CLIMATE, CLIMATE, CLIMATE

It's the big debate in Australia at the moment. Four current articles below

Australia is a climate irrelevance

The most difficult thing for an Australian to get right, especially psychologically, is a sense of our relative standing in the world. We are important, but we are not that important. We are about the 15th biggest economy, which is not negligible, but we are a minnow compared with the great powers. We have the sixth largest land mass. We have a small population and, despite recent growth, it is becoming proportionally smaller compared with the rest of the world, particularly our region. We tend to fall into the competing vices of braggadocio or donning the humble garments of Uriah Heep.

The truth is we are a significant middle power, unable to decide any issue beyond our shores but able to influence, a little or sometimes a lot, almost everything. This is intensely relevant to the climate change debate. Short of war, climate change presents us with a uniquely international problem requiring domestic management. We must do the best for ourselves and our planet. But what that best actually is will be determined by the actions of other international players. If we make policy blind to that fact, we are in danger of making irrational policy. And that could be profoundly harmful.

Those arguing for a very robust response to climate change - that is, severe targets to cut our greenhouse gas emissions - often do so on the basis that it is prudent. There is genuine contention over the science of global warming, whether it is happening at the supposed rate, whether it is caused primarily by human activity and whether changing our activity can halt it. But, it is said, we must act because it may be true or, if you believe the science, it is highly likely it's true. If we act without needing to, we get a cleaner environment anyway. But if we need to act and don't, we may encompass a human catastrophe.

That may very well be true. But there are other scenarios that also may be true. It may be that we act without needing to and produce substantial dislocation in our economy. This would make us much poorer than we are now. Moreover, it may have perverse effects internationally. If we act too dramatically and sustain real economic damage, we may well encourage other countries to avoid our mistakes by acting much more slowly or not acting at all. And if the science is wrong, we may get a wrecked economy for no good reason.

What if the science is right but our own actions nonetheless have no effect? This column is consciously avoiding the usual blizzard of rubbery statistics that all sides use in this debate. But let me give you just three factoids I've come across in the past day or two. By the year after next, carbon emissions from non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries - that is, from developing countries - will exceed those from developed countries. Since 2000, China has increased its emissions by 45 per cent to 65 per cent, depending on whether you include land-use changes. And finally, the Tata company of India is planning to produce a motor car that will sell for about $US2500. Even with petrol getting more expensive, that almost certainly means millions upon millions more cars in India. The same of course will happen in China.

Just let those three facts sink in. What are their implications? How should they affect Australian policy? This column has argued before that developing nations, especially the fast-growing nations of Asia, will never consent to carbon targets and will certainly not reduce their emissions.

Those who find that an inconvenient truth tend to just ignore it, taking a fraudulent comfort in the motherhood pro-environment statements of Chinese, Indian or other developing world leaders, without applying the slightest rigour to analysing what they are actually doing. One possible outcome of all the factors in play today is that we could spend countless billions of dollars combating climate change and have absolutely no effect at all.

One important factor is public opinion. The Australian people want something done and they want it to start now. But, rather contradicting themselves, the Australian people get extremely upset about increases in petrol or electricity prices, which are the first thing that any carbon trading scheme tries to achieve. You cannot ignore public opinion on climate change and you cannot really be offside with it. On the other hand, as the years roll by and reality bites, I'm not sure people will enjoy the idea of losing their job or the employment prospects of their kids so that we can be pure on climate change, especially if the rest of the world doesn't follow our lead.

The debate is so confused and general at the moment that a lot of people probably feel that Australia, by its actions alone, can prevent the Australian climate changing, that we can save the Barrier Reef, make the rivers flow.

How would public opinion develop if it is ultimately presented with a choice something like this: these crook environmental outcomes are going to come about anyway, would you rather confront them as rich people or as poor people? It is said that industry in particular wants the certainty of an emissions trading scheme, but it is difficult to see how a scheme with an endlessly shifting carbon price provides certainty. Of course those many sectors of industry, especially the finance industry, which will make money out of trading carbon credits, will want such a scheme. The rest of industry may be less certain.

All of this is not to argue for inaction. It seems to me there are four obvious things we can do. First, we can go along with, as well as trying to influence through persuasion rather than example, what becomes the consensus position of the developed world. Carbon still has no price in Japan or the US and not an effective price in Canada or Europe. We don't want to be laggards but we would be mad to be far out in front. Travelling with the herd here is truly the only sensible option.

Second, we can encourage every bit of useful technological research. All those carbon capture trials are well worth doing. Third, we can encourage efficiency, conservation and green technology. This is to some extent the preferred option of the US and Asia. These really are low-cost options.

I'm quite happy to have the Government interfere, through regulation and modest tax, to encourage these things: the right sort of light bulbs or fuel efficiency standards for cars. Taking measures such as those and changing our land-use patterns have resulted in a big cut in our per capita greenhouse emissions during the past decade.

Four, we should sell uranium to India. All that's a prudent policy. Anything much more is probably irresponsible, with far too much danger for far too little benefit.

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Rudd sees trade talks collapse as a blow for climate talks

Gotta agree with Rudd on that. Good to see that he is so strong on free trade

PROSPECTS for global co-operation to tackle climate change weakened yesterday as the collapse of trade liberalisation talks cast doubt on the international community's capacity to act in concert for a common good. A downbeat Kevin Rudd - who had personally stayed up to 2am calling world leaders - was yesterday "deeply, deeply disappointed" that World Trade Organisation talks, which would have reduced barriers to international trade, had been abandoned in the Swiss city of Geneva.

And the Prime Minister suggested the failure of the talks augured poorly for the completion of international negotiations aimed at crafting a global agreement for carbon emissions reductions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012. The climate talks, due to be finalised at a UN meeting late next year in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, are seen as crucial to creating a global approach to climate change by creating co-operation between developed and developing nations.

Mr Rudd said the climate talks, which hope to include the big emitters who spurned the Kyoto pact, such as the US and China, would be extremely difficult. The finalisation of the talks is important to Mr Rudd, whose proposal to begin an emissions trading scheme in 2010 will be attacked as meaningless without commitments by big carbon emitters. While stressing there was no direct link between trade and climate change, the Prime Minister noted: "I think we have had a huge setback in terms of the political will of the governments of the world to act in concert for what is plainly in the global economic good." He said global climate change negotiations "have a way to run through until Copenhagen at the end of next year". "They'll be tough, they'll be hard, they'll be difficult," he said. "We understand that, we accept that but we intend to be activists in that process."

Mr Rudd said expanding free trade through the so-called Doha Round of WTO negotiations would have provided benefits for all nations, including Australia and its agricultural sector, which, unlike its competitors in the US and Europe, receives no government protection or subsidy. The long-running Doha Round required co-operation between developed and developing nations, with the US and Europe under pressure to bring down trade barriers to give poor nations greater access to their huge consumer markets.

But despite expectations earlier in the week of a breakthrough, the Doha talks were abandoned early yesterday, Australian time, after the US and India failed to compromise to solve a dispute over tariffs on farm products. The collapse sparked an angry response from Australian exporters, as well as accusations from senior Australian trade officials that US trade negotiator Susan Schwab lost her political nerve and deliberately scuttled the negotiations. The US had agreed on Friday to a breakthrough formula that would have allowed developing countries to defend their rural industries against surging imports. Australian Trade Minister Simon Crean had helped negotiate China's support for the formula, which was backed by all the key nations except India.

However, when negotiations resumed on Monday, Ms Schwab shifted her position, saying the formula would be used to deny US farmers access to developing-country markets. Australian officials believe the US administration concluded over the weekend that the proposed deal would be too hard to sell to the US Congress in an election year.

Mr Rudd said the decision was a "body blow" to the global economy at a time when it needed "a shot in the arm" to counter financial instability. He had spent the early hours of yesterday seeking an 11th-hour solution to the Doha impasse. "I last night was ... until about 2am this morning on the phone to various people in Geneva, on the phone to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others about how this could be rescued. It didn't work. I am deeply disappointed." "What we've got to do now is dust ourselves off and get on with the task of where to next," he said. "I'll be engaged in discussions with various international leaders in the days ahead about how we seek to find a further pathway forward."

Mr Crean said he held no immediate hope the negotiations could be revived. "What has been particularly frustrating is that a deal was clearly well within reach," he said. Mr Crean said there had been an agreement for deep cuts in tariffs for agricultural and manufactured goods, and for an end to export subsidies. Significant gains were made in import quotas, and the world's poorest countries were to get tariff-free access to industrialised countries' markets.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Peter Anderson said Australia must continue to pursue liberalisation. "A bold and comprehensive outcome from the Doha Round could potentially have been worth another $7billion a year to the Australian economy," Mr Anderson said. National Farmers Federation president David Crombie said entrenched positions that led to the breakdown of Doha would undermine global food security.

Aid agency Oxfam blamed wealthy nations. "They defended vested interests and put poor countries under intense pressure to make concessions that have no place in a development round," said acting executive director James Ensor.

Opposition trade spokesman Ian Macfarlane said the breakdown of the talks had exposed the "haphazard, convoluted and politicised" trade policy of the Rudd Government.

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Wong all wrong: Climate paper clouded with mistakes

By Bob Carter (Professor Bob Carter is a geologist who studies ancient environments and their climate, and is a science adviser to the Australian Climate Science Coalition)

The Government's advisory channels are clogged with rent seekers, special pleaders and green activists who have misadvised the minister. Climate Minister Penny Wong published an astonishing green paper in response to what she perceives to be the threat of global warming. The first sentence of the opening section of her paper, entitled "Why we need to act", contains seven scientific errors - almost one error for every two words.

Here is the sentence: "Carbon pollution is causing climate change, resulting in higher temperatures, more droughts, rising sea levels and more extreme weather." And here are the errors.

First, the debate is not about carbon, but human carbon dioxide emissions and their potential effect on climate. It makes no more sense for Wong to talk about carbon in the atmosphere than it would for her to talk about hydrogen comprising most of Sydney's water supply. Use of the term carbon in this way is, of course, a deliberate political gambit, derived from the green ecosalvationist vocabulary and intended to convey a subliminal message about "dirty" coal.

Next, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a naturally occurring, beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere. For the past few million years, the Earth has existed in a state of relative carbon dioxide starvation compared with earlier periods. There is no empirical evidence that levels double or even treble those of today will be harmful, climatically or otherwise. Indeed, a trebled level is roughly what commercial greenhouse tomato growers aim for to enhance growth. As a vital element in plant photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is the basis of the planetary food chain - literally the staff of life. Its increase in the atmosphere leads mainly to the greening of the planet. To label carbon dioxide a "pollutant" is an abuse of language, logic and science.

Third, that enhanced human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming ("carbon pollution is causing climate change") is an interesting and important hypothesis. Detailed consideration of its truth started with the formation of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988. Since then, Western nations have spent more than $50 billion on research into the matter. Despite all the fulminations of the IPCC, 20 years on, the result has been a failure to identify the human climate signal at global (as opposed to local) level. Accordingly, independent scientists have long since concluded that the most appropriate null hypothesis is that the human global signal lies submerged within natural climate variability. In other words, our interesting initial hypothesis was wrong.

Fourth, the specific claim that carbon dioxide emissions are causing temperature increase is intended to convey the impression that the phase of gentle (and entirely unalarming) global warming that occurred during the late 20th century continues today. Nothing could be further from the truth, in that all official measures of global temperature show that it peaked in 1998 and has been declining since at least 2002. And this in the face of an almost 5% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1998. Spot the problem?

Fifth, sixth and seventh, the statement that human carbon dioxide emissions will cause "more droughts, rising sea levels and more extreme weather" is unbridled nonsense. Such confident predictions are derived from unvalidated, unsuccessful computer models that even their proponents agree cannot predict the future. Rather, a model projection represents just one preferred, virtual reality future out of the many millions of alternatives that could have been generated. Complex climate models are in effect sophisticated computer games, and their particular outputs are to a large degree predetermined by programmers' predelictions. It cannot be overemphasised, therefore, that computer climate projections, or scenarios, are not evidence. Nor are they suitable for environmental or political planning.

Moving from virtual reality to real observations and evidence, many of the manifestations of living on a dynamic planet that are cited as evidence for global warming are, at best, circumstantial. The current rates of sea-level change, for example, fall well within the known natural range of past changes.

Should we adapt to the rise? Of course. Should we try to "stop climate change" to moderate, possibly, the expected sea-level rise? Of course not; we might as well try to stop clouds scudding across the sky.

The first sentence of the "Why we need to act" section of the green paper is followed by five further short paragraphs that are similarly riddled with science misrepresentation and error. In essence, the section reads like a policy manual for green climate activists. It represents a parody of our true knowledge of climate change. Never has a policy document of such importance been released in Australia that is so profoundly out of touch with known facts of the real world.

It is a matter for national alarm that the Government's advisory channels should be clogged with the rent seekers, special pleaders and green activists who have so obviously misadvised Wong on the content of her green paper on climate change. Time for some due diligence, Minister.

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Climate mafia has us fooled

By Dennis Jensen (As well as being the Federal member for Tangney, WA, nuclear physicist Dr. Dennis Jensen is a PhD-trained scientist and a former researcher for Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organization (CSIRO) and the Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO)

Vested interests have hijacked the climate debate, and taken Australia's future hostage. The ransom they demand? Simple agreement or, at the very least, compliance. Voices of dissent face derision. Legitimate questions are met with ridicule. But with many of the squabbling forces of power in this country now apparently united in their enthusiasm for an emissions trading scheme, it is more important than ever that we go back and examine the basis of their campaigns.

It has been an article of faith for many years that humans are gradually destroying the environment, and are specifically responsible for global warming via man-made carbon emissions. On Monday, The Australian published results of a poll showing 96 per cent of the population believes climate change is wholly or partly caused by humans. But any detailed scrutiny of scientific data shows that the environment is quite stable. There are even suggestions the world's temperature has decreased in recent years.

Any real climate change in the past century has been at a glacial pace (that is, the speed of a glacier that is not melting because of the globe's supposedly soaring temperatures). Far greater periods of environmental change have been recorded in history without any human intervention. The Ice Ages, anybody?

While it remains almost universally popular (or perhaps just fashionable) to spout the mantra "trees are good, cars are bad" and all the similarly simplistic slogans of the green lobby and those they have seduced, the facts tell a different story. The next time someone tells you that humans are killing the environment and driving up temperatures, ask them to prove it, and demand they disprove the weighty data contradicting such claims.

The same is true of the suggestion that nuclear power be considered part of our future energy mix. The population has been conditioned to equate this incredibly clean and efficient form of power generation with terrifying weapons of mass destruction, and horrific accidents, such as that at Chernobyl. The truth is that hundreds of nuclear reactors around the world have long been efficiently pumping out electricity, with no significant environmental impact. And more are coming on-stream all the time, using cleaner and more cost-effective models. Where is the incontrovertible evidence that nuclear power is a dangerous or unsafe option?

Even the whale-watching club that is the Rudd Government agreed to sell uranium to other countries, most of which have far less scrutiny and monitoring of nuclear power generation than would be imposed in Australia. So the Government also thinks nuclear power is a safe and reasonable alternative. Or is it just hypocritical?

I love a pristine environment as much as the next Australian, but where is the evidence that using a few less light bulbs and riding a bike to work will do anything to improve our surroundings other than in the most token way? How is the belching of coal-fired power stations preferable to the clean air that envelops nuclear plants? Or do we just have to depend on the as-yet-unviable alternatives of solar and wind generation?

If Australia's 21 million people - already some of the most environment-friendly in the world - embark alone on the course set by our climate-change mafia, what real impact will this have? What is the point when the major polluters such as India and China refuse to take part as it would hamper their economic development? If Australia ceased all carbon emissions tomorrow, in just nine months the increase in emissions of China alone would have taken up the slack.

We, too, should be mindful of the impact an emissions-trading scheme will have on our economy. If all carbon in the stationary power sector were to have a $50-a-tonne price of carbon dioxide imposed (as is the case for the European price for CO2), it would mean a cost burden of $660 a year for every Australian, or more than $2500 per household, according to data I have received. These would not all be direct costs from the emissions-trading scheme, but also from higher prices of products that would flow through as a result of increased production costs. Those higher costs would make some businesses unviable, and they would have to close or move offshore. In short, emissions trading will have an enormous effect on every Australian. And glib assurances of compensation for some are no substitute for well thought-out, responsible policies.

Both the issues of an emissions-trading scheme and nuclear energy have been built up to instil and exploit fear in this society, largely based on flawed or questionable data and the promise of a warm-and-fuzzy sense of pride about doing something.

The history of mankind has been marked by repeated cautions against accepting populist claims as truth and is littered with the corpses (both real and metaphoric) of those who failed to heed the advice. And it continues. We laugh today at those who once believed the world to be flat, but see no irony in the widespread acceptance now of equally spurious claims made in the name of science, as in the climate debate. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do hope the issue can be subject to broad-ranging rational debate so that we do not fall as just another victim of history. The subject is too important for us not to ask questions.

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