Would The Australian, in the interests of balance, publish the views of President Ahmadinejad of Iran on the need for a Palestinian homeland or of Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un on the necessity of a science program for the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.
As it hasn’t to date one can probably assume it will not.
Yet a constant diatribe questioning the science around understanding the changing climate by giving the views of a minority of climate scientists and others weight beyond their support among the scientific community.
Whilst science has a different underpinning to politics, which makes most positions arguable, one can only consider the constancy of The Australian on the climate question as a desire to ensure the coal, gas and oil industries get an unhindered run at exploiting the very stuff that the bulk of the scientific evidence identifies as the major and current cause of changes in the climate.
This position, given the weight of evidence, is not in the interest of the majority of The Australian’s readers.
Let’s take the edition of Monday the 28th of January 2013.
It contains an article reporting on a paper titled “Global warming less extreme than feared? New estimates from a Norwegian project on climate calculations” published by The Research Council of Norway (2013, January 25).
The article in The Australian states a lower end temperature increase of 1.9dC. by 2100. However The Australian omits to say the range of increase in the paper is between 1.2dC. [I hope] and 2.9dC., a level which has many dangers.
The reporter, Graham Lloyd, also fails to report that the pre 2000 dataset only gave a temperature increase of 3.7dC. The IPCC currently consider the median increase will be 3dC., with a range between 2dC. and 4.5dC.
No one can be sure that rate of increase will remain at the rate for the 2000 – 2010 decade, the decade of data that brought the median down to 1.9dC.
In an opinion piece Michael Asten, a Professor of Geophysics at Monash University, argues that “Natural disasters caused by wild weather are part of the narrative of our planet”.
Many of his tenets are not readily arguable, but he appears to use a limited understanding of the Earth’s past and current climate events to support his arguments.
He fails to consider this is the first time humans have apparently had direct influence on the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere.
He quotes Boris Johnson, the conservative mayor of London. Johnson may not understand why extreme cold events have struck London and much of Europe in past 5 years but climate scientists have shown that as the polar ocean loses its ice cap in summer so the atmospheric circulation in the northern hemisphere winter is altered by the new polar heat balance, bringing the freezing condition to Europe.
Certainly cyclic temperature variations appear to be influenced by a range of forces. Drought may have affected the course of development of more complex human activity since the destruction of Egypt’s old kingdom. But the events Asten uses are relatively recent phenomenon.
In the past 40 million years a range of drivers has influenced the planet’s climate moving from Ice Ages to Interglacials. The record for that period indicates each time the 400ppmv of CO2 range is reached the sea level rises by a number of metres.
That may not be separable from the influence of long term cycles we are yet to understand, but we don’t have that understanding yet.
We do know that burning fossil fuels is increasing the volume of atmospheric CO2.
There is some confidence that the changes in the planet’s climate level off between 400 and 650ppmv of CO2, but this is no excuse for complacency.
The rate of sea level rise may be steady and limited, but it is not to say that is a fixture, as Asten’s article intimates. The disintegration of land based ice is only now becoming understood.
Certainly Asten’s proposition that a more populated world has more people affected by events is correct. Imagine how many will be affected by rise of sea level by number of metres, or the 1 in 100 year events become 1 in 10.
Queensland has had six [6] 1 in 100 year rainfall events in the last 10 years. Major wildfires have affected all the States. Australia has recently had a long drought, almost half as long as the one that ended Egypt’s Old Kingdom.
Climate scientists may have struck it lucky. Their models have predicted the trend of the events Australia is experiencing but, as Asten claims, they may be caused or influenced by other cycles.
Delaying action does not seem to be supported by the evidence.
In the meantime, whilst we are researching these conundrums, it would seem prudent to take measures to address what the current evidence points to as the driver of climate change, fossil fools promoting the burning of fossil fuels.
