Australia will set a price on carbon from July next year, Aussie PM Julia Gillard announced yesterday. Cost per tonne will be set at A$23, rising 2.5% per annum, and the initial tax will morph into an emissions trading scheme from 2015. A full list of the key points and links to comment and reaction below the fold (as they used to say at the News Of The World)…
Tag: Australia
The Climate Show #14: volcanoes, black carbon and crocks from Christy
A busy news week sees Glenn and Gareth discussing volcanoes in Chile and Africa, busy pumping ash into the atmosphere and disrupting flights in South America, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East, an extreme spring in the USA, drought in Europe and a warm autumn in NZ, a new UN report on black carbon and how a reduction could cut future warming, Aussie scientists fighting back against climate denial, and forecasts for the summer ice minimum in the Arctic. John Cook from Skeptical Science deals with their new series on John Christy’s climate crocks, and introduces a great new graphic front end for the SkS climate literature database, plus we cover price reductions on solar panels, LEDs on streetlights in San Francisco and MIT’s Cambridge crude.
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Song of the Australian scientists
Australian scientists have begun a push back against climate denial. Over at the excellent The Conversation site (a hugely interesting experiment in bringing academic expertise to the news cycle), Stephan Lewandowsky and a long list of prominent Australian academics have kicked off a series of articles “from the nation’s top minds on the science behind climate change and the efforts of “sceptics” to cloud the debate” titled Clearing up the Climate Debate.
Beginning today, The Conversation will bring much-needed and long-overdue accountability to the climate “sceptics.”
For the next two weeks, our series of daily analyses will show how they can side-step the scientific literature and how they subvert normal peer review. They invariably ignore clear refutations of their arguments and continue to promote demonstrably false critiques.
We will show that “sceptics” often show little regard for truth and the critical procedures of the ethical conduct of science on which real skepticism is based.
The individuals who deny the balance of scientific evidence on climate change will impose a heavy future burden on Australians if their unsupported opinions are given undue credence.
Not to mention imposing a heavy future burden on everyone else on the planet…
Lewandowsky’s introduction was followed in short order by The greenhouse effect is real: here’s why, by Karl Braganza of the Bureau of Meteorology — an admirably succinct statement of the facts of the matter.
The climate of Earth is now a closely monitored thing; from instruments in space, in the deep ocean, in the atmosphere and across the surface of both land and sea.
It’s now practically certain that increasing greenhouse gases have already warmed the climate system.
That continued rapid increases in greenhouse gases will cause rapid future warming is irrefutable.
This is an important series of articles: one worth following in detail. Congrats to Steve and everyone involved.
Mad, bad and dangerous
Australian climate scientists have been receiving abusive emails — even death threats — from people who mistake violence for political expression. Graham Readfearn provides some examples (not for the squeamish). The Canberra Times broke the story at the weekend and it’s been covered in depth at The Conversation (one, two). Tim Lambert comments on the vapid response from right wing commentator Tim Blair, but I was horrified by the unrepentant tone adopted by Joanne Nova:
This is sheer beef-it-up spin, making a mountain out of a molehill, clutching at straws in desperation to eek out a PR victory from the dregs of a fading scam.
I might have expected a ritual “we do not condone violence” from Nova and Blair, but it’s nowhere to be seen. Nor is this tactic new. It’s been a fact of life for climate scientists in the USA for years. That it’s crossing the Pacific and polluting the discourse in Australia should be a matter of shame for those opposing action on climate change.
It’s also evidence of how desperate the campaign of denial has become. Denied recourse to the evidence because it is overwhelmingly against them, they resort to bullying and hate speech. There’s a lesson here for those who would argue against action on climate change. When you make common cause with the crazies by invoking conspiracies as your case for inaction, then you open the doors on a very dangerous form of debate.
From science to ethics to action
I’ve been reading the admirably lucid report of the Australian Climate Commission which Gareth highlighted recently, and reflecting on its restrained exposition of the current state of the science. One couldn’t ask for a clearer or more accessible statement within its 70 page range.
At the same time I’ve started reading a book by philosopher Stephen Gardiner (pictured). It’s titled A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change and I’ll be reviewing it in due course. Why I mention it here is because the first proposition he sets out in his preface accorded with what was floating around in my mind as I read the Commission’s report. He notes that we are currently accelerating hard into the most serious environmental problem humanity has ever faced. Yet, after twenty years of awareness we are neither slowing down nor stabilizing, let alone reducing our output to the problem. Rather we are continuing to add more fuel to the fire, ever faster. “This, arguably, is the most striking fact of our time.”