Category: environment and ecology

Climate Change and the Course of Global History

The title in the Kindle Store was irresistible: Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey. American historian John L Brooke is the author, and the book is notable for its attempt to integrate climate science with the study of human history. In his acknowledgements the author brackets climate scientists with historians and archaeologists in the long list of people with whom he has corresponded and from whom he has received data and an understanding of scientific culture.

The scope of the book is as wide as human emergence in the evolutionary process, and before. It’s not my purpose to track through the long story the author has to tell or to follow the intricacies of the climate shifts he refers to. The book demands and rewards patient reading in these respects. But I offer a few comments arising from my reading of the book.

An historian making the effort to understand climate science as thoroughly as Brooke does seems to me in itself worth remarking. Often I could have been reading one of the many books by scientists or science writers that I’ve reviewed over past years on Hot Topic. The culture gap between the sciences and the humanities that C P Snow’s famous 1959 lecture lamented was certainly not evident in Brooke’s history. Five years ago I reported the plea of biographer Richard Holmes at the Hay Festival that we reject the notion of two cultures and accept the duty to understand the scientific discoveries of the modern age, a duty of crucial importance in the face of global warming. Brooke has clearly accepted that duty, though I fear many educated in the humanities continue to excuse themselves from it.

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NZ Greens launch new climate policy: replace ETS with carbon tax and dividend

The NZ Emissions Trading Scheme has failed and should be replaced by a carbon tax, Green Party co-leader Russel Norman told the party’s annual conference yesterday [NZ Herald, Stuff]. Outlining the Green’s new Climate Protection Plan (pdf) Norman told delegates that the government’s mismanagement had “hollowed out and weakened [the ETS] to the point of redundancy, accelerated deforestation and driven up emissions.” If in government after September’s general election, the Greens would replace the ETS by a suite of policies built around a levy on greenhouse gas emissions, with revenues recycled to business and consumers through cuts in income taxes.

The key points of the new policy are (from the policy document):

  1. Set New Zealand on the path to be carbon neutral by 2050.
  2. Establish a Climate Commission to provide expert and independent advice to the government on: carbon prices, carbon budgets, and complementary measures to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
  3. Phase out the failed Emissions Trading Scheme and set an initial price on carbon:
    $25 per tonne on CO2 equivalent emissions for all sectors except agriculture and forestry. Dairy emissions will pay $12.50 per tonne. Forestry will be credited at $12.50 per tonne.
  4. Recycle all revenues raised from a carbon charge back to families and businesses through a $2,000 income tax-free band and a one percent company tax cut. A Climate Tax Cut. Households will be better off.
  5. Introduce a suite of complementary measures to support the rapid transition to a carbon neutral economy.

The tax and dividend scheme has been costed by independent economists BERL (report here). An average household will be over $300 better off per annum.

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Cosmos, climate change, and walking the dog

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBdxDFpDp_k&w=480]

This Sunday the National Geographic Channel’s excellent Cosmos science series explores climate change (Sunday June 1st at 7-30pm NZ/Aus on Sky channel 72). In the excerpt above, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the difference between climate and weather by talking a chocolate Labrador for a walk on the beach. The series has been attracting big audiences in the US, and the episodes I’ve caught have made compelling watching. It’s a reworking of Carl Sagan’s classic 1980 series, with wonderful graphics and great storytelling by Tyson. Highly recommended. And remember, watch the man, not the dog. (Hat tip to Chris Mooney at Mother Jones).

Carter and de Lange’s GWPF sea level report plagiarises their own Heartland-funded NIPCC propaganda

Analysis of a report on sea level rise — Sea-level Change: Living with uncertainty — published earlier this month by Nigel Lawson’s UK climate lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and written by NZ scientists Willem de Lange and Bob Carter, shows that it extensively plagiarises last year’s heavily criticised Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) report, funded and published by US lobby group the Heartland Institute. The GWPF report’s conclusions are taken word-for-word from chapter six of the NIPCC report — Observations: The Hydrosphere and Ocean [pdf] — also written by de Lange and Carter. Nowhere in the report do the report’s authors or the GWPF acknowledge the extent to which they rely on the earlier publication. Carter and de Lange fail to credit themselves, Heartland, or the NIPCC beyond a single reference to their chapter in the list of sources appended to the GWPF report.

Here is the first policy recommendation from the GWPF report:

1. Abandonment of ‘let’s stop global sea-level rise’ policies

No justification exists for continuing to base sea-level policy and coastal management regulation upon the outcomes of deterministic or semi-empirical sea-level modelling. Such modelling remains speculative rather than predictive. The practice of using a global rate of sea-level change to manage specific coastal locations worldwide is irrational, and should be abandoned.

This bears a striking resemblance to the first of the “conclusions” offered on p796 of chapter six of the NIPCC report:

Abandon “let’s stop global sea-level rise” policies

No justification exists for continuing to base sea-level policy and coastal management regulation on the outcomes of deterministic or semi-empirical sea-level modeling. Such modeling remains highly speculative. Even if the rate of eustatic sea-level change was known accurately, the practice of using a notional global rate of sea-level change to manage specific coastal locations worldwide is irrational, and it should be abandoned.

The eagle-eyed will notice that words in italics are edited from the GWPF version, but in every other respect the two sections are identical. The final two GWPF conclusions are also drawn verbatim from the NIPCC chapter, as are many other parts of the GWPF report.

Where it draws verbatim on the NIPCC work, the GWPF report is both unoriginal and wrong, and where it can be bothered to be original it is also wrong. In either case it is work of shoddy scholarship that reflects badly on its authors, the institutions with which they are associated, and the GWPF.

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TDB today: Goodbye coastline – we are beyond the point of no return

In which I pull together the strands of the recent bad news from Antarctica and Greenland, and lament the loss of the coastline we all grew up with — no longer a theoretical possibility but a long term certainty. Check out Goodbye coastline – we are beyond the point of no return, this week’s post at The Daily Blog, and start planning for all our watery futures.