Tag: James Hansen

Kiwiblog kobblers

New Zealand’s leading right wing blogger, National Party spinmeister and opinion poll guru David Farrar, this morning allowed himself the luxury of a rant about the New Zealand Herald‘s coverage of a new paper on sea level during the late Pliocene. In a post teasingly titled “Alarmist bullshit“, he manages to demonstrate his rudimentary grasp of the facts, misunderstands the real story behind the new research, and ends up shooting himself in the foot. Here’s David in full flow:

Anyone who thinks public policy today should be based on a forecast of what the climate might be in 5,000 years is nuts. Look at how the world has changed in just 100 years let alone hundreds or thousands. Hell in 1,000 years we may be living on Mars.

The Herald should be ashamed for saying that the projected increase could “dramatically transform” our coastal boundaries. A change over 1,000 years+ is not dramatic. It’s like saying the separation of Gondwana was dramatic.

20 metres is a lot of sea level rise. Here’s what 20 metres would mean for my nearest city, poor old quake-plagued Christchurch, courtesy of the Firetree sea level rise calculator. The central business district is under water, the new shoreline well to the west. At a rough guess, I’d say 80% of the city is flooded, and Banks Peninsula is an island once more.

I think that can be reasonably described as a dramatic transformation of the South Island coastline, even if it does take 1,000 years to happen. DPF might like to note that coping with two metres per century sea level rise is nobody’s picnic. But his misunderstanding runs deeper…

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On Lignite: Elder not better

Since Don Elder thinks it inappropriate for the visiting James Hansen to comment on the morality of the proposed lignite development in Southland, let me, a fellow New Zealander, say that I find the morality of the development indefensible and all the special pleading offered by Elder doesn’t alter the case.

There is evidence that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activity are already causing hardship to some poorer populations of the world. There is little doubt that they will deliver today’s young and their children a world under pressure from immense and adverse changes which few of us would wish on them. That’s the basis of Hansen’s forthright comments on the morality of continuing to burn fossil fuels. If you want a more eloquent statement than he is accustomed to make have a look at what Norwegian novelist Jostein Gaarder said at a panel he shared with Hansen at the 2010 PEN World Voices Festival. I quoted him at some length in this post, but the essence of his speech was in these words:

“You shall love your neighbour as you love yourself. This must obviously include your neighbour generation. It has to include absolutely everyone who will live on the earth after us. The human family doesn’t inhabit earth simultaneously. People have lived here before us, some are living now and some will live after us. But those who come after us are also our fellow human beings…We have no right to hand over a planet earth that is less worth than the planet that we ourselves have had the good fortune to live on.”

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Supporting Jim: Saunders, Oram and Salinger on tour

With James Hansen arriving in New Zealand next week to tour much (but not all) of the country talking climate action and coal, three NZ-based climate experts have announced a regional speaking tour designed to complement Hansen’s efforts. Climate scientist Jim Salinger will be joined by Professor Caroline Saunders from Lincoln University (well-known for her work on the carbon footprinting of agricultural exports) and business commentator Rod Oram to present a session on “Maintaining farm productivity and profits in an uncertain climate”. They’ll explain:

…the nature of climate change, its impacts on New Zealanders’ health, properties, infrastructure, environment and rural industries. They will bring the latest information on climate change science and how it affects rural industries in regional New Zealand.

They’ll be visiting Wanganui, Hawera, New Plymouth, Stratford, Gisborne, Napier and Hastings in May, with visits to Northland, Bay of Plenty/Waikato, Nelson/Marlborough, South Canterbury and Westland planned for July/August. Sounds like a very worthwhile session for anyone with an interest in agriculture, climate and New Zealand’s future. Schedule below the fold…

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Defending the future: scientists take the stand

Perhaps serving as defence witnesses will prove a new opportunity for climate scientists to make the clear public statement that the confused processes of the media often muddy.  In 2008 James Hansen famously defended the UK protestors, the Kingsnorth Six, who were charged with criminal damage when they climbed to the top of the smokestack at Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent. His role was to provide expert opinion about the dangers of climate change and the part played by coal as the fossil fuel most responsible for increasing CO2 levels. He was an hour and a half on the stand, much of the time given to explaining the consequences of continuing to increase the CO2in the atmosphere. The concluding paragraph of his written statement related his material to the trial:

Recognition of these basic facts by the defendants, realization that the facts were also known by the government, utility, and fossil fuel industry, and realization that the actions needed to protect life and property of the present and future generations were not being taken undoubtedly played a role in the decision of the defendants to act as they did.

The six were acquitted.

Now another climate scientist has given evidence for the defence in the trial of nine members of the Plane Stupid protest group facing breach of the peace charges for occupying Aberdeen airport and disrupting flights in March last year. They plead not guilty, on the grounds that their actions were justified as they assembled peacefully to prevent a greater crime to future generations through climate change. The vandalism charges they also faced have been dropped.

Alice Bows (pictured) from the Tyndall centre for climate change research is the climate scientist who has testified as an expert witness. Yesterday she said in court that the Scottish government’s climate change programme, which seeks to cut emissions by up to 40% by 2020 and 80% by 2050, was “welcome” but not enough. (Reports from Climate9 and the Guardian.)

“The UK Government’s Committee on Climate Change policy of 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 only gives us a 50:50 chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. You wouldn’t go to sleep in a house that had a 50:50 chance of burning down in the night, so we need even tougher targets. In fact we need a complete de-carbonisation of the economy in the next few decades. Because we need to tackle emissions right now, the actions of both governments and individuals are important.”

Bows added that the aviation industry was of particular concern.

“Condensation trails, or the white trails, are also causing climate warming. On a UK basis, air travel contributes 6% of carbon dioxide emissions. If you compare that to other sectors, it’s quite a significant contribution.”

There’s nothing new in what Bows, and Hansen before her, have to say.  But the theatre in which it is said means that it gains sustained public attention. The fact that scientists are willing to emerge from their world of research and speak in the defence of activists is also in itself a sign to the public of how important they hold their message to be.

In August 2008 Alice Bows and Kevin Andersen published a paper, Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.  The abstract opened with these sentences:

The 2007 Bali conference heard repeated calls for reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 50 per cent by 2050 to avoid exceeding the 2°C threshold. While such endpoint targets dominate the policy agenda, they do not, in isolation, have a scientific basis and are likely to lead to dangerously misguided policies.

It’s a fair bet that Bows’ court appearance has achieved more public notice than the carefully argued paper in the Royal Society publication. Not that the paper didn’t therefore matter, but it’s also crucially important that such messages are heard loudly and clearly by the lay public. The action of the Dundee Nine has enabled that as a bonus.

Incidentally, the judge is noted in the Climate9 report as having referred to a BBC radio report of the study discussed in the recent Hot Topic post demonstrating that 98% of climate scientists agree that climate change is anthropogenic.

The Climate War

The climate change rhetoric when Obama came to power was exciting. It sounded as if he would lead from the front and the US would soon have a federal cap-and-trade system. “Delay is not longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”  Certainly we have seen an end to denial from the White House. But we are still waiting for an end to delay, and increasingly it looks as if we’ll be waiting for a long time. Why?

Eric Pooley’s book The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth sheds a good deal of light on why it is that America, in spite of all the scientific evidence that demonstrates the threatening reality of climate change, is still unable, and often unwilling, to mobilise itself to address the danger.
The author is an accomplished journalist who has spent hundreds of hours over the past three years interviewing some of the players in America’s painfully slow progress towards climate change legislation.  The result is an illuminating story of battles in an ongoing war which is far from conclusion. It’s told painstakingly but with a narrative verve that carries the reader along irresistibly through its mass of detailed accounts. It’s compelling reading, from which I’ll mention just a few examples.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is the climate change group to which Pooley devotes most of his attention. A large organisation which has been at work for over 40 years, the EDF has long argued for a cap and trade system to tackle CO2 emissions. Its president, Fred Krupp, is focused on partnership with business to bring about political action on climate change and was influential in the formation of the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) in 2007, initially a group of ten companies and four environmental groups. Among them was Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy. In typically detailed fashion Pooley recreates the drama of meetings at which were hammered out the conditions on which Rogers felt he could join the Call for Action USCAP planned to issue. It hinged on whether allowance was made for initial free distribution of allowances to utilities like Duke, a sticking point for Rogers.

USCAP may have been looked at askance by many Green groups, but Roger’s involvement didn’t go down well with his colleagues at the Edison Electric Institute either. He was chairman at the time and several CEOs called for him to step down. At the Heartland Institute denier’s convention in 2008 Steven Milloy bitterly expressed his dismay that CEOs would endorse a mandatory cap. “What do you do when the people who represent business and free enterprise have switched sides on you?”

As the Waxman-Hartley bill was developing, the question of emission allowances being free or auctioned remained vexed. Krupp was willing to give way to the companies, maintaining that it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was how many allowances were distributed in a given year and how quickly the number was ratcheted down. The declining cap would see to it that coal use declined.

After his close coverage of the tortuous development of the bill, Pooley concludes:

“Of course Waxman-Markey was full of flaws, compromises, and reluctant nods to political reality.  But the bill got right a lot more than it got wrong.  By giving carbon allowances to electric distribution companies and requiring them to pass the value on to customers, it used the cap and trade mechanism to address to genuine cost imbalances between regions of the US – making the system fairer and helping the very heartland people who most wanted to see the whole thing wither and die.”

Pooley recognises that the intransigence of the Republicans meant that the bill reflected negotiations only between the left and right wings of the Democratic party, not between the left and right wings of America. “Like a wounded animal, the GOP’s only reflex was to lash out. Anything Obama was for, they would be against.”  It’s a sad commentary on a party which has too often allowed itself to be informed on global warming by the organised denial movement which Pooley also takes into his purview.

Al Gore features frequently in the book. His Alliance for Climate Protection organization aimed to spend $100 million a year for three years on advertising campaigns. In July 2008 his Repower America speech challenged the nation to commit to clean energy within ten years. After the elections he sought to orchestrate a large, loud chorus of voices calling on the president-elect and the new Congress to go big and go quickly on the energy front. Some wanted an energy bill first and to leave cap-and-trade for later. Gore disagreed. “If we’re going to have a fight on climate, let’s have a big fight.”

James Hansen enters the picture from time to time.  He met with Rogers over a meal. Pooley records each man’s feeling as they left the restaurant. Rogers felt positive: I’m not a confrontational guy, and neither is he. Hansen felt disappointed: This man has a reputation for being green, but he doesn’t really know what it means. His priority is making money.

Pooley records at best mixed messages from the White House. On a good day Larry Summers told USCAP leaders that the stimulus bill needed to be complemented with a cap-and-trade mechanism. “It’s like two blades of a scissors…We need both of them.”  But when it came to the Waxman-Markey bill, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod wanted to stick to the clean energy message and leave climate policy to Waxman. Pooley tells of the committed greens in the White House being defeated time and again by those in the political and economic teams who consider voters don’t care about climate action enough for the president to fight for it. The president who we expected to lead on the issue remains strangely constrained.

Obama went to Copenhagen having failed to move a climate bill. Pooley credits him with an honest, even heroic, attempt there to break the deadlock by bringing the major developing nations to the climate table. His speech offered welcome straight talk on the science, though little on the necessary action to address it. But the possibility of a triumph at Copenhagen had already been ruled out by his decision at home not to mount an education campaign on climate science and clean energy jobs to counter the sceptics, and the failure to put a top-level aide in charge of the international climate issue.

Pooley ends with questions:

“Alexis de Tocqueville long ago said that in the US, events ‘can move from the impossible to the inevitable without ever stopping at the probable.’  Was that still true?  How bad did things need to get before the moment came?  Would the prospect of a clean energy economy, and the jobs it would bring, mobilize enough people to make a difference?  Or would some sort of monstrous, galvanic weather event – epic heat and drought, Katrina on steroids – be needed to shake America fully awake?”

They seem to me open questions.  After following through the labyrinthine processes the author describes by which anything happens, if it happens, in the American political system and recognising the blinkered self-interest and sometimes sheer malevolence that seems to motivate many of the players, I found it hard to credit that America is on the verge of significant progress.  But I took what comfort I could from Pooley’s final brief paragraph where he imagines that the campaigners refused to be paralysed by the questions posed, “splashed some cold water on their faces, ran their fingers through their hair, threw back their shoulders and marched toward the sound of the guns”.

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