I’ll start at the beginning. Or about 56 million years ago, when the dinosaurs had only recently been extinguished and mammals were in the early stages of their evolution. There were no humans — not even any primates. [Figure 1] Temperatures during the Eocene epoch show as a big mound followed by a long, slow decline in the graph at the top left of Figure 1. During the Eocene Optimum, the north and south poles enjoyed tropical conditions.
About 20 years ago, geoscientists studying cores from ocean-floor sediments discovered a big temperature anomaly right at the start of the Eocene. Earth’s crust at the time was going through massive changes. Super-continents were being torn apart by shifting tectonic plates, giving rise to widespread, protracted volcanic eruptions. As the story has unfolded, these seismic events heated sediments containing fossil carbon, releasing carbon dioxide and then methane into the atmosphere. (Does that sound familiar?)
The temperature record, derived from oxygen isotope ratios in the sediments, appears in graphical form as a precipitous peak — a sudden, sharp rise followed by an equally-sharp fall (after which there was another, more gradual rise to the “Eocene Optimum”). The same sediment records showed a closely similar jump in atmospheric carbon concentrations — a much more rapid rise than had previously been found anywhere in Earth’s geological record. The peak has become known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM.
Figure 2, a graph published in Scientific American about six months ago, shows an alternative view of what PETM looked like — that’s the blue line climbing away to the right. The years have been stretched out; they’re in thousands, not millions, so the sharp peak of the multi-million-year scale becomes a gentle climb to the top. Seen like this, it seems almost benign. The fossil record shows there were extinctions, notably in the deep ocean, but most organisms had time to adapt to and survive this “thermal maximum”.
So what are we worried about? If life can survive this giant warming episode with its trillions of tonnes of carbon injected into the atmosphere, why should we be concerned about today’s warming? The question has been put repeatedly by contrarians seeking to persuade us that humans couldn’t possibly influence global climate, or that if they can, it can’t possibly do us any harm.
Well, the red line on the left of the graph is what we’re concerned about. The warming that began early last century and continues apace today is fuelled by a rate of carbon injection that dwarfs the natural processes of the PETM. The result is a rate of warming over ten times that of the earlier “thermal maximum”, a warming which will cease only after we have stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the air. To repeat: science has found no other time in 65 million years where Earth’s atmosphere has been subjected to such a massive injection of carbon over so short a period of time as is happening now.
In addressing the question “what needs to be done”, I could start by running off the countless clever strategies and technologies that have been put up as practical solutions to our climate-energy problem. Things like new kinds of energy generation — solar, wind, hydro, tide and wave, geothermal, biomass. I could do a sales pitch for cheap rooftop energy, or talk about new-generation nuclear fission, or cold fusion. I’ve read some pretty persuasive arguments for both. I could talk about new ways to get ourselves about, or to make buildings more energy-efficient, or to localise travel and commerce and reduce consumption, or to change farming and forestry practices to capture and store carbon in plants and soil. I could wax lyrical about the great efforts being made in communities small and large around the planet, including here in Tasmania, to reduce their energy use and their carbon emissions while improving the quality of their lives.
Maybe if I talked about these sorts of things I could help you to leave here with better feelings about our prospects. There’s actually much to be cheerful about in how we’ve responded in recent years to the challenge thrown up by our changing climate and the ways we obtain energy. Humans are astonishingly inventive, both technically and strategically, when they want to be, and we should continue to be optimistic about the potential for our inventiveness, in the face of this great challenge, in order not merely to survive but to maintain and strengthen our civil community, our humanity, here on Earth in the only home we know.
But I’m not going to say any more today about practical action and technology. We know that all these things and more must be part of the package of solutions (with an “s” on the end, notice — there are no single silver bullets), but the practicalities aren’t our main problem. The main problem lies within each of us.
We’re faced with the reality, confirmed by science, that human-induced warming is an unprecedented threat to civil society and life as we know it. Collectively and personally, we’re challenged to change the technologies we use and the ways we behave. If we wish to continue mining, clearing land, making and buying goods, using electrical energy, travelling — any of these things and more — we must work out how to do them without adding carbon to the air. It’s either that, or we have to stop doing them. Or we fry. This is our stark choice. The responsibility for that choice rests with us, as individual members of the global community, as much as it lies with government. That’s confronting.
There’s a more deep-seated problem. Counter to our instinct to respond to immediate, obvious threats, mitigating climate change requires imaginative, rational, and non-intuitive responses. Climate change is so big and abstract, so removed from our the comfortable lives we continue to enjoy, that it defies belief. Paul Ehrlich calls this “evolutionary mismatch”. Our hunter-gatherer brains evolved to deal with visible, imminent threats that we see before us, like a charging lion: not the creeping, invisible threat posed by a slowly cooking planet. Even if we’ve grasped that it’s real, it’s doubly hard to motivate ourselves and others to act. We have to find a way of bringing these apparently abstract threats into our everyday lives, so we see them for what they really are: real and imminent. This is a personal, social and political challenge.
Powerful campaigns against climate action have revealed governments’ vulnerability in addressing climate change. Governments are a product of history and their people, but they are failing in the face of this challenge. This is partly because inefficiency — a necessary part of democracy and good government — is built into the system. But the principal cause of the repeated setbacks is that the evidence for human-induced warming is highly susceptible to misinterpretation, so that people everywhere have been having difficulty working out what’s true and what isn’t.
Ah, those heady days of the 1990s! There was goodwill aplenty in the Rio “Earth Summit” and the Kyoto meeting of 1997 towards reducing our carbon footprint. All governments, including those of Australia and the United States, signed the Kyoto Protocol, and even when these two governments later decided not to ratify the Protocol, the goodwill endured through the early 2000s. But in those rollicking economic times the goodwill was benign, and ultimately ineffectual. Nobody was being asked to pay a price. Then along came Al Gore.
An Inconvenient Truth was in more ways than one a turning point in the history of climate policy. It popularised the science behind anthropogenic climate change, so that big majorities of people around the world declared themselves in favour of urgent action to reduce emissions. It sharpened the debate, enabling us to see that this demanded more than goodwill; it called for action by peoples and governments everywhere.
It was also a political statement. As we all know, Al Gore was a Democratic Vice-President, up against the Republican George W. Bush at the centre of the most divisive and disputed presidential election in United States history. When he became a movie star in 2006 his opposite number was still in the White House. In the years after the movie’s release, its protagonist became the subject of political dispute, with supporters and detractors lining up as they would for a presidential (or parliamentary) election. It was politics, not science, which drove the “Climategate” email furore. We now know the claims of fraudulent science were baseless, but as they say about throwing mud, some of it sticks.
The big losers out of a politicised climate debate are science and human enlightenment, and our relentlessly-rising emissions. The partisan divide remains, cemented in place by the neo-conservative surge not just in the US but also in Canada, here in Australia, in Europe and elsewhere. The early success of Gore’s campaign brought into sharp relief the real battle-lines of the climate wars, in which vested interests have for decades driven a concerted campaign against scientific inquiry and integrity by deliberately undermining the credibility of scientists and their work. For that awareness alone we owe much to An Inconvenient Truth.
There’s classic partisan politics in this: conservative against liberal, money against the public good, corporate interests against open inquiry, the old order against the young upstarts, dogmatism against scientific inquiry. But as always, it’s more complicated than that. It’s also libertarians and “free spirits” (as in, free to do whatever I damn well like) versus regulators, the good-timers versus the spoilers, ordinary people wanting to go on living their lives versus the intellectual elite throwing up reasons why they shouldn’t.
It’s this latter divide that is now playing so firmly against the cause of climate action. As the debate wears on — and it’s now five and a half years since An Inconvenient Truth hit the cinemas — and as economic fortunes have turned sour, people have tired of the ceaseless rhetoric around the debate. During the Durban meeting the Global Carbon Project released what can only be described as alarming global emissions figures. The response was restrained, muted, as if its message is somehow no longer relevant. Taking another look at the Scientific American graph [Figure 2] can we doubt its great and urgent relevance? But in tough economic times — much tougher in Europe and the US than here, it has to be said — such things pass over the heads of people engaged with their own personal struggles to survive.
The point is, we know what’s wrong. James Hansen, Will Steffen and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have told us. And we know what we have to do. Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Nicholas Stern, Ross Garnaut and countless activists and policy wonks around the world have told us. It couldn’t be clearer. The window of opportunity for having any impact on rising temperatures is vanishing rapidly, and we have to act, all of us, together, with whatever legislative, financial and practical means are at our disposal and with rapid physical effect. Notwithstanding the growing impact, and therefore responsibility, of China, India and Brazil, among other emerging economies, the greatest responsibility remains with the people and governments of developed nations, historically the greatest carbon polluters. People like us.
We know all that, but without paradigm shifts we will continue to deny it.
Faith is an integral part of any resolution. By that I don’t mean faith in the formal sense implied in the title of the “Interfaith Declaration on Climate Change” issued at Durban last week — welcome though that pronouncement was. We need all the help we can get, and Archbishop Tutu and his colleagues have done well to raise the issue of our moral responsibility to Planet Earth. Their commitment is admirable and necessary, but in the absence of a wider political and social engagement they are voices in the wilderness.
Faith is not exclusively a religious matter. I’m interested in a more mundane sort of faith, the kind of faith that we have in engineers to make buildings and freeways that won’t fall down, in pilots to fly us safely to our destination, in physicians to identify and treat our ailments, in governmental, business and legal systems to shield us from unwanted incursions or economic collapse or unjust accusation. Our faith in governments, business people and lawyers, it has to be said, is always compromised by politics or ideology, but fundamentally we accept these institutions because we think there’s a net gain in having them.
Not so long ago a big majority of us felt the same about scientists who investigate climate, and about the politicians and bureaucrats who devise policies to address issues raised by the science. We trusted what they said because we saw no reason not to. It was obvious to everyone that while individual scientists were people with particular biases just like us, and while we may not understand in detail what they were saying, the scientific method was a tried and true means of rising above the personal to a higher plane, out of which came knowledge about the world.
Now, shrill, angry outbursts are proclaiming scientists to be part of some giant global conspiracy to build personal wealth and power at the expense of you and me. Science no longer comes across as impartial, above the fray, but as part of it. Its messages are being tainted with the accusation of political or vested interest. People seem no longer to trust what it has to say. So while the scientific case for human-induced warming has strengthened in recent years, the influence of scientists and their institutions seems to have waned. Do-it-yourself, junk science has moved into some spaces where legitimate science was previously accepted without question — in talkback radio, news media and the blogosphere. Public figures who have made no effort to understand the science are condemning it out of hand, undermining our faith in science. It will not recover without strong bipartisan political support, and that, alas, is yet to materialise.
I’m afraid I can offer no silver bullets, no comforting words, except to say that I’m confident we can achieve remarkable things when the challenge facing us becomes clear to all; when people everywhere see what science has been saying — that today’s greenhouse threat exceeds anything we know from geological time, that our present emissions trajectory amounts to a global emergency that dwarfs our financial difficulties, and that our only recourse is to act as one. I know of no other way for that to happen but to keep the discourse flowing whatever the reaction, to support our time-honoured scientific method and the scientists who exercise it whenever these are questioned, to engage with our governments, our corporations, our communities, people out of our own age bracket (young people if you’re old and old people if you’re young), to enjoin them to come together and act, with real, physical, measurable outcomes… and never to give up.
Democracy is seen as a weakness, but it is also potentially a great strength. If enough voters in enough countries are persuaded that the climate threat is real and urgent, then we have a chance of containing the damage and turning our emissions juggernaut around. An essential part of this effort must be comprehensive educational programs that engage and channel the energy of youth, tomorrow’s citizens, in the processes of putting things to rights. Our Australian Youth Climate Coalition is showing us the potential of that vital energy.
The message that I’d like to see you take away from here is that one person, one community, one nation acting is better than none; that setting an example through determined action, even if it is unilateral, can bring about a paradigm shift by drawing others into the circle. Taking strength from each other and taking advantage of every political, social and economic opportunity that presents itself, we may turn out to have more influence than we think. For this we need both courage and patience. The tipping point that leads to action may not be as far away as it may seem.
Address to the 15th International Environmental Forum, Hobart, 10 and 11 December 2011. Conference theme: Ethical Responses to Climate Change
Published on Peter Boyer’s website, HERE, with full links and graphs
And… Alan Kohler’s thoughts…
PAYING THE PRICE OF A DURBAN VICTORY
Alan Kohler
12 Dec 2011
The meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change long ago changed from being a forum to negotiate a solution for global warming to being a spin-fest to hide its failure.
Did this happen at the failed talks in Buenos Aires in 1998, just a year after the Kyoto Protocol was triumphantly signed, or in 2001 in Bonn, when President George W Bush refused either to attend or to sign up?
The latest Conference of the Parties (COP) in Durban over the weekend triumphantly agreed… to put everything off until 2020. Actually, that’s a little unfair: the deal to work towards an agreement that legally binds all nations – including China and India – instead of just the so-called rich countries, was both hard won and significant.
The question remains, as it has since the ‘Earth Summit’ of 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, whether anything can be achieved at any time that makes any kind of difference to global warming.
There were 194 countries represented in Durban over the weekend. I’d say the only thing that so many different national interests would be able to agree on in a few days is that the sun will rise tomorrow, and even then a few of them would have to be bought off.
The basic problem is that 20 years ago the world was a very different place. Tiananmen Square had just happened and China was 10 years away from joining the World Trade Organisation. It was clearly a poor, developing country, as was India.
As a result, the original 1992 treaty excluded China from the “economies in transition” included in Annex 1. These were mainly the eastern European countries and Baltic States emerging from the USSR.
Annex 2 was a sub-set of Annex 1, consisting of what were then the 23 richest countries in the world, including such pillars of economic strength as Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Iceland.
It was agreed then that developing countries – which basically meant any outside Annex 1 – would not be required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions unless they were paid to do so by Annex 2 countries.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was the legally binding agreement between the 41 Annex 1 countries, foreshadowed in 1992 and five years in the making, to reduce emissions by 6-8 per cent of 1990 levels between the years 2008 and 2012. US President Bill Clinton signed it at the time but Congress refused to ratify.
There were a few unresolved issues to be sorted out the following year in Buenos Aires. Everyone showed up full of hope but hit the first serious brick wall of the UNFCCC process. COP 4, as it was, got nowhere and the issues were put off for two more years.
But two years later, COP 6 in The Hague collapsed in total disarray for two reasons: US intransigence and the first signs of the issue that would become the central one: money. There was total confusion about how and how much to pay the developing countries to even measure their greenhouse gas emissions, let alone reduce them.
And then China joined the WTO and became the greatest manufacturing exporter the world has ever known. Within 10 years it had more or less bankrupted the United States and Europe by maintaining an undervalued currency and helping to keep their interest rates down – not that those rich countries needed much encouragement to spend beyond their means and go into debt.
The result is that China is now rich and Europe and the US are poor.
Some European nations are destitute and should definitely not be in Annex 2, and probably not even Annex 1.
China is now the largest greenhouse gas emitter (accounting for 23 per cent of the world’s emissions in 2008 versus 18 per cent for the US and 14 per cent for Europe). However, its per capita emissions are the same as Barbados – around 78th in the world.
The celebrated breakthrough at COP 17 in Durban over the past few days, achieved through 72 hours of continuous argument, is that the next climate change treaty will bind all nations, not just Annex 1 & 2.
China and India only agreed to this because the deal included the establishment of a new fund – the Green Climate Fund – that would mobilise $US100 billion in cash transfers from the developed to the developing countries.
The details of both the new binding treaty and the fund were left for later – much later. The Kyoto Protocol, which only binds rich countries and which has been comprehensively ignored anyway, has been extended to 2020, giving everyone another nine years to talk about the replacement. But at least a ‘road map’ was agreed yesterday.
It leaves Australia uncomfortably out in front, courageously preparing to introduce a carbon tax on July 1, 2012, and an emissions trading scheme in 2015.
This is well ahead of the COP 17 agreement to get all countries to sign a deal in 2015 that would force them to cut emissions by 2020.
Implementing this will be tricky – not because global warming will be less of a problem than it is now, but because the so-called rich countries will be much, much poorer than they have become even in the past three years, and the developing countries – China, Brazil and India – will be much richer.
As time goes on, the idea that Europe, America and Japan can, or should, pay the others $US100 billion a year to help them deal with climate change will seem more and more preposterous.
But at least at COP 18 in Qatar next year, Greg Combet, or whoever has replaced him, will be Action Man, representing the only government who have Done Something, and is Ahead Of The Game. This is not necessarily a bad thing – our reliance on brown coal for cheap electricity means we are coming from a long way behind and do need to start early.
The fact that it’s just because Australia is the only country in which the Greens hold the balance of power in parliament, and that the Labor Party won government having promised not to do it, presumably won’t be mentioned.
