting in Bali in December 2007, and then the principal advocacy target in 2008 in Australia for organisations such as the Climate Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Climate Action Network Australia, and for a number of climate scientists who entered the public policy debate. Garnaut talked about a 450ppm target requiring Australian emissions to be reduced to 25% below 1990 by 2020 (noticeably dropping the upper range of 40% range, a sleight of hand he was not alone in undertaking). So how might we assess such an advocacy proposal?

The temperature increase: Analysis for the 2006 Stern report (p. 195) shows that, taking uncertainty about climate sensitivity into account, a 450ppm CO2e target has:
• A 26–78% probability of exceeding 2 degrees
Celsius (˚C) relative to pre-industrial
• A 4–50% probability of exceeding 3˚C
• A 0–34% probability of exceeding 4˚C
• A 0–21% probability of exceeding 5˚C

Using a risk-management approach, it cannot be said that this is even a 2˚C target. And 2˚C is far, far too high, given the now clear evidence that at less than 1˚C of warming we are already on the precipice of climate catastrophe, from the Arctic to the Great Barrier Reef, from the Himalayas to Siberia.

Climate sensitivity: The work of the IPCC generally assumes a climate sensitivity (CS: that is, how much temperatures would increase with a doubling of GHG levels) of 3˚C. Whilst “short-term” CS is well established at 3˚C ± 0.5˚C, there is now a very convincing case that long-term climate sensitivity (including “slow” carbon feedbacks such as ice-sheet albedo, loss of ocean carbon-sink efficiency, loss of permafrost and other soil carbon, carbon release from tropical rainforests drying/ wild-fire, and so on) is closer to 6˚C. There is strong evidence in climate history of the last million years to support this view. This is recognised in the IPCC 2007 synthesis report which notes that “emissions reductions... might be underestimated due to missing carbon cycle feedbacks” (page 67) and this may require the cumulative emissions budget for the 21st century (the total amount of GHGs than can be emitted for a stabilisation level) to be “about 27% less” than is assumed. But the 25-40/2020 target and other IPCC emission reduction scenarios do not include this consideration!

On carbon cycle feedbacks, there is already evidence that the strength of ocean, and especially some land, carbon sinks are weakening and becoming less efficient, and that this will persist into the future. Thus the predictions from climate-carbon- cycle models may be too conservative and CO2 in the atmosphere will probably increase more rapidly than the models suggest, which has implications for the development of policies that seek to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at a given level, including those of the IPCC (Cox & Jones).

The IPCC gives a CS range of 1.5–4.5˚C and warns that “policymakers may want to use the highest values of climate sensitivity... to guide decisions” (and virtually admits it is higher than the 3C the IPCC chooses to assume). This precautionary warning has apparently been ignored by those who advocated the 25-40/2020 target during 2008.

If long-term CS is 6˚C, then 450ppm would produce a temperature increase of 4.1˚C, enough to melt all ice sheets and produce a 70-metre sea-level rise, amongst many impacts that would end life on this planet for most people and most species.

After a careful reassessment of climate sensitivity and climate history data, James Hansen and his co-authors concluded in a 2008 research paper that the tipping point for the presence, or absence, of any substantial ice-sheets on Earth is around 450 ppm (plus or minus 100 ppm) of CO2. This means that the CO2 levels often associated with a 2˚C rise may just be the tipping point for the total loss of all ice sheets on the planet and a huge sea-level rise. Yet this is what the principal advocacy was by “our” side in 2008!

[For a more detailed discussion of climate sensitivity, see the discussion on pages 15-16 of the
Climate Safety report published in late 2008 in the UK]The impacts: 450ppm CO2e is roughly the current GHG level, and in 2008 Ramanathan and Feng found that if greenhouse gases were fixed at their 2005 levels (and assuming the IPCC CS of 3˚C), the inferred warming is 2.4˚C (range 1.4˚C to 4.3˚C) and that 2.4˚C would be sufficient to result in the loss of Arctic summer sea-ice, the Himalayan–Tibetan glaciers and the Greenland ice-sheet (based on Lenton et al). The loss of Greenland ice sheet produces about a 7-metre global sea-level rise. One conclusion is that advocacy of the 20-40/2020 target, for example by the ACF in its 2008 Special Places campaign, will result in the destruction of many of Australia’s “special places” ACF wants to protect; Kakadu, for example, will salinate with a sea-level rise of less than a metre.

The scenario is out of date. The scenarios in IPCC 2007 WGIII Box 13.7 were prepared in 2005 or earlier.
• The 450ppm scenario relies heavily of the work of Del Elzen and Meisnhausen, presented at a 2005 UK Met conference (and then published as chapters 28 and 31 in Avoiding dangerous climate change, Schellnhuber (ed.), CUP). Since then, emissions from non-Annex I nations have grown beyond all expectation, which means that emission reductions scenarios need to be re-visited.
• Thus in recent powerpoints, Meinshausen has crossed out the words “Substantial deviation from baseline in Latin America, Middle East, East Asia and Centrally-Planned Asia” and pasted over “–15% to –30% by 2020” for non-Annex 1 nations, a recognition that the 2007 propositions need re-working.
• In addition, the IPCC methodology (and emissions reduction scenarios generally) implies that climate change is a linear event, where predictable changes in emission levels will have predictable outcomes and impacts. But events such as the “big melt” in the Arctic summer of 2007 are non-linear and unpredicted events that can turn climate science knowledge on its head and demand that the whole question of what needs to be done and what are appropriate targets be urgently re-assessed in light of new data, including evidence that carbon cycle feedbacks are kicking in sooner than expected. The Arctic shows that tipping points for dangerous climate change and large sea-level rises have already been passed, a fact that the IPCC did not recognise in failing to include any emission scenarios for less than 2–2.4˚C in its 2007 report.
• It is noteworthy that IPCC author Bill Hare, in the climate chapter for the 2009 State of the World report, includes detailed modeling by the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects of a 1-degree stabilisation scenario (the first I have seen), and sketches the actions for a 300 ppm target. It will be interesting to see if Hare’s views, which in the past have been influential in groups such as CANA and Greenpeace, will be embraced.
• Potsdam Institute head Hans Joachim Schellnhuber says previous predictions about climate change and its catastrophic effects were too cautious and optimistic. “In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than it has been assumed up until now,” Schellnhuber told the Saarbruecker Zeitung newspaper in an interview published on 29 December. “We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize.”
A safe-climate target

James Hansen told scientists at an American Geophysical Union conference in December 2007 that: “We either begin to roll back not only the emissions [of CO2] but also the absolute amount in the atmosphere, or else we’re going to get big impacts ... We should set a target of CO2 that’s low enough to avoid the point of no return.” In order to achieve the return of the Arctic sea-ice, we have seen above that Hansen and his co-authors have identified the target as in the range 300–325ppm CO2, well below the current level. Given the key role the Arctic plays in the global climate system, a precautionary approach would therefore suggest a long-term target of 300ppm CO2e.

This would rule out a domino effect of sea-ice loss, albedo flip, a warmer Arctic, a disintegrating Greenland ice sheet, more melting permafrost, and further knock-on effects of massively increased greenhouse gas emissions, rising atmospheric concentrations and accelerated global warming.

Any proposal for a target higher than 300ppm would imply confidence that it is safe to leave the Arctic sea ice melted, and an assumption that this would not bring about the train of consequences just described. This is, implicitly, the view of all the major nations and organisations involved in setting climate policy. Accordingly, they must be challenged to provide a reasoned argument as to why leaving the Arctic Ocean free of ice in summer is safe. If they cannot, the only acceptable course of action is clear.

David Spratt
March 2009

350 is the wrong target: put the science first

During 2008, US environment writer Bill McKibben and colleagues established the climate activist group 350.org, with the aim of spreading the message that policy targets need to reflect the scientific imperative.

The campaign has harnessed many people and organisations' collective energy and has been successful in the United States, and internationally at such forums at COP14 in Poznan, in helping to educate people that targets such as 450 ppm (per million) carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are not acceptable, that the current level of carbon dioxide (387 ppm) is too high for a safe climate, and so our action must be zero emissions and a cooling of the planet.

The important question now is whether 350 is a target based on the science, or one that is judged to be politically appropriate.

The question now, as Obama takes office, is what really need to be done. In his An open letter to President Obama on how to make the climate challenge real and urgent to Americans, Ken Ward notes that:

The US cannot muster the resources and resolve necessary to lead the world to safety if your administration does no more than plump domestic "green jobs" and "equitable stimulus" programs – progressive rhetoric for the stump and nothing more – and endorse decades-old cap & trade policy ginned up by environmentalists looking for policy acceptable to corporate "climate action" partners.
As our first organizer President, you know that the right course of action is not to tinker with the details of policy… but to rewrite the terms of the debate. The problem is that there is no conflict and it is therefore difficult to bring the resources of the "bully pulpit" to bear.
The bold move is to do nothing.
It will require immense determination to forestall the political forces coiled in anticipation of quick administration action on climate, but you must stiff-arm your advisers, step outside the Congressional climate quagmire, leave environmentalists hanging, and delay international engagement.
It is crucial that the nation does not move directly from the old conflict, "is global warming real?" directly into action, without first facing the terrible questions "how bad is it?" and "what do we need to do?

So what do we really need to do?
The target of 350 ppm was embraced by Al Gore at COP14 in Poznan: “Even a goal of 450 ppm, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate,” said Gore, adding we “need to toughen that goal to 350 ppm.” In a blog from Posnan, Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) CEO Don Henry called Gore’s speech “the high point” and wrote that Gore “said that even stabilizing greenhouse emissions at 450ppm was inadequate and that the science was indicating the we would need to move to 350ppm.” But Henry has not indicated whether ACF, whose corporate branding uses Gore prominently, would adopt this target or whether ACF’s Gore presenters would be permitted or encouraged to include Gore’s new target in their public presentations.

In Poznan the Least Developed Countries caucus and the International Youth Climate Network supported the 350 target, and 350.org used the occasion to announce an international day of action on 24 October 2009 to spread the number.

Why 350? The website proclaims 350 as “The most important number on earth’’. [For a more detailed analysis of the genesis of the 350 target, see here]. McKibben says that:

A year ago, nobody had ever heard of 350. But it turns out it’s the most important number on the planet... If people around the world know nothing else about global warming, we need them to understand that 350 represents a kind of safety – if we can get that message across, then they’ll demand 
dramatic action from their leaders

In a recent article for Mother Jones, McKibben explains why:

The final piece of the puzzle came early this year, and again from James Hansen. Twenty years after his crucial testimony, he published a paper with several coauthors called ‘Target Atmospheric CO2’. It put, finally, a number on the table-indeed it did so in the boldest of terms. ‘If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,’ it said, ‘paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm’.

But that is only half the story. Here’s what else Hansen et al. said (emphasis added) in their article in Open Atmos. Sci. J. 2:217-231:

Equilibrium sea level rise for today’s 385 ppm CO2 is at least several meters, judging from paleoclimate history. Accelerating mass losses from Greenland and West Antarctica heighten concerns about ice sheet stability. An initial CO2 target of 350 ppm, to be reassessed as effects on ice sheet mass balance are observed, is suggested.

It is important to note that this paragraph is not about the Arctic sea-ice tipping point, it’s about Antarctica. Hansen explains in the same article that 350ppm is a precautionary target to stop global loss of ice-sheets, because the paleoclimate record shows 450ppm ± 100ppm as boundary for glaciation/ deglaciation of Antarctica. In the next paragraph, attention turns to the question of Arctic sea ice:

Stabilization of Arctic sea ice cover requires, to first approximation, restoration of planetary energy balance. Climate models driven by known forcings yield a present planetary energy imbalance of +0.5-1 W/m2. Observed heat increase in the upper 700 m of the ocean confirms the planetary energy imbalance, but observations of the entire ocean are needed for quantification. CO2 amount must be reduced to 325-355 ppm to increase outgoing flux 0.5-1 W/m2, if other forcings are unchanged. A further imbalance reduction, and thus CO2 ~300-325 ppm, may be needed to restore sea ice to its area of 25 years ago.

The central point is that Arctic sea-ice is undergoing dramatic loss in summer, having lost 70-80% of its volume in the last 50 years, most since 2000. Without summer sea-ice, Greenland cannot escape a trajectory of ice-sheet loss leading to an eventual sea-level rise of 7 metres. Regional temperatures in the Arctic autumn are already up about 5C, and by mid-century an Arctic ice-free in summer, combined with more global warming, will be pushing Siberia close to the point where large-scale loss of carbon from melting permafrost would make further mitigation efforts futile. As Hansen told the US Congress in testimony last year, the “elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled”.
In short, if you don’t have a target that aims to cool the planet sufficiently to get the sea-ice back, the climate system may spiral out of control, past many “tipping points” to the final “point of no return”.
And that target is not 350ppm, it’s around 300 ppm.

Hansen says Arctic sea-ice passed its tipping point decades ago, and in his presentations has also specifically identified 300-325ppm as the target range for sea-ice restoration (see slide image), as did the paper quoted above. This view, by probably the most eminent climate scientist in America, is reinforced by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute and climate adviser to German Chancellor and the EU, who likewise is one of Europe’s leading climate scientists. On 15 September 2008, David Adam reported:

Professor John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told the Guardian that only a return to pre-industrial levels of CO2 would be enough to guarantee a safe future for the planet... He said even a small increase in temperature could trigger one of several climatic tipping points, such as methane released from melting permafrost, and bring much more severe global warming. ‘It is a very sweeping argument, but nobody can say for sure that 330ppm is safe,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it will not matter whether we have 270ppm or 320ppm, but operating well outside the [historic] realm of carbon dioxide concentrations is risky as long as we have not fully understood the relevant feedback mechanisms.

So 350 ppm is the wrong target because 350 ppm CO2 cannot restore the Arctic ice to its full extent. The people who run 350.org probably now recognise that, because their language is changing. One of their slides used to say: “We need to be here: 350”, it now says “we need to be lower than: 350ppm”. McKibben now talks about 350 ppm as being “the upper limit”, and in a recent radio interview said pre-industrial levels might be the only safe zone. But it’s too late to advocate targets that are only a signpost towards the target we really need to get to.
Sorry, Bill and the crew at 350.org, you’re wrong about 350 being our campaign target for 2009 and the lead-up to Copenhagen. The most important number of earth is 300. That’s what Hansen is saying, that’s what Schellnhuber is saying. There’s no point campaigning on an inadequate target. We only get one chance at this, and advocating targets that will still fail to fully solve the problem is the most de-mobilising action we can take.
Target 300 puts the science first.
Interestingly in Australia, where I am based, 350 has not gained wide appeal, with most of the grass-roots climate action groups adopting a 300 ppm target, consistent with the propositions elaborated in Climate Code Red.
David Spratt
22 January 2009

Climate policy delusions

Last Tuesday I spoke at a climate forum in the Melbourne suburb of Ringwood, and the topic was Climate and Leadership, which seems the key issue, because we face a chronic failure of political imagination and so also of political leadership. Here's the gist of my comments.

We know the problem, we understand the scientific imperatives that mean we must aim for zero emissions and cooling to return our planet to the safe-climate zone.
We know that we face a sustainability emergency and that speed is of the essence in constructing a post-carbon economy as fast as possible.
We know that an imaginative, large-scale “emergency” programme comparable in scope to the "war economy" is required.
In the second world war the major players spent one-third or more of their economy on the war. Stern says global warming impacts will be worse that he two world wars and the Depression put together, yet today talking about spending just 1, 2 or 3% of our economy on global warming is not even on the public agenda, let alone a third if it should become necessary.
We also know and are using many of the solutions and that commitment to innovation and research can solve many more of the issues.
It seems to me that obstacles to implementing climate solutions are political and social in character, not technological or economic.
The big one is, will it cost too much?
McKinsey&Company’s emissions reduction cost curve for Australia (PDF, see page 14) found that around one quarter of the emissions reduction measures are cost positive – they save money – and in doing so, can pay for another quarter. Yet Ross Garnaut report to the Australian government says we should only act seriously if the rest of the world does – a position of moral failure and seemingly economic stupidity if the McKinsey analysis is right. Why wait when starting to act now will not cost, but save, us money, as McKinseys show?
Garnaut recommendations and the government’s proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme are examples of the delusional public debate in Australia; a delusion being a fixed, false belief resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact.

• Delusional because policy makers want to appease the coal industry, the biggest polluters. Appeasing your enemy is dumb, because you lose, in this case not a war, but the planet.

• Delusional because for politicians climate is just another problem, not the GREATEST challenge humans have ever faced.

• Delusional because most of those in public debate — politicians, business elite, commentators, even some environmental lobbyists — don’t know or understand the scientific imperatives and are profoundly ignorant in the sense that they don’t know that they don’t know.

• Who has heard had politicians Penny Wong or Kevin Rudd or Malcolm Turnbull or industry lobbyist Heather Ridout or Australian Conservation Foundation boss Don Henry talking about sea-ice loss and its trigger for large sea-level rises and for the permafrost time bomb, why their targets will kill the Great Barrier Reef when they claim they want to save it, or the aerosols dilemma, or why climate sensivity is not 3 degress but probably double that and why that matters because carbon cycle feedbacks are not included in the IPCC emissions reduction targets (such as 25-40% by 2020 reduction for Kyoto Annex 1 countries) which makes those targets wrong, or the Hilamayas and a billion people without spring melt water in the dry season?

Climate policy is characterised by the habituation of low expectations and a culture of failure. We must with all our energy force such people and the power elite to move beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise because we are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points.
Our political leaders are not taking the actions that the science demands, because the conventional mode of politics is short-term and pragmatic. It's about solving 10% of the problem, or blaming the other side for problems, or putting it off till after the next election, or pretending it doesn’t exist at all. Politics is more and more spin and less and less substance.
Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd and climate minister Penny Wong have adopted a traditional Labor approach to the climate problem: something for the environment lobby and something for business.
But solving the climate crisis cannot be treated like a wage deal. It is not possible to negotiate with the laws of physics and chemistry. The planet cannot be bought off.
There are absolute limits that should not be crossed, and doing something, but not enough, will still lead to disaster. This they simply do not understand at all.
Political pragmatism, window dressing and incremental solutions that will fail take precedence over the scientific imperatives.
The result can only be a suicide note for most people and most species on the planet.
We face a spectacular failure of political imagination. What we lack is political leadership, and so we can only conclude that if our leaders cannot lead, we all must.
In July Al Gore issued his challenge to America:
"Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100% of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years…This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. To those who argue that we do not yet have the technology … I've seen what they [entrepreneurs who will drive this revolution] are doing and I have no doubt that we can meet this challenge."
This is the challenge we must also make and answer: in our homes, our local communities and at the national and global level. Gore said the challenge of climate is politically transformative.
If politicians cannot lead, then we all must, in building a movement across society that uses the brutal reality of our position to advocate and inspire the nation to take transformative action.
We can only play this game once. If we don't do enough, or at sufficient pace, in building a post-carbon economy, the climate system will get away from our capacity to correct it. Trial and error climate policy is not an option.
We must challenge leaders in our local communities to understand and act on climate knowing how serious the problem is, and if necessary inflict political pain on them and not let go till they say, “Yes, I need to lead, we all need to lead” on climate.
Whether it be local councillors, business or church leaders, local MPs or the prime minister, we must pursue them and debate with them and start a conversation and not stop with them until they say “Yes, we face a climate emergency, this is THE BIG issue” and act accordingly.
Climate is not just another issue, it is THE issue that defines whether we will have a planet fit to live on.
The Australian government has a Future Fund. Why not spend it to make a future safe for people and species in this country? There’s no jobs on a dead planet, and not much place for a future fund buried in a bank fault as the sand of desertification blow over and slowly bury it.
Barak Obama said “Change: yes we can”.
We must all say “Climate change: yes we can”.
A safe climate. Yes we can.
We can all lead, we all must lead. It is our only choice.

Middle of the road ... towards a cliff

• First published in Melbourne's The Age, 8 August 2008.

THE economic merit of competing climate policy options will soon find a focus in the final Garnaut review and Treasury modelling on the impacts of global warming on Australia, but there are risks in reading too much into it.

The modelling will be debated, possibly till we feel drowned in a sea of claim and counter-claim, but there may be more heat than light, for three reasons.

First, the big-picture questions are less amenable to political opportunism than quips about petrol prices and China. Will human action lead to the destruction of a big part of the economy's physical basis through multi-metre sea-level rises, for example?

Second, a model is a simplified and limited version of something complex, so it is unwise to take it as representing the whole story. The available models had trouble dealing with some emissions targets. The nature of the modelling process means many issues that should be part of rational decision-making will be excluded, because only market events with strictly quantifiable prices will be included.

Garnaut has recognised the "conventional economic effects that are not currently measurable, the possibility of much larger costs from extreme outcomes, and costs that aren't manifested through markets". For example, Garnaut explicitly says the multibillion-dollar impact on the tourism industry in northern Australia from the loss of most of the Barrier Reef (now inevitable) and of Kakadu (through salination) will not be modelled.

The cost of reducing emissions is largely quantifiable and will likely be fully described, but in tabulating the price we will pay for not acting, many of the adverse effects of global warming will not figure. Thus, the published modelling will be a poor reflection of the total impacts, placing no price on economic loss from ecosystem degradation, or such values as human displacement or the loss of life, biodiversity and environmental amenity. Thus while the report will conclude it is wiser to act, it will underemphasise the economic importance of doing so.

Third, the assumptions underlying the specific modelling may not be valid. Garnaut says the modelling will be based on "middle-of-the-road outcomes on temperatures and decline in rainfall", but these are unlikely to eventuate because climate change is now veering dangerously on the wrong side and headed for a great crash, driven by global carbon emissions rising much faster than in even the most pessimistic scenario considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Many of the impacts, such as the impending loss of an area of summer sea ice in the Arctic the size of Australia, and the destruction of huge ice shelves in both polar regions, are happening much earlier, and at lower temperature increases, than predicted, with global repercussions.

In fact, the worst predictions are coming true. Garnaut has frankly recognised the "bad possibilities" with "immense impacts" and "highly adverse outcomes", but says there is only a "10% chance" of these occurring. Even if it were only 10%, a risk management approach would nevertheless demand we take the "bad possibilities" into account.

Yet in reality they are now overwhelmingly likely to happen unless emergency action is taken to change direction.

A final hurdle concerns targets. Garnaut has already said that the climate science demands emissions reduction rates much faster than the Government seems willing to contemplate.

The Government's climate policy framework is already out of date; its target of 550 parts per million atmospheric carbon dioxide, which Garnaut has been asked to model, is equivalent to a three-degree target, according to Nicholas Stern. Yet a three-degree rise would destroy the Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the tropical rainforests, cause widespread desertification, large-scale species loss and a sea-level rise of tens of metres, if it were reflected in similar policies around the globe.

Yet the Government seems unaware that a three-degree rise would kick the climate into a new state that would not support humans, as planet-changing "tipping points" are crossed, such as devastating loss of carbon from deteriorating rainforests and melting Siberian permafrost. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will not survive. In Asia, 1.3 billion people whose homes lie in the basins of the great rivers that flow from the melting ice cap of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan ranges are vulnerable if spring melt-water is lost, yet it is predicted those mountains will be glacier-free by 2040, or earlier.

But such outcomes are not for modelling, lacking the capacity for strict quantification.

On climate, a trial run is not an option

• Published in 'Adelaide Advertiser' 3 July 2008 under the title 'Not enough time to turn back the climate clock'

Shocking as it may be, within five years the earth is likely to have only one polar ice cap, rather than two, during the summer. Allowing this condition to persist is not safe, but getting our climate solutions right poses a unique challenge.
We can only play this game once. If we don’t do enough, or at sufficient pace, in building a post-carbon economy, the climate system will get away from our capacity to correct it. Start-stop, trial-and-error climate policy is simply not an option.
Yet in quieter moments many of us acknowledge that in responding to global warming, the world is going backwards and the range of responses mooted are simply too little, too late. Labor’s climate adviser Ross Garnaut recently told a Canberra audience there was "just a chance" that nations would meet the climate policy challenge because "observation of daily debate and media discussion in Australia could lead one to the view that this issue is too hard for rational policy-making in Australia. The issues are too complex, the vested interests surrounding it too numerous and intense, the relevant time-frames too long."
Short-term economic preoccupations so constrain actions considered reasonable that maintaining biodiversity and building a safe-climate future have already been negotiated out of existence. The Rudd government’s current policy target of a 3-degree rise would destroy the Barrier Reef and the tropical rainforests, cause widespread desertification, a mass extinction, and a sea-level rise of perhaps 25 metres, amongst many impacts. The federal opposition has no climate target at all.
Climate policy is characterised by a culture of failure, so there is an urgent need to be brutally honest about where we are and what we need to do.
Of all the talk at a major international gathering of global warming experts last December, one speech did just that. The place was not Bali, but San Francisco, where 15,000 climate scientists gathered for their most important conference of the year, hosted by the American Geophysical Union. Centre stage was James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, and the United States’ most eminent climate scientist.
Hansen told his fellow scientists that climate tipping points have already been passed for large ice sheet and species loss, which occurred when we exceeded levels of 300-350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, at least two decades ago (the current level is 387 parts per million). Hansen said there is already enough carbon in the Earth's atmosphere for massive ice sheets such as on Greenland to eventually melt away, and ensure that sea levels will rise metres this century. People must not only cut current carbon emissions but also remove some carbon that has collected in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, in order to cool the planet, he concluded.
And just last month Hansen told the National Press Club in Washington that the climate is nearing dangerous tipping points, with the elements of a “perfect storm”, a global cataclysm, already assembled.
The polar north has until recently been covered by eight million square kilometres of floating sea-ice in summer, an area greater than Australia. Now it is disappearing fast and predicted by Arctic experts to be gone entirely within five years. Their well-founded fear is that rapid heating as a consequence of the sea-ice loss will trigger the unstoppable melting of most or all of the Greenland ice sheet, an event which would raise sea levels by five to seven metres, in as little as a century.
Four broad conclusions can be drawn from these observations.
1. We face dangerous warming impacts now, not just in the future. Serious climate-change impacts are already happening, both more quickly and at lower global temperature rises than projected. Increases of two degrees are effectively already in the system, unless we act dramatically to cut emissions towards zero as quickly as humanly possible. A temperature cap of 2–2.4 degrees, as proposed at Bali and now the subject of international negotiations, would take the planet’s climate beyond the temperature range of the last million years and into extreme danger.
2. Strong action is required now to stop emissions and cool the earth. The tipping points for large ice sheet and species loss were crossed decades ago. It is no longer a case of how much more we can "safely" emit, but whether we can quickly enough stop emissions and produce a cooling before we hit tipping points and amplifying feedbacks — such as large scale loss of greenhouse gases from melting permafrost — that will take the trajectory of the earth’s climate system beyond any hope of human restoration.
3. It is necessary to plan a large-scale transition to a post-carbon economy. Considering the water shortage, the arrival of peak oil, rising population and the impacts of warming — and the reflection of these events in rapidly rising world food prices —we can see a multi-factor sustainability crisis. Speed is of the essence in constructing a post-carbon economy. An imaginative, large-scale programme comparable in scope to the "war economy" is required. The obstacles to implementing such climate solutions are primarily political and social in character, rather than technological or economic.
4. We need to move at a pace far beyond business and politics as usual. These imperatives are incompatible with the realities of politics and business as usual. Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, fearful of deep change and incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed or depth. The consequence of timidity and constraint in government approaches to the environment is that low expectations are now embedded in policy-making. But the climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model, and there is an urgent need to re-conceive the issue we face as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise.
Lacking the collective will to act in a sustainable manner is no excuse. Acting within the constraints on the planet system is now necessary for long-term survival, because we are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points.
-- David Spratt

What politicians won’t talk about: the fate of the Arctic

In the dense fog that passes for the national climate policy debate, the major players stumble from one lamp-post to the next, unable to see the bigger picture in the murky light.
Devoid of context, their climate view is so constrained that they fail to identify the core problem: that the world stands on the edge of a precipice beyond which human actions will be no longer able to control in any meaningful way the trajectory of the climate system, or the fate of human life in a rapidly degrading natural world.
There is no clearer example than the fate of the Arctic.
More than 80% of the mass of sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean in summer has already been lost. An area of summer sea-ice once as large as Australia is rapidly disintegrating, with consequences that will reverberate around the globe.
Scientists with expertise on the Arctic environment are predicting that the Arctic Ocean will be ice free in summer between 2010 and 2013, and that once lost, the Arctic summer sea-ice will not return. Here's what they are saying:

• The frightening models [of Arctic sea-ice loss] we didn't even dare to talk about before are now proving to be true.’ According to these models, there will be no sea ice left in the summer in the Arctic Ocean somewhere between 2010 and 2015. ‘And it's probably going to happen even faster than that.’ — Louis Fortier, scientific director of the Canadian research network ArcticNet .
• ‘Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007… So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative’ — Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, Naval Postgraduate School, California
• ‘The Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012’ — Dr Jay Zwally, glaciologist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• ‘I think the tipping point for perennial sea-ice has already passed… It looks like [it] will continue to decline and there’s no hope for it to recover’ in the near period. — Dr Josefino Comiso, senior research scientist, NASA Goddard Space Centre
• ‘The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming… and now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died.” — Dr Jay Zwally, glaciologist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice will cause a large local warming in the Arctic region of around 5ºC and a smaller but very significant global warming of around 0.3ºC .
This further warming of the Arctic will significantly add to the speed of disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet (sea-level rise of 7 metres if fully lost, possibly five metres this century according to NASA climate chief Dr James Hansen) and to the rate of permafrost melting, which will release much more carbon dioxide and methane and further drive up global warming.
I are not aware of any well-informed climate scientist who thinks that it is possible to have a safe climate or avoid dangerous climate change with the permanent loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice. This topic is not being addressed in Australia, though it must frame the whole debate. To not consider the Arctic is to ignore the biggest issue today in global warming.
Because of the dangerous knock-on effects caused by its loss, the Arctic sea ice must be restored to its normal extent as fast as possible.
To get the Arctic sea ice back we need to cool the earth by about 0.3ºC. If we don’t, we cannot avoid very dangerous climate impacts. There is no third way. This is the new very inconvenient truth politicians seek to avoid.
To cool the earth fast enough to get the Arctic sea-ice back quickly, we need to move to zero greenhouse gas emissions as fast as the economy can be restructured, and is environmentally safe to do so, and take about 200 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air. We also need to find environmentally-safe mechanisms to actively cool the earth while navigating this transition.
Taken together this is a staggering task in terms of the necessary scale and speed of action, but there is simply no alternative if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.
The bottom line is that we cannot leave the Arctic ice-free in summer and avoid climate catastrophe. This is the elephant in the room that politicians strain to avoid. It is not being talked out honestly.
Politicians can ignore or downplay the challenge of the Arctic, only by playing dice with our future and that of future generations.

David Spratt