Climate & Climate Change

I leave today for Brewarrina, 100kms east of Bourke. I will be speaking at a NSW Farmer’s Forum on the issues I raised in my column in The Land of 3rd February.

I wrote:

The latest round of restrictions on tree clearing in NSW and Queensland were driven in part by the Federal Government’s global warming concerns and our Kyoto target.

At Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 the Australian government agreed to a target of limiting greenhouse gas emissions to 108 per cent of 1990 emissions over the period 2008-2012.

But Canberra has never formalized this deal. It says the Kyoto Protocol does not provide a comprehensive, environmentally effective long-term response to climate change. Nor are there clear pathways for action by developing countries, and the United States has indicated it won’t sign.

Without commitments by all the major emitters, the Federal Government says the protocol will deliver only about one per cent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.

However, the federal Environment Minister, Senator Ian Campbell, late last year restated Australia’s commitment to meeting its target and praised the “tremendous effort by governments, industry and the Australian community” in cutting emissions.

Indeed, the Federal government report, Tracking the Kyoto Target 2004, indicates Australia is on target. But what the Minister did not acknowledge was this was mostly a consequence of restricting and redefining ‘tree clearing’.

The report says vegetation management legislation recently introduced into Queensland and NSW will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 24.4 million tonnes. By comparison, the energy sector increased emissions by 85 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent during the period 1990 to 2002.

The total reduction attributed to ‘land use change’, which includes reduced tree clearing, is 78 million tonnes for the same period. So the increase in emissions from the energy sector has been offset by clearing fewer trees – at tremendous cost to individual landholders in Queensland and New South Wales, yet the Minister made no mention of this.

He may be down playing land clearing for the following reason.

What is known as the “Australia Clause” (Article 3.7) in the Kyoto Protocol allows countries for which land use change and forestry was a net source of emissions in 1990 to include the emissions from land use change in their 1990 baseline.

It has been claimed that the Australian national greenhouse office consequently exaggerated the extent of the clearing in 1990 to give an inflated baseline value and at the same time not recorded carbon sinks resulting from forest growth and woodland thickening.

This made it easier to achieve the Kyoto target for 2008-2012.

Ecologist, Bill Burrows, writing in the international journal Global Change Biology in 2002 explained how Australia’s often quoted total net greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 25 per cent if we included the sinks resulting from woodland thickening in our National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

But this would also affect our 1990 baseline and make it harder for the ‘accountants’ to suggest we are on target, and even more difficult to justify the draconian vegetation management laws.

Dr Burrows calculates the annual carbon sink in about 60 million hectares of grazed woodland in Queensland alone is about 35 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.

So we have a Federal Government pretending to meet its obligations to an agreement it hasn’t signed up to using accounting practices that deny the phenomenon of vegetation thickening.

After Michael Duffy interviewed Prof Bob Carter on climate change on his ABC radio program Counterpoint, there was comment on at least one web-blog site.

John Quiggin wrote:
“It would be more accurate to describe Carter as a prominent research geologist with a personal interest in the issue of climate change, and a strongly-held view that Kyoto is a bad idea.
As regards the major issues, I see little evidence to suggest that Carter is any better informed than I am.”

Some of my geologist mates have interpreted this as a slight on their profession and an inference that geologist know nothing more than economists about climate.

I received the following from a geologist:

“Astonishingly, some persons appear to believe that geologists have no part to play in the current public discussion on climate change.

Geologists, as scientists, operate in deep time. They study environmental phenomena on scales commensurate with the earth’s dynamic and changing nature, over periods of hundreds to thousands to millions of years and more.

Geologists are therefore the persons to whom one should turn for accurate advice on whether current meteorological trends, if projected as climate trends, are in any way unusual when compared with Earth’s past behaviour.

Using information from ice cores, deep sea cores, lake cores and other data, first year geology students the world over are taught:

1. That climate has always changed, and always will. Some of the climatic changes are due to slow trends, others due to sudden climate shifts whose origin is not yet understood.

2. That rates of ‘climate’change during the 20th century, as manifest from surface meteorological records of temperature, are in now way unusual in either their magnitude or rate of temperature change.

3. That the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere in past times has not infrequently attained values of 1000 ppm or more (i.e. much more than a doubling of current levels), without any known adverse affects apart from the prolific growth of plant life, for which carbon dioxide is a powerful aerial fertilizer.

4. That over the last half million years the earth has experienced several glaciations and interglaciations. For the majority (>90%) of that time, Earth’s average surface temperature has been substantially, and often much, colder than today.

5. That the current warm period, called the Holocene, has already lasted about 10,000 years, which is the average length of earlier warm periods, and that beyond question Earth’s biggest near future environmental changes are going to be those associated with the onset of the next ice age.

6. Geologists freely admit, however, that it is not possible to predict exactly WHEN the next ice age will start, and also th at despite the magnificent climatic records that they have assembled, there are still many things about climate that are not understood.

It is strange that anyone would assert that geologists have nothing to contribute to the understanding of climate change.”

There is a transcript of the interview with Prof Carter at the Counterpoint site.

Papers from the Managing Climate Change: Practicalities and Realities in a post-Kyoto Future conference held in Canberra on 4th April are now available at Tech Central Station.

This is perhaps a first conference where acknowledged ‘climate skeptics’ including Professor Bob Carter have given papers alongside Australian government representatives including Dr Brian Fisher from ABARE.

A delegate from the Chinese embassy spoke about the need for China to reduce its reliance on coal as an energy source and China’s intension to build possibly 6 new nuclear power stations over the next 15 years.

Senior Cliamte Negotiator from the US Department of State gave an interesting and fairly technical paper on US policy directions.

Papers also include a contribution from author of Taken by Storm and key contributor to the ‘hockey stick’ debate, Canadian Ross McKitrick.

The conference papers are supplemented with Background papers that include an analysis of global carbon trading prospects.