One of the most interesting aspects of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report Synthesis (big pdf here), released overnight Australia time, is that the political interference that was feared seems not to have eventuated. As the science has become so compelling, the options for interference have fallen away, and the science shines through.
Now, the scientists are passing the baton to the policy makers. If we don’t act on this advice, I really can’t imagine what will make us act.
The Greens’ Action Plan, our ’synthesis report’ of our climate policies, is being released this morning by Bob Brown and Christine Milne. You can read it here, with links to the various policies. We’ve called it Staying Below 2C, to emphasise that vital part of the strategy for climate policy that the other parties have thus far ignored.
A few important elements of the IPCC Synthesis are that:
- it confirms that, if we are to have any hope of staying below 2C, we have to see global emissions peak by 2o15, and start coming down rapidly from there;
- it acknowledges that sea level rise estimates in the original reports are likely to have been conservative, as ice melt is accelerating much faster than had been expected when the science was collated over 12 months ago;
- it notes that feedback loops that had been expected some decades down the track, including arctic ice melt anda drop in the oceans’ capacity to absorb our carbon emissions, are starting now, and may blow out even the worst case scenarios the IPCC has modelled; and
- it confirms that there is a wide range of cost effective emissions reductions options available and that even deep cuts scenarios will reduce GDP growth by less than .12 percentage points.
Worryingly, it’s clear from this report, as from the Working Group III report itself, that there is a serious lack of economic modelling for scenarios that will keep us below 2C. Most effort seems to have been spent on the less steep emissions cuts scenarios that, as the report shows, are most likely to condemn us to climate chaos. We really need to see some major effort put in to modelling scenarios for constraining warming to no more than 2C.
Do have a read of our Action Plan and pass it around so that people can see which party is really preparing for climate action.
This week a well educated friend surprised me by saying that “there are dissenting scientists on climate change and we really should wait for agreement before taking action”.
So I worked up the following analogy to help explain that you can make a decision in the presence of dissent:
Imagine you have no choice but to be a passenger in a vehicle which will drive down a road, there is simply no way out of it, but you have a choice of two vehicles which are making the journey. You have a group of ten expert advisors to help you decide the most appropriate vehicle. You have no means to distinguish who is the better advisor, as far as you know they are all equally competent. All ten experts have done a lot of research.
Now for the tricky bit. Nine of your group of experts have produced research that indicates that there are almost certainly land mines along that road and the chance of driving down the road without hitting a landmine is around 10%. The landmines are such that they would be expected to destroy a regular vehicle. However the dissenter in the group says there is insufficient evidence to conclude that there are in fact landmines.
This is where vehicle choice becomes important. You must choose either vehicle A or vehicle B below.
Vehicle A is a Holden Barina in which a seat is available free of charge.
Vehicle B is the world’s most landmine resistant vehicle, field trials in Iraq indicate it is our best available technology for reducing the risk of passenger injury due to landmines. The problem is a spot in vehicle B will personally cost you say 20% of your next year’s earnings.
You must travel down the road. Which vehicle would you choose?
On the off chance you’ve had way to much Pepsi Max, imagine instead that it’s not you who is compelled to be a passenger, but the young child of a lifelong friend of yours must be the passenger. You have to decide what vehicle they will ride in. What vehicle will you choose for that child?
This is not a perfect analogy by any means, and it is deliberately simplistic. Its only purpose is to illuminate why the existence of dissent isn’t by itself sufficient reason for choosing the Barina. In the above analogy climate change inaction is represented by choosing the Barina.
The scientific method guarantees two things, we will never know anything with absolute certainty, and that on any issue there is room for dissent. Dissent is entirely valid and is not necessarily evidence of bad science.
Expecting no dissent amounts to a misunderstanding of the scientific method.
If seatbelts are mandatory in cars and crash helmets on motor bikes, etc. etc., to prevent injury, why aren’t we taking preventative action against injury from climate change? Let’s stop talking about it and just get on with it before this earth goes completely out of control!!
Exactly!
Rob, that’s a fantastic analogy.
Thanks Sam
The problem Rob is that politicians are great at attempting to justify the unjustifiable, and its the government that effectively get to choose the vehicle, not us.
If the kid dies it saves the government money for education. The replacement of a vehicle and funeral expenses all add to GDP. In short the goverment sees many benefits in risking the Barina, and then they can greenwash the situation by saying the Barina uses fewer resources, is more economical to run, and the world is over populated anyway. They can ramp up the scare campaign about the world being a dangerous place too.
Assuming the peoples of the world were to move from a burning limited things economy to a sustainable renewable fueled economy, in error, because as is ultimately discovered the scientists were wrong. The downsides are the cost and lost opportunities, which would account for but a small percentage of GDP. The upsides are cleaner air, higher life expectancy, and the peoples of the world working united towards a common goal thus reducing the risk of war.
Seems like a no brainer to me!
At http://www.uic.com.au/nip37.htm we have:
“In 2006 Australia’s power stations produced 255 billion kilowatt hours (TWh) of electricity.”
At “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloncurry_solar_power_station” we have:
a) Project cost A$31 million including a A$7 million gift from the government
b) Production of 30 million kWh in a year
Significant cost advantages come with scaling up solar thermal. So (at the risk of relying on the above info) 1000 times the capacity of the Cloncurry plant will cost (probably a fair bit) less than $30B and would produce 30 billion kWh in a year, thats nearly 12% of the 2006 generation.
$30B sounds strangely affordable when the government proposes $44B in giveaways the bulk of which is unlikely to be invested for a future benefit. This is a much too simple, but if the government provided say one third of its giveaways (i.e $15B) in grants and an industry partner provided $15B and a modest carbon tax was imposed on coal fired power (so govt gets back its grant and wholesale prices go up a few cents) then the industry partner would have a very, very nice business. Sounds like a job for B&B or Macbank. It would be a better use of our super money than unsustainably driving up real estate prices.
This generation could neatly be directed to peak load (with highest payoff since wholesale peak power pays much more). In any event with regard to baseload:
“An important advantage of solar thermal energy is the possibility of storing heat. In this way, the plant can also produce electricity at night or at overcast days. The Cloncurry plant uses the new technology of heat storage in blocks of purified graphite. The blocks are placed on top of the tower. The concentrated light on the receivers of the towers is directly transported to these blocks.”
There are many other options available and it would be ridiculous to simply stop here and follow the above plan. The point of the above straw man is only that maybe there is at least one vaguely interesting sounding way forward for near term action. There will be others and they will be better (my five minutes of navel gazing won’t be able to compete). So with intelligent engineering involving a portfolio of technologies and sound economic modelling a really good plan would almost certainly emerge
Maybe the greens could see to it some task force is setup early in the new term similar to the nuclear task force. It would make interesting reading to compare the output with Ziggy’s report.
[...] the most accessible posts I have seen are Tim Hollo at Greensblog and Tim Lambert at Deltoid. Qiuggin picks it up in in a brief links post followed by a vigorous [...]
The Greens action plan is urgently needed to tackle climate change. The Coalition scores 0/10 for real action while Labor scores 2.5/10. Neither of them are committing to any emission reductions by 2015 or 2020, when the science now clearly tells us that emissions must peak by 2015 then decline.
Voting 1 Green will be the only way the old parties will now get this message. They are just are not listening to the public or the scientists.