The Australian has published a Newspoll today which suggests that a narrow majority (51%) of Australians would like the Federal Government to put the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on ice until the current financial troubles are resolved (though it should be noted that the question was far from neutral: "Under a carbon pollution reduction scheme, the price of energy sources, such as petrol, electricity and gas may become more expensive. Do you think the federal Government should delay or should not delay the introduction of carbon pollution reduction scheme...")
This is precisely the wrong thing to do, as you can't press the pause button on climate change. The economic crisis is likely to be relatively short lived, and then global greenhouse gas emissions will resume their upwards trajectory.
The fact that so many people (including the Federal Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull) think that we can postpone mitigation measures suggests that there is a fundamental lack of awareness about the nature and scale of the climate crisis.
In a recent article in Science John D Sterman from MIT examined this disjuncture. He explains that when it comes to policy measures to deal with climate change common sense is not a very good guide:
Wait-and-see works well in simple systems with short lags. We can wait until the teakettle whistles before removing it from the flame because there is little lag between the boil, the whistle, and our response. Similarly, wait-and-see would be a prudent response to climate change if there were short delays in the response of the climate system to intervention. However, there are substantial delays in every link of a long causal chain stretching from the implementation of emissions abatement policies to emissions reductions to changes in atmospheric GHG concentrations to surface warming to changes in ice sheets, sea level, agricultural productivity, extinction rates, and other impacts (4-6). Mitigating the risks therefore requires emissions reductions long before additional harm is evident. Wait-and-see policies implicitly presume the climate is roughly a first-order linear system with a short time constant, rather than a complex dynamical system with long delays, multiple positive feedbacks, and nonlinearities that may cause abrupt, costly, and irreversible regime changes (7, 8).
Sterman and Booth Sweeney gave MIT grad students a survey that explained how climate change worked and then asked them to draw a rough graph showing the emissions reductions necessary to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. They found that the vast majority (84%), many of whom were trained in science, got it wrong and thought that by stopping the rise in emissions that this would stop the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Using the analogy of the bathtub Sterman says that respondents seemed to think that filling a tub faster than it could be emptied would not lead to it overflowing.
Sterman concludes that we need better public understanding of the basics of climate science. A grand Manhattan project won't solve the crisis, he argues, but rather there will need to be a step change in public attitudes akin to that achieved by the civil rights movement:
The civil rights movement provides a better analogy for the climate challenge. Then, as now, entrenched interests vigorously opposed change. Political leadership and legislation often lagged public opinion and grass-roots action. Success required dramatic changes in people's beliefs and behavior, changes both causing and caused by the courageous actions of those who spoke out, registered voters, and marched in Washington and Selma (18).Building public support for action on climate change is in many ways more challenging than the struggle for civil rights. Science is not needed to recognize the immorality of racism but is critical in understanding how GHG emissions can harm future generations. The damage caused by segregation was apparent to anyone who looked, but the damage caused by GHG emissions manifests only after long delays.