Climate & Climate Change

According to Michael McCarthy writing in The Independent today:

“The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia – the Earth which keeps itself fit for life.

In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today’s Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late.

The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes. He writes: “Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

In making such a statement, far gloomier than any yet made by a scientist of comparable international standing, Professor Lovelock accepts he is going out on a limb. But as the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on Earth since Charles Darwin, he feels his own analysis of what is happening leaves him no choice. He believes that it is the self-regulating mechanism of Gaia itself – increasingly accepted by other scientists worldwide, although they prefer to term it the Earth System – which, perversely, will ensure that the warming cannot be mastered.

This is because the system contains myriad feedback mechanisms which in the past have acted in concert to keep the Earth much cooler than it otherwise would be. Now, however, they will come together to amplify the warming being caused by human activities such as transport and industry through huge emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2 ).

It means that the harmful consequences of human beings damaging the living planet’s ancient regulatory system will be non-linear – in other words, likely to accelerate uncontrollably.

He terms this phenomenon “The Revenge of Gaia” and examines it in detail in a new book with that title, to be published next month.”

What a different view to that of Patrick Moore! Patrick Moore, was quoted a few days ago (13th January) in The Honololu Advertiser suggesting global warming might be a good thing for Planet Earth. Sean Hau wrote :

“Global warming and nuclear energy are good and the way to save forests is to use more wood.

That was the message delivered to a biotechnology industry gathering yesterday in Waikiki. However, it wasn’t the message that was unconventional, but the messenger – Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. Moore said he broke with Greenpeace in the 1980s over the rise of what he called “environmental extremism,” or stands by environmental groups against issues such as genetic crop research, genetically modified foods and nuclear energy that aren’t supported by science or logic.

Hawai’i, which is one of the top locations nationwide for genetically modified crop research, has become a focal point in the debate about the risks and value of such work. Friction between environmentalists and other concerned groups and the biotech industry surfaced most recently in relation to the use of local crops to grow industrial and pharmaceutical compounds. Last year that opposition halted a Big Island project planning to use algae for trial production of pharmaceutical drugs.

Zero-tolerance standards against such research by environmental groups delay developments that could help those with unmet basic needs, Moore said. Instead Moore called for compromise rather than confrontation on the part of the environmentalists.

“There’s no getting away from the fact that over 6 billion people wake up each day on this planet with real needs for food, energy and materials,” he told those attending a luncheon at a three-day Pacific Rim Summit on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy.

The event was sponsored by the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Sponsors included Dupont, Carghill and the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, which spent $15,000 to support the conference.

In direct opposition to common environmentalist positions, Moore contended that global warming and the melting of glaciers is positive because it creates more arable land and the use of forest products drives up demand for wood and spurs the planting of more trees. He added that any realistic plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and the emission of so-called greenhouse gases should include increased use of nuclear energy.”

I was going to title this blog post ‘Martin Ferguson for Prime Minister’ – but I don’t really know that much about Martin Ferguson.

He gave a great speech in defence of Tasmanian foresters some weeks ago, click here.

Yesterday The Australian newspaper published him asking that we move beyond politics and embrace the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.

The speech and the article are revolutionary because Ferguson is a senior member of the Labor Party and he is taking a stand against traditional green politics yet over recent years the Labor Party has not only consulted with, but encouraged environmental activists, including Don Henry from the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), to write Party policy (see the Latham Diaries).

Ferguson is redefining what it means to be an environmentalist and reshaping environmental politics in Australia. In yesterday’s The Australian he wrote:

“Unprecedented world economic growth is creating unprecedented global energy demand, rising energy prices and faster depletion of non-renewable energy resources. These are genuine threats to our future economic wellbeing. Maybe worse, the unequal distribution of energy resources across the world is a real threat to future geopolitical stability.

International initiatives such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate have the potential to ease both these tensions. But although greenhouse gas reduction targets may be necessary, any frank review must conclude that the world’s greenhouse emissions are not going down in the short term: they are simply being shifted from one country to another.

After all, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters are not bound by Kyoto. The US, as the world’s biggest emitter, has refused to ratify the agreement. China and India, the second and fourth biggest emitters, are not required to reduce their emissions. And while we are often reminded by the Greens that Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions, let’s not forget there are good reasons for that.

Australia’s relatively high energy intensity has to be considered in the context of the country’s size and its relatively low population density, its climate, its heavy reliance on coal for power generation, and the presence of energy-intensive industries such as aluminium which form the backbone of the nation’s wealth-generation capacity.

That is why it is a significant achievement of the Asia-Pacific Partnership’s first meeting that the aluminium industry in the member countries reached an agreement on working together to reduce emissions. This is essential to overcome the problem of simply shifting emissions from one country to another and at the same time shifting Australian manufacturing jobs and prosperity offshore, to countries with lower environmental standards.

It is extraordinary that the Greens could place the economic security and jobs of their constituents at risk and at the same time advocate a worse greenhouse outcome by displacing Australian industry to countries with lower standards.

It’s time to abandon the political correctness espoused by the green movement. Let’s be real: without getting business on board we cannot achieve anything.

Read the full article by clicking here.

The Australian newspaper continues the theme with its editorial today. The the last paragraph includes:

The reactionary response to the Asia-Pacific Partnership meeting this week demonstrates that support for Kyoto cloaks the green movement’s real desire – to see capitalism stop succeeding. Extreme greens cannot bear to accept that our best chance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions will occur when free enterprise has incentives to implement solutions. While power providers and big electricity users will howl, we need a national carbon trading scheme, with permits bought and sold in the free market, as a means of meeting greenhouse reduction targets set by Canberra. And we need tax concessions for industries that develop new technologies to clean up power supplies. In the long term geo-sequestration, which buries carbon dioxide pumped from power plants, may be a solution. And research into technologies to clean the coal burned in electricity generators is already under way, including development of a power plant in Florida designed to deliver much lower emissions. When the incentives exist business will use technology to find a way. For a century London was plagued by pollution that killed people. No longer. People now fish in the great lakes of North America which were once sludgy industrial swamps. And the idea that cars could emit much less pollution would have seemed impossible to environmental doomsayers 30 years ago. They would not have even conceived that commercial cars could run on batteries, with hydrogen power on the horizon. Whatever the extreme greens say, we can address global warming without adopting a medieval mindset that sees electricity as inimical to the environment. This week’s meeting was a practical step forward by six nations whose legitimate energy requires continued use of coal – perhaps with more nuclear energy to follow. It worried environmental activists – because it showed up their messages of doom for what they are – hot air.

What a difference a week can make!

The Prime Minister John Howard seems to get all the breaks. There was Tampa a couple of federal elections ago, then the terrorists bomb plot uncovered the day he introduced the IR legislation into parliament and now, the week the Prime Minister gets to host the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, science journal Nature publishes a paper attacking “one of Kyoto’s conceptual cores“.

Under Kyoto, trees are good. Forests count as a sink for carbon, with carbon credits for trading being available to those who plant forests in accordance with Kyoto rules.

But carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas, there are a few others including methane. Methane is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a warming gas.

The new study led by Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute in Germany has found living plants emit methane and calculates that all the world’s living vegetation (forests included!) could emit between 62 and 236 million tonne of methane per year. This is apparently equivalent to between 10 and 30 per cent of all annual global emissions.

The finding is being hailed as an explanation as to why methane emissions had been reducing – by about 20 million tones a year during the 1990s. And I had been sure methane emissions were going up and up, click here for related blog piece with graph of atmospheric methane levels.

The reason methane levels are now thought to have been reducing during the 1990s is because we apparently cut down 12 per cent of the world’s tropical forests during that decade, click here.

How have global methane emission being trending over the last 5 years?

How does planting a forest compare with defrosting a Siberian swamp – in terms of adding methane to the atmosphere?

What are the implications for Kyoto participants if forests are a source rather than a sink for greenhouse gases?

Australia, a Kyoto dissident, is nevertheless on target to meet its Kyoto targets because it has banned broad scale trees clearing. But hang-on, maybe it will now be OK to clear regrowth?

So many questions!

I had avoided the issue of carbon trading and targets in the piece I recently wrote for the Courier-Mail about the the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, click here. It looks like the rules might have to be rewritten now anyway.

Imagine trees emitting methane! Who said the science was settled?

Tomorrow, leaders from 6 nations will meet in Sydney, Australia to discuss mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The group are a fascinating mix:

1. The United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and a super power.

2. India and China, the most populous nations on earth and emerging super powers.

3. South Korea and Japan, members of an alliance that plan to build a $16 billion nuclear fusion reactor in the south of France. Fusion is what powers the sun.

4. Australia, the other Kyoto recalcitrant and a country with a lot of natural resources including coal and uranium.

Together these six countries account for about half the world’s GDP, population, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

They have already decided that arbitary emissions targets (a central plank of Kyoto) will not be on the agenda. Instead they want to focus on developing, promoting and sharing new technologies including nuclear, hydrogen, fusion and solar.

The theme for the meeting tomorrow was perhaps forshadowed by Quigqing Zhao, First Secretary, Chinese Embassy in Australia, in his address to a climate change conference in Canberra last April, click here for full text. He said,

In China’s school textbook, there is a sentence which almost all Chinese adults believe to be true and I think most children
between 10 and 18 can recite, that is “Science and technology
is the most powerful impetus to productivity”. If I were one
of the editors, I would propose to add one more sentence
somewhere in the text book, that “Science and technology is
the most reasonable way to address climate change”.

We need a new approach – a new focus. With just Kyoto, global emissions will be some 40 percent higher in 2010 than in 1990.

I wish the new Asia-Pacific Partnerhsip on Clean Development and Climate well in Sydney at their first official meeting tomorrow.

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade outlines government policies on climate change and the new Partnership at its website, click here. For information on tomorrow’s meeting click here.

I have just found the following statement amongst emails from December last year. Why didn’t the ‘leading economists’ mention the Kyoto Protocol? Is the Protocol too prescriptive and regulatory in nature? Would they endorse the upcoming meeting in Sydney on Wednesday of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate?

Policy Solutions

United States Needs Incentive Based Policy to Reduce Carbon Emissions
________________________________________
Statement by leading economists
December 7, 2005

The signatories below are all senior economists with expertise in the application of economics to environmental policy. We believe it important that the United States should move to control greenhouse gas emissions. There is now no credible scientific doubt that the composition of Earth’s atmosphere is changing, that this change is driven in part by the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities, and that this change in atmospheric composition is changing Earth’s climate. The United States’ emissions of greenhouse gases constitute a major contribution to this process. The consequences of the climate change can be expected to be disruptive. Specific details of these effects at this stage remain uncertain. Nonetheless it is clear that any delay in the pace of change reduces the costs of adjustment. It serves as public insurance against more dramatic impacts and damages that can be expected when opportunities to adapt are limited.

It is important that greenhouse gas emissions be managed using an incentive based policy, such as a market-based approach to capping and reducing such emissions. This type of strategy provides clear incentives for changes in business practices and the development of new technologies. It assures that economic forces are directed to keeping the cost of reducing emissions as low as they can be. Many industrial nations have now adopted policies intended to limit greenhouse gases. As a result we can expect that the market for clean technologies will continue to grow over time. Adding industries in the United States to the other sources of these demands will help to reinforce this process.

George Akerlof, University of California at Berkeley
Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University
Edward Barbier, University of Wyoming
Robert T. Deacon, University of California at Santa Barbara
Walter P. Falcon, Stanford University
Hossein Farzin, University of California at Davis
Anthony C. Fisher, University of California at Berkeley
A. Myrick Freeman III, Bowdoin College
Lawrence H. Goulder, Stanford University
Theodore Groves, University of California at San Diego
Peter Hammond, Stanford University
Michael Hanemann, University of California at Berkeley
Geoffrey Heal, Columbia Business School
Gloria Helfand, University of Michigan
Larry S. Karp, University of California at Berkeley
Paul R. Kleindorfer, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
Charles Kolstad, University of California at Santa Barbara
Roz Naylor, Stanford University
Jason F. Shogren, University of Wyoming
V. Kerry Smith, North Carolina State
David A. Starrett, Stanford University
Joe Stiglitz, Columbia University
David J. Vail, Bowdoin College
Jeffrey Vincent, University of California at San Diego
James E. Wilen, University of California at Davis

It is official, last year was the hottest on record in Australia. The following graph from the Bureau of Meterology shows 2005 was exceptionally warm and more than a degree warmer than the 1961-1990 average which is the standard reference period for calculating temperature anomalies.

Many of Australia’s warmest years, including 1988, 1998 and 2002, had temperatures boosted by significant El Nino events. However, 2005 was not an El Nino year, making the high temperatures even more remarkable.

According to the Bureau:

1. Australian temperatures have increased by approximately 0.9C since 1910, consistent with global warming trends.

2. Both daytime and night-time temperatures were high in 2005. The annual mean maximum temperature was 1.21C above average (equal highest), while the mean minimum temperature was 0.97C above average (2nd highest).

3.Temperature anomalies varied throughout the year but autumn 2005 was particularly warm. April had the largest Australian mean monthly temperature anomaly ever recorded, with a monthly anomaly of +2.58C breaking the previous record of +2.32C set in June 1996.

The Bureau noted in its assessment that:

Australian mean temperatures are calculated from a country-wide network of about 100 high-quality, mostly rural, observing stations. The Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre and National Climate Centre have undertaken extensive quality checking to ensure that the temperature records from these sites have not been compromised by changes in site location, exposure or instrumentation over time.