“Critical decade” or “lost decade”? (1) The conservative tide

Political parties which vacillate between denial and delay on climate action are set to dominate Australian politics for the remainder of this decade, so how should we respond?

by David Spratt | First in a series | Part two | Part three

Published at ReNewEconomy on 8 April 2013 

The global average temperature is now higher than
at any time during the Holocene, the period of
human civilisation

Australian Climate Commission reports in recent months (here and here) emphasise that this is “the critical decade”. Yet the bookies say there is an 85-90% probability that the Gillard Labor government will lose this year’s federal election – and by a big margin – heralding an era of conservative domination of Australian politics at national and State levels.

Just before Easter, ALP stalwart and former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty wrote that: "The politics of the next few months is no longer about the result of the next election" (emphasis added). Everybody knows Labor is lost, baring Kevin Rudd rising from the dead and at least giving the conservatives a shake.

Doubling down on our Faustian bargain

Intro note: NASA's James Hansen and colleagues Pushker Kharecha and Makiko Sato have a new paper, "Climate forcing growth rates: doubling down on our Faustian bargain," in the current issue of Environmental Research Letters. They have also summarised their findings in an overview out today, and reproduced below. Main points include:

• Associated with human greenhouse gas production is the release of fine particle known as aerosols which have a temporary cooling effect (they last in the atmosphere less than a week).
• Aerosol cooling probably reduced global warming "by about half over the past century". In the paper Hansen et al estimate the temporary cooling "aerosol forcing -1.6 ± 0.3 watts per sq. m.". This is around 1.2 degrees Celsius. That is, without the aerosols associated with burning fossil fuels, the planetary would be more than a degree warmer!
• The amount is uncertain because global aerosols and their effect on clouds are not measured accurately. Overcoming this gap in knowledge is urgent.
• To prevent catastrophic global warming human greenhouse gas emission must cease, but this will also end the aerosol cooling effect and the full heating effect of our "Faustian bargain" will be revealed.

Ending the stupid technology innovation vs. deployment fight once and for all

By David Roberts, via Grist  

Human beings are pretty damn clever. We have adapted and invented our way out of some extremely grim situations. And we can do the same in the face of climate change! The ideas and innovations necessary to ensure our security, and the security of future generations, are within our power. What’s needed is a smooth, effective conveyor belt to carry those ideas and innovations from our heads, into the world, and up to sufficient scale.

Unfortunately, as things now stand, that conveyor belt is rusty and full of gaps. Clever ideas get stuck in our heads, or fail to make it across the “valley of death” between labs and markets, or fail to take hold and grow in those markets. We call these gaps “market failures,” but that is a misleadingly passive construction. The conveyor belt is not something that exists in Platonic market space, a priori, that we merely need to uncover. It is something we must build, consciously, using markets among other tools.

Putting carbon back into the ground – the way nature does it

by Adam D. Sacks

Global climate change and land degradation have to be put on a war footing internationally - meaning that all nations need to pull together and treat this threat as we would a war. . . . Only through uniting and diverting all the resources required to deal with climate change and land degradation can we avert unimaginable tragedy. We have all the money we need.  All we cannot buy is time. – Allan Savory

I've been a climate activist since the millennium turned, twelve long years ago.  Like so many others I've rallied, marched, petitioned, organized, lectured, blogged, fumed, despaired, studied, argued and hoped.  Now, sadly, it seems that we have to come to terms with a painful reality: Our fight against global warming has not worked. 

Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate

By Joe Romm, via Climate Progress

The two greatest myths about global warming communications are
1) constant repetition of doomsday messages has been a major, ongoing strategy and
2) that strategy doesn’t work and indeed is actually counterproductive!

These myths are so deeply ingrained in the environmental and progressive political community that when we finally had a serious shot at a climate bill, the powers that be — led by team Obama! — decided not to focus on the threat posed by climate change in any serious fashion in their $200 million communications effort (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“).

New study reveals Labor will hand $2.3–5.4 billion profit bonanza to Australia's dirtiest power stations from carbon price compensation

by David Spratt

The warnings were clear and now its happened: bending over backwards with carbon tax compensation to appease Australia's dirtiest electricity generators, the Gillard government has handed big coal billions in windfall profits, whilst consumers are effectively paying twice for the carbon price.

Anybody with any sense — from Professor Ross Garnaut to The Greens — warned two years ago that Labor's carbon tax package was far too generous in compensating Australia's dirtiest, brown-coal-fired power stations in Victoria and that, rather than providing reasons for them to be phased out, the package would perversely provides financial incentives to keep generating dirty power even longer.

And now the damning evidence is in.

To fear or not to fear...

.. as Australia’s contribution to climate change on track to double in next decade or so thanks to fossil fuel exports

Note: As a followup to the post of my contribution to this year's Melbourne Sustainability Festival Great Debate, here is the contribution by Guy Pearse. – David

by Guy Pearse

OK, some personal questions to start… Who’s got a BMI of over 30? What about a tattoo completely covering just one arm – come on I know you’re out there... People are a bit shy... Let’s try an easier one… Who’s got a Facebook account, or has tweeted or felt the need to follow someone who does. Congratulations – you’re part of rapid social change. Not so long ago, very few of us would have answered ‘yes’ to any of those questions. Now, maybe you signed up to Facebook hoping to stalk your high school sweetheart; or got that tattoo fearing you might not fit in without it at the nursing home later in life. But, I’m guessing fear and optimism played little role. Yet, here we are debating which is the stronger driver of rapid social change.

Fear, optimism and activism: What drives change?

It's  a fair bet that my Brightsiding series in 2012 was responsible for the topic at this year's Melbourne Sustainability Festival Great Debate held last Friday: "Fear is stronger than optimism in creating rapid social change".
      So six of us lined up, not in teams, but with clear instructions to take one side or the other and not fence-sit (more of this later). The participants were Bob Brown, Jon Dee, Fiona Sharkie, David Spratt, Guy Pearse and Tanya Ha, and the debate host was ABC TV's Bernie Hobbs.
      Given the brightsiding that still dominates the poor performance of the government and many of the big environment groups on climate action, I felt obliged to bend the stick in the opposite direction, even though the question was poorly framed. Ten minutes is hardly time to canvas the meaning of life, so this was my contribution:

Effective climate communication: 140 characters at a time

Jeff Nesbitt (@jeffnesbit), the Executive Director of Climate Nexus, shows how powerful a tool Twitter can be in communicating the global warming story.
     Here's how it started. Nesbitt had tweeted:

Record snow in a warming world? The climate science is clear.bit.ly/WXOLUB

Nesbitt was challenged by a leading Christian pastor and popular southern California radio talk show, David Housholder (@LibertyHous):

@jeffnesbit Dude. Weather is complex. Climate has never been stable. Can you name a more random set of data? davidhousholder.com

Do we need a Plan B for the fossil fuel industry?

by Graeme Taylor

Is their any future for the oil and coal industries without doing what they do now: burning the stuff? In Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, Bill McKibben argues that:

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Renewable energy now cheaper than new fossil fuels in Australia

Note: This wonderful story from Bloomberg New Energy Finance today can be summed up in it final para: “New wind is cheaper than building new coal and gas, but cannot compete with old assets that have already been paid off... For that reason policy support is still needed to put megawatts in the ground today and build up the skills and experience to de-carbonise the energy system in the long-term.”
As Giles Parkinson notes today in RenewEconomy: "The analysis by BNEF is significant. Australia relies more on coal than nearly any other industrialised country, but it also has some of the world’s best renewables resources, which it has been slow to exploit. But is this likely to prompt a review of the Coalition’s energy policies – which are based on the premise that renewable energy is expensive and unreliable? Don’t bet on it."

Australia wind beats new coal in the world’s second-largest coal exporter

[Bloomberg, 7 February 2013]: Sydney, 7 February 2013 – Unsubsidised renewable energy is now cheaper than electricity from new-build coal- and gas-fired power stations in Australia, according to new analysis from research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance. 



Dependence on coal a bad strategy with shift to renewables unstoppable

By Richard Denniss, via The Conversation

Last week, Greenpeace released a report calling for a halt to Australia’s burgeoning coal exports and pointing to the catastrophic climate impacts they would cause.
      In response, Mitch Hooke, chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia, took a standard industry line: “the proposal to stop Australian coal exports won’t stop global coal use – it will just send Australian jobs offshore and deprive state and federal governments of billions in revenue”.
     Arguments that the strength of the Australian economy is heavily dependent on digging up and shipping out as much coal as possible, as quickly as possible, are common. Of course, they also imply that economic arguments trump any concerns about contributions to climate change.

Australia’s sea-level risk assessment out of date as US authorities say possible 2-metre rise by 2100

by David Spratt

In assessing risks, it’s pretty basic that you assess the full range of possible future events, and the costs and benefits associated with each outcome. The more extreme outcomes at the edges of the range of possibilities may be considered less likely, but are often associated with very high costs and – in the case of climate change – catastrophic outcomes.
    On rising sea levels and coastal inundation due to global warming, that’s precisely what the Australian government is NOT doing.  While the science has for years projected sea-level rises in the range of 0.8 to 2 metres by 2100, the Australian government plods along spending tens of millions of dollars on consultants and adaptation research on the assumption that the rise will not exceed 1.1. metres.

Rebuilding optimism of will for effective climate activism

Many climate activists have experienced depression, exhaustion, and alienation as the time-frame for acting to avoid climate disruption shrinks. So whilst pessimism of the intellect is growing sharper, how do we “right the balance” and grow optimism of the will?

By Trent Hawkins

Che Guevara said that “the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love”. But not just any love, the love of humanity that transcends the day to day love of individuals (our family for example)  In a way its a shame that the actual content of this paragraph from Che has been bastardised to be about some nebulous love that drives revolutionaries. Instead what Che was talking about was a very real dilemma. How to keep ourselves motivated, heading towards the goal, when we have so little time for our real “loved ones”, so little time for ourselves, and to develop our personal lives.

Connecting the dots to local climate impacts is a key to community engagement

by Graeme Taylor

Notwithstanding Australia’s record-smashing heatwave, the impacts of climate change are often perceived to be distant in time and space.
     Most Australians do not yet understand the scale and urgency of what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls the climate emergency—the most serious threat facing humanity. The reasons are many, including the poor performance of much of the media, and the complacency of political and business leaders. The most broadly disseminated view is that climate change is a distant and very long-term problem; an international problem (and therefore too big and complex for you or me to influence); and something that can and will be eventually managed with adaptation and new technologies.

The Australian admits it misinterpreted research on sea level rise linked to climate change

• The Australia runs false story about sea-level rises
• Forced to apologise, story is deleted from The Australian's website
• It fits a long-term pattern of deceit and denial by Murdoch media on climate

 by Graham Readfearn

A few days ago The Australian newspaper ran a story on its front page with the headline “Sea rise ‘not linked to warming’” which was supposedly based on the findings of research published in a peer-reviewed journal late last year.
     The problem with the story, written by the newspaper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd was that, as I showed a couple of days ago, the scientific paper published in the Journal of Climate made no such claim and came to no such finding.
The paper discussed at length the role of humans in rising sea levels. In short, Lloyd had the arse of the story where the face should have been.

Climate change and the myth of human progress

Illustration by Mr. Fish, TruthDig

Note: On present climate policy settings, the world is headed to 4 degrees C of warming by 2100, perhaps as early as 2060. We've known that for at least the last five years, but in the last year its become almost polite to recognise the fact, with the World Bank chiming in, amongst many others. There is even  a conversation about adapting to 4 degrees.
      Last week, Climate Commission scientist Prof. David Karoly told ABC News: "We are expecting in the next 50 years for two to three degrees more warming", and that is on top of the almost 1 degree C that the world has warmed since the industrial revolution.That's up to 4 degrees C of warming by 2060.
     In the same week Paul and Anne Erlich asked, "Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?", in a new, well-referenced, peer-reviewed paper: "Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, over-consumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity.

If we need a war footing to rebuild the physical economy, why can't we talk about it?

by Philip Sutton, Manager, RSTI

A 2009 WWF report says
"a 'war footing' may be the only
option" to re-industrialising
at the necessary speed

At the end of last year a very useful discussion was opened up by a number of climate scientists in different parts of the world calling for climate change action to be put onto a war footing.
    John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute, questioned the desirability of pursuing this approach. But how valid was John's critique? And is there a better response to the call from the climate scientists to go onto a war footing?

This is what John said in the Climate Institute's 13 December 2012 newsletter (emphasis added):

If you are not scared or getting scared, you are not paying attention. Yet another rollercoaster year for climate policy and investment is ending as a remarkable chorus of conservative voices from the World Bank, the World Meteorological Organisation, the International Energy Agency and others state that climate change is happening and on track to get much worse in terms of danger and expense. These are realities, not just risks.

Top Climate Stories of 2012

Greg Laden, via Science blogs

A group of us, all interested in climate science, put together a list of the most notable, often, most worrying, climate-related stories of the year, along with a few links that will allow you to explore the stories in more detail. We did not try to make this a “top ten” list, because it is rather silly to fit the news, or the science, or the stuff the Earth does in a given year into an arbitrary number of events. (What if we had 12 fingers, and “10” was equal to 6+6? Then there would always be 12 things, not 10, on everyone’s list. Makes no sense.)
    We ended up with 18 items, but note that some of these things are related to each other in a way that would allow us to lump them or split them in different ways. See this post by Joe Romm for a more integrated approach to the year’s events. Also, see what Jeff Masters did here.

Scientists call for war on climate change, but who on earth is listening?

by David Spratt

When it's too late for half measures, the only option is to be really honest.  And that's what a number of brave climate scientists have just done.

Dr Daniel Pauly: time to prepare economy
for a climate change 'war':

It's been a week of startling news that has buried the idea that reasonable action will keep global warming to 2°C, with evidence that the world is now heading towards a 4–6°C warming this century, and as early as 2060. And we know that a safe climate is global warming of under 1°C degree!
    Releasing the Global Carbon Project's latest report on Monday,  executive-director Dr Pep Canadell of CSIRO reported:

Emissions trends over the past ten years are tracking consistently with the most carbon-intensive pathways of the four families of scenarios, leading to 4 to 6°C warming over pre-industrial times by the end of this century...
     It is clear that the type of transformation needed would required the world to wake up tomorrow and embrace a new green industrial revolution whereby new economic development is focused on establishing a large and rapidly growing non-polluting energy sector as the vehicle to meet new energy and jobs demand...In all cases, there is the need for high levels of technological, social, and political innovation, and the increasing likelihood of the need to rely on net negative emissions in future."