As Tony Abbott launches all-out war on climate action, what's the plan?

[ Updated 2 February 2014]
NOTE: This blog was originally drafted as notes for a small group discussion in Melbourne. It is in part a situational analysis, covering the need to engage with conservative voters, the fragmentation of our efforts, and the growing gap between what is scientifically necessary and what is considered politically possible, resulting in a cognitive dissonance which is structurally embedded in the climate discourse. At first, I was reluctant to publish these notes because they are pretty blunt, but a number of people thought they were worth an airing, especially because the Abbott government is waging an all-out "shock and awe" war to destroy climate and environment public policy, for which much of our side appears ill-prepared.

• Related Post: A sober assessment of our situation (July 2012)

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by David Spratt

“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.”
— Ian Dunlop, formerly senior oil, gas and coal industry executive and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors,  "Global warming is a global emergency", Crikey, 25 February 2009

Australia's climate action movement is diverse: from large, professional national organisations to local volunteer community groups; from issue-specific campaigns focussing on coal, coal seam gas (CSG) and renewables to sector-specific groups; from organisations focused on policy-makers to activists directly confronting the fossil fuel industry. The election of the Abbott government has created a moment of crisis and a chance to review.

Code Red's most popular climate posts

Here's the pick of the crop: our most popular posts over the last three years, starting with the most read.

 A sober assessment of our situation (3 parts)

The state of the Australian climate movement as Labor falters and the conservatives gain ascendancy in mid-2012, some harsh realities and ways forward.

Arctic sea-ice melt record more than broken, it’s being smashed
The extraordinary events of the 2012 northern summer and their consequences.

Brightsiding is a bad strategy (5 parts)
Why all “good news” and no “bad news” is a bad climate action and communications strategy?

What would 3 degrees mean?  
The astounding global impacts of 2, 3 and 4 degrees of warming.

With Arctic freezer door open, frigid air drains into USA and Eurasia, with Arctic unusually mild

by David Spratt

It's a cliche that a picture tells a story better than a thousand words, and it's really true in the case of this extraordinary map of weather modelling of northern hemisphere temperature anomalies (variations from the expected values based on climate records) for 29 January 2014:

The why and how of radical emissions reductions: (1) Kevin Anderson

Prof. Kevin Anderson

First in a series

On 10-11 December 2013, a Radical Emissions Reduction Conference was held at the Royal Society, London under the auspices of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. The conference's purpose was described as:

Today, in 2013, we face an unavoidably radical future. We either continue with rising emissions and reap the radical repercussions of severe climate change, or we acknowledge that we have a choice and pursue radical emission reductions: No longer is there a non-radical option. Moreover, low-carbon supply technologies cannot deliver the necessary rate of emission reductions – they need to be complemented with rapid, deep and early reductions in energy consumption – the rationale for this conference.

A climate of denial grips Abbott government's holiday madness

by James Wight

While many of us were distracted in December by seasonal festivities and summer sports, the Abbott government quietly announced a number of actions which will exacerbate the climate problem, in the long-standing tradition of avoiding scrutiny by hiding unpopular announcements in holiday periods.

The government approved Adani’s T0 coal export terminal, and the dredging for two more coal export terminals, at Abbot Point. This will be the world’s biggest coal port and open up mining in the Galilee Basin, whose nine proposed mega-mines would export coal with annual emissions of 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, almost twice Australia’s domestic emissions and greater than the emissions of all but six countries. Four other fossil fuel projects were approved: an Arrow coal seam gas processing facility on Curtis Island, a transmission pipeline to supply it, Clive Palmer’s China First mine, and the Surat Gas Expansion.

Landmark TV series puts people at centre of the climate change story

Introduction: Regular readers of  this blog will know we have argued long and hard that to communicate climate change effectively and to maximise public engagement, people need to be put at the centre of the story, as for example here and here. So unusaly for a climate blog the often focuses on new science, there were smiles all round when this story from Joe Romm was published this week.

Click to watch preview

by Joe Romm, via Climate Progress

This April (2014), Showtime will start airing its ground-breaking climate change TV series on the experiences and personal stories of people whose lives have been touched by climate change. Years Of Living Dangerously is an 8-part series produced by the legendary storytellers and film-makers James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Weintraub -– together with three former 60 Minutes producers who have 18 Emmys between them.

Australia’s hottest year was no freak event: humans caused it

by Sophie Lewis and David Karoly, via The Conversation

Australia saw extreme heat and bushfires in 2013.
Flickr/Rossco ( Image Focus Australia )

The Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that 2013 was the hottest year in Australia since records began in 1910.

Unusual heat was a persistent feature throughout the year. For the continent as a whole, we experienced our hottest day on record on January 7. Then January was the hottest month on record, and the 2012-13 summer was the hottest recorded for the nation.

The nation-wide temperature record set for the month of September exceeded the previous record by more than a degree. This was the largest temperature anomaly for any month yet recorded.

Warming climate may cut cloud cover, push temperatures even higher

One of the great unknowns of climate science is what effect clouds have in accelerating or slowing warming. A new study sheds a disturbing light on their possible impact.

By Tim Radford, via Climate News Network

Australian and French scientists believe they have cracked one of the great puzzles of climate change and arrived at a more accurate prediction of future temperatures.

The news is not good, according to Steven Sherwood of Australia’s Centre for Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. If carbon emissions are not reduced, then by 2100 the world will have warmed by 4°C.

Reigniting the debate: Climate change is fundamentally a human story

A British group says people's interest in global warming has dwindled, and new ways of telling what is essentially a human story should include talking to those who may be sceptical about climate change.

By Kieran Cooke, via Climate News Network

George Marshall is a co founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), an organisation based in Oxford in the UK which specialises in climate change communication.

Whenever he can, Marshall tries to engage people in conversation about global warming: he finds it a tough task.

Naomi Klein: Radical GHG emissions policies need radical social movements to back them

by Gabriel Levy, People and Nature

Naomi Klein

Policies to counter global warming effectively “will only advance if accompanied by radical social movements”, socialist writer and activist Naomi Klein has told the Radical [greenhouse gas] Emissions Reduction conference in London. “Transformative policies…  must be backed by transformative politics.”

Advocates of radical action have to face the fact that pro-market ideology is dominant in mainstream political fora and that “we are the marginal ones”, Klein said yesterday, on a web link from Toronto, Canada.

“It’s not that our ideas [about cutting greenhouse gas emissions] are not popular. But they are not powerful, not dominant. They are not winning.” The movement needs to “turn the popular into the powerful” by creating a “radical, enabling environment in which these policies can flourish”, she said.

Crunch time for Victorian government on coal exports

Right now, the Victorian  Government is charging forward with plans to develop a major new brown coal export industry in the state.

If these plans go ahead, up to 13 billion tonnes of brown coal could be handed over to coal companies to be dug up, hauled across the state, and shipped to China and India for burning.

The devastating impact would stretch from fertile farmland in Gippsland where the coal is buried, to protected marine zones beside Wilsons Promontory or Philip Island where it would be shipped from major new ports.

2 degrees hotter not an acceptable climate target but a disaster, say leading scientists

Countries round the world have pledged to try and limit the average global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial figures. That’s way too high and would threaten major dislocations for civilization say a group of prominent scientists.

Lead author James Hansen

by Tim Radford, Climate News Network

Governments have set the wrong target to limit climate change. The goal at present – to limit global warming to a maximum of 2°C higher than the average for most of human history – “would have consequences that can be described as disastrous”, say 18 scientists in a review paper in the journal PLOS One.

With a 2°C increase, “sea level rise of several meters could be expected,” they say.  Increased climate extremes, already apparent at 0.8°C warming, would be more severe. Coral reefs and associated species, already stressed with current conditions, would be decimated by increased acidification, temperature and sea level rise.

Parts of Australia reaching threshold where it is impossible for normal life to continue because of the heat, says climate impacts researcher

Some parts of Australia, such as Darwin, and some farms and factories, are likely to be  unviable in a 4°C hotter world, according to climate impacts research by Dr. Liz Hanna, from the Australian National University’s National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health.
Paul Brown of Climate News Network reports from the UN climate talks in Warsaw.

UN bodies and health authorities are being advised to prepare for a world temperature rise of 4°C because scientists no longer believe that politicians are capable of holding the temperature rise below the internationally agreed limit, 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College in London, was speaking at a conference here which also heard that some parts of the world were already in danger of becoming too hot for humans to inhabit.

Typhoon Haiyan and climate change: connecting the dots (updated)

UPDATED 15 November


NEW:  Super Typhoon Haiyan's Intensification and Unusually Warm Sub-Surface Waters
A remarkable warming of the sub-surface Pacific waters east of the Philippines in recent decades, due to a shift in atmospheric circulation patterns and ocean currents that began in the early 1990s, could be responsible for the rapid intensification of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Hurricanes are heat engines, which means they take heat energy out of the ocean, and convert it to kinetic energy in the form of wind. It's well-known that tropical cyclones need surface water temperatures of at least 26.5°C (80°F) to maintain themselves, and that the warmer the water, and the deeper the warm water is, the stronger the storm can get.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2579

The Abbott government: climate policy as culture war

by David Spratt, first published at ReNewEconomy

Overnight in London, former prime minister John Howard gave the climate-denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation's annual lecture, telling his audience:

I've always been agnostic about [climate change]… I don't completely dismiss the more dire warnings but I instinctively feel that some of the claims are exaggerated… I don't accept all of the alarmist conclusions… You can never be absolutely certain that all the science is in.

 Agnosticism masking denial has been Howard's trademark. In February 2007, he told Lateline that 4-to-6 degrees Celsius of climate warming "would be less comfortable for some than it is now".  Yes, really!

Connecting the dots can turn the table on denialist prime minister

by David Spratt, first published at The Guardian and RenewEconomy

It's hard to imagine that one tweet from Australian Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt could change the terms of the climate change policy debate in Australia. But it has.

View PDF of how the story evolved

On 17 October, as fierce, out-of-season bush fires erupted around Sydney and destroyed 200 houses after the hottest year on record in Australia, Bandt tweeted that Australia would experience more terrible climate impacts if newly-elected conservative prime minister Tony Abbott got his way and abandoned the carbon pricing and renewable energy legislation enacted by the Labor government in 2010.

The previous day, Bandt had written in The Guardian that: "Faced with the biggest ever threat to Australia's way of life (bush fires), Tony Abbott is failing in the first duty of a prime minister which is to protect the Australian people." This struck a chord with many people and launched a long overdue, but until now suppressed, public discussion about the relationship between a hotter and more extreme climate and worsening disasters.

Climate change and fire risk: what scientists say

Prime minister Tony Abbott says that "fire is a part of the Australian experience" and not linked to climate change. Here's what the peer-reviewed scientific research says.

Bushfire weather in SE Australia: Recent trends and projected climate change impacts

Lucas, C., K. Hennessy, G Mills and J. Bathols (2007), "Bushfire weather in SE Australia: Recent trends and projected climate change impacts", Bushfire CRC, Australian Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, Melbourne.

The number of ‘very high’ fire danger days generally increases 2-13% by 2020 for the low scenarios and 10-30% for the high scenarios (Table E1). By 2050, the range is much broader, generally 5-23% for the low scenarios and 20-100% for the high scenarios. The number of ‘extreme’ fire danger days generally increases 5-25% by 2020 for the low scenarios and 15-65% for the high scenarios (Table E1). By 2050, the increases are generally 10-50% for the low scenarios and 100-300% for the high scenarios.

Fire and climate change: don't expect a smooth ride

By Roger Jones, Victoria University, via The Conversation

With fires still burning across New South Wales, it’s time to have a look at the role climate change might have played. Are the conditions we’re seeing natural variation, or part of a long term trend?

In fact, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

Has bushfire risk increased due to climate change?

In research I did with colleagues earlier this year we looked at the Fire Danger Index calculated by the Bureau of Meteorology, and compared how it changed compared to temperature over time in Victoria.

Is the Abbott government fiddling while NSW burns?

" …it is precisely during extreme weather events that journalists have the best opportunity to communicate the reality of climate change… As the events increase in number and scale, they will advance so far into the daily lives of Australians that social and psychological issues will emerge — that will touch us so personally and deeply — as to require narrative symbolisation. For even the most tabloid journalism to ignore these issues when people are desperately searching for an explanation will not be possible."

By David Holmes, Monash University, via The Conversation

Watch Adam Bandt on ABC News24

For the Abbott government, it has emerged that talking about climate change during a “natural” disaster is taboo. Of course, how “natural” the NSW fires actually are is the issue here, as we witness over 100 separate fires across NSW. These fires are the likes of which have never been seen in the month of October anywhere in Australia, let alone this close to population centres.

Yesterday Greens MP Adam Bandt posted the following on Twitter that drew several reactions from LNP politicians:

Tony Abbott’s plan means more bushfires for Australia and more pics like this of Sydney.

Confused about the new IPCC's carbon budget? So am I.

by David Spratt

When the IPCC's new report on the physical basis of climate change was released in late September, media attention focused on a conclusion from the Summary for Policymakers that the world had emitted just over half of the allowable emissions if global warming is to be kept to 2 degrees Celsius (2°C) of warming.

Unfortunately, because many people think if you have a budget you should spend every last dollar, the "carbon budget" message could be interpreted as saying there is plenty of budget left to spend. The respected climate researcher Ken Caldeira told Climate Progress that the carbon budget concept is dangerous for two reasons:

There are no such things as an “allowable carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.” There are only “damaging CO2 emissions” or “dangerous CO2 emissions.” Every CO2 emission causes additional damage and creates additional risk. Causing additional damage and creating additional risk with our CO2 emissions should not be allowed.
If you look at how our politicians operate, if you tell them you have a budget of XYZ, they will spend XYZ. Politicians will reason: “If we’re not over budget, what’s to stop us to spending? Let the guys down the road deal with it when the budget has been exceeded.” The CO2 emissions budget framing is a recipe for delaying concrete action now.