Key messages of Climate Code Red

On the publication of "Climate Code Red" in mid-2008, we tried to elaborate some of the key themes in the book:

1. Our goal is a safe-climate future – we have no right to bargain away species or human lives

• No species has the right to consciously determine what proportion of all other species on earth should become extinct — as the compromise 2 and 3-degree temperature rise targets do. Lacking the collective will to act in a sustainable manner is no excuse.
  
• Humans have created the looming catastrophe of global warming and we have the capacity and duty to undo the damage and act in a sustainable manner, to cool the earth back to the safe-climate zone.
  

Bubbling our way to the apocalypse

Here's an article published in Rolling Stone in November 2008, which while focused on the permafrost issue, made some comments about the trajectory of the Rudd Labor government on climate. They turned out even worse that expected.

Bubbling our way to the apocalypse

Despite some public stunts that suggest concern about carbon, the Rudd Government's global warming plan just doesn't add up

by David Spratt and Damien Lawson

Kevin Rudd should send his climate change minister, Penny Wong, to Siberia.

Not as punishment, but because our future may depend on Penny Wong and climate policy-makers around the world understanding what’s going on there. For beneath its frozen landscape a catastrophe is lurking, and Siberia may about to become the scene of global retribution for our extravagant consumption of fossil fuels.

"Siberia" has become a metaphor for exile and deprivation. In the nineteenth century more than a million prisoners were deported there. Last century at last 18 million people were banished to the Soviet Union's labour camps for political and other prisoners, known as the Gulag, scattered across north-east Siberia.

What would 3 degrees mean?

David Spratt

The failure of international climate negotiations means that if all countries acted on ALL their commitments, the world would still warm by more than 3 degrees, according to Climate Tracker. 

So what would a world 3 degrees warmer llok and feel like? Scientists draw on a number of disciplines and methods to answer the question, including paleo-climatology (study of past climate history), complex mathematical models of the world's climate system tested and refined against past climate data, observation of current events and specific research testing hypotheses. Mark Lynas surveyed much of this research for his book "Six degrees: our place on a hotter planet" (Harper Collins, 2007). Drawing from his work and other sources, the following is an overview of some of the scientific projections as the world warms. These are not all certain events, but they are what scientific research thinks is likely. A full set of references on pp. 301-327 of "Six Degrees".

Three degrees of warming

Three degrees may be the “tipping point” where global warming could run out of control, leaving us powerless to intervene as planetary temperatures soar. America's most eminent climate scientist, James Hansen says warming has brought us to the "precipice of a great “tipping point”. If we go over the edge, it will be a transition to “a different planet”, an environment far outside the range that has been experienced by humanity. There will be no return within the lifetime of any generation that can be imagined, and the trip will exterminate a large fraction of species on the planet" ["Wild" magazine, April 2007].

Liberals would cut $1.5 billion in climate funding

A detailed statement outlining the savings measures or cuts that would be made by the Coalition has been released by the opposition's finance spokesman Andrew Robb.
Based on the content of the statement it seems the Coalition would cut over $1.5 billion in climate related funding set out in the Budget over the forward estimates (next four years). This includes the $653 million renewable energy and energy efficiency fund announced in the Federal Budget.
In addition they would also reduce funding to the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships Program by $200 million.
Further evidence that the Coalition like Labor don't have a real plan to tackle climate change.

Door knocking in Coburg

Climate Action Moreland and the Climate Action Centre held our second day of door knocking in Coburg today.

Hundreds of residents of the city of Moreland found out about the campaign to Replace Hazelwood with Clean Energy and signed our petition.

Many commited to asking the local Labor candidate where she stood on the Hazelwood election test.

More door knock days are planned for inner city electorates to find our more sign up for email updates and keep an eye on the Replace Hazelwood page of the Climate Action website.

10 lessons for the climate movement

Damien Lawson

[First published for the second Australian climate action summit, Canberra, March 2010]

For the 2009 climate summit, I wrote a short article titled “Looking back - moving forward: ten lessons for the climate movement”. It attempted to articulate some of the challenges and opportunities for the community climate movement after two years of rapid growth in scope and capacity.

A lot has happened since the last summit: the dominance of the debate on the government’s carbon-trading plan, the failed Copenhagen conference, the division over climate in the Liberal Party and the emergence of the climate denier Tony Abbot as leader. In many ways the harsh reality of the terrain in which we are working is even more stark than it was a year ago, and requires us to face up to the enormous challenge we face.

Taking "Replace Hazelwood" to the streets

The Labor member for Northcote, Fiona Richardson, is greeted by members of Darebin Climate Action Now, Fairfield shops, Saturday 24 April 2010.
More on the campaign...
and help door-knock in Moreland

A climate of can-do

by David Spratt

[First published in Earth Song Journal (Perspectives in Ecology, Spirituality and Education), Autumn 2010]

In an Australia Day speech this year, prime minister Rudd evoked the "two great spirits, that of the can-do, that of the fair go, (which) essentially hold together the narrative of our nation" and "this great... ennobling attitude of Australians where we have the sense and the spirit of the fair go etched deeply into the Australian soul".

But are those attitudes simply to be lauded in others when the nationalist "spirit" peaks on ceremonial occasions, or they should they inform our national leadership in facing global warming, the great challenge of our time?

The greens’ proposal for a carbon tax

by David Spratt
[First published for the second Australian Climate Action Summit, 12 March 2010]

On 21 January, The Greens proposed a “levy on polluters” or carbon price/tax to break the Senate deadlock on climate change. The Greens are currently negotiating with the government on the plan.

How the Murdoch press got it wrong on the Himalayan big melt

Published in Crikey, 20 January 2010

by Damien Lawson and David Spratt

Drawing on a January 13 New Scientist story by Fred Pearce reporting on a debate among glaciologists about the IPCC's claim, The Times (UK) and subsequently The Australian and other Murdoch papers have tried to shift from a debate about timing to a questioning of global warming.

A climate con: Analysis of the "Copenhagen Accord"

By David Spratt and Damien Lawson
21 December 2009
Climate Action Centre Briefing Note

''In biblical terms it looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our future and our people … our future is not for sale.'' Ian Fry, Tuvalu negotiator

"This is a declaration that small and poor countries don't matter, that international civil society doesn't matter, and that serious limits on carbon don't matter. The president has wrecked the UN and he's wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it's at the expense of everything progressives have held dear. 189 countries have been left powerless, and the foxes now guard the carbon henhouse without any oversight." Bill McKibben, 350.org

Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!

Thanks to Gristmill for pointing to this amazing advertisment from a 1962 issue of Life Magazine. Humble Oil later merged with Standard to become Exxon.

And it's all true!
Reporting in the journal Nature in September, researchers from British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bristol describe how analysis of millions of NASA satellite measurements from both vast, polar ice sheets shows that the most profound ice loss is a result of glaciers speeding up where they flow into the sea.

The authors conclude that this ‘dynamic thinning’ of glaciers now reaches all latitudes in Greenland, has intensified on key Antarctic coastlines, is penetrating far into the ice sheets’ interior and is spreading as ice shelves thin by ocean-driven melt. Ice shelf collapse has triggered particularly strong thinning that has endured for decades.

For an overview of the Arctic, check out the Arctic Report Card, released earlier this month.

Copenhagen reality check: 25% by 2020 isn't in the ball park

First published in Crikey, 4 November 2009

Climate policy analyst David Spratt writes:

Columnist David Roberts sees the Copenhagen climate change conference negotiating process so far as akin to "an aquarium full of hamsters connected to rudimentary motors. There's a lot of frantic running, a lot of sweat and heat, but in the end, very little light".

The dim light that does exists flickers on a target for Australia and the developed economies of reducing emissions by 2020 to 25% below the level of 1990.

In Bali two years ago, the European Union proposed a framework that included global emissions peaking in 10–15 years and for developed countries to achieve emissions levels 20–40% below 1990 levels by 2020. The United States, supported by Australia and others, strongly opposed this.

In a flood of tears and acrimony, the final Bali session sat through the night to produce a compromise that mandates "deep cuts in global emissions", with footnote references to the 2007 IPCC report which talks about the developed economies needing to reduce emissions 25 to 40% below 1990 levels to have a reasonable chance of holding warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

The Garnaut report quietly dropped the 40% end of the range and mischievously took 25% by 2020 as being a 2-degree target. The Rudd government followed in these footsteps and went for a 25% target, with highly conditional qualifications, in the revised CPRS in May, abetted by the ACTU-led Southern Cross Climate Coalition.

Now 2 degrees isn't the sort of target anyone with grandkids should aspire to. The research tells us that a 2-degree warming will initiate large climate feedbacks on land and in the oceans, on sea-ice and mountain glaciers 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-sheets; sea- level rises; the extinction of an estimated 15 to 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification and widespread drought, desertification and malnutrition in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

You can bet your house that Copenhagen will not conclude with a 25% mandatory target for all the developed economies, but is it what we need to do, or is the whole of the Copenhagen process wrapped in an enormous delusion?

In September, researchers from Oxford and Germany's Potsdam Institute, produced figures on a carbon budget to 2050. In essence, they estimated how much carbon in total can be put in the air to 2050 if the aim is to not exceed 2 degrees.

From there it's not too hard to work out what each country needs to do, and that what's the Potsdam Institute Director Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber did in his recent presentation to the "4 Degrees and Beyond" conference in Oxford.

Assume the present population, and divide it into the total carbon budget and you get a budget per person to 2050. [This is based in the assumption that each citizen of the planet has an equal right to the budget, a proposition disputed by many in the developing world who rightly point to the historic carbon debt on which the developed world built their economies].



Nevertheless, by taking the per capita allocation to 2050 and comparing it to a nation's current annual emissions per person, you get a clear picture of national responsibilities, and that's what Schellnhuber did in a single chart.

Australia, like the USA, is top of the pops for per capita emissions.

If we maintain that rate, our carbon budget to 2050 runs out in five years. Five years!! Or put in another way, as the chart illustrates, Australia and the USA would need to be at zero emissions by 2020. Just follow the black line.

Not 25% by 2020, but 100% by 2020 for Australia. That's the science, unadorned. God forbid the politics.

A 4 degree world

A recent conference in Oxford attended by the best and brightest of the climate science academy examined the prospects and impacts of 4 degrees of global warming. The prognosis is not good. New Scientist have done a good summary with a Google Earth interactive guide (download .kmz file), but if you have a spare hour listen to some of the presentations available on the conference website; Prof. Schellenhuber's and Richard Betts' from the Met Office are a must.

Copenhagen in a Nutshell

This figure from the Washington Post and statement by Jose Barroso sums up what we can expect from the current Copenhagen process.

As Prof. Prof Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change, said this week the chances of the getting a deal that could keep warming below two degrees was "pie in the sky".

Forget about 2050, we're blowing the carbon budget right now

by David Spratt

Sick of hearing about greenhouse emission reduction targets for 2020 or 2030 or 2050? Now there's a new way to think about what we need to do in Australia, and its a million miles from the Canberra debate: The carbon budget for Australians to 2050 for a 2-degree target runs out in five and a bit years!

Focusing on targets decades ahead has a bad side to it, because it transfers responsibility for action to the future, rather than the here and now. Perhaps that's why the 10:10 campaign in the UK has picked up such a groundswell of support so quickly, because its action time horizon is the next year.

As the world head towards COP15 in Copenhagen this December, the question about how far / how fast emissions need to be reduced is always lurking. The mainstream public debate is still focused on the Kyoto Annex 1 (advanced industrial economies) reducing emissions by 25-40% compared to a 1990 baseline by 2020. But that is the wrong target and the Australian governments proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme won't reduce Australia's actual emissions below the 1990 level for another quarter of a century.

And there are some startling new figures about what we need to do, right now. Earlier this year this blog looked at two new research papers published this week in Nature on emissions targets.

One paper looked at how much carbon "budget" was left to 2050 to keep warming to 2 degrees. Now 2 degrees is not a good idea, but the results were sharp. They found that almost a third of that budget had been used in the first 8 years! From that work, a number of conclusions can be drawn:

• 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 in would take a miracle for COP15 in Copenhagen to produce a result that would even stabilise global emissions at their current level by 2020, in which case COP15 will blow the carbon budget to 2050 for 2 degrees in less than 20 year from now.

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.

Now there's an even more compelling way to look at the issue, thanks to Potsdam Institute Director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber in The Guardian of 10 September: Developed countries are 'carbon insolvent'.

Applying his logic to Australia...

1. The total carbon budget 2050 to have a 2-in-3 chance staying below a 2-degree temperature increase is 750 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2).
2. If you take the world population now at 6.9 billion people (and assume no population increase!) and...
3. Then assume that the world's population has an equal right to emit carbon (a starting point which ignores historic carbon debt and responsibility), then...
4. The carbon budget per person to 2050 is 110 tonnes CO2 (750 divided by 6.9). Of course if you allow for increasing population (estimated at 9 billion by 2050), that figure is lower.
5. We know that Australia emissions today are 20.58 tonnes CO2 per person per year, the world's highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions from energy use.
6. Divide that budget of 110 tonnes by the yearly figure of 20.58 and the result is that:
7. The carbon budget for Australians to 2050 for a 2-degree target runs out in 5 and a bit years!

Or do we reckon that we have some inherent right to pour more CO2 into the air that the billions in the developing world who lack the infrastructure and standard of living that our historically high emissions have bought us?

SEE also discussion in Sydney Morning Herald: Lost opportunities from the crisis.

Punting on coal is a loser, tell the Government

First published in The Age, 10 September 2009

Everyone else can see the folly of propping up polluting industries.

THERE'S an irony in the rushed construction of a new security fence around the Hazelwood power station, in anticipation of a community protest this weekend.

The Government, it seems, is more in interested in protecting Hazelwood from protesters, than protecting our climate from Hazelwood.

Victoria has been shamed as the least climate-friendly state, running three of Australia's four dirtiest power stations. And Hazelwood is one of the dirtiest in the developed world, scheduled to close this year but in 2005 given a lifeline by the State Government to 2031.

The timing is significant, because it reflects the climate policy strategy of the major parties: hang on with dirty coal till 2030-35, and hope that by then carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will work. For now, pour money into CCS research, but stall on serious emission-reduction strategies.

This is reflected in the proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme. Treasury modelling for the defeated legislation shows that Australia's actual emissions don't drop below the 1990 baseline until 2035, when it assumes CCS will be commercially viable. Meanwhile, the ''decrease'' in emissions is engineered by buying carbon credits at the lowest price, likely from Papua New Guinea and Indonesian forest offset schemes, which are beginning to look like scams in the making.

Another indication of the punt on coal is the Federal Government's expansion of Australia's coal export capacity. The two infrastructure projects announced in 2008 will alone result in destination nation emissions 17 per cent greater than Australia's total emissions.

If you are going to bet your house on a horse, you need to be assured that it is going to hit the winning post first. But already CCS is stumbling, and the 2030 timeframe is being pushed further into the future.

Recent analysis from a team at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, whose work was influential in the emissions reduction work published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is startling. Assuming a global warming target of two degrees - now far too high according to IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri - they find that the carbon budget from 2000 to 2050 has already been one-third consumed. If global emissions can be cut 2 per cent a year in Copenhagen, which is highly unlikely, the carbon budget to 2050 will run out by 2030. If emissions keep growing at the present rate, the carbon emissions budget for the two degrees target will run out in 2021!

The increasingly grim observations of global warming impacts demand that we move to a zero-emissions energy system quickly. CCS simply cannot deliver such an outcome in the relevant time-frame, if it is ever proven to work at scale. Recently the British Government admitted that proposals to require existing power plants to fit CCS technology would force their closure on cost grounds.

Retrofitting current generators isn't cost-effective, so CCS depends on building a whole new array of coal-fired power stations, at which point our carbon budget will already be in planet-threatening deficit. Waiting to see if CCS is technologically viable at scale, let alone cost-competitive in two or three decades time, defies the principles of sensible risk management.

It just doesn't add up. A recent Harvard University study finds that electricity costs could double for first-generation CCS plants. At the same time, innovation continues to lower the cost of renewable energy at an estimated 10 per cent a decade, and increasing scale of renewable plants is also moving that cost curve down.

China says it is more interested in spending resources on energy efficiency and building renewable energy capacity than adding CCS to coal power stations.

It plans a national feed-in tariff for large-scale solar plants by the end of 2009, paying up to half of the price of solar power systems of more than 500 megawatts, with support rising to 70 per cent in remote regions. ''The idea that carbon capture has to happen in China is a Western idea,'' says Stanford University researcher Richard Morse.

Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, now his state's trade commissioner in Los Angeles, says time is running out for coal: ''The traditional markets for its product will start slowly shutting down as green energy becomes more price-competitive and public policy continues to demand greener outcomes.'' The result in the US is that plans for 100 coal-fired power plants have been stopped in the past 18 months.

The writing is on the wall. Robin Batterham of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences says that if within three years from now ''we don't see some of these large-scale plants actually happening, then people are going to say, 'This is not a real alternative'.'' Large-scale CCS plants in three years is a pipe dream, a bet on a horse that isn't going to make it to the starting gate.

Clean coal has become a cargo cult for government and the coal industry, but what may descend from the skies is less likely to be salvation than the recognition that the dirty, big cloud overhead is killing our planet's wonderful diversity of life and habitat.

That fence around Hazelwood is locking in a disaster, but it will not keep its critics at bay.

David Spratt is the co-author of Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action, shortlisted for the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

The CPRS aftermath

CPRS emissions will be higher than baseline till 2035

Since the CPRS was defeated in the Senate last week, there has been a vigorous debate amongst activists and on a number of grassroots climate e-lists about this event, what it means, whether the decision of the climate action movement to oppose the CPRS as presented was wise, whether we will now get an "even worse" scheme with Liberal support, and whether a better scheme was possible with Green-Labor negotiations.

[On the last point, Senator Milne's office has indicated that the government has been totally unwilling, on numerous occasions, to seriously discuss the Greens' proposals to improve the CPRS.]

So would the CPRS, even in its current appalling form, be something we should support because at least in moves Australia "in the right direction" (one of ACF's Don Henry's favourite phrases) and start to reduce emissions?

The evidence is clearly to the contrary. The attached chart is drawn from the published summary of Treasury modelling for the CPRS (page 26). I have added the red line which is the 1990 level of Australian emissions (also roughly 2000 level due to drop in land clearing emissions).



The green line is the theoretical drop in Australian emissions, but when we look at the purchase of (cheap, scam) permits from overseas (light blue), we see that actual emissions (mid-blue) are above the 1990 baseline till after 2035!!! And the government has said that if the target is increased to 15 or 25%, then the number of permits imported will be increased, even to the point of the government buying them out of the federal budget to protect the big polluters (in addition to the windfall profits those big polluters are currently gaining from the allocation of free permits).So almost 30 years from now under the CPRS, emissions will be as high as the 1990 baseline!!!!

And would a "slightly better" CPRS means anything other than purchasing even more credits from rainforests not chopped down or some other equally dubious "emissions reduction" scam?

Compare this outcome to the work by Malte Meinshausen from Potsdam Institute for limiting warming to 2C (yes, 2C is a stupid target because it means no Arctic sea-ice, probably Greenland and Himalayas past their tipping points, a third of the Amazon gone, multi-metre sea-levels rises, a global water and food crisis, etc etc) published as: Meinshausen et al. "Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2C" in Nature 458:1158-62. In a supplementary Q&A, he says:

Having a good chance of staying below 2C requires limiting our overall CO2 emissions. Our study indicates that we have an emission budget of a trillion tonnes CO2 during the first 50 years of this century. Of that budget, we already used up a third in the first nine years (234 GtCO2 up to 2006 and more than 36 GtCO2/yr since then). At present rates of emissions, we will use up the remaining two-thirds in another 20 years, by around 2030. We will consume this 2000 to 2050 budget even earlier, if emissions continue to increase according to the "business-as-usual" scenarios.

In that context, the CPRS locks in an emissions trajectory for Australia that ensures by 2030 emissions as high as they are today, when even for a too-high target of 2C they need to be zero!

We are all frustrated, I suspect because the debate in Australia and elsewhere is deeply delusional and getting worse. As the evidence becomes more overwhelming that we are heading for a climate apocalypse if we go on as we are for even another 5 years, the level of cognitive dissonance increases in proportion. Sometimes it drives us crazy too.

The political elite hang even more neurotically to the view that their current policies (clean coal, CPRS, appease the big polluters etc) can solve the problem when in fact they ensure catastrophic failure. They will cling even more stubbornly to these delusions because the other choice -- actually solving the problem -- frightens the crap out of them because it requires a great over-turning of political and economic priorities, transformative leadership, and the re-allocation on at least 5% of global GDP (IMHO, perhaps much more) for decades.

That is the message that we have to hammer. Incremental improvements and "broad but shallow" advocacy that has dominated the climate scene for the past 10 years will not get us there. Yes, we have to drop an "awe and thunder" climate bomb on the political elite (as we tried to do with Climate Code Red) and talk about what really needs to be done and how to get here.The climate movement can't expect politicians and 'the system' in general to break out of failure-inducing incrementalism for as long as we in the movement are locked into the same model. The only way we can break out is to commit to pursuing goals that would actually produce a safe climate in time and then we work like crazy to figure out ways to make these goals bite politically. We can only find these solutions by doggedly and creatively pursuing non-watered down goals.

Part of what we must do is launch psychological warfare on the power elite (because it is also an illusion that they will respond to well-considered rational argument, as we have seen), make in personal and tell them their grandkids and great grandkids will (metaphorically) burn in a climate hell, that even bags of money won't buy oneself a safe place to hide in a world at 3 or 4 or 5 degrees, that now is the hour to make moral choices, and that not to do so will condemn the rest of their careers to irrelevancy and their souls to pergatory.

Of course that is not all we need to do, but it is important. Copenhagen will be awful and we must plan through (and not just up to) COP15 and into next year. We have a chance in the election lead-up to hit some MPs and candidates hard with the full message, to cause sitting members real political pain and get commitments that are less delusionary that the present policy debate. That means carefully selecting the target seats and candidates, coordinating our actions and making sure there is real capacity to make it happen, re-allocating and raising funds to put organisers on the ground in key areas. To some extent, the larger eNGOs have a choice as to whether they will allocate their resources to campaigns and actions that will badge and promote their brands, or whether resources (and mailing lists in particular electorates, etc etc) will be pooled and shared so there is real and effective local organisation and capacity.

The NGOs gathered around the Southern Cross Climate Coalition (ACF, ACOSS, ACTU and Climate Institute) will undoubtedly run cover for Labor. The CI CEO John Connor has said that CI's role is to act as a "minesweeper" (i.e. clearing obstacles) for Labor, and when you put CI in a coalition with Labor luminaries such as the ACTU's Sharon Burrows and ACOSS CEO Clare Martin (former Labour chief minister in the NT) you can only expect pro-Labor twaddle. How ACF will survive being squeezed again by this mob of Labor heavy hitters (as they were on the CPRS, and it cost them very dearly) is another issue.

But we can be certain that cheer-leading for Labor won't help. Adrian Whitehead says politicians generally don't listen until you inflict real political pain on them first. He's basically right, and election year gives us that opportunity. To me, that's more important than tearing our hair out over a CPRS than locks in utter failure.

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: