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Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on

  • Hamilton at Copenhagen- Lulus-back-in-town

     

    This loophole is so big that it undoes much of the effort by Western European nations to cut their emissions under the protocol. The Russian surplus is enough to cause a collapse in the price of international emission permits should Russia decide to flood the market.

    It was therefore with some excitement that the old hands at Copenhagen pricked up their ears when they heard a rumour that the Medvedev government is considering giving the world an early Christmas present by renouncing its surplus allowances awarded at Kyoto.

    The second Kyoto loophole also took the form of a gift extracted from reluctant givers by a nation playing hard ball. At 2am on the Saturday morning, after the clock had been stopped to allow the conference to continue beyond its mandated closing time, the conference chair was gaveling through the treaty finally agreed.

    In those dying minutes, when all else had been agreed and the thoughts of exhausted delegates turned to their beds, Australia’s environment minister, Robert Hill, rose to his feet and declared that Australia would refuse to join the consensus unless the parties agreed to include in the accounting carbon emissions from land-clearing.

    The blackmail worked and article 3.7 was duly incorporated into the agreement. It was immediately dubbed “the Australia clause” because it would apply to no other country. As the delegates trooped out a senior European negotiator told the press that “the Australian deal is a disgrace and will have to be changed”.

    Although it was to generate years of dissension, Robert Hill returned a hero to the Howard government, receiving a standing ovation at his first cabinet meeting after Kyoto. The reason for the bitterness abroad and the jubilation at home was the same. Emissions from land-clearing in Australia had declined sharply after 1990 due to changes in the economics of beef farming, so that the Australia clause turned Australia’s headline emissions target of an 8% increase into a de facto 30% increase in fossil emissions over the 1990-2010 period.

    It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that before the last election the Howard government could claim that Australia would meet its Kyoto target even though it had implemented no policies that reduced emissions.

    History matters in international climate negotiations. History builds or destroys trust. And what a nation has done in the past conditions how others receive what it proposes to do in the future. So the Australian delegation in Copenhagen, new as their faces are, should not be surprised if the rest of the world takes a jaundiced view of any arguments it advances for the treatment of land-based emissions, including forests.

    At Copenhagen, a good deal of suspicion surrounds developed country proposals to meet emission reductions by the use of accounting tricks through provisions covering “land use, land-use change and forestry” or LULUCF (pronounced “loo loo CF”).

    The G77 group of developing countries wants a cap on the ability of rich countries to meet any targets through changes in forest and land use instead of cutting fossil emissions. Australia is arguing that it should be able to count reforestation as a credit against fossil emissions but that emissions from cutting forests down should be excluded. So forests would be counted as a carbon sink but not a carbon source, a provision that would encourage intensified harvesting.

    The desire to have it both ways naturally raises suspicions, and Australia’s track record with article 3.7 does not help.

    The history of LULUCF should be remembered too when assessing Tony Abbott’s argument that the Opposition wants to refocus greenhouse policy on land-based emissions. It’s an excuse to do nothing about the real culprit, burning fossil fuels, deferring to the next generation the hard tasks, while pandering to a rural constituency that has reverted to its customary stance of angry whingeing and demands for special treatment.

    In this case, the farmers want all the financial benefits to be had from augmenting land-based carbon stores — from tree-planting, changed tillage methods and biochar — while shirking responsibility for emissions from livestock, rice cultivation and fertiliser use.

    Of course, when the agricultural sector does not pull its weight, it free-rides on the rest of the community, which has to do more to make up the difference. If the coalition gets its way, instead of referring to primary producers as “rural socialists” they will perhaps be better described as “climate bludgers”.

    http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/10/hamilton-at-copenhagen-lulus-back-in-town/

  • Brain food: how voter’s whims could scupper Copenhagen

     

    General principles often get lost in political translation. US voters typically oppose free trade – until they go shopping for Chinese electronics. They’re hostile to immigration, but are loyal customers at their Korean corner store. Political theorists put this disconnect down to public ignorance, or a sense of individual powerlessness (especially against giant lobby groups) but American academic Bryan Caplan has another explanation: “Voters are worse than ignorant. They are irrational – and vote accordingly.“

    In fact, he believes such voters are “rationally irrational”. In a large democracy, no single ballot paper settles the result, so there’s no point in someone swotting up on the options. As long as voters pay no direct cost for supporting a policy, they’ll call for whichever seems most pleasant or socially respectable. But when there’s a price, the option lightest on the wallet usually wins.

    This helps explain why green policies often stall at Westminster, says Mathew Humphrey at Nottingham University. The British tell pollsters that climate change is more important to them than religion, but a recent Times survey found that even greens aren’t willing to fly less. In this way, the fight against global catastrophe is reduced to a clarion call to, um, unplug the mobile-phone charger.

    Governments can, of course, impose change and leave it to voters to adjust; Whitehall has launched a big drive for renewable energy that will add thousands to household fuel bills. But for Humphrey, the phenomenon of rational irrationality “makes me pessimistic about the ability of democratic governments to fight climate change”. Caplan is even more pointed: the cover of his latest book depicts the electorate as a flock of sheep.

  • The climate denial tndustry is out to duoe the public. And it’s working

     

    The second observation is the tendency of those who don’t give a fig about science to maximise their importance. The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.

    Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence that could possibly be disputed – the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents – the evidence for man-made global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

    No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years. The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the Earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed – no science ever is – but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for man-made global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to Aids.

    The third observation is the contrast between the global scandal these emails have provoked and the muted response to 20 years of revelations about the propaganda planted by fossil fuel companies. I have placed on the Guardian’s website four case studies; each of which provides a shocking example of how the denial industry works.

    Two of them are drawn from Climate Cover-Up, the fascinating, funny and beautifully written new book by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore. If every allegation it contained could not be traced back to leaked documents (I have checked all the sources), their findings would be unbelievable. Nothing exposed by the hacking of the Climatic Research Unit’s server is one tenth as bad as the least of these revelations.

    When I use the term denial industry, I’m referring to those who are paid to say that man-made global warming isn’t happening. The great majority of people who believe this have not been paid: they have been duped. Reading Climate Cover-Up, you keep stumbling across familiar phrases and concepts which you can see every day on the comment threads. The book shows that these memes were planted by PR companies and hired experts.

    The first case study I’ve posted reveals how a coalition of US coal companies sought to persuade people that the science is uncertain. It listed the two social groups it was trying to reach – “Target 1: Older, less educated males”; “Target 2: Younger, lower income women” – and the methods by which it would reach them. One of its findings was that “members of the public feel more confident expressing opinions on others’ motivations and tactics than they do expressing opinions on scientific issues”.

    Remember this the next time you hear people claiming that climate scientists are only in it for the money, or that environmentalists are trying to create a communist world government: these ideas were devised and broadcast by energy companies. The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that “your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit”, or “you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age”, are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.

    The second case study reveals how Dr Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change deniers with a qualification in climate science, has been lavishly paid by companies seeking to protect their profits from burning coal. As far as I can discover, none of the media outlets who use him as a commentator – including the Guardian – has disclosed this interest at the time of his appearance. Michaels is one of many people commenting on climate change who presents himself as an independent expert while being secretly paid for his services by fossil fuel companies.

    The third example shows how a list published by the Heartland Institute (which has been sponsored by oil company Exxon) of 500 scientists “whose research contradicts man-made global warming scares” turns out to be nothing of the kind: as soon as these scientists found out what the institute was saying about them, many angrily demanded that their names be removed. Twenty months later, they are still on the list. The fourth example shows how, during the Bush presidency, White House officials worked with oil companies to remove regulators they didn’t like and to doctor official documents about climate change.

    In Climate Cover-Up, in Ross Gelbspan’s books The Heat is On and Boiling Point, in my book Heat, and on the websites DeSmogBlog.com and exxonsecrets.org, you can find dozens of such examples. Together they expose a systematic, well-funded campaign to con the public. To judge by the comments you can read on this paper’s website, it has worked.

    But people behind these campaigns know that their claims are untrue. One of the biggest was run by the Global Climate Coalition, which represented ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and several big motor manufacturers. In 1995 the coalition’s own scientists reported that “the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well-established and cannot be denied”. The coalition hid this finding from the public, and spent millions of dollars seeking to persuade people that the opposite was true.

    These people haven’t fooled themselves, but they might have fooled you. Who, among those of you who claim that climate scientists are liars and environmentalists are stooges, has thought it through for yourself?

  • Expert view: Let the people see our climate as the scientists do

     

    We collect a number of data sets to study our climate through such things as sunshine, rainfall, winds and temperature. The HadCRUT dataset is based on the measurements of surface temperature from close to 5,000 stations, going back to 1850. The latest version of HadCRUT includes observations from both land and sea (the HadCRUT3 data). The raw station data is put on to a grid and shows variations against the 30-year average from 1961-90. The difference from this average gives us a reference point against which we can see how the temperature varies from one year to the next.

    The basic data is collected from a series of stations, all of which have to meet a standard criteria for how they place their thermometers and to make sure these are properly calibrated. That is quite important as you want to be sure that any changes are not down to differences in the way measurements are made. This means we have a very high quality of data, with low error-bars associated with the observations. The collected data is also quality-controlled to cope with obvious mistakes and misreporting.

    One important point to note is that the basic data is not collected from some strange locations in some mysterious way. This data is the basic information that is also regularly used in our everyday weather forecasting work.

    Good science by its nature should always be transparent and robust, that’s how it works. Scientists collaborate by sharing information with each other and comparing results. It is through this comparison that we understand where the uncertainty lies and how we can focus our efforts to improve knowledge and understanding.

    The important thing about the problems surrounding the University of East Anglia, and the questions it has raised in people’s minds about climate science, is that lots of groups around the world have done similar things to the scientists there, and they’ve all been showing similar results. That gives us some confidence the information we’re getting from the data is well-founded.

    Paul Hardaker is chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society

  • Copenhagen deal taking world to 3.5 degree rise

  • Copenhagen must be a turning point. Our children won’t forgive us if we fail

     

    And today, together with Norway and Australia, the UK is taking a further step to a Copenhagen agreement: publishing a framework for the long-term transfer of resources to meet the mitigation and adaptation needs of developing countries.

    Let no one be in any doubt about the overwhelming scientific evidence that underpins the Copenhagen conference. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change brings together over 4,000 scientists from every corner of the world. Their recent work has sharpened, not diminished, the huge and diverse body of evidence of human-made global warming. Its landmark importance cannot be wished away by the theft of a few emails from one university research centre. On the contrary, the pernicious anti-scientific backlash that the emails have unleashed has exposed just what is at stake.

    The purpose of the climate change deniers’ campaign is clear, and the timing no coincidence. It is designed to destabilise and undermine the efforts of the countries gathering in Copenhagen today.

    And the reason is that – if we can summon the political will to secure the ambitious agreement we need – Copenhagen is poised to achieve a profound historical transformation: reversing the road we have travelled for 200 years.

    Over that time we have based our prosperity on burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. Now we need to create wealth and quality of life, not by putting carbon into the atmosphere but by taking it out. We need to build, in short, a low carbon economy. And not just at home: our aim must be to do this in every major economy of the world.

    This will involve change: a shift from the energy dictatorship of oil and traditional fossil fuels to the efficiency, self-reliance and security of low carbon energy systems, which will be the engine of growth and job creation over the coming decade.

    Inevitably, as with every great project of social and economic progress in the global and public interest, there will be vested interests who seek to oppose it. And so I will take on with evidence, argument and moral passion all the anti-science and anti-change environmental Luddites who seek to stand in the way of progress.

    As we embark on these two weeks of negotiations, the British government is absolutely clear about what we must achieve. Our aim is a comprehensive and global agreement that is then converted to an internationally legally binding treaty in no more than six months. The agreement must put the world on a path to no more than two degrees of global warming. That means at least halving global emissions by 2050. And at the same time the deal must provide help to the poorest and most vulnerable countries to adapt to those climatic changes that are now inevitable – and that many are already experiencing.

    While we have made huge progress over recent weeks, there is still movement required. First, all countries need to reach for high level ambition in their commitments to reduce their emissions and their emissions growth. Many countries have put forward offers that are dependent on the ambition of others. The European Union, notably, has committed to reducing our emissions by 30% if the overall deal is strong enough. Others, such as Australia and Japan, have made similar offers. So in Copenhagen we need to ensure that all countries move to the top of the range of their ambition, thereby enabling others to do so in a process of mutual reinforcement.

    Second, we need a financing agreement that enables developing countries to tackle climate change. Money is needed for both adaptation to climate change and for its mitigation – that is, for investment in low carbon energy and energy efficiency, for green technology co-operation and – perhaps most important of all – to enable a radical reduction in deforestation in the rainforest countries.

    That is why at the Commonwealth meeting last weekend I proposed, and the Commonwealth agreed, a Copenhagen Launch Fund to provide financial assistance to developing countries – not simply in 2013 but now, starting next year and building to $10bn annually by 2012. I am delighted that President Obama is not only going to Copenhagen to help conclude the deal, but leading the way on this. Along with President Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Rudd he has committed his country to paying its fair share. This week I will ask the whole of the EU to do so as well.

    And as our joint statement says, at Copenhagen we also need to address the need for financing in the longer term, to support adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. The world needs to be sure that the agreement will secure the required level of global emissions reductions. But that means developing countries must to be able to plan their investments with confidence. So we need to consider a system of “payment for results”, in which low carbon and sustainable forest mitigation plans are financed over the long term for the emissions reductions they achieve.

    Third, we need to design a “transparency mechanism” by which all countries can see clearly what is happening, not only in their own countries but in others. In a great global project of mutual ambition, we all need to be confident in one another.

    When I first said leaders should go to Copenhagen, I wanted to ensure that there was as little room for failure as possible. More than 100 leaders are now attending. If by the end of next week we have not got an ambitious agreement, it will be an indictment of our generation that our children will not forgive. I will be doing everything in my power to ensure we succeed.

    Sometimes history comes to turning points. For all our sakes, the turning point of 2009 must be real.

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