Tony Abbott’s rising tide of inconvenient truths
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Kenneth Davidson
Senior columnist at The Age
Our new Prime Minister has quickly demonstrated his contempt for climate science.
Why the IPCC report matters
The latest climate change report is the most scrutinised document in the history of science, according to one expert who helped write it.
As Tony Abbott said ad nauseam during the campaign, the 2013 federal election was about three things: the onerous level of public debt, stopping the boats and abolition of the carbon tax.
Compared to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government.
Ignored until after the election was the question of whether the moderate level of debt was a major factor in Australia avoiding the recessionary consequences of the global financial crisis. Then the new government (and its media apologists) segued effortlessly and without explanation into arguing that the deficit wasn’t a life-and-death issue after all. In fact, the budget couldn’t be brought back quickly into balance without risking undermining the still soft recovery.
‘As Prime Minister, Abbott has demonstrated his contempt for climate science by an immediate wholesale assault on the climate change infrastructure left by the previous government.’ Photo: Nic Walker
All the information needed to make that judgment was publicly available by the beginning of 2013. But to recognise the economic reality would have involved a different election narrative: that there was room for expansionary budgetary policies. There was no debt crisis. But the truth didn’t fit the narrative that Abbott constructed to win the election: that the Labor government was incompetent and illegitimate.
By contrast, the latent xenophobic fear and resentment of the latest wave of boat people – fanned by both major parties during the 2013 election – will have long-term costs in terms of social solidarity, national self-respect and economic opportunities forgone, as well as damaging relations with Indonesia.
But this election campaign entered darker territory. On my reading of history, this was the first post-enlightenment election in which a core policy was based on denial of fundamental laws of science.
Edward Davey, the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, is quoted inPushing our Luck – Ideas for Australian Progress, published by the Centre for Policy Development, as saying: ”Two hundred years of good science – teasing out uncertainties, considering risk – has laid the foundation for what we now understand. It screams out from decade upon decade of research. The basic physics of climate change is irrefutable [and] human activity is significantly contributing to the warming of our planet.”
The Centre for Policy Development notes there is bipartisan agreement between Britain’s Conservative-led coalition government and the Labour opposition that global warming is both a serious challenge (Britain is committed to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, from 1990 levels, of 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050) and a major economic opportunity. (Prime Minister David Cameron said this year that: ”It is the countries that prioritise green energy that will secure the biggest share of the jobs and growth in a low carbon sector set to be worth $4 trillion by 2015.”)
In contrast, Abbott went into the 2013 Australian election falsely implying that living standards were falling and that a major component in rising electricity prices was the carbon tax. He said the effect of policy action on climate change was ”to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of families around Australia”.
By comparison to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government. Abbott is on the record as saying ”the science isn’t settled”, the world is ”cooling”, and ”whether the carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven”.
As Prime Minister, Abbott has demonstrated his contempt for climate science by an immediate wholesale assault on the climate change infrastructure left by the previous government – closing the Climate Commission, instructing the Environment Department to prepare legislation to scrap the Climate Change Authority (which was independently responsible for allocating $2 billion a year for programs designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), and sacking two department heads who had been involved in development of the emissions trading scheme.
Worse, Abbott has appointed the former head of the ABC and the Australian Stock Exchange, Maurice Newman, as chairman of the government’s Business Advisory Council. Newman recently complained (in The Australian Financial Review on September 17) about the former government’s cavalier attitude to the carbon tax ”and related climate myths”. He went on to say: ”The money spent on agencies and subsidies pursuing these myths was wasted. Their legacy continues to undermine Australia’s international competitiveness.”
Rubbish. Action by the previous government to impose a price on carbon was a small step to improve Australia’s long-term viability as a wealthy country. Dismantling these measures is a futile defence of early 20th-century industrial capitalism.
Australia cannot make the transition to a low-carbon, post-industrial state when we have a governing elite that is hostile to established science and therefore prepared to back Abbott’s ideological obsessions.
As David Spratt, the co-author of Climate Code Red – the case for emergency action, has pointed out, Abbott successfully used the politics of fear to win the 2013 election. ”The challenge for the opposition is to construct a narrative that recognises this apprehension and fear and provides a clear path to climate safety so that Howard’s battlers become safe climate champions,” Spratt says.
It’s a difficult but essential task.
Kenneth Davidson is a senior columnist for The Age.
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Reality of global warming is screaming at us
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Geoffrey Lean
But there’s still not enough action from governments.
‘Humanity is warming the planet from 90 per cent to 95 per cent.’ Photo: Glenn Campbell
The latest giant climate report was met with a dance and a scream.
The dance came when the governments and scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally put the finishing touches to the most important analysis yet of its kind after a series of sessions that allowed them only six hours’ sleep in the last 52. The conference manager, Francis Hayes – a former British Met Office scientist – donned a Russian hat and performed a Cossack caper in celebration.
The mass scream was part of a demonstration outside the former Stockholm brewery in which they had convened by protesters venting their frustration that governments have largely failed to act on previous warnings. They hope that will change. For this is the first in a year-long series of giant IPCC reports to prepare the ground for an attempt to forge an international agreement on tackling global warming in Paris in December 2015.
Mind you, there are those who say the IPCC has long been leading the world a merry dance. As some extreme sceptics see it, a small clique of scientists has been concocting, against all the evidence, one of history’s greatest hoaxes, bamboozling governments into addressing a problem that doesn’t actually exist. But the conspiracy theory fails at the briefest reality check.
The summary report published at the weekend, and the million-word full version that will follow, result from a mind-bogglingly thorough process. Together they were written by 259 top scientists from 30 countries, drawing on 9200 mostly recent scientific publications – and checked by 1089 reviewers, whose 54,677 comments all had to be taken into account. And over the past week ”every single word” has been justified to 110 governments.
Unsurprisingly, this painstaking procedure produces cautious reports. It was not until 2007 that the IPCC straightforwardly accepted that humanity was causing global warming, nearly 20 years after leading scientists had begun publicly saying so. Even then, it grossly underestimated the resulting sea level rise, and wholly failed to a predict a dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice that year.
This latest report increased its assessment of the likelihood that humanity is warming the planet from 90 to 95 per cent. Yet it, too, errs on the side of caution on Arctic ice, and takes little account of what scientists say is one of the most alarming developments: the release of methane from melting permafrost to reinforce the gases already warming the planet.
Its conclusions are nevertheless alarming. Atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases are ”unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years”. The Greenland ice sheet is melting more than six times faster than just a decade ago. And whatever changes take place will only be reversible over many hundreds, even thousands, of years.
What it does not conclude, despite widely publicised sceptic assertions, is that the world is warming at about half the rate it previously estimated. Its actual reduction is by just a 10th of a degree, from 1.3 to 1.2 degrees a decade.
The IPCC did, however, address a much more substantial sceptical point, that the temperature increase at the Earth’s surface has slowed down since 1998 to about 40 per cent of its average rate since 1951 – something it accepts it didn’t predict. One reason is that 1998, the year invariably chosen by sceptics, was one of the warmest ever: if 1995 or 1996 is chosen as the starting point, the rate actually exceeds the long-term average. But, even then, the warming has been much slower than in the previous decade.
That seems partially due to rather less heat reaching the Earth from the sun, since it is going through a cooler phase in its regular cycle and dust from volcanoes is providing some screening. Even so, enough is getting though to warm the planet somehow: to deny that it is doing so is to challenge not global warming but the laws of physics themselves.
It has almost certainly ended up in the oceans, like more than 90 per cent of all the solar heat we receive, and there are some indications that it has penetrated deep down where our monitoring is poor. If that is so, it could provide temporary, if illusory, relief. The process could just as well reverse when conditions change, seriously accelerating warming. Such slowdowns have happened before, only for rapid heating to resume.
Despite the IPCC’s work, however, there is so far little sign that governments will do enough to avert dangerous climate change. Looking back at its report, it seems future generations are more likely to scream than to dance.
Geoffrey Lean is environmental columnist of The Telegraph, London.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/reality-of-global-warming-is-screaming-at-us-20130929-2umbf.html#ixzz2gS7YfNjJ
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