A Tipping Point is reached but still no action

This will be the year when the mainstream media started to report on the effects of climate change as if it is real, and without all the caveats they have used so far. Not before time, and not too surprising given the:-

• Massive floods in Pakistan affecting more than 12 million people.
• Record temperatures in Russia causing huge wildfires.
• Current Decade reaches an all time global temperature record.
• Rolling 12 months global temperature record set.
• July 2010 global temperature record.
• January to July global temperature record.
• A host of other temperature records broken.
• Arctic sea ice extent is near the record all time low set in 2007, while the graph of the more important sea ice volume looks like it’s fallen off a cliff.
• Phytoplankton populations in the world’s oceans have declined by 40% since 1950 because of global arming (and they are the base of the food chain).
• Wild weather is being reported everywhere.

NOAA has released their 2009 state of the climate report documenting 10 key indicators, each supported by multiple datasets, which unequivocally show the planet is warming.

The Russian President Medvedev said “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.”

All of the above are completely consistent with the predictions of climate change, and there is worse to come. So what are we doing about it?

That depends where you are. In Europe and China and India, the answer is “too little but at least trying”

Arabinda Misrah of The Energy Resources Institute in India said “If we look at the Indian scene and look at the actions being taken by state and central governments, it’s a little bit difficult to understand why it is so difficult to get strong legislation passed domestically in the United States”. As reported in ClimateProgress China has shut down enough inefficient coal power stations to power the UK and is set to start domestic carbon trading during the current 5 year plan. Unfortunately a growth rate of 10% still means that China will probably exceed European and US emissions by 2020.

In the US and Australia the answer is to bury our heads under the pillow, and hope we wake up from a bad dream. This article in the Guardian by Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, points to the reason. He says “Why has every attempt to set prices for global carbon emissions failed? The answer can be found in one word: coal – or, rather, the fact that coal is cheap and abundant. … In Europe, indigenous coal production no longer plays an important economic role. It is thus not surprising that Europe could enact a cap-and-trade system that imposes a carbon price on a large part of its industry”.

And this comes to heart of the matter, which I keep banging on about like a broken gramophone record…

Gros also states “A planet composed of nation-states that in turn are dominated by special interest groups does not seem capable of solving this problem” echoing Thomas Friedman in the US, Geoff Bertram in NZ and Ross Garnaut in Australia, who pulls no punches accusing Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott of a ”breathtaking sidestepping of responsibility” and calling our response to climate change ”an extraordinary failure of leadership”, concluding that something had ”gone wrong with political culture and economic policy”.

In Norway James Hansen has taken the government to task for on the one hand planning to reduce emissions by 40% while allowing the majority State owned Statoil to invest in Canadian tar sands. After a cop-out reply which said this was the board’s decision and purely a commercial matter Hansen stated “The Norwegian government’s position is a staggering reaffirmation of the global situation: even the greenest governments find it too inconvenient to address the implication of scientific facts. Perhaps our governments are in the hip pocket of the fossil fuel industry…”

Simply put we need to get the money out of politics. Don’t hold your breath.