On climate, a trial run is not an option

• Published in 'Adelaide Advertiser' 3 July 2008 under the title 'Not enough time to turn back the climate clock'

Shocking as it may be, within five years the earth is likely to have only one polar ice cap, rather than two, during the summer. Allowing this condition to persist is not safe, but getting our climate solutions right poses a unique challenge.
We can only play this game once. If we don’t do enough, or at sufficient pace, in building a post-carbon economy, the climate system will get away from our capacity to correct it. Start-stop, trial-and-error climate policy is simply not an option.
Yet in quieter moments many of us acknowledge that in responding to global warming, the world is going backwards and the range of responses mooted are simply too little, too late. Labor’s climate adviser Ross Garnaut recently told a Canberra audience there was "just a chance" that nations would meet the climate policy challenge because "observation of daily debate and media discussion in Australia could lead one to the view that this issue is too hard for rational policy-making in Australia. The issues are too complex, the vested interests surrounding it too numerous and intense, the relevant time-frames too long."
Short-term economic preoccupations so constrain actions considered reasonable that maintaining biodiversity and building a safe-climate future have already been negotiated out of existence. The Rudd government’s current policy target of a 3-degree rise would destroy the Barrier Reef and the tropical rainforests, cause widespread desertification, a mass extinction, and a sea-level rise of perhaps 25 metres, amongst many impacts. The federal opposition has no climate target at all.
Climate policy is characterised by a culture of failure, so there is an urgent need to be brutally honest about where we are and what we need to do.
Of all the talk at a major international gathering of global warming experts last December, one speech did just that. The place was not Bali, but San Francisco, where 15,000 climate scientists gathered for their most important conference of the year, hosted by the American Geophysical Union. Centre stage was James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, and the United States’ most eminent climate scientist.
Hansen told his fellow scientists that climate tipping points have already been passed for large ice sheet and species loss, which occurred when we exceeded levels of 300-350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, at least two decades ago (the current level is 387 parts per million). Hansen said there is already enough carbon in the Earth's atmosphere for massive ice sheets such as on Greenland to eventually melt away, and ensure that sea levels will rise metres this century. People must not only cut current carbon emissions but also remove some carbon that has collected in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, in order to cool the planet, he concluded.
And just last month Hansen told the National Press Club in Washington that the climate is nearing dangerous tipping points, with the elements of a “perfect storm”, a global cataclysm, already assembled.
The polar north has until recently been covered by eight million square kilometres of floating sea-ice in summer, an area greater than Australia. Now it is disappearing fast and predicted by Arctic experts to be gone entirely within five years. Their well-founded fear is that rapid heating as a consequence of the sea-ice loss will trigger the unstoppable melting of most or all of the Greenland ice sheet, an event which would raise sea levels by five to seven metres, in as little as a century.
Four broad conclusions can be drawn from these observations.
1. We face dangerous warming impacts now, not just in the future. Serious climate-change impacts are already happening, both more quickly and at lower global temperature rises than projected. Increases of two degrees are effectively already in the system, unless we act dramatically to cut emissions towards zero as quickly as humanly possible. A temperature cap of 2–2.4 degrees, as proposed at Bali and now the subject of international negotiations, would take the planet’s climate beyond the temperature range of the last million years and into extreme danger.
2. Strong action is required now to stop emissions and cool the earth. The tipping points for large ice sheet and species loss were crossed decades ago. It is no longer a case of how much more we can "safely" emit, but whether we can quickly enough stop emissions and produce a cooling before we hit tipping points and amplifying feedbacks — such as large scale loss of greenhouse gases from melting permafrost — that will take the trajectory of the earth’s climate system beyond any hope of human restoration.
3. It is necessary to plan a large-scale transition to a post-carbon economy. Considering the water shortage, the arrival of peak oil, rising population and the impacts of warming — and the reflection of these events in rapidly rising world food prices —we can see a multi-factor sustainability crisis. Speed is of the essence in constructing a post-carbon economy. An imaginative, large-scale programme comparable in scope to the "war economy" is required. The obstacles to implementing such climate solutions are primarily political and social in character, rather than technological or economic.
4. We need to move at a pace far beyond business and politics as usual. These imperatives are incompatible with the realities of politics and business as usual. Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, fearful of deep change and incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed or depth. The consequence of timidity and constraint in government approaches to the environment is that low expectations are now embedded in policy-making. But the climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model, and there is an urgent need to re-conceive the issue we face as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise.
Lacking the collective will to act in a sustainable manner is no excuse. Acting within the constraints on the planet system is now necessary for long-term survival, because we are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points.
-- David Spratt

What politicians won’t talk about: the fate of the Arctic

In the dense fog that passes for the national climate policy debate, the major players stumble from one lamp-post to the next, unable to see the bigger picture in the murky light.
Devoid of context, their climate view is so constrained that they fail to identify the core problem: that the world stands on the edge of a precipice beyond which human actions will be no longer able to control in any meaningful way the trajectory of the climate system, or the fate of human life in a rapidly degrading natural world.
There is no clearer example than the fate of the Arctic.
More than 80% of the mass of sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean in summer has already been lost. An area of summer sea-ice once as large as Australia is rapidly disintegrating, with consequences that will reverberate around the globe.
Scientists with expertise on the Arctic environment are predicting that the Arctic Ocean will be ice free in summer between 2010 and 2013, and that once lost, the Arctic summer sea-ice will not return. Here's what they are saying:

• The frightening models [of Arctic sea-ice loss] we didn't even dare to talk about before are now proving to be true.’ According to these models, there will be no sea ice left in the summer in the Arctic Ocean somewhere between 2010 and 2015. ‘And it's probably going to happen even faster than that.’ — Louis Fortier, scientific director of the Canadian research network ArcticNet .
• ‘Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007… So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative’ — Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, Naval Postgraduate School, California
• ‘The Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012’ — Dr Jay Zwally, glaciologist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• ‘I think the tipping point for perennial sea-ice has already passed… It looks like [it] will continue to decline and there’s no hope for it to recover’ in the near period. — Dr Josefino Comiso, senior research scientist, NASA Goddard Space Centre
• ‘The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming… and now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died.” — Dr Jay Zwally, glaciologist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice will cause a large local warming in the Arctic region of around 5ºC and a smaller but very significant global warming of around 0.3ºC .
This further warming of the Arctic will significantly add to the speed of disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet (sea-level rise of 7 metres if fully lost, possibly five metres this century according to NASA climate chief Dr James Hansen) and to the rate of permafrost melting, which will release much more carbon dioxide and methane and further drive up global warming.
I are not aware of any well-informed climate scientist who thinks that it is possible to have a safe climate or avoid dangerous climate change with the permanent loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice. This topic is not being addressed in Australia, though it must frame the whole debate. To not consider the Arctic is to ignore the biggest issue today in global warming.
Because of the dangerous knock-on effects caused by its loss, the Arctic sea ice must be restored to its normal extent as fast as possible.
To get the Arctic sea ice back we need to cool the earth by about 0.3ºC. If we don’t, we cannot avoid very dangerous climate impacts. There is no third way. This is the new very inconvenient truth politicians seek to avoid.
To cool the earth fast enough to get the Arctic sea-ice back quickly, we need to move to zero greenhouse gas emissions as fast as the economy can be restructured, and is environmentally safe to do so, and take about 200 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air. We also need to find environmentally-safe mechanisms to actively cool the earth while navigating this transition.
Taken together this is a staggering task in terms of the necessary scale and speed of action, but there is simply no alternative if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.
The bottom line is that we cannot leave the Arctic ice-free in summer and avoid climate catastrophe. This is the elephant in the room that politicians strain to avoid. It is not being talked out honestly.
Politicians can ignore or downplay the challenge of the Arctic, only by playing dice with our future and that of future generations.

David Spratt

Reactions to Climate Code Red

Senator Christine Milne blogs on her reaction to Climate Code Red:

With Climate Code Red, David Spratt and Philip Sutton have provided a valuable and sobering contribution to the policy challenge of climate change at a pivotal moment.

Over recent months it has become ever clearer to many of us working in the field that global warming, accelerating faster than scientists had predicted, is leaving policy so far behind it is outdated as it is released. The current ambitious policies of the Australian Greens, developed on the basis of science 12-18 months ago, are now too conservative. Where, then, does that leave our new Federal Government, elected on a platform of climate action far weaker than the Greens’?

Spratt and Sutton persuasively call on us to put aside politics as usual. My great fear, however, is that none of the people now charged with setting Australia’s emissions targets – Professor Garnaut, Ministers Wong, Swan and Garrett, and Prime Minister Rudd – have grasped that this is a state of emergency and none are ready to set aside politics as usual.

Spratt and Sutton have provided a vital example for Professor Garnaut on the work that is needed to set emissions targets – not by “plucking figures out of the air because they are politically convenient or someone else said they might be OK”, and not by economic analysis of what now seems achievable.

And this from a respondee in Canada:

...your Section 3 is so timely, and sec 3.3 an accurate description of what is going on in the enviro movement fairly generally in Canada...

We have been exposed to (Canadian PR) research that indicates that if you want the public to pressure the government about policy response to climate change, the ENGO's can't be the source of the heavy message, too many people discount it. However they will listen to scientists giving out serious messages. But they don't like scientists talking science - it is too often interpreted as disagreement. However, ENGO's with science based ideas for solutions are heard. There is obviously useful material in these studies but for the moment the [many climate groups] and others are avoiding the hard message.

I am also aware of 'operational psychosis' among several climate scientists, who are in total surrender in their labs and speaking optimistically in public. It remains to be seen how an otherwise forward looking Climate Action Team of 22 'experts' influences the BC Premier's Climate Action Secretariat in the formulation of emission targets for 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2050. We have legislation in BC for a 33% reduction in emissions below 2005 levels (10% below 1990) - but no penalties for failure! Other than the big penalty of course.

Sound familiar?