EcoRadio

Category: Climate chaos

The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity. 

  • Liberals facing election rout

     

    Mr Abbott is considered to be the frontrunner in any challenge, but there is also strong support for Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey.

    Mr Hockey has said he will contest the leadership only if it is vacated by Mr Turnbull, who was digging in last night, saying he would remain Liberal leader until the party removed him.

    Mr Turnbull believes that abandoning support for the compromise Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme would be fatal for the Coalition’s electoral prospects.

    Related Coverage

    According to the Newspoll analysis, support for the government’s emissions trading scheme legislation is overwhelming among Coalition voters in metropolitan areas. Newspoll shows that 63 per cent of Coalition voters in the cities believe the government’s bill should be passed, while only 28 per cent think it should be opposed.

    If one in 10 of those voters changed sides because of a Coalition decision to block action on climate change, it would cost the Liberal Party the 20 metropolitan seats that it holds with margins of less than 6.5 per cent.

    These findings are consistent with the Liberal Party’s internal research in marginal seats, which shows that between 75 and 80 per cent of swinging voters favour action on climate change.

    Senior party officials say the research shows a triumph by climate change sceptics would be “the death of the party”.

    Newspoll chief executive Martin O’Shannessy says the most worrying finding for the Coalition is that its voters aged 18 to 34 favour the government’s legislation by a margin of almost five to one. The Newspoll survey, taken in mid-September, showed that 75 per cent of Coalition voters in this age group backed the bill, while only 17 per cent were opposed.

    “It was a tremendous swing in that age group that put most of the energy behind the swing to Labor in 2007,” Mr O’Shannessy said, noting that the same age group had also been important in the success of former prime minister John Howard.

    “These people aren’t rusted on to the Coalition, even though they say they’re Coalition voters. They are clearly at risk.”

    The Newspoll analysis shows that Coalition seats are not safe in rural areas either. A clear, though much smaller, majority is also in favour of the government’s bill.

    In rural seats, Newspoll found that 41 per cent of Coalition voters were opposed to the government’s emissions trading scheme bill while 50 per cent were in favour.

    Whatever the Coalition does will lose votes in rural seats, but opposition to the climate change legislation would lose it more.

    The Liberal Party’s own research shows the strongest opposition to the government’s bill is in the bedrock 35 per cent of the electorate that is its core support.

    Many of these conservative voters share Senator Minchin’s belief that there is no human-induced change to climate.

    These are the voters who have been inundating MPs’ offices with emails and phone calls, urging them to block the legislation.

    However, the party’s analysis of voters who supported the Coalition in 2007 but previously voted Labor, and former Coalition supporters who voted for a change of government at the last election, shows they massively favour action on climate change.

    Election analyst Malcolm Mackerras said the Newspoll analysis is consistent with his own research, suggesting the Coalition would lose up to 20 seats, taking Labor’s majority from 26 to more than 40 seats.

    Mr Mackerras said he believed high-profile Liberals such as Mr Hockey, Mr Andrews and Mr Robb had enough local support to retain their seats.

    However, if Mr Turnbull vacated his eastern Sydney seat of Wentworth at the next election, it would fall to Labor.

    Mr Mackerras said the leadership infighting would cost the Coalition severely. “The instability is a greater reason for them losing votes than their climate change position, but both are bad losers.”

    Labor had passed up an opportunity by deciding not to contest the December 5 by-election in the Melbourne seat of Higgins, being vacated by former treasurer Peter Costello, Mr Mackerras said.

  • Climate change linked to civil war in Africa

    Climate change linked to civil war in Africa

    Ecologist

    25th November, 2009

    Higher temperatures cause declines in crop yields and ‘economic welfare’ which increases the risk of conflict

     

    Climate change is likely to increase the risk of conflict in African countries over the next 20 years, says a US study.

    Research led by the University of California Berkeley looked back at two decades of fluctuations in temperature and civil war across the continent.

    They found that a 1°C increase in temperature correlated with a 4.5 per cent increase in civil war violence in the same year and a 0.9 per cent increase in conflict incidence in the next year.

    When the researchers restricted their analysis to look just at countries that have a history of conflict, the 1°C rise in temperatures led to a 49 per cent increase in civil violence.

    Crop yields

    Researchers said temperature rises could hit crop yields by between 10-30 per cent and affect entire communities that depend on agriculture for income.

    Agriculture accounts for more than 50 per cent of gross domestic product and up to 90 per cent of employment across much of the continent.

    ‘Economic welfare is the single factor most consistently associated with conflict incidence in both cross-country and within-country studies. It appears likely that the variation in agricultural performance is the central mechanism linking warming to conflict in Africa,’ said the study.

    Improve agriculture

    The authors said rising temperatures over the next 20 years were likely to outweigh any potentially offsetting effects of strong economic growth.

    ‘Given the current and expected future importance of agriculture in African livelihoods, governments and aid donors could help reduce conflict risk in Africa by improving the ability of African agriculture to deal with extreme heat.

    ‘Such efforts could include developing better-adapted crop varieties, giving farmers the knowledge and incentives to use them,’ said the authors.

    Useful links
    Study: Warming increase the risk of civil war in Africa

  • Rare iceberg flotilla in southern pacific poses threat to shipping

     

    Large numbers of icebergs last floated close to New Zealand in 2006, when some were visible from the coastline – the first such sighting since 1931.

    An iceberg up to 200 metres long had reached 160 miles south-east of New Zealand’s Stewart Island on Tuesday, Australian glaciologist Neal Young said.

    He could not say how many icebergs were at large in the south Pacific, but said he had counted 130 in one satellite image alone and 100 in another.

    New Zealand oceanographer Mike Williams said the icebergs were drifting at a speed of about 16 miles a day, and he expected most would not reach New Zealand. He said he was “pretty sure these icebergs came from the break-up of the Ross sea ice shelf in 2000” – an ice shelf the size of France and the origin of the 2006 flotilla of icebergs.

    Temperatures have risen in the Antarctic Peninsula area near South America by as much as 3C in the last 60 years, and “whole ice shelves have broken up,” Young said. But he said the iceberg flotilla south of New Zealand came from the Ross Sea, a completely different area of Antarctica, and the event was unrelated to climate change(DEBATABLE

  • Pretending the climate email leak isn’t a crisis won’t make it go away

     

     

    The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

     

    It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

     

    One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief. Jones knew that any incorrect papers by sceptical scientists would be picked up and amplified by climate change deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, who often – as I documented in my book Heat – use all sorts of dirty tricks to advance their cause.

     

    Even so, his message looks awful. It gives the impression of confirming a potent meme circulated by those who campaign against taking action on climate change: that the IPCC process is biased. However good the detailed explanations may be, most people aren’t going to follow or understand them. Jones’s statement, on the other hand, is stark and easy to grasp.

     

     

    In this case you could argue that technically he has done nothing wrong. But a fat lot of good that will do. Think of the MPs’ expenses scandal: complaints about stolen data, denials and huffy responses achieved nothing at all. Most of the MPs could demonstrate that technically they were innocent: their expenses had been approved by the Commons office. It didn’t change public perceptions one jot. The only responses that have helped to restore public trust in Parliament are humility, openness and promises of reform.

     

    When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.

     

    I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an honourable exit. Otherwise, like the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, he will linger on until his remaining credibility vanishes, inflicting continuing damage to climate science.

     

    Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.

     

    The crisis has been exacerbated by the university’s handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond. RealClimate reports that “We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.” In other words, the university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike.

     

    When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”. When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called “WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999”. Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.

    By then he should have been touring the TV studios for the past 36 hours, confronting his critics, making his case and apologising for his mistakes. Instead, he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Now, far too late, he has given an interview to the Press Association, which has done nothing to change the story.

     

    The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline. They appear to have no idea what they’re up against or how to confront it. Their opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary.

     

    The greatest tragedy here is that despite many years of outright fabrication, fraud and deceit on the part of the climate change denial industry, documented in James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore’s brilliant new book Climate Cover-up, it is now the climate scientists who look bad. By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow. Hoggan and Littlemore have shown how fossil fuel industries have employed “experts” to lie, cheat and manipulate on their behalf. The revelations in their book (as well as in Heat and in Ross Gelbspan’s book The Heat Is On) are 100 times graver than anything contained in these emails.

     

    But the deniers’ campaign of lies, grotesque as it is, does not justify secrecy and suppression on the part of climate scientists. Far from it: it means that they must distinguish themselves from their opponents in every way. No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last.

    monbiot.com

    Posted by George Monbiot Wednesday 25 November 2009 17.23 GMT guardian.co.uk

     

     

  • Coal industry scores sweetener in ETS deal

     

    “Overall, the most important thing is that we get the legislation passed this week so the prime minister can go to Copenhagen with legislation for the introduction of the emissions trading scheme. We need the momentum before Copenhagen, not after.’’

    But the ultimate fate of the deal, nutted out between the coalition’s chief climate change negotiator Ian Macfarlane and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, still hangs in the balance.

    Shadow cabinet ticked off on the agreement at a meeting this morning but the joint coalition party room is still considering the deal.

    The meeting will be a major test of Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull’s authority with the Nationals flagging their opposition to any deal and up to a third of Liberal politicians suggesting they could oppose it.

    Cuts to household package

    Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Senator Wong said today the package, which will cost the budget an extra $204 million over the next four years, was ‘‘fiscally responsible’’.

    It includes extra expenditure of $1.28 billion over the next four years but this will be offset by cuts to the package for households, which will shave $910 million from the cost.

    But Mr Rudd denies poor families will be worse off from the changes.

    ‘‘We don’t intend with our families and in particular low-income families to shoulder the pain of the adjustment,’’ he told reporters. ‘‘This has to be done equitably across the entire economy.’’

    A transitional electricity cost assistance program of $1.1 billion will be established to assist medium and large manufacturing and mining businesses with scheme-related increases in electricity prices.

    Agricultural emissions will be excluded from the scheme and offsets for agricultural emissions abatement will be included.

    Voluntary action by households will now allow Australia to go beyond its 2020 emissions reduction target.

    The scheme will be amended to ensure that all existing and future purchases of GreenPower will be counted.

    The road to Copenhagen

    If they pass the Senate, Mr Rudd hopes to play a prominent role in negotiating a new global climate treaty at a summit in Copenhagen next month. Senate approval would mean Australia backing what would be only the second domestic emissions trading scheme outside of Europe to pass into law.

    The United States and New Zealand, which are also trying to pass carbon trading laws, are eyeing developments in Australia closely.

    Mr Rudd’s revised scheme still remains far from assured as opposition parties are deeply divided over it, with some conservatives vowing to vote against the laws regardless of the deal and some moving to delay the vote until February 2010.

    If the laws are again rejected by a hostile Senate after a failed August vote, Mr Rudd would have a trigger for a snap election on climate change.

    “A vote on the bill must be held before parliament rises this week. Passing the CPRS this week will give Australian businesses the certainty they need to make investments,” Mr Rudd said.

    “It will also mean Australia goes to Copenhagen with a means to deliver its targets and provide a much-needed boost to negotiations on a global deal.”

    Greens politicians disagreed.

    “Today is a black day for Australia’s green future, and we intend to campaign on this all the way to the next election. It’s polluters payday in parliament house,” said Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens, which have five seats in the Senate.

    UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December will seek to reach agreement on broader, and tougher, strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally to replace or expand the existing Kyoto Protocol, whose first phase ends in 2012.

    AAP, Reuters

  • US to go to Copenhagen summit with proposed target on carbon emissions.

     

    America is the only major industrialised country that has yet to reveal its emissions reduction plan. The official did not give details on the stringency of the proposed cuts, but it is thought likely they would range from 14% to 20% from 2005 levels – still below those put forward by the EU and other industrialised countries.

    “The one thing the president has made clear is we want to take action consistent with the legislative process,” the official told reporters. “[We] don’t want to get out ahead or be at odds with what can be produced through legislation.

    The Observer reported on Sunday that the US was considering a “provisional target” at Copenhagen.

    Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, told the Observer: “What we are looking at is to see whether we could put down essentially a provisional number that would be contingent on our legislation.”

    Stern, who was speaking in Copenhagen, where he was meeting Danish officials, said: “We are looking at that, there are people we need to consult with.”

    The administration official shared that caution today, saying: “Whatever number we put on the table will be with reference to what can come out of the legislative process.”

    Obama has yet to decide if he will join about 65 other leaders – including Gordon Brown and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel – who have said they will attend the climate change summit, the official told reporters.

    “What the president has always said is if it looks as though the negotiations have proceeded sufficiently that going to Copenhagen would give a final impetus, a push, to the process, then he would be willing to go,” the senior administration official said. “We’re making the judgment as to whether it makes sense for him to go.”

    The announcement that Obama would propose a target for cutting emissions marks a shift in strategy for the White House. His administration, until today, has resisted international pressure to commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, fearing a domestic backlash if it were seen to pre-empt Congress in dealing with climate change.

    But the strategy led to growing frustration in the international community that the Copenhagen meeting would fail to produce the strong political agreement needed to avoid the worst ravages of climate change. The international community had been looking to Obama – who put climate change at the top of his agenda – to put America in the lead of efforts to deal with global warming. America has produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other industrialised country.

    Sweden’s prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, had criticised the US failure to commit to targets for cutting emissions as “untenable”.

    Obama will still have to tread cautiously in proposing America’s emissions cuts, however. The president promised to cut emissions by 14% over 2005 levels by 2020 when he was running for the White House. The house of representatives narrowly voted on a climate change bill last June, which proposed a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020. A similar bill in the Senate proposed a 20% cut.

    But efforts to build a consensus around climate change legislation in the Senate have stalled. Senate leaders now say they do not expect to take up climate change law until February next year.