Tim Stephens

Michael Duffy is a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald who writes entertaining and thought provoking opinion pieces on a range of topics, including urban planning issues (his blog Urban Jungle is well worth a visit). Michael also co-presents Counterpoint on ABC Radio National.

In both the electronic and print media Duffy has repeatedly questioned anthropogenic global warming. Last Saturday in the Sydney Morning Herald he claimed that

For most of the past seven years... temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there's been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites.

I took up his invitation, and it confirmed that Duffy is pulling our legs. The Hadley Centre data shows that there has been some levelling-off of temperatures, but at a high level. Temperatures have not fallen in absolute terms; they have remained high. The best estimate temperature anomaly for 2008, so far, is +0.296°C which is lower that the record years of 1998, 2005 and 2007, but higher than most years going back several decades (see the data here).

Duffy's claim is akin to saying on a hot day that is slightly cooler than a record hot day before it that this heralds the end of global warming. He has fixed on a trend at an insignificantly short time scale, and neglected to mention that there is no absolute cooling. Quite to the contrary the 2008 records indicate an enduring warming on the back of a succession of broken records. In this light Duffy's opinion piece is highly misleading and disingenuous.

Another authoritative source for temperature observations is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The GISS Global Temperature Trends 2007 Summation notes that 2007 tied with 1998 for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind 2005 as the record warmest year. The Summation points out that the 2007 warmth was particularly significant because it took place without the heating effect of the El Niño-La Niña cycle and when solar forcing is at a minimum.

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.

(my piece in Crikey yesterday)

When Kevin Rudd heads to Bali next week for the UN climate conference he will want the wheels to be in motion on a key election promise – Australian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Regrettably, no matter how quickly the Rudd Government acts, there is no way we can join the Kyoto club until around March 2008. Under the terms of Kyoto, it will only take effect for Australia 90 days after the government deposits the "instrument of ratification" with the UN.

Professor Don Rothwell argued in Crikey yesterday that even getting to this stage would involve some headaches for the Rudd Government because of the Australian treaty-making process. However, there appears to be no real obstacle to getting the documentation in the diplomatic bag as soon as the new cabinet is sworn in.

The first step in hitching Australia to Kyoto was taken back in 1998 when the Howard Government signed the agreement. Kyoto was subsequently repudiated by John Howard so none of the ordinary procedures for treaty making were activated. What normally follows treaty signature is preparation of a National Interest Analysis, the tabling of the treaty in Parliament, review of the treaty by the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, the passage of legislation implementing the treaty and, finally, ratification by the Executive.

These steps are there so that there is Parliamentary review of proposed treaty action. However, the Kyoto Protocol is now a special case. It has been debated endlessly in the Parliament over the last decade, Kyoto ratification was one of Labor’s main election promises and it now appears to enjoy bipartisan support. These are compelling reasons for sidelining procedural niceties and there is a mechanism for doing so.

The Constitution gives the Executive, not the Parliament, formal authority to enter into treaties. And under the treaty-making procedures reformed by the Howard Government, the Executive reserved the right to ratify a treaty immediately if it is particularly urgent or sensitive and involves significant commercial, strategic or foreign policy interests. The Kyoto Protocol is just such a treaty.

The custom that ratification should not proceed until legislation is in place is a more substantial objection to immediate ratification of Kyoto. This penultimate step in the treaty-making process is there to safeguard Australia from breaching its international obligations by not giving domestic effect to a ratified treaty. Thankfully, in the case of Kyoto, this is not a problem as Australia can comply with the agreement for the time being without any new law.

Australia is roughly on track to meet its absurdly generous Kyoto emissions limitation target and there are already arrangements in place for collecting and reporting Australia’s emissions to the UN. Kyoto imposes few other requirements needing legislation. The only possible downside to not having a Kyoto law is Australian companies may not be able to take immediate advantage of some of the carbon trading opportunities offered by Kyoto.

It will be necessary to embark on a program of climate law reform if the Rudd Government is to discharge Australia’s international obligations fully and cut our greenhouse gas emissions. While work on this could conceivably be delayed until the complexion of the Senate changes in July 2008, there is no reason to wait for a climate law to be drafted and hit the books before Australia restores its international reputation by ratifying Kyoto and getting behind international efforts to address climate change.

The Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law was held in Canberra recently. I gave a short paper on the future of the Kyoto Protocol. Its first commitment period will end in 2012, and unless agreement is reached soon on emissions reductions for a second commitment period then we could have a period of unrestrained emissions (a lawless 'interregnum'). I argued that there is much value in Kyoto, and that its achievements should not be downplayed.

However, it is clear that a more robust regime is needed to bring emissions down by the 50 to 80 per cent that is required by 2050 if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. The debate over the future of the international climate change regime is essentially between a top-down, Kyoto-style approach, on the one hand, and a bottom-up and fragmented approach on the other. Some Governments (notably Australia and the United States) have advocated a bottom-up approach largely as an excuse for inaction. They are not committed to implementing the serious response that is required. Other states such as the United Kingdom have been willing to demonstrate leadership through unilateral action to cut emissions. The United Kingdom's Climate Change Bill, would make emissions reductions of 60 per cent on 1990 levels by 2050 legally binding. The European Union as a region is also a recognised international leader, and is taking action in advance of any global pact.

Given the diversity of sub-national, national and regional regimes I may have been too hard on bottom-up approaches as a way of driving innovation in climate change mitigation efforts. I see the force of the argument that binding treaties such as Kyoto are very conservative, and can step no further than the willingness of the least committed member (Underdal's 'law of least ambitious program'). I perhaps should have qualified my criticism by saying that it depends how stringent sectoral approaches are. If they are of the nature of the EU ETS or the UK's Climate Change Bill then it's great. If they are of the nature of the United States and Australian supported Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate that sets no goal of reducing aggregate emissions, then it's not so good at all.

For a ventilation of some of these issues, check out this exchange in Science.

A few weeks back I gave a paper at the Lowy Institute for International Policy's New Voices Conference. The theme of the conference was individual leadership, and I spoke about climate change policy and leadership dynamics.

Drawing an analogy with the invisible 'elastic band' that keeps groups of professional cyclists together in a race, I argued that our political leaders are severely constrained in taking the urgent action that is necessary to address the climate crisis. Key constituencies will be (or are perceived to be) hostile to such leadership. Too much leadership at the front, the elastic will break, and there will be no followers. This raises the more fundamental question as to whether democratic forms of government are able to respond effectively to environmental change.

The title of the talk was 'Climate Change and Elasticity in Leadership', and you can read it here: Download file.

The Prime Minister's Task Group on Emissions Trading handed its report to the PM last week, and it is now publicly available.

I am making my way through its 233 pages, but it appears that many preliminary assessments have been spot on. Peter Hartcher writes in The Sydney Morning Herald that the cautious report "seems designed to help Howard not in dealing with the environmental threat to civilisation but in beating back the political threat to the Government." The PM has been told what he wanted to hear. Which is not surprising given the make-up of the Task Group.

One of the most interesting features of the Report is the way it downplays the seriousness of climate change, and quotes selectively from the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While the Report summarizes aspects of the IPCC's most recent work, it does so very briefly, and leaves out key conclusions in relation to climate change trends and impacts.

Crucially, the Report omits what the IPCC has to say on the massive cuts in emissions necessary to stabilise CO2 concentrations. As one of the world's highest per capita emitters, Australia will have to face up to this fact one day. But clearly this is not an issue the Task Group wanted to get into. It is therefore not surprising that the Report makes no mention of targets for Australia. To have done so would have embarrassed the PM who is critical of the ALP's plans to cut emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 (on 2000, not 1990, levels).

The Report also has nothing to say about the economic impacts of climate change. It expresses concern about the economic costs of mitigation measures, but not the costs of inaction. The ALP has set out to fill this gaping hole in our understanding of the implications of climate change upon Australia by commissioning Professor Ross Garnaut to author an Australian version of the Stern Review.

So it seems that the Report has a high degree of unreality about it. As an academic exercise in considering economic techniques to constrain emissions it all looks very interesting. But the conclusion must be that the Report's cautious recommendation to place a modest cost on carbon are not grounded in the scientific reality that the world is warming, and something drastic and urgent needs to be done about it.

Great new paper out today from The Australia Institute on aviation and climate change policy in Australia. This is timely given the rush by some airlines such as Virgin Blue to go green through promoting carbon offsets.

Andrew Macintosh and Christian Downie analyse the contribution of aviation to Australia's emissions footprint, and call for the introduction of a $30 greenhouse flight charge to reduce demand. Demand side solutions are critical in reducing emissions from aviation as there is no technological fix to the problem (you can't have an electric-avgas hybrid jumbo for all sorts of reasons!).

Key findings by Macintosh and Downie are:

- If Australia adopts a 60 per cent reduction target, aviation could account for between 32 and 51 per cent of Australia's total greenhouse gas allowance by 2050;

- If Australia adopts an 80 per cent reduction target (which is preferable), aviation could account for between 69 and 109 per cent of the total greeenhouse gas allowance by 2050;

- Aviation carbon dioxide emissions should be included in a national emissions trading scheme.

- In the absence of a major technological breakthrough (which is nowhere on the horizon), the amount of air travel by Australians will need to be reduced.

The US Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision on 2 April, concluding that the US Environmental Protection Agency had the power and the duty to regulate emissions of greenhouse gas emissions.

The decision is a remarkable one in many ways, not least because of the assured way it deals with the science of global warming and because it also gives credence to all efforts to reduce emissions, even if not within the framework of an international agreeement. In this regard Justice Stevens, delivering the majority opinion, noted (at page 23) that '[a] reduction in domestic emissions would slow the pace of global emissions increases, no matter what happens elsewhere.'

I've already written a few entries on James Lovelock's views on climate change. To reprise, Lovelock believes that it is too late to address the worse effects of climate change, and that we have to batten down the hatches for the wild climate ride ahead, in which the earth will move to a permanently hotter state. This is painted as an apocalyptic vision, but there are some climatologists (such as Andrew Watson, Fellow of the Royal Society) who have come up with even more terrifying possibilities such as temperature increasing unabated until the oceans boil away and all life is extinguished.

To return to Lovelock for the moment. To get some idea where Lovelock's views fit within the panoply of perspectives on global warming, check out the deliberations of the BBC's Climate Panel convened in the middle of last year. The panel of experts was asked to give its verdict on 20 key questions. Here's what they had to say in response to question 17:

17. Politicians are unlikely to cut greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently until it is too late to prevent dangerous warming. VERDICT: YES 6, NO 1

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release the first of four volumes of its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) on 2 February. Although it doesn't carry a particularly striking title, the AR4 promises to have the biggest impact of any recent study on climate change, including the Stern Review.

The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorologial Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for understanding climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. The last IPCC Assessment Report was in 2001, but has remained the best authoritative guide to the science of global warming to date. The AR4 will take over that mantle. AR4 documents will be released on a rolling basis throughout 2007, culminating in the publication of the Synthesis Report, the drafting of which is carefully overseen by governments.

By early accounts AR4 will be stupendously terrifying assessment, and will conclude that it is 'extremely likely' that man-made global warming will result in temperature increases of around 3 degrees celsius by 2100. Last Sunday The Observer reported that

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

For a discussion of what a world 3 degrees warmer would be like to live in, have a listen to the report on gaia and climate change on ABC's Science Show last Saturday.

Sometimes it is difficult to understand the enormity of the climate change problem, as the possible consequences are so broad ranging and complex.

On statistic that really cuts through, however, is the numbers for species extinction. Writing in The Age today, Tim Flannery notes the following

The computer models used by scientists to predict how species will fare as our planet warms indicates that between two in 10 and six in 10 of all species alive on Earth today will become extinct if our planet warms by just three degrees. And our Earth is likely to warm by that much this century if we just continue as we are. Think about it. You see three kinds of birds in your garden today. In future you might see just one.

A great new idea emanating from the Climate Group - an international organisation now with an office in Melbourne. To be published each week in The Age will be a climate change indicator telling Victorians how much greenhouse gases were produced the week before, with a breakdown on sources. It would be great if Fairfax could also pop an indicator for NSW emissions in the weather pages of The Sydney Morning Herald.

Late last year James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, was awarded the Collier Medial by the Institution of Chemical Engineers in the UK. In accepting the award he delivered an amazing speech. Apart from providing many insights about his own career in science, the speech helpfully sets out some basic facts about climatology and Lovelock's own view about the fate of the Earth Goddess thanks to human interference with atmospheric systems.

Lovelock repeats the view, developed in more detail in his 2005 book (The Revenge of Gaia) that

the catastrophe threatened by global heating is far worse than any war, famine, or plague in living memory; worse even than global nuclear war. Much of the lush and comfortable Earth we now enjoy is about to become a hot and barren desert.

WWF and The Sydney Morning Herald are running an environmental campaign called Earth Hour that aims to have as many lights as possible turned off in Sydney from 7.30pm on 31 March 2007. Many lights from the Harbour and Anzac Bridges will be switched off for an hour that evening, and a range of companies (including ANZ and IAG) have already come on board. Hopefully law firms will join in also (though this may be difficult given the notorious hours put in by Sydney solicitors in the big firms). I reckon Sydney Uni should sign up to Earth Hour - let's ask the Vice-Chancellor to do so.

Often it is the plight of an iconic species, rather than less visible but equally important living organisms, that helps to raise dramatically the public profile of an environmental catastrophe in the making. Such is the case of the Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus), as its Arctic habitat disappears thanks to global warming. The United States interior secretary, Dick Kempthorne, has recommended that the bears be added to the list of threatened species. As many have noted, this is a clear reversal by the Bush administration from its previous reluctance to acknowledge climate change as a significant problem.

The final Switkowski report on opportunities for the nuclear industry has now been released. As with the draft report, the material included on climate change is valuable for its frankness. Such as this assessment, for instance (buried in Appendix O):

If emissions continue to grow, or even just remain at their present level, climate models indicate that global average temperatures and sea levels will rise, rainfall patterns will shift, sea ice will melt and glaciers will continue their global retreat. Impacts will vary greatly across regions. Overall however, rapid climate change presents fundamental challenges for human and biological adaptation, especially for natural ecosystems which typically evolve over millennia. It also poses fundamental questions of human security, survival and the stability of nation states. Climate change is therefore an issue of major significance for all of us.

The final report confirms the draft report's conclusion that nuclear is no quick fix to rising emissions. With 25 nuclear power plants operating by 2050 Australia's emissions will still be almost double what they were in 1990. This is essentially because demand for electricity is projected to increase by more than double before 2050, and most of this demand will have to be satisfied by coal and gas power plants.

At negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol Australia secured a couple of great concessions - the most significant being that we were allowed to increase our emissions to 108 per cent of 1990 levels by 2008-2012. But despite maintaining that this target will be reached, Australia never ratified the Protocol. In its most recent projections, the Australian Greenhouse office now says that Australia's greenhouse gas emissions will reach 603 Mt CO2 -e over 2008-12, which is 109% of 1990 levels. One per cent is hardly a blowout, but what follows surely will be. Rather than emissions coming down as a result of Government policy, they will continue to rise, to a projected 127% of 1990 levels by 2020.

When the Prime Minister recently established a task group to examine what a global carbon trading scheme might look like, he attracted a lot of flak for not appointing a single representative from the renewable energy industry, or from an environmental group such as the ACF. Well news yesterday that at its first meeting the carbon task group decided to get input from beyond its narrow fossil fuel industry focus. It will release a discussion paper in February and invite interested groups to respond. This seems a rather long way from meaningful involvement by the players in renewables who will be central to any comprehensive carbon trading scheme, national or global.

An interesting statistic in the recent draft nuclear power review by the Switkowski panel has been largely overlooked by nuclear enthusiasts but picked up by the Climate Institute. The review shows that even on the most optimistic assumptions of nuclear power uptake, where 25 nuclear plants are built across Australia, total greenhouse emissions would still increase by 40% by 2030. If 25 stations were built then emissions would plateau at 700 Mt CO2-e by 2050, 150 Mt CO2e below the business as usual scenario. Yet emissions would still be 200 Mt CO2-e above 2001 levels. This makes reading James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia even more depressing, as Lovelock places so much store in nuclear power as a way for humanity to buy some time while we work out a way to abandon fossil and other non-renewable fuels.

Generating a lot of weblog chatter is a proposal by economist Warwick McKibbon for a carbon trading scheme that might just work to cap and then bring down greenhouse emissions, even with no target being set. The whole idea is to make carbon permits valuable and widely held in the community in order to create a constituency that is interested in carbon prices being always on the up (like baby boomers enjoying rising house prices). The scheme is described by McKibbin in a revealing interview with Peter Martin.

Climate change has finally arrived on Australian shores as a political issue, even though we've already experienced a faster rate of warming than the rest of the world (temperatures in Australia have increased by around 1 degree C, as compared to the gobal average of 0.6 degrees C). But rather than making new policy the Prime Minister has been busy making new taskforces. The first, on nuclear power, recently released a draft report. Regardless of one's perspective on things nuclear at least the report pulled no punches in highlighting the threat of climate change nationally and globally. The second task force, on carbon trading, was established last Sunday and its composition and terms of reference suggests that it will be far more ambivalent in recognising the existential threat of climate change.