It is easy (and pretty apt) to get depressed about the climate situation. As records keep tumbling and feedbacks kick in and polluters continue to throw their political weight around, the momentum on our trajectory into ever greater disaster can feel overwhelming. Yet it is also apt at times to remember some glimmers of good news amidst the gloom. Here are the ten signs that most encourage me about places where progress that has been made since this image was taken a handful of years ago.
In five years, the value of the four largest US coal companies has plummeted from $45b to $200m, a drop of more than 99.5%. A string of major financial institutions have declared the coal industry to be in structural decline.
For the last two years, China has reduced its coal consumption without being in recession. This included shutting down hundreds of smaller, dirtier coal mines.
For the last few years, new renewable electricity generation capacity has exceeded new fossil fuel + nuclear capacity. Both wind and (especially) solar have seen their costs drop dramatically in the last 5-7 years.
ExxonMobil faces the possibility of real legal consequences for their decades of lies and misinformation. And by extension, other fossil companies too.
Fossil fuel divestment continues to expand rapidly, with now trillions in funds under management having divested in part or whole, or having committed to doing so.
Mass civil disobedience against the causes of climate disruption is increasingly becoming a reality. Australian efforts such as the #LeardBlockade and #PilligaPush and #BentleyBlockade and #LockTheGate have seen the largest campaigns of civil disobedience since the Franklin River in the early 80s.
Leaders with large followings in the UK and US are speaking openly and repeatedly about corruption, plutocracy, inequality and corporate hegemony - and drawing the links to climate change.
Public opinion in the English-speaking world on the need for taking climate action is at its highest for almost a decade. While fickle and related most closely to recent weather as much as anything else, this nonetheless presents new opportunities.
The compromised and weak Paris Agreement nonetheless represents the most ambitious step forward in international negotiations thus far, with every nation signing on to the need to participate in emissions cuts to keep warming to less insane levels.
The US Republicans - the only major party in the developed world to embrace an official policy of climate denial - look increasingly likely to nominate an unelectable and divisive figure who could demolish their gerrymandered Congressional stranglehold on his way down.
The most recent papal encyclical, Laudato Si', was a stirring call with implications that were nothing short of revolutionary, whose effects continue to reverberate throughout the global Catholic (and catholic) church.
And the final encouraging sign is that I sat down to try to write a list of ten and came up with eleven.
Near the end of last year, a famous Australian put his religious and scientific convictions into action and was arrrested at the #LeardBlockade while non-violently protesting the construction of the Maules Creek open cut coal mine. This mine is being built in the middle of a critically endangered woodland ecosystem and is reducing the water supply to some of Australia's best farmland. The coal extracted over the planned lifetime of this mine will result in as much carbon pollution as would be emitted by hundreds of millions of people living with sustainable carbon footprints for a year. Air pollution from extracting, transporting and especially burning this coal will very likely result in thousands of early deaths and hundreds of thousands of people finding it more difficult to breathe.
So, who was this Australian icon putting his body on the line to protect our farmers, our koalas and bats, our neighbours, our habitable planet? I'm not referring to David Pocock, though the rugby star and committed Christian was also arrested days later doing much the same thing, and undoubtedly received more coverage than of the other 350-odd arrests at Maules Creeks over the last year or so. I'm talking about the man who (in my book) is the most credible and authoritative of all those who have joined the #LeardBlockade: Professor Colin Butler, an international expert on climate and public health, an IPCC author, and sole editor of the most up to date and weighty volume in that field, Climate Change and Global Health, a collaboration of 56 authors from 18 countries that came out weeks before his arrest. Prof Butler is also co-founder of the Buddhist NGO BODHI (Benevolent Organisation for Development, Health and Insight).
Prof Butler was arrested back in November and faced court yesterday, where the original charges against him were dropped and he was found guilty of a lesser charge. No conviction was recorded under Section 10, and Prof Butler was given a two year good behaviour bond (which is still heavier than many people who have been arrested under similar circumstances, including David Pocock).
Almost every time people read about people being arrested for peacefully protesting, there will be comments from confused people who have perhaps conflated "peaceful/non-violent" with "lawful", and who think it is outrageous that someone could be arrested for a peaceful protest. It was indeed a peaceful protest, but once which broke the law of NSW.
So what did Prof Butler do wrong?
Essentially, a parking violation. Prof Butler parked his backside in the middle of the road for a few hours (and presumably refused to move when directed to do so by a police officer), a road which just happened to one that mining equipment required for the construction of the mega-mine in question.
It is good to have laws against parking/traffic violations. In general, people ought not to be allowed to block public roads. But sometimes, there are bigger fish to fry: people really, really ought not be to be allowed to dig up sequestered hydrocarbons on a massive scale without regard for the damage caused by the extraction, and ought not be allowed to burn those hydrocarbons while dumping their waste into the global commons of the atmosphere and oceans in such a way as to endanger the habitability of the entire planet. In that context, one crime is far, far, far more serious than the other.
And so thank you Professor Butler. Thank you for your vital research, public voice and actions in seeking to protect the habitability of our home. There is no planet B. First image (Leard State Forest being cleared for the mine) from Greenpeace Australia Pacific. Second image (Prof Butler's arrest) from Front Line Action on Coal.
"These are the three crucial numbers missing from the climate debate in Australia. Neither major party is likely to mention them. These three bipartisan agreements are fundamentally incompatible with the demands of either justice or prudence, let alone the love for neighbour at the heart of Christian ethics, a tradition from which both Rudd and Abbott claim to draw inspiration."
The ABC Religion and Ethics site has published a piece I wrote for CPX outlining some of the missing numbers in this federal election. Between writing the piece and its being posted, Abbott indicated he is not, after all, committed to even the paltry 0.5% emissions reduction target that he had previously (repeatedly) promised.
Also, if I'd wanted to pick five, rather than three, numbers, I would have included these two as well.
• One twelfth: the share of global carbon reserves Australia controls.
• Eighty billion: the number of dollars in the Australian Future Fund, which ought to divest from fossil fuels, given that it is a future fund after all.
China announces peak coal usage. This is fascinating. It may be an ambition that fails by a wide margin, but it is nonetheless a very interesting development, not least for Australia, which is still planning to double coal exports in the next decade.
Ice sheets: A new study confirms with greater accuracy than ever before that world's major ice sheets are melting at an accelerating rate. This is why sea level rise is happening 60% faster than was expected in the most recent IPCC report.
Coal boom: 1200 new coal plants planned. Three quarters of the new plants are to be located in China and India. A breakdown of the countries is available here. Though India's expansion plans need to be taken with a grain or two of salt.
Extinction is forever: Tim Flannery reflects on the challenges facing Australian biodiversity and suggests that the current approach isn't working. With a reply from David Bowman. Perhaps how do we triage conservation priorities?
Coal seam gas: Recent measurements (yet to be peer reviewed) suggest coal seam gas production may have significant "fugitive emissions" of methane that render the claims of the gas industry to be somewhat less bad for the climate questionable. Some have suggested that natural gas is methadone to coal's heroin.
Fracking: Stories from the front line in the US. In the UK, academics have just advised the government that it is "categorically clear" that pursuing a shale gas dominated energy strategy is incompatible with legislated UK climate targets. But it looks like they are going to do it anyway.
IPCC: The IPCC has been repeatedly wrong on climate change, frequently underestimating the rate and impacts of change.
Note that the first link makes an embarrassingly obvious mistake in its opening claim, confusing carbon with carbon dioxide and so getting the numbers hopelessly muddled.
Air pollution: 97% of EU citizens are exposed to levels of tropospheric ozone above WHO recommended limits. "On average, air pollution is cutting human lives [in Europe] by roughly eight months and by about two years in the worst affected regions". The situation is considerably worse in many parts of the world. The true cost of the public health burden on respiratory function of burning coal in China, for instance, is perhaps as high as 7% of annual GDP, even before climate costs are considered. A 2011 study of the external costs of coal in the US (excluding climate costs) found an annual price tag between 1/3 and 1/2 a trillion dollars.
Climate change is here: Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP, according to a new study. The impacts are being felt most keenly in developing countries, according to the research, where damage to agricultural production from extreme weather linked to climate change is contributing to deaths from malnutrition, poverty and their associated diseases. Air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels is also separately contributing to the deaths of at least 4.5m people a year, the report found. That means failing to tackle a fossil fuel based economy will contribute to something like 100 million deaths by the end of next decade.
Warming oceans: warming and acidification will cut the productivity of fisheries in many countries. "About 1 billion people depend on seafood as their main source of protein. But some of those countries most dependent on fishing are expected to lose up to 40% of their fish catch by the middle of the century." Hardest hit will be the Persian Gulf, Libya, and Pakistan. Of course, this is just from carbon-related changes and does not take into account patterns of overfishing, invasive species, pollution, eutrophification, stratification, shifting currents or habitat loss from coral reef degradation. And even the size of fish will shrink in warmer oceans.
Dying trees: Who will speak for the trees? Trees are dying by the millions all around the world due to a wide range of factors. Not just deforestation - which, though it has slowed down a little in Brazil, still continues with increasing rapidity elsewhere - but also due to ground level ozone pollution, infectious diseases (a third of all UK trees face wipeout from a new fungal threat that is expected to wipe out over 90% of Danish Ash trees) and a variety of threats associated with climate change, such as heat stress, invasive species (pine bark beetle) and droughts. For instance, last year's drought in Texas killed over three hundred million trees (or about 6% of all its trees). Heat stress has been linked to widespread tree mortality in scores of studies over the last few years.
Ocean acidification: A basic primer with FAQs, including excellent brief answer to common misconceptions.
Killer cats: How much do cats actually kill? The Oatmeal summarises some recent research. There are hundreds of millions of domestic cats around the world, and tens or hundreds of millions of feral cats. They are taking a big toll on small wildlife.
Australian coal: Australia's carbon price, far from signalling the "death of the coal industry" as claimed repeatedly by the Opposition, has apparently done little to dent the explosive growth of coal exploration in the country. Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal, fifth largest extractor of fossil hydrocarbons globally and has the highest per capita domestic carbon emissions in the OECD. Despite setting very modest carbon reduction targets in recent legislation, both government and industry are planning on a doubling of coal exports in the coming decade, representing emissions many times greater than Australia's tiny domestic reductions, which will largely come from international offsets in any case.
Coercion: Do we ever think coercion might be a good thing? Brad contemplates what a cheating athlete can teach us about the place of law in public life.
Debate vs argument: What's the difference? And what difference does it make to recognise the distinction?
Peak coal: John celebrates the 140th anniversary of the death of William Stanley Jevons, an English writer who foresaw the end of British coal-expansion from way back in 1865 (and who also gave his name to the Jevons paradox). Jevons was aware that relying on finite resources brought a false complacency to social questions by enabling the deferral of questions of distributive justice. If we expect the economy to keep growing, then we can skirt of over gross inequality, trusting that a rising tide will lift all boats. If we accept that the global economy faces certain physical limits within timeframes of human interest, then the deferral of questions of distributive justice can no longer be maintained. In short, faced with limits to growth, there is a certain sense in which it becomes incumbent upon us to make wealth history (which is also the name of this excellent blog, in which Jeremy wrestles with the economic and social implications of this insight).
Chalk wars: Chalk it up to the suppression of dissent; increasingly, people are being arrested for chalking pavements, at least in the Land of the Free™. The Edinburgh Festival would go out of business if this attitude were introduced over here. And Arthur Stace (a.k.a. Mr Eternity) would have gone to gaol.
H/T Gordon for the final observation.
Growth myths: Herman Daly walks us through eight fallacies about economic growth. A very useful and insightful summary of some of Daly's contributions to these discussions.
Last words: The final unpublished letter from eco-author Ernest Callenbach, discovered after his death. His top tips? Hope, offer mutual support, gain practical skills, organise, learn to live with contradictions.
Climate intro: The basics of climate science. It's worth posting pieces like this from time to time, since I am constantly reminding just how common it is for otherwise intelligent people to have some basic misunderstandings (myself included!).
"Coal-fired power triggered lung, heart and nervous system diseases estimated to cost Australia $2.6 billion a year, while the annual health costs of pollution from oil-fuelled vehicles were put at $3.3 billion a year. Switching from vehicle transport to cycling or walking to work would reduce obesity, which would significantly reduce risk of heart disease, breast cancer and mental illness. Reductions in consumption of meat from cattle and sheep, which were big contributors of greenhouse gas in Australia, would not only reduce pollution but also reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer. The report says: "In Australia, air pollution is estimated to kill more people every year than the road toll.""
So, actually, the immediate costs of our high emissions just in Australia greatly exceed $6b a year, since the first two items alone account for that. There are plenty of other fascinating figures in the report that the SMH article skips over (and it entirely ignores one whole section of the report on the benefits for natural ecosystems):
Motor vehicle-related air pollution is believed to be responsible for between 900 and 4,500 cases of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and bronchitis each year in Australia, and between 900 and 2,000 early deaths.
Reductions in red meat consumption in Australia from the (current) average of 100g to 50g per person per day have been predicted to reduce annual emissions from livestock by 13.3 MtCO2-e (about 22 per cent) as well as cutting the incidence of colorectal cancer by 11 per cent.
Globally, 3.2 million deaths each year can be attributed to physical inactivity. [...] Longtitudinal studies reveal cycling for transport is associated with 30-40% lower mortality rates, and cycling and walking projects provide high value for money, with the health gains returning a benefit:cost ratio of 5:1. The likelihood of becoming obese increases by 6 per cent for each hour spent in a car each day.
Indeed, I think the SMH article missed the most politically sensitive number from the report, which is that if we simply take the public health costs of greenhouse emissions (and ignore climate costs), then the price of carbon ought to be at least $45/t CO2e, rather than the current price of $23/t CO2e. Let me repeat that: if the climate dissenters turn out to be right, and anthropogenic climate change is non-existent or not particularly injurious, it would still make sense to put a price on carbon emissions at almost double the present rate purely for the public health benefits.
And such benefits are by no means confined to Australia:
"Globally, air pollution [from coal and oil] kills 1.34 million people each year. [...] The 2012 OECD Environmental Outlook report suggests that without policy action, air pollution will become the biggest cause of environmentally-related deaths worldwide by 2050.
The report also notes that the black carbon (i.e. soot) pollution from burning biomass in poor countries kills more than two million each year "from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer and pneumonia."
A somewhat similar study in the US by Harvard Medical School estimated that US public health costs of burning coal (it didn't even look at petroleum) run into the hundreds of billions annually. Total externalities for coal were estimated at between 300 and 500 billion dollars annually. If the price of coal-fired electricity included these costs (as it ought, in a well-designed economic system), coal no longer looks "cheap". It is cheap only to the moment you burn it, then it is nothing but costs.
Another report from the EU found that reducing carbon emissions 30% from 1990 levels by 2020 could save €80b annually in public health costs alone. For comparison, Australia's carbon scheme will actually see our emissions still rise between 1990 and 2020, though we use 2000 as our benchmark in order to hide this fact. And remember, all these studies are looking at countries with semi-decent pollution controls already. China and India's costs - burning much dirtier coal with little pollution control - are measured in millions of lives lost, shortened and worsened.
Two gripes with the SMH article:
It is criminal that online newspapers do not provide direct links to reports on which they are reporting. Here is the report in question.
The headline is misleading, not only in lowballing the true figure, but also in saying these are the costs of "rising carbon levels". The article makes clear they are the immediate health costs of burning dirty fossil hydrocarbons. The climate costs are likely to be much, much greater, but they are harder to get a handle on (either statistically or emotionally) because they are deferred and operate through highly complex causal chains.
However we slice it, the practice of burning fossil hydrocarbons has huge implications. There are all kinds of ways we can easily and quickly reduce our reliance on them, and taking such first steps is a no brainer even in the absence of climate concerns. When we acknowledge the shared understanding of 19 national science academies of OECD nations (which is contradicted by no scientific body of national or international standing in the world) that our greenhouse emissions are dangerously altering the climate then the demands of justice and prudence call us further than just the easy and obvious reductions. We should have started many decades ago, but today is better than tomorrow.
Pricing nature: George Monbiot highlights the myopia of attempting to include "ecosystem services" within mainstream neoliberal economic thought. The initial government report noted that some of the services provided by natural ecosystems "may in fact be infinite in value". You don't say.
Ten Billion: A "play", reviewed here and here, in which noted Cambridge scientist Stephen Emmott plays noted Cambridge scientist Stephen Emmott. The only set is a recreation of his messy Cambridge office and the drama is Emmott delivering a lecture on our current predicament. describes himself as a "rational pessimist" and lays out the daunting, perhaps impossible, task before us in the coming decades where we face multiple converging crises. He concludes that the only rational way forward is radical cultural change with widespread embrace of lower consumption and fewer children (this is pretty close to what I think, with nuances regarding children), but thinks it is not going to happen (this is also basically what I think, though with all kinds of reasons why it is still worth trying). Given that those who will hear this are those willing to pay through the nose for a night of "theatre" more disturbingly horrifying than any fictional film, it's probably better to avoid reading too much into fact that all performances are sold out. Attempts such as this to piece together the various disparate pieces of information that float around the internet and scientific journals are to be valued. That people come away terrified ought to be entirely unsurprising. What is needed is a moral vision capable of surveying such a situation and finding reasons to throw ourselves "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more".
Australian coal: A victory as one proposed coal plant is shelved.
Hunger games: Coming soon to a future near you. Future heat, drought, food costs and global unrest. I have long been saying that such secondary and tertiary effects of climate change are at least as dangerous as any direct physical effects, though they may not generate headlines that mention climate.
Planetary boundaries: "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere", a recent paper in Nature includes this in its abstract: "Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence."
Solastalgia: The word is a neologism coined by psychologist Glenn Albrecht in 2003 and is gaining some recognition. It refers to nostalgia one feels for a place being lost even while you're still there, a homesickness while you're still at home, but home is becoming less hospitable. In Albrecht's own words, it is "emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment". I think it is a useful concept, even if I'm not convinced by the etymology.
Extreme weather: Extreme heat events experienced in many places in recent years are very, very unlikely to be unrelated to climate change. A new study by James Hansen on the attribution of extreme weather events does not use models, but is a statistical study based on observed changes that argues that the increase in what used to be extreme events (three standard deviations above the 1950-80 average) to now cover something like 10% of the globe's surface at any given time (rather than about 0.1% during 1950-80), is strong evidence that such events are vanishingly unlikely to not be related to climate change.
Overheated economy: Temperature rises correlate with declines in economic indicators and political stability, at least in developing nations. Good thing we're not expecting any discernable pattern in global temperatures over the next few decades and centuries then.
The West in Flames: The US West and Southwest is projected by most climate models to get hotter and drier. This has all kinds of implications, but this article by the author of A Great Aridness summarises the implications for trees and wildfire. It's not pretty.
400ppm CO2: Last time CO2 levels were this high. A study investigating conditions 15 million years ago found that "The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8-5.6ºC) higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet (22.9-36.6m) higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland".
"When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers."
Apart from missing "s" in the title and a dodgy stat in the opening paragraph, McKibben's compelling 5-page piece is a good summary of some important elements of the challenge we face. The bottom line of his three numbers is that, according to our best understanding, if we want at least an 80% chance of staying under the internationally agreed (but still very dangerous) 2ºC limit we can only burn about 20% of our current fossil fuel reserves (not resources, but reserves, i.e. what is known and could be profitably brought to market under present conditions). This is the kind of statistic that can really serve to focus the attention. We need to leave four out of every five known and already profitable barrels of oil, tonnes of coal, cubic metres of natural gas underground.
Of course, the great difficulty is that no one country wants to do anything other than burn every last molecule of fossil hydrocarbon that can be brought to the surface unless all other countries agree to limit themselves also. And when some countries have far larger reserves (and so far more at stake economically in leaving 80% of them in the ground), then reaching such an agreement is basically impossible under present political assumptions. If you look at where the blockages in international negotiations are coming from, then it's no great surprise that these are also the countries with the largest reserves of fossil hydrocarbons: China, USA, Russia, Australia, Canada, various middle eastern states. Countries with tiny (or largely depleted) reserves are the ones at the forefront: small island nations, non-oil-based African nations and the EU (esp UK and Germany, which have historically had huge fossil carbon deposits, but have already burned most of their easily accessible stuff).
And so we are left with an international multi-player game of chicken, with no country wanting to blink first and lose market advantage, ensuring that all countries suffer horrendously as a result. The fact that those with least to contribute to the problem generally have greater vulnerability only serves to entrench both the injustice and the intractability of the issue.
The slim silver lining in recent extreme weather in the US is that it might bring home to US voters and policymakers that there are no winners in a game of chicken. Even if others are going to suffer more and sooner, the US is far from immune, especially to precisely these kinds of threats (droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, water stress). Russia is facing its own wildfires and floods. China has had large areas in drought almost constantly for the last five years and a flood this week has a death toll that could pass 100. Canada has simultaneously faced deadly floods and serious drought in the last couple of months. Middle Eastern petro-states are all too aware of their dire water situation as they rapidly go from grain exporters to zero wheat production within a decade (Saudi Arabia) after basically exhausting their fossil water. And Australia has all too quickly forgotten its own droughts, bushfires and floods just a couple of years ago.
Further complicating the picture is that it is not simply countries that are making these decisions. Apart from some nationalised oil companies, most of these reserves are held by for profit corporations with very, very deep pockets and who are generally not shy at throwing their weight around, spending up big on lobbying, misinformation and propaganda at every level in order to convince us all that without them we'd be living in caves and that they are struggling to get by in tough conditions.
Yet according to the most recent data, fifteen out of the thirty most profitable companies in the world are directly fossil fuel related (many of the remaining fifteen also have significant, if slightly less direct, links).
The bottom line is that until a very wide audience grasps just how dire our situation is and starts to demand something different from our corporate and political leaders, then none of key climate numbers are likely to improve.
For me, the most telling number in McKibben's piece is the one that he doesn't mention. McKibben is an author with a string of respected publications about environmental and economic issues. He was the first popular writer to publish a book on climate change back in the 80s. Yet in the last three or four years he has re-invented himself as an activist after becoming convinced that writing alone is too slow to effect the changes that need to happen. He has built and become the public face of the world's largest climate movement, a movement named after and dedicated to a number: 350. His organisation, 350.org, refers to the highest concentration of CO2 in parts per million considered "safe" by some of the world's leading climate scientists. We are currently over 390 ppm and rising rapidly. For most commentators, 350 ppm is seen as a pipe dream, an impossibility, well outside the realm of the thinkable, let alone the achievable. International negotiations talk about 550 and occasionally 450, but many commentators think we'll be lucky to stay below 650 and our current path is heading for 750 or significantly higher. In this context, McKibben and 350.org have served as a witness to how far from a just and sustainable world we are currently travelling. And yet here, in one of his highest profile pieces to date, he doesn't mention the number to which he has dedicated the last few years of his life and of which he is a relentless promoter. Is this because he has been so successful in publicising 350 ppm that he felt he could move on? Or because he decided that this idea is now so detached from reality that he needed to lower his sights?
Image by ALS.
Groundwater depletion. A new study has calculated that the biggest single contributor to sea level rise over the last fifty years has not been melting ice from Greenland or Antarctica, nor melting glaciers, nor even the expansion of the oceans as they warm, but groundwater depletion. This helps to plug a previously puzzling hole between the observed rate of sea level rise over recent decades and estimated contributions from these other sources. Of course, there is an even bigger problem in many places that results from taking groundwater at a rate faster than it is replenished: running out. For three decades, Saudi Arabia used to export wheat grown in its deserts with water extracted from fossil aquifers (i.e. groundwater that fell as rain thousands of years ago and unlikely to be replaced anytime soon). In the last few years, its wheat production has collapsed and is expected to cease entirely by 2016. As a result, it is buying up productive land in Africa, which results in various other problems: dispossession of traditional owners (who may lack adequate documentation of land ownership), corruption of government officials involved in a lucrative business, reduction of local food stability and so on.
Economic collapse? An update to the 1972 Club of Rome study done by researchers at MIT predicts global economic collapse by 2030 on our present unsustainable trajectory. Much discussed, debated and derided at the time, the computer predictions of the 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, have been tracking well with historical data over the last few decades and their timeframe of very serious ecological and resource problems by 2030 do not need to be substantially revised, according to the new study.
Australian droughts and floods: A land of (more extreme) droughts and flooding rains? This is an excellent intro to the hydrological effects of climate change on Australia and is the first in a recent series on hydrological changes in Australia. Parts Part Two, Three and Four.
Biodiversity decline: EU farmland bird numbers have dropped by 50% over the last thirty years, largely due to farming policies.
2011 CO2 emissions update: John Cook outlines IPCC and IEA scenarios for different emissions trajectories we could follow. Note that the very best (and most difficult) ones still involve major disruption and difficulty in a harsher and less predictable world. They are also likely out of reach without radical and rapid shifts in the global political and economic climate.
UK Climate Policy: George Monbiot traces the latest watering down of UK climate legislation. The UK's Climate Climate Act passed in 2008 with very close to unanimous support, making it the first piece of national legislation setting targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the world. When originally introduced in late 2007, the bill called for a 60% reduction by 2050, but this was increased to 80% on the urging of NGOs, church groups and a Royal Commission.
Great Barrier Reef: The UN has warned that the reef's World Heritage status will be downgraded to "in danger" if Queensland goes ahead with a slew of further port developments to expand the coal and natural gas industries. This article helps to lay out the political context and puts the debate in context, distinguishing between short and long term threats to the reef. It is quite possible to lose the wood of carbon emissions for the trees of maritime traffic. While a major accident would be a disaster, having an increasing number of coal ships successfully reaching their destinations ensures a long term catastrophe through warming and acidifying oceans. Australia's recently announced major marine reserve expansion, while praiseworthy, will do little to save the reef.
WA Forest collapse: "ecosystem change can be sudden, dramatic and catastrophic". Western Australia is rapidly losing its (remaining) forests. The south-west of Australia has experienced some of the most obvious changes in precipitation anywhere in the continent, with a fairly sudden step-change occurring around 1970: "Groundwater levels have fallen up to 11 meters in some forested areas, with larger decreases in populated areas."
Cane toads: A new development with the potential to start turning the tide against Australia's second most destructive introduced species. H/T Mick.
Warragamba Dam, Sydney's main water catchment and storage facility, is now at 100% capacity and started spilling about an hour or two ago. This is likely to contribute to rising floodwaters downstream along the Hawkesbury-Nepean Rivers, which are rising rapidly due to heavy rain. Something like 900 houses are on evacuation alert.
However, in the headlines about localised flooding, let us not lose the wood for the trees. While a full dam is undoubtedly excellent news for the immediate prospects of Sydney's water supply, it is worth remembering that just five years ago, the dam was below 35% and it has not been full since 1998. The situation was threatening enough in 2007 to lead the NSW State government to build a major desalination plant as a precautionary back-up.
Australia has long been known as a land "of droughts and flooding rains". The intensity of our hydrological cycle, regularly bringing both extremes, is one of the challenges faced by our ecosystems (including the human social system). Our familiarity with the dangers of this intensity can numb us to the warnings of climate scientists, that our continued pollution of the atmosphere is likely to bring even more intensity to the hydrological cycle. Simply saying that we've had floods and droughts before does not excuse us from paying attention to the increasing threat these now represent. When combined with rising human population (and rising consumption levels) in a land of fragile soils and ecosystems already significantly modified and degraded by human impact, the implications of these climate projections should not be ignored.
The last 24 months have been the wettest in Australia's recorded history, and they have followed one of our most severe droughts. As always, these have been associated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, however, this natural cycle now has a strong warming trend superimposed on it, bringing more moisture into the atmosphere and redistributing it differently in space and time to familiar patterns from the past. We Australians are not immune from the changes our actions are helping to cause.
And if we are tempted to minimise our contribution to this global problem, keep in mind three factors:
(a) Australian per capita emissions are higher than all other countries except some micro-nations and petro-states with heavily subsidised oil prices. Our historical emissions put us in the top ten emitters worldwide (not per capita). These figures exclude both coal exports and our propensity to take frequent overseas flights.
(b) We are the world's largest exporter of coal and have plans to continue greatly expanding our coal production on a scale that will, by 2050, use up more than 10% of the global carbon budget required to have a decent change of keeping us below 2ºC warming. Indeed, expansion of coal exports will lead to carbon dioxide emissions 11 times greater than the projected savings of the recently passed carbon pricing legislation.
(c) As a nation with one of the highest standards of living in the world (being regularly placed in the top ten for quality of life in various surveys), we can afford serious action more easily than almost any other nation, having almost greater freedom from other pressing concerns than anywhere else.
So let us thank God for a full dam, pray for those affected by flooding and love our neighbours in how we use our precious fresh water - and in how we minimise our climate impact.
"The good news is that the modest carbon price announced yesterday will neither impoverish Australians nor bankrupt our economy. The bad news is that the modest carbon price announced yesterday won’t save the planet either."
The minority Labor government in Australia has announced the details of a long-awaited scheme to put a price on carbon. The basic outline is quite helpfully explained in the animation above, and summarised in greater detail here.
I speak of a carbon price, because it is not a tax, but an emissions trading scheme with a fixed price for three years. This is not simply a matter of playing with words, as explained here.
The scheme is modest in ambition, with only a 5% reduction in emissions by 2020,* despite Australians having the highest per capita emissions of all advanced economies and the 10th largest aggregate emissions overall (it would be interesting to see figures on aggregate per capita emissions, but I haven't been able to find them anywhere). However, unlike Kevin Rudd's defeated ETS, this target is not locked in, but can be raised by an independent Climate Commission anytime from 2015 when the carbon price shifts from being directly set by the government to being dependent upon the auction of a set number of emissions permits. Furthermore, the target for 2050 has been raised from 60% to 80%.
*From a 2000 baseline, which Australia continues to use, despite a global agreement to use 1990 as the benchmark. Therefore, Australian targets cannot be directly compared to those of most other countries. The later baseline makes them less ambitious than a similar figure from a 1990 baseline.
The price for tradable permits will start at a set price of $23 per tonne, rising slightly until 2015, when the number of permits will be capped and the price determined by the market. Only the largest five hundred or so companies will be involved, who together emit the vast majority of Australian emissions. Agriculture and petrol are excluded from the scheme. The former because monitoring of agricultural emissions are too complex; the latter because petrol prices are too politically sensitive (despite this weakening the social, economic and ecological benefits of the scheme). Most households will receive compensation in the form of tax rebates and a raising of the minimum tax threshold will simplify matters for the tax office and for about a million Australians who will no longer need to lodge a return. Only the wealthiest households will be worse off (or rather, only the most carbon-intensive wealthy households).
Many experts see the scheme as representing a decent first step of what was politically possible with a few regrettable compromises. This piece gets into more of the details than I have time or inclination to do at the moment.
A few brief thoughts: with the vast majority of Australian households projected to be better off and the administrative burden falling on about five hundred major companies, the threat of bureaucratic and economic armageddon waved around by Tony Abbott will hopefully be quickly rejected.
Yet with all the focus (by both sides of politics) on what it will mean for the average household budget, most people don't seem to understand that the point of the system is encourage behavioural change. If you don't want to pay more for your energy bills, then switch to renewable power and implement some basic energy efficiency and conservation measures. If you don't want to pay more for your food, then switch to eating local and organic produce. If you don't want your small business to pay more for its inputs, then consider lower-carbon alternatives for your business model. Whether the price will remain too low to encourage these changes directly through the hip pocket remains to be seen. It may be that the primary benefit of the system in the short term will be to provide some needed stability to the renewables market.
From a political perspective, the claim that the Greens are not interested in environmental issues ought to be put decisively to rest, given the political costs Gillard has borne over the last few months during negotiations. What these demonstrate is that without the Greens pushing her, she would not be here of her own free will. This was the price the Greens and independents demanded of Gillard after the hung parliament, and it is clear that this is therefore at the heart of what the Greens hoped to achieve with their new-found political influence. Whether they were right to block Rudd's proposed scheme back in 2009 (which was superior in a couple of ways to the current proposal, though clearly inferior in many others) is a more difficult question. Hindsight offers a perspective of the enormous fallout of that earlier decision (change of leadership in both parties, an early election, a protracted chance for the opposition to pursue large swings in popular support for a carbon price), little of which was obvious at the time.
The Greens' shift from principled opposition to pragmatic support of a least worst viable option represents a difficult yet crucial debate. The proposed scheme may represent the best that was actually available, that is, politically palatable, under current conditions (and so requiring plenty of sweeteners for some of the worst polluters), yet it is important to admit and repeat that it falls far short of what is necessary to avoid some very bad outcomes. Under such circumstances, is a small step better than nothing? Does this represent the strategic establishment of a system that can be scaled up as the political will builds over time? Or can much ado about very little ultimately prove a distraction from or substitute for more radical change, locking in assumptions about the viability of the status quo without addressing the root causes of the problem in our consumerist idolatry and myopic pursuit of further economic growth?
UPDATE: Ethos have kindly published a version of this post on their site, and there has been further discussion over there.
Old King Coal was a merry old soul,
And a merry old soul was he.
He called for his pipe,
And he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.
Continuing my little series, this one writes itself. The great age of King Coal is a double reference to the geological time periods required to create coal and other fossil fuels (yes, they are renewable if you have millions of years) and to the age of the industry itself; the king became the father of the industrial revolution in his youth.
Why is he merry? Because coal is king, comprising the single largest source of energy currently employed by humans. At least for now.
His pipe? Emissions, of course: burning coal contributes the lion's share of all carbon dioxide emissions causing dangerous climate change (as well as having all kinds of other nasty side-effects).
His bowl speaks of the great wealth of the coal industry. Or perhaps it could be the begging bowl that the industry takes to various governments to ensure ongoing subsidies and political support.
And his fiddlers three are the spin doctors, think tanks and lobby groups that maintain his position of privilege.
"Finally, a comment on frequently asked questions of the sort: Was global warming the cause of the 2010 heat wave in Moscow, the 2003 heat wave in Europe, the all-time record high temperatures reached in many Asian nations in 2010, the incredible Pakistan flood in 2010? The standard scientist answer is 'you cannot blame a specific weather/climate event on global warming'. That answer, to the public, translates as 'no'.
"However, if the question were posed as 'would these events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?', an appropriate answer in that case is 'almost certainly not'. That answer, to the public, translates as 'yes', i.e., humans probably bear a responsibility for the extreme event."
The whole piece is worth reading, not least for the prediction that 2012 is "likely" to reach "record high global temperatures", after 2010 has already repeatedly broken the twelve month running average (temperatures in 2011 are likely to be slightly suppressed from record levels by the La Niña that has developed in recent months). I also talked about the difference between weather and climate back here.
Dr James Hansen is the head of NASA GISS and was the first academic to bring climate change into mainstream awareness at his US congressional testimony on 23rd June 1988, which became front page news when he claimed there was sufficient evidence to give 99% certainty that "It is already happening now".
As you may have noticed, Hansen takes his duties as a citizen (and grandfather), as well as a scientist, seriously. Last week Dr Hansen was arrested (once again) for civil disobedience while protesting coal mining through mountaintop removal, which manages to combine a whole raft of destructive effects on the way to disrupting the climate.
Here is another quote on attribution worth pondering:
"The point is that while it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask: “Was this event due to climate change?” it would more useful to ask a related question: “are we putting ourselves at greater risk of experiencing this kind of event?” And to that scientists can answer with high confidence: yes!
"Now, you might think this question is less interesting or useful, and perhaps not as worth asking than the first one. But we would argue that, in fact, it is very important to pose this question, and to carefully consider its answers.
"Think of smoking, sun bathing without sunscreen, eating lots of junk food and so on. You may not be able – ever – to unequivocally attribute one person’s problem to the effects of these activities: people develop lung cancer without smoking, for example, but as a population we know we are better off wearing sunscreen, watching our cholesterol, and not smoking, since all of these actions have been shown to make the chances of harm to our health lower."
This piece from The Age argues that the common claim that China is dependent upon the US consumer market is a flattering piece of self-deception and that China is largely economically dependent upon, well, China. Australia's place in this? Although we used to move in sync with the US economy, now Australian marches to a more Asian drumbeat. Is this good news for Australia when the US is struggling and China booming? Economically (measured in GDP at least) it has been, with Australia being the only OECD country to avoid a recession as the result of 2008 financial crisis.
It is somewhat ironic that Australia and China are two of the richer countries (putting China in the "very rapidly developing" basket and taking its riches collectively rather than per capita) more vulnerable to the ill-effects of climate disruption (and facing increasingly severe problems with water stress and soil degradation), yet our current and possible future shared wealth is significantly dependent upon the exploitation of climate-destroying coal.
However, I've just discovered that we don't export as much coal to China as I thought. It is less than 10% of our total coal market. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that Australian coal exports are huge. This will become more common (as will this).
Deep-sea trawling damages an area twice the size of the contiguous USA each year.
And just to show that sometimes simultaneous disasters can dilute rather than amplify each other: Scientific American reports on research showing that hurricanes help save thermally-stressed coral reefs by cooling water temperatures; Skeptical Science points out that in New York, higher rainfall doesn't necessarily mean more flooding due to drier soil from higher temperatures; and NASA satellites reveal that the incidence of wildfires is no higher in dead forests killed by mountain pine beetle infestations (which have reached epidemic proportions due to warmer winters enabling more beetles to survive) since green needles of live trees are more flammable than brown needles of dead ones.
These points vaguely remind me of the story of a man who wanted to kill himself and so decided to do a thorough job. He hung himself over a lake after taking poison and brought along a gun to make sure. His shot missed his head and severed the noose, dropping him into the water which diluted the poison. Since all the other methods had failed, he decided he wanted to live after all and so swam to shore and survived. I'm not sure we're going to be so lucky.
Byron is a husband, and father of two small children. He keeps worms, bees and a compost pile, with a small garden to justify them.
In his spare time, he is an ecological ethicist, author, activist, speaker, assistant minister and postgraduate student.
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