phill Parsons
The Herald Sun’s chief climate change denier, Andrew Bolt, now appears to be isolated, all and sundry abandoning him …
Howard has moved from denial to delaying action, Murdoch has moved from denial to recommending prudent action and the younger Liberals about the Ministry are making noise about the necessity for some action.
They are doing so due to the convergence of the science and people’s experiences creating a polity of opinion among voters.
It is a given that Earth‘s climate fluctuates through time, providing different results for the surface, apparently governed by the balance of several gases in the atmosphere measured in parts per million and billion, very small percentages, the position of the land masses on the surface as they drift along on a molten sea under the crust, volcanic activity and variations in solar radiation.
Examples of change impacting on human activity are there as lessons from paleontology and archaeology.
The palynological work on the sediments of Lake George tell us of the changes in the flora from the last glacial period. It is postulated that human activity influenced that change through fire and thus is used as a marker of the arrival of humans in Australia.
Archaeology at Lake Mungo shows change in the human artefacts as the societies there reacted over time to the swings of the climate, without a measurement based understanding of the causes which we have now.
The more complex societies of today may be less adaptable to major changes and particular sites may be heavily impacted on by changes associated with the prevailing climate.
Greenland, besides it current ice sheet melt forcing it into global consideration, had a warmer period in the Middle Ages followed by a longer cooling one. The Norse migrants [986 – c1400] apparently weren’t willing to adapt to the cold conditions and so died out. Their exact fate remains an unrecorded mystery
If you are an agricultural society in the tropics structured around city states depending on regular crops to maintain a large population and rainfall declines significantly warfare can increase to ensure resource availability and placate the gods. The Mayan temples stand today as mute testimony to how that reaction to a drying climate change ate up a civilization.
Tuvalu is going under water as sea levels rise right now. [Pop on over Andrew and see the changes people are making to survive.]
But Bolt loves to argue and so he refers to the immediate record of Victoria’s annual rainfall from 1900 to 2005. Source of the evidence for this 105 years is the Weather Bureau.
Taking the 1900/45 period when the average was 603mm and compare it to the 1946/1996 when the average was 671mm Bolt postulates that the more normal may be the drier first 45 years.
Now the 10 year average is 591mm Bolt claims we were spoilt by the last 50 years.
This may be so, but there are differences between the period before 1945 and now. Population, agricultural production and the volume of greenhouse gases have all increased. The first 2 use more water and the last is a result of burning more fossil fuels because of the first and second.
Narrowing it down to the lowest 9 consecutive years, from 1936 to 45, the average was 543mm.
Here were years that could have been used as a planning measure to tell us how much we had to ration water to not over allocate to irrigators and degrade the aquatic environment. It may even have asssited in deciding not to abolish water tanks when reticulation spread through the cities and towns.
Perhaps we were foolish and should have restrained ourselves to remaining in some golden age of the past but we would now be in Howard’s second worst nightmare, the Australian economy eclipsed by every other.
No, the times were good and money was to be made and so the supposedly free things; such as water, native vegetation and its asssociated animals were used up by many land managers without much thought for tomorrow let alone the day after.
Would restraint have been Bolt’s argument then or would he have railed for forging ahead, solving the problems as they appear and growing Australian manufacturing to assist that.
Indeed, those above average rainfall years from 45 to 95 could have been the first signals of climate change. We do not know what the reactions are, small climate events like the middle warming period or the lilltle ice age that followed may not have occurred in the southern hemisphere or even outside the North Atlantic basin.
For me climate change was at first a curiosity, not implausable as it had occurred in the past, but human induced, how could that be. I am susceptible to the measured view and the arguments of Keeling along with the measures from the Antarctic Ice Cores for 350,000 years convinced me that a rise in CO2 and warming were linked some 6 years ago.
Since then CO2’s rate of increase has gone from 0.8% in the 1990/99 period to 3.2% in the last 5 years. [Dr Mike Raupach, chair of the Global Carbon Project]
“This is more very bad news. We need a 60 to 70 per cent cut in emissions, but instead, emission levels are spiraling out of control. The sum total of our meagre efforts to cut emissions amounts to less than zero.” Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre in London
One of the greatest single sources of carbon emissions is the destruction of South-east Asia’s peatlands and forests. The annual emissions from annual peat and forest fires are about five times as great as the total annual emission cuts which the Kyoto Protocol aims to make by 2012, back to 1990 levels.
Indonesia alone holds 60% of all tropical peat, containing some 50 billion tonnes of carbon. This is equivalent to 7-8 years of total global fossil fuel emissions. Timber and oil palm plantations are draining the peatlands and also pushing local communities and small-holders into peat areas and rainforests. [Marcel Silvius of Wetland International]
Once this peat is drained, all this carbon will eventually be released into the atmosphere, unless the peat is subsequently re-flooded and restored. Annual fires, many of them set deliberately by plantation owners, speed up the process.
Added to this is the associated methane release from the arctic peat where it has been frozen. [Pop up to the Arctic and see it melt before your eyes Andrew if visual evidence is all you can react to. Have a chat with the Inuit of Nunavit, who have never experienced this in all their time as polar dwellers. No legends cover this event that is changing their lives.]
The CSIRO has modelled the impacts of climate change on Australia and show that in the South East we can expect declines .. of by 2030 and .. by 2070.
Now on 591mm it makes some area of Victoria most interesting by 2030. For example the western Districts are forecast to be drier in every seasonal quarter.
On the 1936 to 1945 rainfall lows the drier areas have desert rainfalls, the Murray Darling system a shadow in the sand like many of Austrlaia’s ancient rivers, if we cannot change our attitude to water use.
For example Horsham. In 129 years of record the dry years [Decile 1] average 320.4mm, a full 223.6mm below the 1936 to 1945 average for Victoria, the wetter being 568.4mm with the mean being 448.6 [130.6 years of record]. More than 10 days of rain occur in the months between May and November. January has been the driest month, February the least number of rain days at 3.8. [http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_079023.shtml]
The seasonal distribution of rainfall is expected to change with Summer Autumn, the usually dry period, becoming wetter and the usually wetter Winter and Spring becoming drier. [CSIRO – Climate Change Modelling]
The the water balance [rainfall minus evaporation] could decline by 2030 between 20 and 150mm and by 2070 to between 80 and 400mm [CSIRO Climate Science]
This is one of the risks Bolt is willing to take with the future of his readers, their children and grandchildren, by railing against action to limit and thus avoid dangerous climate change. Some change is now unavoidable.
Humans have never had as good an understanding of the mechanisms driving climate, nor as much to loose if the sum of our activity to date accounts for anything
Sir Nicholas Stern, former World Bank Chief Economist, recommends 1% of GDP spent each year to address this threat fof dangerous and costly climate changee, each country making its contribution.
Another World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz says in his Guardian piece
“To an economist, the problem is obvious: polluters are not paying the full costs of the damage they cause. Pollution is a global externality of enormous proportions. The advanced countries might mean Bangladesh and the disappearing island states no harm, but no war could be more devastating.
A global externality can best be dealt with by a globally agreed tax rate. This does not mean an increase in overall taxation, but simply a substitution in each country of a pollution (carbon) tax for some current taxes. It makes much more sense to tax things that are bad, like pollution, than things that are good, like savings and work.
Although President George W Bush says he believes in markets, in this case he has called for voluntary action. But it makes far more sense to use the force of markets – the power of incentives – than to rely on goodwill, especially when it comes to oil companies that regard their sole objective as maximizing profits, regardless of the cost to others.”
[http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/joseph_stiglitz/2006/11/a_cool_calculus_of_global_warm.html]
What is wrong with the remaining deniers and their apprentices, the ditherers, who wish to delay real action at every turn, demanding all should bail together or no one should start bailing out lifeboat Earth.
When the Howard government announces an investment in renewables it does not claim the economy will collapse.
It is better to spend now and avoid the costs of damage predicted to far exceed the costs of adaptation and mitigation.
What harm can there be to measures adapting the rural land to better deal with dry years. Such an investment can only bring the rewards that a few innovative farmers have shown are there if you change your attitude to the landscape and act to retain water. Gerry Harvey [Harvey Norman CEO] is no fool in relation to business and he is adopting these practices on his property.
Whilst fiddling around waiting for a super Kyoto we are passing through levels of CO2 not know for at least 650,000 years. [They drilled further in the additional years]. Is Howard seeking the status of a modern Nero downunder.
There is no past to refer to here, glacial or interglacial, wet or dry, coral reefs far to the south or not, CO2 levels have not been this high since early homonids.
Such references to the past, whilst they assist in understanding climate, are not measures of the outcomes of rapid, human induced, climate change. Only a fool, or someone with malicious intent, would continue to use them as such.
“It takes 30 or 40 years to realize the change in carbon dioxide emissions. It highlights how important it is to take quick and effective action now.” Dr Peter Falloon, a climate impact scientist at the UK Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre.
That means the warming we are having now relates to the warming greenhouse gases present in the 1965 to1975 period when they had gone to the highs of the interglacial periods from the 650,000 year record.
We are beyond that by about as much again with signals of positive feedbacks occurring. Reduced ice albedo, methane release from the permafrost region, ocean acidification and and warming of the surface, all these have major negative consequences.
We have no idea what tipping points we have passed, or may pass with the Howard government’s business as usual approach to CO2 emissons, we only have some forecasts varying from tolerable discomfortsure to disaster for many as sea levels rise, disease incidence moves, precipitation changes and nation states react in the interest of their survival.
Adopting low carbon energy technologies has the benefit of extending the life of the CO2 rich fuels [mostly coal] from their current 400 years out to beyond a 1000 if the reduction in CO2 emission needed is only 60%. It may end up being more with continued dithering.
Finding that for Australia is relatively easy with water heating accounting for about some 10% of energy use and the sun available for almost half the time [daytime] and a large block of the baseload is in the daytime.
Wind offers additional power. Geothermal [hot rocks] would run 24 hours and storing energy generated by daytime solar has been shown to be theoreticall feasible at a current privce of $0.25 per kilowatt hour. Further technological developments will be made with investment in renewables.
Without new discoveries Australia’s oil import bill will send vehicles to gas and locally produce biofuels, the crops being more valuable as energy sources than the current value of wheat.
A big ego would find it hard to abandon their position and would continue to act as though they alone had the light when the weight of evidence about the outcome of the business as usual course is against them, using the simple trick of if you cant see it isn’t there. Even Howard has abandoned this one.
We needed sceintific assistance to see microbes and black holes, positions had to be abandoned to agree that the earth revolved around the sun.
It is time for Bolt state the evidence he needs to be convinced and to give us the time lines for implementing effective action to avoid dangerous climate change once he is satified.
Otherwise criticise the course of avoidance, adaptation and mitigation measures, but do not argue the premise that there is no human induced climate change.
Unlike those who have studied climate as their life’s work, if you do not have the evidence of the safe outcome for your do nothing approach, stop risking the future of many for your bread today.
phill Parsons
