Category: environment and ecology

Don’t let a thief steal into your heart

Quite a fuss about stolen emails over the weekend. Let’s review the story so far. Person or persons unknown hack into servers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and steal lots of emails and other documents [BBC 1, 2, Times, Bob Ward at The Guardian]. This is a criminal offence in the UK, the USA, New Zealand and many other jurisdictions. The criminals then release edited highlights of these documents and emails by putting them up on a Russian web server, and let the news out via what Nature calls “a relatively obscure climate-sceptic blog” (The Air Vent which may have been Andrew Bolt’s blog in Australia). Within a matter of hours, the usual suspects are out in force, screaming data manipulation, conspiracy to exclude climate sceptics from publishing, and fraudulent behaviour. Criminals are portrayed as whistleblowers, quotes are pulled out of private emails and taken out of context, and the end of climate science is proclaimed.

I’ve been reluctant to weigh in on this issue, because commenting on stolen and possibly edited documents strikes me as unethical. In a courtroom, improperly obtained evidence is not allowed to influence proceedings, and I would prefer to apply the same standard here. That hasn’t stopped the likes of Wishart (peer review is broken, climate science is dead), propagandist in chief Marc Morano (continuously updated “Climategate” coverage at his Climate Depot), or even now well out of the closet denialist, the NZ blogger sometimes known as Poneke (warming stopped in 1998 (yet again)). However…

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Rudd brooks no denial

Rudd Somehow Kevin Rudd’s climate change speech to the Lowry Institute earlier this month escaped my detection systems and it took Joseph Romm’s Climate Progress post today to draw it to my attention. New Zealanders, whose political leaders avoid big statements on the issue, can welcome its unequivocal tone. There seems an air of unreality to me in the emphasis our government places on catching up with Australia economically, with never a mention of the environmental challenges faced by that country.  But Rudd meets them full on:

As one of the hottest and driest continents on earth, Australia’s environment and economy will be among the hardest and fastest hit by climate change if we do not act now. The scientific evidence from the CSIRO and other expert bodies have outlined the implications for Australia, in the absence of national and global action on climate change:

  • Temperatures in Australia rising by around five degrees by the end of the century.
  • By 2070, up to 40 per cent more drought months are projected in eastern Australia and up to 80 per cent more in south-western Australia.
  • A fall in irrigated agricultural production in the Murray Darling Basin of over 90 per cent by 2100.
  • Storm surges and rising sea levels – putting at risk over 700,000 homes and businesses around our coastlines, with insurance companies warning that preliminary estimates of the value of property in Australia exposed to the risk of land being inundated or eroded by rising sea levels range from $50 billion to $150 billion.
  • Our Gross National Product dropping by nearly two and a half per cent through the course of this century from the devastation climate change would wreak on our infrastructure alone.

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Imagining 2020 — the world will be what we make it

Hot Topic is pleased to join with Scoop and Celsias in launching a new series of articles with the theme of Imagining 2020. We want New Zealanders, as Scoop co-founder Alastair Thompson explains in this introductory post, to imagine what a low carbon future might be like:

The idea is to provide a platform for a collective long-term forecasting effort which considers the impacts of economic transformation on each sector in the NZ economy. If we start by dreaming and imagining our futures, then perhaps we can effectively gain some control over them.

Imagining 2020 will be what Al describes as “a creative commons online discussion festival in which individuals and businesses are invited write about how a low-carbon future affects their individual circumstances”. As the project progresses, we hope to get contributions from a wide spectrum of opinion in NZ, with (I hope) a focus on the positive aspects of the transformation we will inevitably have to make. This is your invitation to take part — email (address below) for details. Over to Al:

In recent months the climate change debate has all too often been framed as a matter of what level of sacrifice we as consumers and businesses are prepared to bare to save the planet. Domestically and internationally various economists have produced econometric models which show the likely negative impacts on GDP growth – extrapolated to household income – of climate change mitigation measures.

On the other side the public is berated by doomsayers who tell us the question is not what the cost of change is, but what the cost of not changing will be in the future. However as many commentators have since pointed out, the reality of climate induced economic transformation is infinitely more complicated than either these perspectives indicates.

A sacrifice approach to the issue of climate change induced economic transformation is a wrong headed – as our international trading competitors such as Japan and China have already clearly recognised. There is huge opportunity for economic growth in transformation.

Meanwhile the “fear the future” approach is a giant turn off. It is defeatist for one thing. If we are doomed anyway – say the cynics – then why not enjoy the view while the ship goes down. And while the argument may be true – until we actually start to smell the fear personally, it is hard to comprehend what threats global warming really poses to us.

Therefore a group of New Zealand websites has decided to get together and encourage discussion of the positive side to climate change mitigation. After all — how many of us really believe that the way the world is currently run is optimal – both for our personal lives as well as for the environment.

So let us think about what opportunities and benefits are present in the coming transformation to a low-carbon future for NZ and global economy. How can our lives be improved by a reorganisation of the economy? How can we use this opportunity for change to fix many of the obvious wrongs in the current consumption driven trading and economic system?

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Our Choice: Al’s plan to solve the climate crisis

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate CrisisAl Gore hasn’t been resting on his laurels since An Inconvenient Truth. His substantial new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis has grown out of the more than 30 lengthy and intensive “Solution Summits” he has organised to enable leading experts from round the world to share their knowledge and experience in subjects relevant to solving the crisis, as well as the one-on-one sessions he has had with others.

The expertise shows. The discussions of energy sources are focused and packed with useful information and judgments. Electricity from the sun is the first. Concentrated solar thermal (CST) power and photovoltaic power are both explained and evaluated. Each has a future, photovoltaics perhaps more so than currently recognised as it develops new chemical processes and fabrication technologies. Indeed some conclude that photovoltaics are near a threshold where they will have a cost advantage over CST and soon even over fossil fuel generation.

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Rage against the machine

Before I begin the onerous task of catching up with the posts left undone by a fortnight of tourism and hospitality (old friends, in NZ), I’d like to draw your attention to a most interesting piece by Naomi (No Logo) Klein in the current Rolling Stone. Titled Climate Rage, it’s a thorough examination of the issue of climate debt — the need to recognise two things in any climate deal: that the developed world got rich by using up and exceeding the atmosphere’s “headroom” for greenhouse gases, and that the ones who suffer first and most severely will be the developing world, who played no part in creating the problem.

“If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need a massive mobilization larger than any in history,” [Angelica] Navarro [climate negotiator for Bolivia] declared at the end of her talk. “We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth. This plan must mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we reduce emissions while raising people’s quality of life. We have only a decade.”

Klein reviews the calls for climate equity coming from the developing world, and the inadequacy of the responses currently on offer. She highlights the frustration felt:

The developing world has always had plenty of reasons to be pissed off with their northern neighbors, with our tendency to overthrow their governments, invade their countries and pillage their natural resources. But never before has there been an issue so politically inflammatory as the refusal of people living in the rich world to make even small sacrifices to avert a potential climate catastrophe. In Bangladesh, the Maldives, Bolivia, the Arctic, our climate pollution is directly responsible for destroying entire ways of life — yet we keep doing it.

If you read nothing else today, read this.