Tag: Australia

How to be a denier: lesson #1 (shrivel and die)

One of Hot Topic’s favourite sceptics is NZ C”S”C member Roger Dewhurst, best known for turning up from time to time to unload links to the denier meme du jour (and for his carefully cultivated grumpy old man persona). Yesterday morning he sent me a link to this “interesting” document prepared by Dr David Evans, one of Australia’s more active cranks (he’s Joanne Codling aka Nova‘s partner, for a start). Evans’ latest assault on reason is a series of papers asking Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? His answer’s easy to guess…

Continue reading “How to be a denier: lesson #1 (shrivel and die)”

Hide’s Aussie holiday: warming up for Carterist science’s new consensus

Rodney “The Hood“ Hide is taking an Aussie break during the current Parliamentary recess — popping over to Melbourne and Sydney to act as warm-up man for Bob Carter at the launch of Carter’s magnum opus, Climate: The Counter-consensus – a Scientist Speaks. And it appears Hide is as happy to allow his hosts to misrepresent his qualifications as he is to mislead Parliament. The flier for the “Quadrant dinner” in Sydney says:

Rodney has a degree in environmental science, and is a powerful and well-informed public speaker.

He may be a powerful speaker, but Hide does not have a degree in environmental science, and he is woefully ill-informed on climate matters. Hide has Masters degrees in economics and resource management (Wikipedia, NZ Parliament bio), and as this comment at Hot Topic two years ago suggests, he could have completed the latter without encountering any science at all. But he’s good for a bit of rabble-rousing, and I expect his “ditch the ETS” rhetoric, liberally laced with attacks on NIWA’s stewardship of the NZ temperature record and chanted lines from the climate crank catechism will make the Quadrant dinner worth every cent of the A$74 being charged…

Meanwhile, Carterist science is finally getting the recognition it deserves, and the Heartland climate con is on its way to Sydney. Carter’s been appointed Chief Science Advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition.

 

Here’s Carter welcoming his appointment:

“Working with ICSC as Chief Science Advisor is a welcome opportunity to counter the widespread but erroneous belief that dangerous global warming is occurring, and that it has human causation”. Professor Carter continued:  “Science has yet to provide unambiguous evidence that problematic, or even measurable, human-caused global warming is occurring.

So, do we have ambiguous evidence of problems caused by that unmeasurable warming, or is Carter just repeating standard climate crank nonsense? I think we know the answer to that one…

In one sense, however, Carter is breaking new ground in crank thinking. The title of his book (Climate: The Counter-consensus – a Scientist Speaks) suggest that a “counter-consensus” is assembling. For there to be a counter-consensus there first has to be a consensus in mainstream climate science to counter, but for years sceptics, deniers and cranks have been claiming loudly that there is “no consensus“. Indeed, point 5 of the “core principles” of the organisation that has just appointed Carter its chief science advisor says:

Claims that ‘consensus’ exists among climate experts regarding the causes of the modest warming of the past century are contradicted by thousands of independent scientists.

But if there is no consensus, how can a counter-consensus assemble? Does Carter support the ICSC’s core principles? And what about that modest warming? According to Carter it’s not measurable, or not happening. At this point, dear reader, you will forgive me if I pour another glass of wine and ponder the many contradictory things you have to believe at the same time if you are to be a true climate septic…

Finally, the Heartland Institute is holding a one-day climate sceptic conference in Sydney next Friday, October 1st. Carter’s talking, of course, and Chris de Freitas is popping over to talk about Developments in Climate Science: Potential Drivers of Emissions Policy Beyond 2012 (at a guess, wishful thinking will be involved). Interestingly, the climate day follows on from two days of “workshops and brainstorming with free market advocates from the Pacific Rim” at the Pacific Rim Policy Exchange: chief sponsors Heartland, Americans for Tax Reform (a Koch & Scaife funded lobby group), the Property Rights Alliance (an ATR spin-off), and Australia’s free market Institute of Public Affairs. And NZ’s pulling its weight on the agenda, with the Business Roundtable’s Roger Kerr on a panel considering free trade, and (somewhat more surprising, to me at least) Kiwiblogger and National party stalwart David Farrar taking part in a “working lunch” on “getting the message out”. Interesting to see he’s happy to take the Heartland shilling…

The secret migration

Acouple of weeks ago, a comment on carbon footprints and immigration kicked off a brief exchange of views on New Zealand’s vulnerability to climate-forced migration. It’s an interesting subject, worth more attention, and so in this post I’m going to set out how I see NZ’s position in the context of the likely future flows of climate-forced migration.

Let’s start by defining the probable sources of migrants. The first and most obvious are refugees forced to move by climate impacts. The horrendous situation in Pakistan gives some idea of the sheer scale of the problems likely to be faced by some of the world’s most populous and least-wealthy countries. Here’s how the New York Times describes the situation in Pakistan:

Initial estimates for the scale of damages and human suffering for Pakistan’s worst flooding in 80 years, is larger than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 2005 Kashmir earthquake, 2008 Cyclone Nargis disaster in Burma and 2010 Haitian earthquake — combined.

Each of the great Asian megadeltas — in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and China — could face similar problems if the Asian monsoon intensifies further, or if sea level rise picks up pace. The potential for tens of millions of people to be made homeless, to start a desperate search for dry land and food is obvious — but that’s not where New Zealand’s principal vulnerability lies.

Continue reading “The secret migration”

Keep right on to the end of the road

When one spends a good deal of time following what scientists working on climate change are saying, it’s hard to understand how the community at large and politicians in particular can appear so unaffected by the prospect ahead if we don’t radically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. The only conclusion is that they haven’t yet understood the full reality of the science.

James Hansen is notably one scientist who has been much exercised by this fact. He and his co-writers offer some reflections on the communication of the status of global warming to the public in a summary discussion at the end of their revised paper Global Surface Temperature Change, which has been accepted for publication in Reviews of Geophysics. The comments on communication are carefully characterised as opinion and differentiated from the primary scientific contribution of the paper. But it is entirely understandable that scientists should be exercised about why there appears to be so much difficulty having a subject of such “surpassing importance” communicated clearly to the public.

 

The paper notes first that weather variability hampers lay people’s perceptions, a difficulty which can best be addressed by drawing attention to the changes in frequency and magnitude of changes from the norm apparent on decadal time scales as warming increases.

The writers then remark the media’s difficulties in framing long-term problems as news, the preference for sensationalism, the generally low level of familiarity with basic science, and the preference for ‘balance’ in every story.

The politicisation of reporting of global warming compounds these difficulties. The paper acknowledges that politicisation is perhaps inevitable given the economic and social implications of altering the course of human-made climate change. Alleviating it is made more difficult by attacks on the character and credibility of scientists, which appear to have been effective in causing many in the public to doubt the reality or seriousness of climate change.

What can scientists do about this? Keep on keeping on:

“…the best hope may be repeated clear description of the science and passage of sufficient time to confirm validity of the description.”

Hansen acknowledges the danger is that while we wait for this to happen the climate system could pass tipping points that cause major climate changes to proceed largely out of humanity’s control.

“Yet continuation of careful scientific description of ongoing climate change seems to be essential for the sake of minimizing the degree of future climate change, even while other ways are sought to draw attention to the dangers of continued greenhouse gas increases.”

The paper, these reflections apart, continues precisely such careful scientific description, updating and discussing the Goddard Institute’s analysis of global surface change and showing that contrary to popular misconception the rate of warming has not declined.

“Global warming on decadal time scales is continuing without letup… we conclude that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”

The Australian Academy of Science last week produced a worthy effort to communicate the science with the publication of Climate Change: Questions and Answers (web, pdf). It is a lucid account for the lay reader of the central features of climate science as currently understood by its practitioners. In his foreword the President of the Academy, Kurt Lambeck, points to some of the complexities which beset the communication of climate science. It is at the intersection of a number of science disciplines and sub-disciplines.

“It is at this intersection of the disciplines where uncertainty can and will arise, both because of the yet poorly understood feedbacks between the different components of the climate system and because of the difficulty of bringing these components together into a single descriptive and predictive model.”

Equal complexities may be evident in many other areas of experimental science, but they bear special weight in climate:

“What makes climate change different is that the consequences are not only potentially global and serious but also that they occur over long time scales (decades to centuries) so that actions need to be contemplated before full understanding is achieved.”

The Academy has produced the document to try to aid public understanding and to tread a path through the often contradictory public commentary on the science. Lambeck emphasises that it is not intended as a formulation of a public response, but as “an attempt to improve the public understanding of the science upon which any policy response should be constructed.”

The document is a model of clarity in its explanations of the science and restrained in its presentation of the impacts of global warming. Look at the careful language which communicates truly alarming but well-founded predictions:

“If emissions continue unabated, current mid-range estimates are for 4.5°C higher global average temperatures by 2100 which would mean that the world would be hotter than at any time in the last few million years. Sea level would continue to rise for many centuries. The impacts of such changes are difficult to predict, but are likely to be severe for human populations and for the natural world. The further climate is pushed beyond the envelope of relative stability that has characterised the last several millennia, the greater becomes the risk of passing tipping points that will result in profound changes in climate, vegetation, ocean circulation or ice sheet stability.”

What policy response should be constructed on that?  A 5% reduction in emissions in Australia by 2020 from a 2000 base says Tony Abbott, who prevaricates on whether humans are causing climate change.  It depends what a citizen’s assembly comes up with says Julia Gillard, who affirms she believes in human-caused climate change.

Scientific bodies must use measured language. But it shouldn’t be asking too much of policy makers and the educated public to translate it into the urgent awareness that it demands from anyone who takes the trouble to attend to it. How much longer will that be delayed?

[Harry Lauder!]

Offshore energy for export

Ben McNeil’s scenario, in The Clean Industrial Revolution, of Australia as a future source of renewable energy exported to its Asian neighbours was of necessity somewhat speculative. However a major report published this week laid out, in very concrete terms, the possibility of the UK becoming a net exporter of renewable energy, not solar in this case, but garnered from the wind and waves of the sea.

The report of the Offshore Valuation Group was sponsored by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, the Scottish government, and a number of large companies. Tasked with estimating the value of the offshore renewable energy resource, the group’s findings exceeded their own  expectations.

 

“The next four decades of technological development could enable us to harness a practical resource ten times the size of today’s planned deployments. Integration with neighbouring electricity networks though a ‘super-grid’ could provide access to a single European electricity market, enabling the UK to sell renewable electricity across the continent.”

The report relied on technologies already either in use or in development: offshore wind with fixed or floating foundations, tidal stream, tidal range, and wave power. It also took into account competing uses of the sea and accessibility constraints.

The resource identified by the report is very large, capable of producing six times as much electricity as is currently used in the UK. The report recognised that electrification of transport and heating will add to demand by 2050, an increase of perhaps 75% on today’s demand. Harnessing 29% of the offshore resource by 2050 would be enough to turn the UK into a net exporter of renewable electricity at an estimated cost of £443 billion with an estimated annual revenue return of £62 billion. The annual production in 2050 would be equivalent to 1 billion barrels of oil. This is the average level of production experienced by the UK’s North Sea oil and gas over the four decades leading up to 2008.

The infrastructure deployment required is similar in scale to that of oil and gas in recent decades.  To deploy the capacity by 2050 would require an average build rate of 7.2GW per year (one thousand 7.5MW turbines per year), including repowering. Of this, 5.4GW would be fixed offshore wind, with the next largest share coming from floating wind. A big plus is that 145,000 jobs could be created in direct roles.

The current EU supergrid negotiations are of major importance to any export development and the report urges that the UK take a leadership role to ensure that the UK derives maximum value from its design and implementation. Government involvement would be essential in many aspects of the development, in cooperation with industry. One is finding ways to develop innovative financing mechanisms that can match the long term risk and reward profile of renewable energy investments. This could take the form of green energy bonds designed either for corporate investors such as pension funds or for individual investors, and should be designed to deliver finance at the required scale; for the 29% harnessing option an average annual investment of £11 billion will be required between 2010 and 2050.

Another role for government is setting a national ambition to become an exporter of offshore renewable electricity. This will provide industry with the confidence it needs to invest for the longer term, it will demonstrate a strong commitment to existing renewable energy and climate targets, and it will help to guide long term policy development on related issues such as energy markets, grid and supply chain development.

The conclusion:

“The UK is now most of the way through its first great offshore energy asset, our stock of hydrocarbon reserves. The central finding of this report is that our second offshore asset, of renewable energy, could be just as valuable. Britain’s extensive offshore experience could now unlock an energy flow that will never run out.”

We wait to see what the policy makers do with the report. Peter Madigan, Head of Offshore Renewables at RenewableUK, was in no doubt about what should happen:

 

“This is a hugely exciting piece of research which sets out compelling factual evidence of the huge potential of the UK’s offshore renewable energy resource. As an association we have long been saying that the North Sea will become the Saudi Arabia of wind energy, and today’s tonne of oil and employment comparisons amply bear this out. Just as 30 years  ago, the North Sea could be our ticket for economic growth. We are looking forward to the new Government putting in place the policy framework to make this happen.”