Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation:
They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an “Oh, shit” moment–an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself.
It’s especially alarming when people who, ahem, know their shit, speak about their own personal “Oh Shit” moment.
Take Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, and a physicist whose specialty is chaos theory.
Speaking in July at an invitation only conference in New Mexico, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it.
Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues’ study states that the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020. Yep, that means quit carbon completely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035.
The world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050.
This kind of timetable is lightyears from what the IPCC is proposing, and failing to get agreement on.
But even this “brutal” timeline of the WBGU study, Schellnhuber admitted, wouldn’t guarantee staying within the 2C target. It would merely give humanity a two-out-of-three chance of doing so–”worse odds than Russian roulette …But it is the best we can do.”
To have a three-out-of-four chance, countries would have to quit carbon even sooner.
“I myself was terrified when I saw these numbers,” Schellnhuber said. Hans’ suggestion to push past that rising “Oh Shit” feeling and avert paralysis? “War-time mobilisation.”
So, time to share: what’s produced your latest “Oh Shit” moment? Or have you, like many of the Australians polled in the latest Lowy Institute survey, managed to ignore the bad news and pushed climate change down the list of your concerns, to, oh, seventh — just behind job security, the economy, terrorism and the threat of nuclear weapons?
Oh, shit.
119 Comments
Pages: « 1 [2] 3 » Show All
Venice #43 You say “If we cannot .. force our politicians to act wisely..”
If the people vote for politicians who say they will do unwise things, how can we force our politicians to do something different?
Surely the only answer is to lobby for voters to elect wise people. And when it comes to climate change, that rules out Liberal and Labor.
Malcolm @ 35 said “Stephen @ 19 – an interesting and thought-provoking list of things to do, but “Decided not to breed?” is the odd one out. All the other measures help the situation if everyone does it, but deciding “not to breed” if everyone did it would by definition lead to the certain extinction of humanity. Move to a world-wide (and start in Australia) two-child policy by all means (which in practice would lead to a gradual reduction in population), but someone needs to have kids for the species to continue.”
and kdkd @ 41 said “A worldwide two child policy would cause a halving of human population within about three or four generations. A no child policy would alienate the brownies and some greenies extremely, so as far as dud policy ideas go, this one which forces people to go right against their biological instincts, where a more user friendly policy is just as effective is a dud.”
Again, I’m not advocating any policy changes. My list is a spontaneous jumble of things that might have made a difference if the vast majority of humans had done them for the last 20 years. My honest opinion is that the horse has bolted regarding mitigating the effects of anthropogenic climate change. The bird has flown. That bridge too far is crossed. The merde has hit the Mistral. We are in deep schtung.
Specific inspiration for the inclusion of “don’t breed” came from a New Scientist article, 15 November 2008 – Can I Recycle Window Envelopes, And Other Dumb Eco-questions. The last question in the article was “What is the single most effective thing I can do for the environment?” The answer: “Over a 75-year lifespan, the average European will be responsible for 900 tonnes of CO2 emissions. For Americans and Australians, the figure is more like 1,500 tonnes. Add to that all of humanity’s other environmentally damaging activities and, draconian as it may sound, the answer must surely be to avoid reproducing.”
Really, go and have as many kids as you like. The only people you’ll be hurting is them.
For those of us who have kids, now that mitigation is futile, the priority is adaptation. We’ll have to teach our children to expect less, do more for themselves and be tough as buggery. My children will be able to grow their own vegies, fix anything mechanical, barter for things they can’t grow, etc. They’ll start their lives in a house that is designed from the ground down (yes, that means underground) to operate without connection to services.
My post was essentially about the intertwined failure of our selfish genes and our system of government – a system that simply wasn’t designed to cope with a problem of this enormity.
Does anyone think any political party would be stupid enough to try taking a birth control policy to the electorate, here or anywhere else that people are lucky enough to vote?
Stephen, while I think it’s mostly good to advocate the old ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ ideal, doing crazy things like not drinking wine will not really fix the problem. If we start playing the ‘luxury items’ game then a lot of things are off the agenda pretty quickly, and for naff-all benefit. How much difference to Australia’s emissions would it make if we all stopped drinking wine? Almost zero.
What we need to do is stop burning coal. That’s it. If we can do that the problem is solved. I care less and less how this is achieved, but it really has to be the main goal. How can we? Well, personal sacrifice doesn’t make a lick of difference. There’s almost a million customers who have signed up for voluntary action through Greenpower and Australia’s emissions keep on rising. So the decision really has to come from the top down. Which it isn’t.
As mentioned elsewhere in Crikey, expect to see a lot more direct action in cming years.
Stephen @ 45 – not being a troll.
Obviously the most effective mitigating action any of us in the developed world coudl do would be to kill ourselves, especially if before reproducing. The old joke slogan “Save the planet, kill yourself” starts to sound less funny.
BTW, you’re coming over very much like a survivalist, albeit from a left rather than right perspective.
Thanks for this fantastic discussion everyone, we’re going to feature some of your comments in the email today — really great stuff.
Generally the problem is not what you do, it’s what other people and their governments do. So it’s about changing culture so that the problem behaviours change themselves. The only important thing about your own actions is that you can promote a cultural change. Going dead against your (and especially other people’s) biological instincts is not going to make a difference, and could well be counterproductive. The key is to work out how to push these instincts in the right direction via cultural change.
SO what did I say in my comment that made it get left in the moderation pile??
I didn’t really have an ‘Oh….’ moment. I’d heard all the stuff starting to build up about it, but basically, I didn’t want to know. What got me interested in it, was hearing an interview with Martin Durkin, director of “The Great Global Warming Swindle” on ABC Radio National Counterpoint. The interview by Michael and Paul was unbelievably obsequious. Durkin said some extraordinary things – global warming was a plot by Margaret Thatcher to undermine coal miners’ unions, the driving force for it came from the middle-classes no longer being able to afford servants… Really strange and curiously, far-left wing – particularly contempt for the middle-classes and a plot by Thatcher. (Denialism really is a fusion of opposites.)
This was a few months before Durkin’s masterpiece “The Great Global Warming Swindle” was shown on the ABC at the behest of the Right wingers on the ABC board. I watched it, found it convincing, then watched the panel discussion afterwards where it was shown to be completely misleading. I remember David Karoly answering every point the denialists came up with. I remember the humiliating interview with Durkin where, when he was asked some quite reasonable questions, appeared to panic.
I also remember the graphs that Durkin produced and how they were shown to be a complete fabrication. His excuse for dropping the last 15 years off the graph and fabricating several hundred years of data was “an underling did it”.
As well as being annoyed at being misled by Durkin, I found myself thinking that if the denialists had to manufacture evidence then their argument can’t be very strong. And I was right. I started reading and now find the evidence pretty compelling. It didn’t help that the denialist point of view was taken up by the far right as an article of faith and seems to me to be now completely irrational. Before it became a right wing shibboleth, Andrew Bolt said in 2007 that he agreed that global warming was happening and that it was probably caused by human activity. His argument was with the doom-sayers, which to my mind was an entirely reasonable point of view. Reasonableness from the denialists is now something in very short supply. As an experiment, people have posted Andrew’s exact words from 2007 on his own blog and been shredded.
Anyway, my turning point was Martin Durkin and Counterpoint, a denialist own-goal if ever there was one.
The “…oh shit” moment (it really does need that dramatic pause for effect) for mine was I think in a New York Times article discussing how the ice around the North Pole itself had melted. (BBC coverage here. Debate of course was wide & varied on whether or not this was a big deal and how it happened, but simply having it happen in the first place was worrying enough. The inevitable train of thought ran along the lines – “There’s a lot of ice up there, and the water’s got to go somewhere…”
Oh shit moments: when I started my PhD (7 years ago – yep, still going…) and realised climate change was already happening, and how quickly… but it is also ongoing e.g. last week when I read in ‘More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want’ by Robert Engelman that our human population is increasing EACH DAY by more than the number of ALL the chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas on the planet combined.
When will we realise that 90% of all modern human culture could be regenerated *from scratch* in maybe 4000 years (given that we started with, say, written language, fire, paper and the wheel), whereas biological diversity is a legacy of 4 billion years. If we lose it, we won’t be hanging around until we get it back.
And this population thing… why are we behaving like bacteria in a petri dish? Why is ecology not the central ‘guiding light’ for humanity? It is only an understanding of how we fit in a living world that can allow us to escape the biological determinism of ‘boom and bust’ (and extinction) to which all species are vulnerable.
I looked at David Suzuki’s book of a while back, saying there would be a global environmental disaster if we didn’t change things radically in 10 years. Now its past ten years. It both did and didn’t happen, and we did and didn’t change.
I think the environmental movement need to be very careful in making predictions, that they are clear and testable (perhaps even scientific!!).
For instance, in the short term (maybe 20-50 years) I would describe the probable effects of climate change as “more of the same, but worse”. More floods, more famine, more wars, more natural disasters, more disease. Not a good thing, but neither will it have a big impact on MOST of the people (and countries) who have the MONEY to protect themselves.
This is why people-charities (e.g. Oxfam) are doing great stuff raising the profile of climate change – it is a social justice issue as much as anything else.
(Poor people will continue to get sick and die, rich people will continue to move, build, fly, and even make their own snow)
In the long-term of course “our” climate change is one of many, but its effects may well be much more severe (and the first to impact on upwards of 6,799,389,982# humans!): firstly it is MUCH faster (I’ve heard Tim Flannery estimate it could be 30 times faster) than anything “similar” in prehistory, and secondly humans have already stressed many (most) ecosystems to near breaking point, and fragmented the landscape so that plants and animals can’t now gradually “migrate” to stay within suitable climates. We’re already at the beginning of the sixth great extinction event (starting 20,000 years ago with our (probable) extirpation of various ‘megafauna’) and climate change could “commit to extinction”^ a good proportion of what biodiversity remains.
So – how to remain positive?
FIRST – remember we are all going to die. Anyway. Regardless of climate change.
SECOND – look at the stars. It is a big, and amazing (and very very old) universe out there. At least there are some things we can’t (yet) destroy.
THIRD – keep doing stuff – at least we know basically what we need to do, and we have 6,799,389,982 plus humans to think / help / work / create *solutions* (as well as greenhouse gases!!)
# As of ~10:30am 15/10/2009 Melbourne time – source http://www.worldometers.info/
^ “commit to extinction” = it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen
meski #50
Generally with the crikey blogs if you put more than one url (http://example.com) in your post it will be flagged for moderation. The best thing to do is to limit your posts ot one url each, or if you really need to you can always use spaces to split the url up so the software doesn’t recognise it: http:// superbad.com
Fred@52 – the melting ice at the North Pole won’t affect sea levels as it’s floating on water. Qv melting ice-cube in a glass of water – ice is less dense than water.
The real problem is melting of ice *on land*, notably Greenland. That will raise sea levels.
Of course melting polar ice cap brings its own problems – reduces reflectivity of the earth hence increasing absorption of heat and (I understand) given that it’s fresh water reducing the salinity of the Arctic Sea, which could have all sorts of repercussions.
Malcolm at 56, yes melting ice on land will raise sea levels, but what will raise them more than anything is the general thermic expansion of water, where water expands as it gets hotter.
The main thing is though that the denialists get the full, rich credit they so richly and rightly deserve. I mean, in 15 years the results will be fully in and we’ll say ‘hey look at this weather,and we did nothing! Hey I really want to give some feedback to the deniers’. Like any good conservatives, deniers can reach the rich full rewards they so rightly will deserve!!!!
Thank you Crikey, it’s good to see that you seem to support the right of posters such as KDKD to abuse others, to wit:
“I can put you in your place with a combination of vitriol, abuse and actual data analysis showing that your position is intellectually bankrupt”.
Good to see that abuse still seems to be the first refuge of those who are confronted by others who take a different position on a subject.
Thank you KDKD, but I prefer not to have to listen to your self-important Vitriol,and abuse, particularly on a subject where your mind seems closed to any dissension from the ruling orthodoxy on this subject.
Two thoughts for you to contemplate:
1. The Club of Rome
2. The Global Cooling theories of the 1970s.
Both postulated the demise of civilisation based on modelling that did not stand up to scrutiny by peers.
Something that should stand as a warning today to ensure that all of the assumptions on which the Climate Change debate stands, are rigorously tested and replicated before attempting massive and cripplingly costly social engineering to counteract.
michael #57
No, it’s just that your position doesn’t stand up to vitriol, and if you’re ideological blinkers are up so much that you can’t acutually see the data clearly then your opinion is worthless. The debate is over except among the deluded. The cage match thread has been through the points you make ad-infinitum, but just because you can repeat them doesn’t make them right and/or relevant.
Hope this clarifies things for you.
err scrutiny not vitriol. And so if you can’t look at the data objectively then you need to be told that clearly.
michael:
just to be clear, you have the right to be wrong. You shouldn’t have the right to try to influence policy from a position that is clearly wrong from any honest attempt to examine the data.
Michael James #57
So you feel confident to ignore all the scientific work of thousands of experts on climate change because a long time ago some different people looking at different things got it wrong? (and actually their getting it wrong is debatable).
I don’t think you will find anyone who is worried about climate change who does not encourage further research. And so far the scientific consensus is that it does “stand up to the scrutiny of peers.”
If you think that it is right to do nothing until climate change is even more certain, then at what stage do we start to do things?
Given that, if climate change is a real threat, delaying action locks us in to warming of above two degrees, do you really think that the appropriate response is to do nothing until it is to late to prevent a two degree warming?
my “OSM” was while I was reading a book about the collapse of various civilisations throughout history, and the factors leading to their collapse. We are getting pretty close to ticking all of the boxes for impending collapse. These include (but are not limited to) relying on diminishing critical resources such as oil and water for food production, while continuing to grow our populations, depleting our farming soils and expanding deserts, reducing plant and animal diversity by habitat destruction, concentration by business on efficiency with no regard to resilliance, politial system intent on maintaining the status quo than planning for the long term, while extracting an ever larger percentage of wealth from the productive sections of the community. Regardless of potential catastrope due to climate change, we are walking a pretty frayed tightrope as a species, and when collapse happens, it is always fast and messy.
Lindsay, that wasn’t Collapse, by Mr (forgotten his first name) Diamond was it?
Great discussion. If I hadn’t had the “Oh shit!” moment years ago, and wasn’t already constantly plagued with a sense of impending doom, this would do it.
My moment came after some sort of political announcement, when I simultaneously comprehended the magnitude of the problem and the utter impossibility of government action. Wow, I’m going to live to see wars, famine and global destruction. Scary!
The “oh fuck!” moment came this year when I read Guy Pearse’s “Quarry Vision” and realised that, beyond food rationing and manning the anti-climate-refugee machine-gun nests, at worst, the changing ocean chemistry could enable anaerobic bacteria to proliferate and render the oceans and air uninhabitable to most life forms.
So now when I picture my future, I’m eating rationed protein powder, while shooting refugees, in an oxygenated dome. I’m not kidding.
Malcolm Street #47 said “Obviously the most effective mitigating action any of us in the developed world could do would be to kill ourselves, especially if before reproduce.”
There are two things wrong with this statement …
The first is that under Rudd’s proposal, killing yourself would mean that the companies who would have had to buy carbon credits on your behalf no longer need to do so. But these carbon credits can now be bought by another company, and so total emissions are not reduced.
Even worse, because there is now slightly less demand for carbon credits due to your death, this means that the price of carbon credits will fall slightly.
So the only effect of killing yourself is to make it slightly cheaper for industry to pollute
The second thing wrong with the statement is that it assumes that individual action is part of the solution.
To play its role, Australia has to make huge reductions. Even if individual reductions were taken into account by Rudd’s scheme, even under the most optimistic real-life scenarios, individual action is only likely to reduce our emissions by less than say 5%.
Focusing on individual action is great for setting an example, and for making us feel better.
But overall I’m convinced this is doing much more harm than good because our attention is diverted from what must be done to fix the problem.
The only thing that will really make a difference is electing politicians who are committed to the large and radical changes which the science says are needed.
The relative lack of interest in this view (see post #34) is very telling.
Evan,
Correct.
The realisation that none of this is going to happen in time? It really isn’t. So what’s the so-called ‘Plan B’ for what we do to deal with not meeting these carbon limitations?
RE #66 It isn’t mitigation vs adapatation we need BOTH
But at the moment spending MOST of the effort trying to stop the problem getting worse (i.e. mitigation) makes better sense (it is hard to unscramble an egg)
Adaptation is already happening – e.g. our bushfire policies are being rewritten to “cope” with the hotter, drier conditions – and more and more money will be spent on it for quite some time to come, regardless of whether we manage to (eventually) turn the ship around.
My OSM came about 3 years ago, when my boyfriend’s dad gave me a book called Peak Oil Prep. I suppose it wasn’t the book itself, so much as the crushing realisation of what it would be like if/when my comfortable western world disintegrated.
There’s a bit in the book that talks about learning survival skills. I tried to imagine myself slaughtering an animal. I realised that not only was I too squeamish to ever want to do it, but I also had no idea of exactly how to kill, clean, gut and whatever else you need to do to make an animal edible. I realised, in short, that I wouldn’t last a week in survival mode.
So I freaked out. At that stage I was convinced we had maybe 5 years. I got a group of my friends together and told them we needed to pool our (scant) resources, buy a farm and start kitting it out.
Then I went to school. I started by doing renewable energy design at TAFE. Then I enrolled in a master of environmental management, which I’m now 3 weeks from completing. That was another huge eye opener.
I observed, in my masters cohort, a peculiar phenomenon. We each started out keen as mustard, full of vim to save the planet, me included. Then at some point, usually around 2-3 subjects in, the Crisis hits. It’s like an Oh Shit moment on steroids, because by this point you’re educated. All of us have gone through this time, when we can see in detail exactly how f*cked we really are, and we each have to come to terms with it somehow. Usually via a period of depression, apathy, hopelessness, anger. It’s a real grieving process.
Anyway, we each seem to come to a conclusion like this: if we quit, we’re doomed, but if we try and try with every ounce of strength we have in us, maybe just maybe we’ll survive. The benefit of this is if we do come good, the human race in general will be much better off.
Final thought: I see this as a test on humanity. If we’re too selfish and stupid to take the action we know we need to take, then we don’t deserve to survive. I love being alive, so I hope we get it together. I’ve pledged the rest of my life to the effort. Fingers crossed.
hmmm… Clive Hamilton’s written something for tomorrow’s edition of Crikey… and I’m not sure it’s going to make any of you feel better. Working title? ‘Accommodating Apocalypse”….
My Oh shit moment was listening to the scientist James Lovelock basically pronounce that our capacity to address climate change in any meaningful way was pretty much nil and that this century will be one of great human suffering. Stephen Moreland’s post on this thread was of a similar ilk. I think we need more of this – anything to punch through the deafening cacophony of white noise that substitutes for debate in this country and which ultimately leaves most people where they were in the first place- hopelessly passive, willfully ignorant.
Humans have a limited capacity to conceive of the extraordinary…to change on a profound scale .we’re geared to the everyday….to normalising and standardising our lives. What we know we’re comfortable with…To do otherwise would be to invoke psychological trauma. Much better to take a pill or fall in with the soothing cadences of whatever the dominant ideology tells us is ‘real’. Who nowadays talks about the big picture. The global picture is the biggest picture of them all. We can’t even agree about health care funding or what hair care product works best let alone the planet. No…If the sun comes up tomorrow, and last week it was unseasonally cool and the ABC news still features story’s of cats stuck up trees then everything must be alright.
We’re not intrinsically judicious, rational or wise – human history tells us that…the programing of commercial tv tells us that, the whole advertising industry is testimony to that. If aroused we can easily be calmed by the reassuring naysaying of the small band of climate sceptics. Its the reassurance we crave, not the argument, not the facts. In a world raised up on the cult of the expert, a world given over to submissive compliance to whatever the ‘specialist’ advises us is true, the fact that Over 90% of environmental scientists subscribe to AGW is not good enough when the implications are so incompatible with our lives as big dumb consumers. No need to worry ourselves with abstract and complex concepts for a generation brought up on sound bites, pop riffs and text messages. And for those who have a nagging feeling that its all true, there’s Kevin the dentist with his tank of nitrous oxide, he’s impenetrable but soothing bureaucratic speak which placates bot our conscience, our need to be responsible to the planet and future generations, and our craven desire to have it all and keep it all.
And when Kevin isn’t there handing out no fault absolutions, there are that motley crew of sceptics, inspiring in their bold everyman appropriation of the arcane language of science – wandering into the laboratories of the world like a bunch of slack jawed hillbillies wandering around a big city, making it all intelligable to the masses, exposing the scientific community as self interested charlatans just like Hanson exposed the cultural elites with her folksy please explain language. ‘If its too hard to understand then its probably bullshit’. Out there as always out of their worn old kit bags comes that year again, that year 1998! Like a primitive totem warding off the evil spirits. You can just imagine the way their child like gaze was drawn to it. The allure of the simple paired back fact, big, dumb, accessible. ‘It was warmer that year 10 years ago than it is now’
I suspect the climate sceptics are actually more horrified than most people – conservatism is an ideology founded on fear, denial of any ‘trend’ is their pavlovian response to anything which isn’t about safeguarding their own material priviliges. Its why there’s a clear correlation between political conservatism and climate scepticism. Its not about the science for them, you wont find Miranda, Piers, Bolt et al consulting a resident new age herbal crackpot if they notice a lump in their groin, or angrily ranting about the child immunisation ‘industry’. They’ll go with the consensus of expert opinion every time. No, for them its about their entrenched psycho pathology masquerading as a ‘political conviction’ that the great unwashed masses are gonna rise up and take their stuff. That the hordes of trendy lefty rent seekers forever in search of an ‘issue’ have finally arrived at the big one. That the filthy industrial wheel of production which funnels massive priviliges to them and the (usually corporate) interests that they represent is going to grind to a halt and they’re gonna find themselves on the streets with all the other desperate johnies. If there’s a positive side to global warming its that its exposed the craven pathological selfishness of this class and their willingness to stoop to any level to protect their (material) interests. No need to listen to all the other tosh they dish out in disproportionate volumn about life, society, politics, the welfare state, the chardonay set, and postmodernism etc etc.
But, this unhinged cohort aside, other than that its exposed us as a society for what we are – not children of the enlightenment, not ‘the most informed and educated generation in human history’ , not creatures of reason, but something altogether more complex and meagre. Kevin Rudd knows all about it. Analysing his strategic efforts to keep himself electable tells the story. Until we accept this, then we won’t be moved by the better parts of out nature.
My moment was a “thank goodness” moment when I realised there was a solution and it was achievable without the sacrifices we are told are inevitable. If you want to participate in a workshop to hear how we can act come to my workshop on Sat 24th http://greeninstitute.org.au/gnd/
If you want to see the background to the “thank goodness” moment then listen to this presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/cscoxk/financing-sustainability-2188734
My Oh Shit moment was really clear. It was May 2006 and I was taking a holiday with my family to Botswana. At the airport picked up a copy of Tim Flannerys The Weather makers.
By the time I was comfortably established at our first camp, the book was half way through and it started talking about the impact of aviation on climate change. As it happens, I’m the co-founder of an Adventure Travel company (Intrepid travel) that prides itself on our Responsible Tourism attitudes, and we’d won a host of awards for supposedly being such great corporate citizens. It was then that the penny dropped….
“Oh Shit – we spend a whole heap of effort as company convincing members of the public to get in a plane and travel from one side of the world to the other in order that we can give them a “responsible” holiday” Let me tell you = there is nothing responsible about aviation!
I realised we took about 70,000 travellers a year, each traveller’s flights probably emitted around 6 tonnes of carbon on average – meaning the company I had created had single handedly contributed nearly half a million tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. So much for being a responsible travel company – we were environmental vandals of the first order!! Oh Shit!!!
(OK, so we set about changing the situation, but it was a hell of a shock nonetheless!)
I was looking back through some old issues of Dissent Magazine, trying to find the precise quote which hit me between the eyes and left me sleepless for a couple of nights afterwards. I could not find it. But I found a couple of other interesting articles along the way. One is an article called “Are We Getting The Third Degree?” by David Spratt, a copy of which can be found at http://www.carbonequity.info/docs/thirddegree.html This briefly summarises the likely effects of a one degree, a two degree and a three degree rise.
I saw another along the way which included a counter to the frequent claim that we “need” a growing population to cope with an aging population. I don’t have the article in front of me, unfortunately. From memory, the point was that the proponents of population growth point to the ratio of retired or old people to working people. This article pointed out, that if you look at the ratio of ALL economically dependent people to working people, the statistics are quite different. This is because, as a society, we have less economically dependent YOUNG people. I thought I would throw that in for use in the next population debate. I had never seen that argument before.
And thank you to Mark for correcting one of my previous typo’s.
About wine, red meat and methane. Using figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics,
wine production takes about 700 litres per litre to produce. Milk is about half this but
with prodigious amounts of methane and cheese comes in at about 4800 litres per kg.
Red meat (http://www.australasianscience.com.au/bi2007/2810Brook.pdf) is over
50kg co2eq per kg and the actual warming is more than that. At the risk of giving
people more “Oh sh!t” moments, the current atmospheric CO2 increase is made up of
stuff that we did … our cars/computers/etc … and stuff that lots of other people did
going back about 300 years or so. Ie., when our ancestors dynamited and burned
the Aussie bush in the 19th century, a lot of the CO2 is still up there. But the 1790 ppb
of methane that’s all ours. All of the increase above preindustrial
levels is down to us. There is no methane left from the cattle of our ancestors.
Paraphrasing Hansen, if we don’t control CO2, we are toast. But even
if we do control CO2, that’s not enough, if we don’t reduce methane, black carbon
and a couple of others, we are still toast. As it happens, cattle don’t only produce
prodigious methane, they are the prime drivers of deforestation … always have
been. When Jack Mundey and the boys were chewing on corned beef sandwiches
during the famous green bans on a few acres
in the early 1970s in Sydney, some of that beef will
have probably come from the 50,000 acres of rainforest
cleared in the early 1960s by the D9 bulldozers of
King Ranch in Tully, Qld. This marks the beginning of a long period of
environmental hypocrisy continuing
today with the Tassie Greens like Kim Booth who support the beef industry and
Tim Flannery who not only supports it, but who in his “Now or Never” essay, wants
to expand it.
When it became so much more difficult to grow food in the backyard in Summer.
Michael W-H @64, I admire your commitment to democratic means of achieving change, and I’m sure you do fantastic work for the Greens (if that is you…sorry if I’m getting earlier posts confused with someone else).
I think what other people here might have a problem with is your faith in the democratic process. Andrew Dobson’s, in Green Political Thought, argues that one of the things letting the green movement down is the fact that we want to achieve quite radical change, but are committed to pretty soft ways of achieving it, and seem to assume that once people understand, they’ll be on our side.
I’m not saying that he or I or anyone else has the answer as to what the best way to effect change, but I think you have to recognise that a lot of people here believe that democracy is failing us. I think the green movement needs a wide spectrum of action, from those pushing shit uphill within the labor party, to the greens, to (dare I say feel-good?) new media lobby groups like the AYCC and GetUp!, to radical action: those doing their best to physically stop coal being dug up and burnt.
Georgina @68, you are incredibly inspiring.
This has been a great discussion and a fantastic source of links to important information. Thanks everyone for making my first ever attempt at blogging an amazing experience. Thanks especially to Mark Duffett for your kind words. Forgive me for being a bit flippant in the first instance.
But I’m not here to rehearse my Oscar acceptance speech. I’m here to observe that absolutely no-one has said “Oh, I’ve had an oh shit moment but I every confidence that the CPRS will come to our rescue” or similar.
The ‘oh, shit’ moment for the government is likely to be “Oh, shit, no-one with a brain is buying our spin.”
Wow, there are some very honest, powerful posts here – I do hope Sophie that you publish some in the Sealed Section tomorrow.
My own climate ‘moment’ was over the course of 1991.
I read Ian Lowe, Bill McKibben, David Suzuki and Graeme Pearson and got a part time job working for Australia’s first climate campaign – Greenhouse Action Australia.
Being a serious young man with a heavy sense of responsibility, I forced myself to slog through the IPCC’s first report (and took notes).
I felt I had read humanity’s final tragedy and that there was no way out. Part of me died.
My understanding was that the only chance of averting climate change was to do what the science implored – immediately slash emissions, to start the transition beyond the fossil fuel age.
I helped organise a UN climate conference in Melbourne. I met the world’s best climate thinkers. I watched the fossil fuel and aluminum executives prey on the meekness of climatologists, liberal environmentalists and government. The movement was over before it began.
By late 1991 is was clear that a fatal political compromise had been made. Led by the USA, nations negotiating the pre-pre-Kyoto framework agreed to forget the immediate transition and instead opt for the future, for “targets and timetables”.
That’s where the first decade of the climate ‘movement’ went.
I spent most of my youthful energies and years on climate change. It drove my life choices and often inhabited my dreams.
Was it worth it? I don’t know what other choice I had.
I knew by 1991 that the goal of preventing climate change was unreachable, so I concentrated on the journey. I had a meaningful life, learning as much as I could about how power and change operate, working with some of the best and smartest people.
But yes, it is terrible. It is uncalled for.
All we can do is stop bothering the future – it will bear down on us fast enough – and learn how to work well with the good people and have a meaningful life of it. Some great changes are happening already and they deserve us.
(See http://bit.ly/rriWW)
Over the last 20 years or so, a small number of Australian climate scientists who have repeatedly issued warnings regarding carbon gas emissions and dangerous climate change, have been:
1. Ignored by governments and industry
2. Some were silenced under pain of dismissal
3. Some lost their jobs
4. Most were largely or partly censored by the mainstream media (often under the pretext as if their letters and articles were “too alarmist”, or “too technical” or “too simplistic”)
6. Subject to ad-hominem and ridicule.
Had the warnings been heeded in the early 80s, attempts at mitigation may have had a chance of success.
Sadly, despite confirmation by the world’s leading climate research organizations, the mainstream media continues to offer an open platform to dangerous disinformation perpetrated by so-called “sceptics”, or give a “ballanced” treatment to both science and denial (as if every time someone says the “globe is round”, there is a need to have a “ballanced” view “The Earth is flat”).
The media and those behind it have much to answer for, not least to the young and future generations.
Andrew Glikson
Earth and paleoclimate scientist
15-10-09
Nick of McEwen – My work for the Greens is now rather minimal, but I did do a huge amount of work last election when I was a candidate. (Note that all my comments here are just my personal opinions.)
To reduce our emissions requires government to take huge action, and soon.
There are only three ways I can think of that might make this happen:
1 – there is a coup and the new government make the changes which are needed,
2 – a government is elected that promises to make the changes needed, or
3 – a government in power radically changes policy and makes the changes.
A coup to bring in the needed changes is very unlikely. (In reality I think the most likely coup for Australia would be if a government was elected that promised to make the changes. The coup would oust them!)
Either one of the above succeeds or we fail to take appropriate action. Which option should those concerned about climate change work towards?
I don’t have much faith in democracy, but I think that option 2 is our best chance.
And clearly I’m talking about something very different from just electing a few more Green politicians. We need a new government and quick.
This almost certainly won’t happen, but what else might work?
Further note: The myth of climate “stabilization”
Schellnhuber’s warning is not new to those who study the evolution of the atmosphere/ocean system.
Rarely is it acknowledged that scientists like Wallace Broecker, James Hansen, Stephen Rahmstorf, have long pointed out, from ice core studies, to the evidence of tipping points in the history of the glacial-interglacial era during the last 740,000 years.
Due to the cumulative nature of atmospheric CO2, and the role of carbon cycle feedbacks and ice melt/albedo change/infared absorption feedbacks, no scientific foundation exists for expectations inherent in IPCC reports and derived reviews, such as the Garnaut Review, as if atmospheric CO2 targets can result in “stabillization” of the climate at any specified level.
Once CO2 levels have risen above 350 ppm, or even above 320 ppm, the atmopshere assumes a runaway mode. An abrupt upward shift is defined at 1975-1976. From that stage only sharp reduction in carbon emissions accompanied with CO2 draw-down techniques (fast-growing plants, reforestation, chemical carbon capure) are likely to be capable of making a difference.
Requiring a rapid transformation in the behaviour of the species H. “Sapiens”, consistent with the comment by Stephen Moreland (Crikey 15-10-09).
Andrew Glikson
16-10-09
I approached this from another point of view – that of peak oil. So I never had an Oh Shit moment.
From the early ’90s – probably around the time of of the first gulf war, I believed that oil would start to run out, it didn’t matter if the peak would be 2010, 2020 or what-ever, the point would be that for a long period oil would be much more expensive than it is now.
In my mind the issue of enery shortages was more immediate and easier to understand than climate change.
The changes needed to cope with climate changes are (in the main) the same ones needed to deal with energy shortages. So perhaps our best hope is for long ongoing shortages of oil.
While there is a lot of coal (perhaps several hundred years of supply), it should be easier to manage/transition a dozen or so coal fire fired power stations than several million motor vehicles and homes.
Agreed Dan, we’re bowled over by some of the comments here. We’re currently trying to figure out what more to do with them… we featured some yesterday in the email but may do it again today… there’s some really very beautiful, thought provoking writing here.
My first OSM was coming out of a second year climatology lecture given by Barrie Pittock in 1980. I hadn’t heard of the greenhouse effect before then. Nor had most of the world. I remember walking out of the lecture, into warm spring sunshine, fellow students lolling around, thinking ‘ But this is serious! The world needs to be doing something about this!
Its been a series of OSM’s since, having kept up with the science and committing myself to activism and Green politics. Readiing Climate Code Red was a recent big OSM, as was talking with Philip Sutton just this week about the implications of melting the arctic.
Yet I have to stay optimistic because you need that to keep going, and if you don’t fight you lose.
Imagine if The Greens and Xenaphon had balance of power in the Senate at the moment as we should have had, if not for the deal the ALP did to elect Stephen Fielding. Then the Government would be negotiating with the Greens over the CPRS. That’s the power that a small number of Greens in our Parliaments can have to begin with. Imagine Greens with balance of power in state and federal lower houses in the next five years, determining which of the big old parties forms government.
Even so, Lovelock’s prognoses seem chillingly likely. Huge amounts of suffering seems inevitable.
Our best hope I think is a climate change related disaster in the next decade or so that kills thousands and leaves hundreds of thousands of wealthy white people homeless. This might just provide the political will for the world to get moving on the transition, and achieve seeming miracles. And for a positive exploration of just what those actions might be join me at the Green New Deal conference on 24-25 October in Melbourne http://greeninstitute.org.au/gnd.
I had ten years of emails from Bruce Sterling to prepare me for the day when life was going to be all climate change all the time. http://viridiandesign.org/
When I started spending time with local climate activists, from 2007 forwards, part of my line was to argue that huge political and cultural changes do happen in history, and that we should have some confidence that whatever is truly necessary to avert catastrophe will in the end be done. I do seem to remember getting a little anxious around the end of 2008, when I was thinking over that 350ppm paper of Hansen et al and thinking about the physical magnitude of the problem.
However, I grew up on a different sort of apocalyptic futurism, that involving nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, and in the end I think those trends trump anything to do with unsustainability. Which is not to deny that people may die in very large numbers in the coming decades. But whether we become sustainable is not going to decide the long-term future of humanity. I give it twenty years maximum before we have self-replicating nanosystems that can eat all that atmospheric carbon much faster than a tree. And at that point the climate problem is over and the nanotechnology problem has arrived.
I’ve been increasingly gloomy and depressive about climate change for a long time now. But the last time I felt a real spike of depression was reading Climate Code Red by David pratt and Phil Sutton. An important little update to what science is now telling us.
Gawd, did someone mention the CPRS? Don’t make me laugh. Thankfully Australia will have a solution imposed on us, but not without unnecessary impacts on the economy.
An Incomprehensible Truth
(A tragi-comedy in one, very long, act)
by Stephen Moreland
The Cast:
The role of the IPCC and vast majority of the Scientific Community, NGOs & social welfare groups is played by a computer terminal.
The role of humanity and its system of governance is played by Homer J Simpson.
The role of the climate denialists is played (with special thanks to Mr Simpson’s proctologist and animators) by Mr Simpson’s sphincter.
ACT ONE, Scene One
The Time: 1989
The Scene: a nondescript room, could be anywhere.
Stage props: A table, a chair. The computer terminal is on the table. A line of text is glowing on the screen.
Homer enters from stage left and approaches the table and sits down, reads the computer screen -
HOMER:- Hmmmm…. “To start, press any key.”
Homer looks at keyboard. Looks at screen. Looks at keyboard again.
HOMER:- Oooooooooh, I find the any key!
Homer continues to sit in front of the computer screen, eyes slowly glazing, jaw slackening, occasionally farting, for 20 years.
THE END
*Producer’s post script: A second act (working title “Common Sense Strikes Back”) was planned but cancelled due to lack of interest and the inability to find a financial backer willing to forgo a return on investment for a measly four or five years. A shame, really. We’d already secured Kermit The Frog to play Bob Brown and Toni Collette to play the UN (she’s SO versatile!)
Oh gawd, the joke’s on me I left out the crucial word ‘can’t’ in Homer’s line!!!
This response to Hamilton’s 16-10-09 article is relevant to this blog:
Over the millenia humans worried about the end-of-the -world-as-we-know-it, repeatedly, the diffrence this time is that the most authoritative science indicates an abrupt transformation of terrestrial climate to conditions that shaprly depart from those which allowed the emergence of civilization some 8000 years ago.
Our prehistoric ancestors managed to survive through major climate upheavals (mid-Pliocene 400 ppm CO2, 2-3 degrees C rise, 25 meters sea level rise; glacial/interglacial +/- 5 degrees changes in mean global tempratures) mainly through migration.
Where will the 6.6 billion humans of the 21st century migrate to? (little prospect for an “escape” are offered by the thin film of water detected recently on some lunar rocks).
Fortunate are believers in devine supervision, snatching them to heaven when the day comes.
Less fortunate are believers in Gaia, the living Planet, who feel guilty the species to which the belong has betrayed “mother Earth”.
Looking at the issue with perspective of natural evolution, the question arises whether any species, including humans, has a choice in the matter of its own survival?
Children of the “enlightnment” have been raised with a notion of “free will”, but while limited choices may be presented to fortunate individuals, does an entire species possess free will ???
In this instance, a ‘free will’ to transform from the principal energy source – fossil fuels – which allowed the emergence of technological civilization some 250 years ago, to other energy sources?
Unfortunately the atmosphere is not waiting to human decisions.
Andrew Glikson
My “Oh shit” moment can probably be traced back to pictures taken from satellites showing the shrinking of the Arctic ice cap during recent years. These images were quite scary, but really only tell part of the story. Ice is a very efficient reflector of the Sun’s heat whereas open ocean is a very efficient absorber of the Sun’s heat.
So here we have a kind of built in accelerator where reflecting ice is being replaced by absorbing ocean, so there’s not much chance of a short term reversal of that process.
It seems obvious to me that the process of warming now under way will continue far into the future regardless of what efforts are made by the human race and the most we can hope for (best scenario) is to slow the process down a little. I sincerely hope I’m wrong!
David_C
By the way: Did anyone notice that October is BeyondBlue Anxiety And Depression Awareness Month?
http://www.beyondblue.org.au/index.aspx?link_id=59.1188
My oh sit moment came at the end of 1970 just before having my second child. I read The Ghost in The Machine by Arthur Koestler and his comments on global population. My appreciation of anthropomorphic induced climate change has merely become keener as the decades fly by.
No one person can change this scenario; you can add your own puny effort that makes you feel better (it does me). Our immature emotional responses have not caught up with our cortex and that’s the rub.
Besides the lack of genetic diversity in the human genome vitually seals the fate of Homo sapiens or should that be Homo greedicus or Homo can’t-see-past-my-big-toe-icus?
We will have the distinction of having been the shortest lived species this planet has ever known. Could be worse, I suppose.
Pages: « 1 [2] 3 » Show All