phill Parsons
“CURRENT global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable — environmentally, economically, socially … What is needed is nothing short of an energy revolution.” I have said similar things myself, but this quote is from a new “World Energy Outlook” by the International Energy Agency.” [IEA]
So starts Professor Ian Lowe in his oped piece at the end of 2008 in the The Age.
Commencing the New Year Ross Garnaut criticizes the K Rudd government for failing to adopt a 25% emissions reduction target by 2020. Garanaut was appointed by Rudd and the State Premiers prior to the election of the K Rudd government to bring down a report on the impacts of and strategies for Australia to avoid further increasing climate instability and thus the end result, a climate catastrophe as dangerous climate changes runaway from humans ability to interven onb global scale changes to the chemistry of the atmosphere and the physics of the Earth’s surface [the Arctic albedo].
Garnaut’s recommendation was not accepted. His criticism of this failure by the K Rudd government, like the activism of the British Economist Lord Nicholas Stern, continues. Garnaut thinks, like many, that there is a limit to his power. If Garnaut believes the government has made a wrong decision with potentially fatal impacts, and certainly costly ones for the economy, even if they are deferred for our descendents attention, he should speak out more forcefully. The time is past for polite and due process on this matter.
Professor Lowe continues “The agency’s [IEA] conversion is only the latest and most dramatic example of a new global attitude. The changes leave the Federal Government suddenly looking out of touch, its recent climate change announcements more like a white flag than a white paper.
The Government’s weak emissions trading scheme design is not just a surrender to the big polluters, but appears to give up on saving precious national icons such as the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the Murray-Darling river system. It is also bad news for the economy, as Professor Ross Garnaut wrote in these pages recently.
It is dishonest to claim that our per capita pollution reductions are comparable with those of Europe. Increasing population is not being forced on us by Martians, it results from 20th century policies to boost immigration and encourage larger families. The Earth’s natural systems don’t understand how many Australians there are, only our total impact. As global citizens, we should curb the growth in our numbers and set serious targets to cut pollution.
The UN’s 2007 Bali conference noted that countries such as Australia need to reduce greenhouse pollution by 25 to 40 per cent to give the Earth a fighting chance of avoiding dangerous climate change.
The latest science is more alarming. Until recently, methane levels in the air had been stable for a decade, but there has been a surge. Unpublished research shows the methane is coming from the Arctic. This is the sign climate scientists have been warning about, a possible tipping point.
Temperatures have increased more at the poles than in the tropics. Warming is releasing methane from tundra, increasing warming and causing further methane releases, possibly setting in train an unstoppable surge in temperature. We need an urgent and concerted approach to cut greenhouse pollution.”
One result of that is below. A precursor to many natural systems malfunctioning as the changing temperatures trigger changes patterns of rainfall, of ocean circulation patterns and thus of migratory patterns of animals, all linked in a complex upon which we have built our complex of activities, and with 6.4B head, upon which we depend entirely.
Magellan penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) live in relatively warmer climates than other penguin species, and breed and nest in burrows in the southern hemisphere spring and summer, from October to February, in southern Chile and Argentina, in a temperate and dry climate.
They travel out to sea during the winter, from March to September, to follow anchovies, their favourite food, in order to fatten up.
Juveniles also migrate north. This year, about 2,500 disoriented juvenile penguins traveled more than 2,500 kilometres beyond the normal point, coming ashore in Salvador, in Bahia state, 1,400 kilometres north of Sao Paulo, to the amazement of beachgoers. The penguins were rescued by IFAW and the Centre for Marine Animal Recovery, with help from other organisations and Brazilian environmental authorities.
After months of care and feeding, the 372 surviving penguins [86% died] were banded and loaded onto a C-130 Hercules military plane and transported to Cassino Beach, in Pelotas, in southern Brazil.
After an overnight rest, they were released into the South Atlantic ocean, along with a few other rescued adult penguins, with the hope that they would guide the younger ones safely home to Patagonia.
Magellans are one of 17 species of penguins, which all live in the southern hemisphere, including the Antarctic. Magellans are among the largest, weighing just over four kilograms, with striking colouring: a white chest and a white band around a black back and black head.
The Magellan penguin population is fragile, as their numbers have plummeted by about 20 percent, with about one million breeding pairs today, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. The penguins are at risk due to the effects of climate change, tourism, oil leaks from tankers and shrimp nets.
Furthermore, stress from the ocean changes would exacerbate an already dwindling source of fish for the penguins, due to aggressive commercial fishing in the region. During nesting season, male penguins are swimming further each day to feed, compared to their normal forays, according to P. Dee Boersma, a penguin expert at the University of Washington.
Boersma, who has a research station in Punta Tombo, home to the largest colony of Magellan penguins, on the coast of the southern Argentine province of Chubut, says the changing climate has included more rain in recent years.
Coastal Patagonia is normally very dry, and the increasing rains mean that wet penguin chicks die of exposure, Boersma says in research published recently in the journal BioScience.
“Penguins are sentinels of the marine environment, and by observing and studying them, researchers can learn about the rate and nature of changes occurring in the southern oceans,” she says.
Punta Tombo is a tiny peninsula near the city of Rawson. Its widest point is less than one kilometre, and it is teaming and crowded with penguins — and tourists — during breeding season. About 105,000 people visited the penguin colony in 2007. Local efforts are underway to protect the penguins from further encroachment.
[Some cultures, with their failure to properly respect nature endanger not only species and ecosystems, but all of us. An example of capitalism and the Japanese desire for perfection and oneupmanship comes from 1982. The Punta Tombo colony was saved from Japanese commercial interests, which wanted to slaughter the birds and use their pelts to make golf gloves. The area was turned into a penguin preserve and research centre, led by Boersma.]
And closer to home Australia has failed to meets it RAMSAR reporting obligations for its wetlands of international significance. Although the first signatory on the agreement the parlous state of many wetlands already registered has left government unsure about reporting because if the wetlands have been too degraded they will be deregistered. Not a good look for a government attempting to lie its way into a green cloak to cover its coal black heart.
Dr J Hansen, head of the Goddard inbstitute of Space Sceince, a part of NASA, and his wife have wriitten a letter of appeale advocating a three-pronged attack on the climate problem – all measures he has promoted before. First, he wants a moratorium and phase-out of coal-fired power stations – which he calls “factories of death” – that do not incorporate carbon capture and storage.
“Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as the other fossil fuels combined, and its reserves make coal even more important for the long run,” the Hansens wrote in a personal appeal to President Elect Barak Hussein Obama.
Second, he proposes a “carbon tax and 100% dividend”: a mechanism for putting a price on carbon without raising money for government coffers. The idea is to tax carbon at source, then redistribute the revenue equally among taxpayers, so high carbon users are penalised while low carbon users are rewarded.
Finally, Hansen wants a renewed research effort into so-called fourth generation nuclear plants, which can use nuclear waste as fuel. “In our opinion [fourth generation nuclear power] deserves your strong support, because it has the potential to help solve past problems with nuclear power: nuclear waste, the need to mine for nuclear fuel, and release of radioactive material.”
Hansen argues that the current emphasis on reduction targets combined with carbon trading schemes make it too easy for countries to wriggle out of their commitments. He cites the example of Japan’s increasing coal use – the dirtiest fuel in terms of carbon emissions. To offset these increases in emissions Japan has bought credits from China through the clean development mechanism – an instrument set up by the Kyoto protocol – yet China’s emissions have continued to increase rapidly. China has now overtaken the US as the biggest polluter in the world.
“Nobody realistically expects that the large readily available pools of oil and gas will be left in the ground. Caps will not cause that to happen – caps only slow the rate at which the oil and gas are used. The only solution is to cut off the coal source,” the Hansens wrote.
Another indicator from the sea realm is the fate of the Great Barrier Reef [GBR]. Flagged to fail under the business as usual plan for the climate it now appears a date range can be set based on its current rate of decline.
The Australian Marine Research Institute’s Dr Glenn De’ath reports that with 400 years of record, coral growth has slowed by 14.2% in the last 20 years. The growth is slowing more and more closer to the latest readings of 2005 and is predicted to cease between 2035 and 2050.
The GBR will then begin to fall apart. Globally reef cover is shrinking by 1% annually. This is happening independent of the global temperature record that certain parties refer to as evidence for anything but a human caused climate disaster.
Here is a pretty conundrum for the Queensland and Australian Governments. Captured by killer coal these jurisdictions are presiding over the death of a national icon they should act to save. We will know if the world is smart enough to try and save this piece of its heritage, along with all the others, by the end of the year when the next round of emission reduction targets are agreed in Copenhagen.
The Queensland Government’s assurances that it knows how best to save the reef is shown by its own activities to be completely and entirely hollow, another lie. They will not be able to act surprised and deny knowledge soon enough. Further the advice on the degree of change in carbon emissions needed has been clearly given to government so the culpability will lie with it under a Labor administration. No passing the buck to the Liberals here, they are as guilty with their denial since 1997 and now their questioning of the pitiful targets of the K Rudd government.
How will the death of tourism, except for a macabre interest in the decline of the GBR, be felt by the communities dependent on it for the services it provides for the tourist and fishing industries and as protection to the coast. The current downturn in visitation will appear as nothing to the cost of those impacts and no compensation will be possible.
And how has the national newspaper, the supposed icon of serious journalism, the fourth estate guardians of the national interest, aka The Australian, reported this. Hidden under an article on reef recovery in Aceh, where those reefs are no longer poisoned by cyanide or blown up, only acidified by the carbon terrorists, killer coal and poison oil and gas.
Continuing with Queensland, the U of Q has severely criticized the State of The Environment reporting methods used nationally, marking it below the shonkiest accounting methods of the corporate world which we see unfolding during the current financial crisis.
Using existing reporting methods to analyse land clearing in Queensland between 1997 and 2003, the study found that conservation gains showed a positive environmental benefit. But when applying its new responsiuble accounting formula the U of Q accounting method showed a negative result and plummeting biodiversity.
Prof. Possingham is one of the authors and one of the directors of the University of Qld’s Federal Governmentfunded ecology centre. The study is recommending a better method of accounting for changes in land use. Watch the space for changes to indicate how the green cloak will be worn.
The Independent conducted a poll of leading climate scientists. Of the 80 International experts polled, 54% favored drastic interference with the natural systems governing the planet, believing it was time for radical last ditch methods. 11% did not know if radical geoengineering was needed, leaving only 35% opposed.
Almost everyone who thought that geoengineering should be studied as a possible plan B said that it must not be seen as an alternative to international agreements on cutting carbon emissions but something that runs in parallel to binding treaties in case climate change runs out of control and there an urgent need to cool the planet quickly.
Lovelock, of GIAI fame, states ‘I never thought that the Kyoto agreement would lead to any useful cut back in greenhouse gas emissions so I am neither more nor less optimistic now about prospect of curbing CO2 compared to 10 years ago. I am, however, less optimistic now about the ability of the Earth’s climate system to cope with expected increases in atmospheric carbon levels compared with 10 years ago. I disagree that geoengineering the climate is a dangerous distraction and I disagree that on no account should it ever be considered. I strongly agree that we now need a “plan B” where a geoengineering strategy is drawn up in parallel with other measures to curb CO2 emissions. However, climate change is an Earth system problem and the UN is not a suitable body to host or organise it’
His plan, working with Chris Rapley of the Science Museum in London, is to put giant tubes into the seas to take surface water rich in dissolved CO2 to lower depths where it will not surface. The idea is to take CO2 out of the short-term carbon cycle, cutting the gas in the atmosphere. Critics say it may bring carbon locked away in the deep ocean to the surface.
Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, London states “I am not enthusiastic about geo-engineering, as to intervene on a massive scale in the Earth’s climate system will certainly have unforeseen consequences, some of which could be as regrettable as the problem the intervention was designed to address in the first place. This is why Jim Lovelock and I have been encouraging thought and exploration of means to “help the Earth help itself”; i.e. by amplifying carbon sequestration processes that the Earth already practises – in the ocean and on land. I very much support the various tropical rainforest initiatives for this reason. My real concern is that the need to take action is now very urgent. Events in the Arctic suggest that we may already be passing through a significant “tipping point”. The action taken in response to the credit crunch indicates the scale and speed of what is possible. Saving the ecosystem services upon which we all depend would seem to be at least as important as baling out the worldwide cartel of reckless and greedy bankers.”
James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institue of Space Science, a part of NASA, has also described those driving the climate catastrophe that will follow a failure to act in a timely way both efeectiviely and comprehensively to reduce carbon pollution as criminal with his “factories of death” description of coal fired power stations.
Can K Rudd have confidence in the Carbon Capture abd Storage innitiative he is promoting and funding. Well it is interestring to see that CCS failed to get a mention in the ETS released by Wong last year.
Conclusion CCS is a smoke screen held up as an excuse for inaction for at least another 10 years whilst the process is researched and piloted. If it works buld it now. Not only will it save the difficulties and costs we will all face but the recuycling of the emission trading moneyt as a gift to the coal industry for doing nothing would actually have a purpose. $3.9Billion should reduce carbon pollution from caol fired power just a little you would think.
So what can these carbon terrorist do to end their war of the greedy on th the planet, their supposedly holy mission on behalf of mysterious shareholders to kill all life, complete ecocide, do?.
If they are serious about stopping a climate catastrophe, limiting climate instability and saving their customers from an inability to pay for the product due to turmoil followed by death, they will demand an immediate rise in the emissions trading target, eschewing greed over need.
After all, the money raised by emissions trading is going back to compensate energy users and fossil fuel energy producers, so why not do more sooner and find a way to reward the loosers by moving their investments into the new low carbon technologies rapidly and without further delay.
They can sell energy efficiency. It is already a prectice in the USA where coal companires have provided energy saving light globes rather than build new plants. Soon their will be the benfit of carbon offsetts in emissions trading that conversions of homes and businesses to low energy could be credited with, besides the owners repaying loans for that conversion to the energy producers.
A simple redirection of investment. We know the stone age did not end for the want of stones. Killer coal, choking oil, poison gas and forest destruction, all these industries will have to change to limit the damage caused by further climate instability or their will be an inevitable climate backlash.
Recently a carbon positive cement was discovered. The carbon emitting cement industry was outdated immediately. But instead of embracing this discovery and rushing forward responsibly their initial reaction was to dismiss it including the excuse they were not sure their was enough resource. The response of the inventor was to ask if 10,000,000,000,000. tonnes would be sufficient.
Really thew complaint was that we would have to write down the cost of exisating investment. Well duh, what do you want a habitable planet.
Is the failure to take timely action to avoid a climate catastrophe possible after a period if further and increasing climate instability feed turning points torunaway change?.
Both the old parties and industry claim they now believe that the climate is changing under the pressure of human activities and that must be avoided their action indicate they are only paying lip service to be elected to their positions in parliaments or on boards.
There is ample evidence now that K Rudd etal were paying lip service simply to get elected and that they do not actually believe the evidence. Otherwise a higher 2020 target would have been posited and the lower used only if the world failed to agree, rather than the way it was put with the lower first.
After all, if the world opts for a strong target K Rudd has only 2 choices, to deny it was strong enough or take the ire of industry at the 2010 election and face both their pressure to not have a 15% reduction and the pressure of the environmental lobby, disappointed by the 5%, who will have difficulty trusting the government whose words and actions don’t align and be demanding a 25% cut by 2020.
One has to agree that Australia’s contributiuon to CO2 as a greenhose gas is small, the importance of our action more in its moral weight among devloped and developing nations thatn its physical volume.
However, everybody is in this together on lifebaot earth and if the planks part were sunk. At the moment we can bail furiously and we may remain afloat whilst the world transits to a new low carbon economy to remain living in a new climate because the carbon will remain in the atmosphere for aeons; the legacy of greediness, be it big cars, big arses, big families or big profits, or we can slip under as tipping points pass and the past becomes a distant memory of the now under 35’s who may marvel at the baby boomers incoherent culpability, as they were advised by the brightest of the time that the days would end.
And the evidence for that end continues to mount, making the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmnetal Panel on Climate Change a very dated document, even though the data supporting it is only 3 or 4 years old.
Canada’s 1.2 million square miles of trees have been written off by the government as carbon sinks. Once dubbed the “lungs of the planet” by ecologists because they account for more than 7 percent of Earth’s total forest lands, and could be depended upon to suck in vast quantities of carbon dioxide, naturally cleansing the world of much of the harmful heat-trapping gas.
But not anymore.
In an alarming yet little-noticed series of recent studies, scientists have concluded that Canada’s precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming and the concomitant insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.
As the globe heats up this will be the fate of all terrestrial carbon stores. They will cease to sink and then begin to emit CO2 as they decay.
Sinking and storing carbon [biosequestration] may return as a function of these forests but not until 2022. according to current knowledge.
In principle locally produced timber for human need is stored carbon and such uses should continue, but the wholesale reduction of natural forests to produce packaging, newsprint and single or short cycle uses of other disposable paper products has passed by, the reduced carbon sinking of all natural systems now in urgent need of strengthening lest further tipping points see them join the forests of Sahara recorded in the animals skeletons and cave paintings of the long dead forest dwellers.
A cessation of the use of timber will only see the product replaced with other, most likely more carbon intensive materials. If the Tasmanian government was serious about addressing further climate instability it would review the Latham funding proposal to fund the transition of the timber industry and put a proposal to its RFA partner, the Federal government. A plan to rapidly phase out export of woodchips from natural forests and a move to the production of laminated veneer lumber from the managed forests and plantations retained for timber production.
K Rudd and his opponent Turnbull have a responsibility to recant their denial of the importance of Australia’s carbon pollution in the context of a world agreement to significantly reduce emissions, seriously working to stop the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere and returning us to pre industrial revolution levels of emissions in a relatively short period.
The consequences of failure are similar to the farmer who, as he denied ‘climate change’, said that along with all the problems he faced living on the land, that if he admitted that ‘climate change’ was real he might as well slash his wrists now.
phill Parsons advises that he will not let the bastards off so lightly. Not only will his single subject monographs continue to bore the already convinced he will also through his work be doing his utmost to reduce carbon emissions. He hopes others will join in the various ways they can act from driving less and slower through eating more home grown produce to ethical investment in low carbon technologies. Also in action in their communities including only voting for the politicians that take the climate catastrophe we are causing seriously and will do their utmost to mitigate it now.
If the worst becomes unavoidable, which seems very likely without strong and immediate large reductions in GHG emissions, [and geoengineering is attempted and also fails] anomic nihilism will become a contagion as the complex human activity from which we benefit unwinds in a world where water becomes scarce, nature a shadow of its former complexity and war a common event as the last throws of nation states scrabbling for survival as entities.
Based on climate modeling from 23 models the heatwave Europe suffered in 2003 is likely to be the norm for temperate zones. The maximums now becoming the average by the end of the century. Food production fell in by 21 to 36% depending on the crop and the region. With a population trending toward 9B a fall in food production of that magnitude can only mean one thing.
