Category: Climate business

The Critical Decade: time is tight

Australia’s Climate Commission (established by government, but “not subject to government direction“) today released an overview of the current climate state of play — The Critical Decade: Climate science, risks and responses (key points, full report). It’s important and timely — especially in the Australian political context, but it also has lessons for most of the world’s policymakers. Here are the key findings:

  1. There is no doubt that the climate is changing. The evidence is overwhelming and clear
  2. We are already seeing the social, economic and environmental impacts of a changing climate
  3. Human activities – the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation – are triggering the changes we are witnessing in the global climate
  4. This is the critical decade. Decisions we make from now to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change our children and grandchildren experience

The last point is the most important. It underlines much of what we’re learning about the climate system’s response to the pulse of greenhouse gases we’re forcing it to swallow. Here’s one of the bullet points under point four:

This decade is critical. Unless effective action is taken, the global climate may be so irreversibly altered we will struggle to maintain our present way of life. The choices we make this decade will shape the long-term climate future for our children and grandchildren.

This is what Jim Hansen was on about in his tour of New Zealand — the duty we owe to our children and our children’s children. Please read his latest draft paper: The case for young people and nature: a path to a healthy, natural prosperous future. And look in particular at the emissions paths therein. We have a limited window in which to prevent unimaginable damage to the planet.

To do that, we need policy that starts where the laws of physics finish, not pretends that they can be bent to economic theory. We need more bodies like the Climate Commission, willing to speak truth to power, and we need politicians who will listen.

[See The Conversation for comments from senior Aussie academics.]

[Booker T and the MGs]

Changing Planet, Changing Health

Interconnectedness is a major theme of Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens our Health and What We Can Do about It. Jeffrey Sachs describes the book in his preface as “a scientific detective story of the first order, told with brilliance and relish by one of the world’s great ecological detectives”. The detective is physician and public health scientist Paul Epstein. He has co-authored the book with science writer Dan Ferber.

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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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Life Without Oil

Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future“A gradual contraction into more sustainable patterns of resource use is not the norm for a society that is exploiting the environment. The norm is a last-ditch effort to maintain outward displays of power, and then a sudden, and dramatic, collapse.”   That’s one of the foreboding statements with which Steve Hallett and John Wright punctuate their preview of past civilisations in the opening section of their book Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future.

They consider we are at the peak of oil production and that we’re not facing that reality. There are late flurries to extend the discovery of further oil.  Deep sea drilling, the exploitation of the Alberta tar sands and oil shale extraction are among them, the latter two causing horrendous environmental damage. But all they will produce is a temporary delay of the decline. The authors judge that around 2015 oil production will show a clear and convincing decline, and the world will be at the beginning of the end of what they call the petroleum interval. It’s an interval that will have occupied a couple of centuries in the long history of humanity. Oil has enabled the construction of a monumental global civilisation in which we have become dependent on the increased productivity and efficiencies of scale it can provide. As it diminishes and disappears we require an energy transition which the book considers we are not geared to make in good time. We therefore face a long global economic contraction as the price of oil escalates, a sequence of economic slumps which will continue until fundamental problems of energy availability, food production, water supply and population control are sufficiently well corrected.

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Listener gets serious about sea level

As I walked past the magazine stand at the supermarket this week my eye was caught by the front cover of the this week’s Listener (on sale last week). “Rising sea levels & extreme weather — why NZ needs to get serious,” it said. A cautious peek inside suggested Ruth Laugeson’s article might deserve a comment on Hot Topic so I parted with four dollars and brought it home to look more closely.  It does indeed deserve mention here if only because it’s the sort of straightforward treatment of climate change that we should be able to expect of serious journalism. Laugeson has been reading Mark Hertsgaard’s book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, which I reviewed a few weeks back on Hot Topic. Hertsgaard argues that we must plan adaptation to the now unavoidable changes at the same time as working to avoid much worse and likely unmanageable change.

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