How climate disruption turns strategic priorities upside down

 by Ian Dunlop and David Spratt, first published at Pearls and Irritations

Second of a two-part series.

The first article in this series highlighted the risks of accelerating climate change, and the existential threat humanity now faces because of global leaders’ collective failure to take timely action, culminating in the COP28 meeting in Dubai not acting decisively to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.

The bottom line is that a 1.5°C average global surface temperature increase will be approached this year and, without radically accelerated action, the world is headed toward a catastrophic 3°C of warming, bringing the curtains down on contemporary civilisation.

In short, the Paris Agreement is dead and the imperative for emergency action has never been greater. This demands a fundamental change to Australia’s strategic priorities.

The stark choice facing climate conference: A livable climate or more oil and gas?

 by David Spratt, first published at The Bulletin

Guardian story, 3 December 2023

Looking for ideas for a new streaming video series on climate politics? Try this:

Over three decades, global emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases increase by half, despite repeated promises by nations to cut them. Now it is crunch time, with petrostates determined to increase their oil and gas production while poor and vulnerable nations say that, for their peoples, such a course will mean the end of life as they have known it. In 2023, the stage is set for a clash over the human future.

Small island states are aghast that dirty deals result in a petrostate winning the presidency for an annual global climate policymaking get-together, amid deepening fears of another year of political failure and as the clock ticks down. And then, just days before the conference is to start, leaked documents show that the host state—the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf—has used its position to push new oil trade deals with senior government officials and business leaders from around the world. There is uproar. Will the conference president, who is also the chief executive officer of the UAE’s state-owned oil company, confront the media and declare it is all “fake news”? He does, with a straight face, and the show goes on, with crumbling credibility.

COP-out: Why the petrostate-hosted climate talkfest will fail on key emissions-reduction task

by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, first published at Pearls and Irritations

New York Times story on extreme heat in COP host nation

After a succession of record-breaking months of unprecedented heat including 1.8°C for September, global warming in 2023 as a whole will likely tip 1.5°C, with 2024 even hotter as the effect of the building El Nino is felt more fully. Already hundreds of thousands have died and millions displaced, primarily in countries least responsible for climate change. The annual economic cost globally is in the hundreds of billions.

So what will the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), starting 30 November in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), say about this? And in particular what will Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the UAE state oil company ADNOC, who will preside over the international negotiations, say?

Climate activists deserve our support, say 70 Australian and international researchers in public statement

 

Seventy scholars from 16 countries have signed a public letter in support of climate activists taking non-violent direct action and speaking out about the potentially (and increasingly likely) civilisation-ending risk of accelerating climate disruption.

Discussing the open letter, Professor Colin Butler, of the Australia National University, explains that "Peril lies in understating the risk to global civilisation from unabated climate change (and other aspects of limits to growth); I call on my colleagues to show leadership and courage." 

Focusing on the unfair treatment of climate activists, Professor in Science Education, Dr Caroline Smith, from the University of Tasmania said: "Shooting the messengers is a disgraceful state of affairs. We send congratulations and strength to those courageous scientists who continue to speak out for all our futures." 

One swallow doesn’t make a Spring, so do a few super-warm months mean global warming has really hit 1.5°C?

by David Spratt

One swallow doesn’t make a Spring. And a week, a month, or even a year of global warming above 1.5°C does not make that the long-term trend.

In this field, a trend is an average over a longer term, by scientific convention 30 years, though sometimes shorter periods may be used.  From this point of view, a trend can’t be determined till way after the event when the running averages can be calculated. It’s similar for tipping points — you generally can’t say they have been breached till you have the observational evidence some time after the event — and then it is too late.

So a more pertinent question is this: when we look back in five, ten, fifteen years, is it likely that the global warming trend during 2023 and 2024 will be seen to have been 1.5°C or above?

Did Penny Wong really just suggest China is an ‘existential’ threat?

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Poster and cover of Cold War comic book, 1947

The Australian Government has a big problem with its security narrative. Preparing for a putative war with China is the nation’s top security priority, while the government’s knowledge of the growing existential threat of climate disruption and their security consequences remains a closely-guarded secret.

It is embarrassing for the government that it will not share in any meaningful way the assessment of climate–security risks delivered to the Prime Minister’s Office last November by the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), even in a declassified version. As our allies have done. Nor has it outlined any substantial policy responses.

The ONI report, if it ever sees the light of day, will likely portray climate disruption as the greatest threat to Australia, the region and its peoples, both in terms of likelihood and impact.

So how can the government square the ledger? Elevate China to become an existential threat, too? Preposterous as that may seem, this appears to be the purpose of Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s speech  to the UN General Assembly in New York on 23 September. 

Decarbonising? Only just.

By David Spratt

The scientific imperatives are overwhelming. The planet has just experienced its first month with warming more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial temperature zone, and the hottest winter on record in Australia. 

Extraordinary events with the North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures and with Antarctic sea-ice are way outside scientific projections and expectations. The Canadian bushfires are blowing away all records.  And on it goes, as Joelle Gergis describes in her recent essay for The Monthly. 

Policymakers tell us we are on the path to decarbonising the energy sector and the economy, but the reality is different from those carefully-manicured expectations. Take one example. Governments, including that of the USA, will make all sorts of pledges and noises about being committed to net zero emissions by 2050. Or more accurately, as Prof.Kevin Anderson puts it, “not zero”.

Then have a look at this chart from the US Energy Information Administration on projected energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to 2050 for the USA.  The central, or reference case, is for emissions to have fallen just 20% over the next 30 years! No wonder, when the US is pumping oil faster than ever.

Click on chart for higher-resolution image

Betting against worst-case climate scenarios is risky business

Illustration by Erik English

As the world is hit my mind-boggling, even-more-extreme climate events, records are busted and some events are way beyond scientific expectations, it’s time to ask the question: "Are the worst-case scenarios coming true too often, and what does that for the way we approach climate risks in policy making?"

And this is relevant to the way the Australian government constructs its emission-reduction targets, based on some very risky analysis.

The IPCC and the climate-economy models it uses to produce carbon budgets and emission scenarios focus on the probabilities, not the possibilities. Is this a fatal mistake? 

Thinking in boxes, Australian Government's Intergenerational Report misleads and fails to connect the climate dots

by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, first published at Pearls & Irritations

The Australian Government’s public analysis of climate risk, our greatest threat, is dangerously misleading. The Intergenerational Report 2023 (IGR) is a prime example. By dumbing down the implications of climate change with simplified economic models, the IGR and similar reports are institutionalising the global failure to face climate reality.

The US inquiry into the 9/11 World Trade Centre attack in New York concluded that the greatest government shortcoming was the intelligence agencies’ failure to “connect the dots”. The Brookings Institute explains that “thinking in silos” meant that “pieces of the puzzle were to be found in many corners of the US government but no one connected the dots well enough or in a timely enough manner to predict with sufficient accuracy the attack that came”.

Australia’s greatest security threat is a Canberra secret

by David Spratt, first published at The Canberra Times and Newcastle Herald

It's a no-brainer: China is the greatest threat to Australians' future.

The government and the opposition and the Sinophobic commentators tell us so. Often. 

Then there is AUKUS, the Quad, the endless regional hand-shaking, more joint military exercises, nuclear-powered submarines and upgraded US bases in Australia's north.

But there is a much greater security threat that the government seems determined to keep secret.

The World Economic Forum each year surveys public and private sector global leaders on the biggest risk the world faces and publishes the results. Their 2023 survey finds that the biggest three risks in the  decade from now were all climate-related, whilst "geo-economic confrontation" (read China) came in ninth.

Are we failing to see the wood for the trees on climate risks?

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls and Irritations

Extreme climate impacts are exploding in this year’s Northern Hemisphere summer. We urgently need to understand how climate disruption will affect Australians: their safety and well-being in the face of ever-more-extreme climate events, the viability of public and private infrastructure, communications and logistical systems, challenges to food security, and much more.

The Australian Government is spending $28 million to assess climate risks to the nation’s future. But the National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) initiated by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water is poorly conceived, won’t do the job and should not proceed in its present form.

It proscribes mitigation (emissions reduction) options and says the focus is on adaptation and resilience responses only. A bit like telling the frog it can do what it likes as it sits in a pan of slowly heating water, as long as it does not jump out to save itself.

A recent report for the UK government by Chatham House on climate risks concluded that before 2050 it is likely that impacts will “become so severe they go beyond the limits of what nations can adapt to”. Which may leave the NCRA’s adaptation-only mandate dangerously detached from reality.

The Australian Government refuses to say what it knows about climate-security threats, so we gave policymakers a helping hand

By David Spratt

Last year the Australian Government asked the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) to assess climate-related security risks. Due to time constraints, ONI looked at the global and regional picture, but not the domestic one, and their report was given to the government last November.  

Eight months later, the Prime Minsters’ Office has decreed that the report is not to be released, even in a declassified form. This is contrary to the practice of the government that the prime minister likes to call our best ally, which regularly releases climate and security assessments, such as Climate Change and International Responses Increasing Challenges to US National Security Through 2040. Likewise, the Pacific Islands Forum has just published a Pacific Climate Security Assessment Guide.

What scientists say...

Scientists in their own words provide a compelling way to communicate often-complex ideas. So we have put together a small collection of useful quotes, with more to come.

You can find them at the Links & Info tab on the navigation bar. Here is a selection.

Societal collapse

Prof. HANS JOACHIM SCHELLNHUBER, August 2018
"Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.”
      Foreword to What Lies Beneath
      breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath

Dr JOELLE GERGIS
"It’s extraordinary to realise that we are witnessing the great unravelling; the beginning of the end of things. I honestly never thought I’d live to see the start of what sometimes feels like the apocalypse. The Earth is really struggling to maintain its equilibrium. It’s possible that we are now seeing a cascade of tipping points lurching into action as the momentum of instability takes hold and things start to come apart.”
      Living with extremity as the new normal     
      griffithreview.com/articles/elemental-summer-a-season-of-chang

Three climate interventions: Reduce, remove, repair

Courtesy Climate Crisis Advisory Group

In September 2022, Stockholm University’s David Armstrong McKay and his colleagues concluded that even global warming of 1-degree Celsius risks triggering some tipping points, just one data point in an alarming mountain of research on tipping points presented in the last year and a half. Clearly, even the current level of warming of around 1.2°C is unacceptably dangerous.

To protect small-island states, the Great Barrier Reef, Antarctica, Greenland, the Amazon — indeed to provide protection for the many places and people we care about — requires returning to a climate similar to the relatively stable Holocene conditions of the last 9000 years and fixed human settlement, during which time carbon dioxide (CO2) levels did not exceed 280 parts per million (ppm) CO2. it also requires preventing a cascade of tipping points in the meanwhile.

Dramatic Arctic sea-ice news should not be a shock: We were warned.

by David Spratt

It's almost unthinkable. The Arctic Ocean blue all over in summer, with none of the eight million square kilometres of sea-ice — a thin frozen white crust floating on the ocean surface — that covered it in summer just 40 years ago.

No wonder it made headlines this month when researchers found, as reported by The Washington Post, that "a summer in which the Arctic Ocean features almost entirely open water could be coming even sooner than expected and may become a regular event within most of our lifetimes".

The research is "Observationally-constrained projections of an ice-free Arctic even under a low emission scenario", and was published in Nature on 6 June 2023.   It projected "an ice-free Arctic in September under all [emission] scenarios considered", including low greenhouse gas emission scenarios. In other words, even if  emissions are sharply reduced, the Arctic will be ice-free at the end of the northern summer in September in coming decades.

James Hansen’s new climate bomb: Are today’s greenhouse gas levels enough to raise sea levels by 60+ metres?

By David Spratt

Prof. James Hansen is sometimes affectionately referred to as the ”godfather” of modern climate science, so when he drops a bomb, there is bound to be shock and awe.  

And that’s what has happened with the recent release by Hansen and his colleagues of a draft of a new paper which finds that the climate is much more sensitive to increases in greenhouse gas that generally thought. This new analysis means that the current level of greenhouse gases, if maintained, would be enough in the longer term to melt all ice sheets and push up sea-levels by more than 60 metres.

Why markets fail on fossil fuel pollution, heralding an era of climate disruption

For more than 30 years, policy-makers have believed, and relied on, market mechanisms to respond to rapidly rising fossil fuel emissions and a heating planet. They have failed, and an era of climate disruption is now upon us. This post is an extract on "Markets and disruption" from a recent article, "Reclaiming 'Climate emergency'", published (in English) in a special issue on emergencies of the Slovenian journal Filozofski vestnik in March 2023.

by David Spratt

Markets crave stability and fear disruption. Yet the world is entering an era of instability and uncertainty driven in part by climate-related financial risks, preventing the market generation of reliable prices. Energy markets provide just one example. 

In 2011, Paul Gilding concluded that it was an illusion to think the contradictions can be resolved within the current economic frame and that disruption and chaos was now inevitable as system failure occurs. Five years earlier, Nicholas Stern had said that "paths requiring very rapid emissions cuts are unlikely to be economically viable" and disruptive because “it is difficult to secure emission cuts faster than about 1% per year except in instances of recession.”

Are climate–security risks too hot to handle for the Albanese government?

Heat wave in Karachi, Pakistan, June 29, 2015.  Credit:Asim Afeez/Bloomberg

by David Spratt 

[An abridged version of this article was first published by Pearls&Irritations]

The Australian government is keen to talk about defence, big submarines, China and national security. And renewable energy, big batteries, electric cars and big hydrogen. But put the two together — security and climate — and an odd thing happens. When it comes to the biggest threat to the nation, that of climate-related risks to human and regional security, there is a big black hole in the government’s discourse.  

When a declassified version of the Defence Security Review (DSR) was released on 24 April, there was a glaring omission. A short chapter on climate change focussed exclusively on domestic climate risks, specifically emergency responses to climate-warming-enhanced extreme events such as bushfires and floods, and why the defence forces should not be amongst the first responders.

[Articulating &] Reclaiming the Climate Emergency

 

Watch the discussion with Nick Breeze on ClimateGenn

by David Spratt

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Nick Breeze for his excellent ClimateGenn video podcasts. The subject, loosely, was my recent article, "Reclaiming 'climate emergency'", published (in English) in the Slovenian journal, Filozofski vestnik.

We discussed the origins of "climate emergency", the treatment of the term since then, and what next? How do we reclaim and respond appropriately in a real climate emergency, much like the one we are irrefutably in?

Also included, and so relevant today on the trajectory of the climate system, is a segment of an interview Nick recorded with Professor James Hansen, recorded in Vienna at the European Geophysical Union Conference in 2012. It highlights how perilous the lack of action over the last decade has really been.

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The case for climate cooling, and some eye-watering charts

 

by David Spratt

Recently I had the opportunity to do one of the MEERTALKS, organised  by Mirrors for Earth's Energy Rebalancing (MEER), a network of researchers and advocates established by Ye Tao which focusses on mirror-based cooling solutions. The topic was the recent Breakthrough paper Faster, higher hotter on some takeaways from climate research in 2022. But equally it could have been called "The case for cooling".

A video of the event is now available. 

In the talk I also included some slides not in the original paper, and each is startling in its own way.