Much too little – Much too late

Oh judgement thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason. The bard said it well, and it feels right for the strange non rational limbo we seem to be in. On the good hand we have carbon price legislation enacted in Australia, though the likely next prime minister (may the fates preserve us) has promised to rescind it. It is of course much too little and a decade too late, but it’s not too awful in a world where the US is steadfastly ignoring the problem and Europe, which actually made some promising moves seems now to be retreating to coal in response to their economic woes, and China – despite doing more than most – are rapidly growing their emissions. Also on the good side of the ledger is the unexpected success of the occupy movement, the first skirmish in a people versus business war. It holds some promise of undoing some of the more ridiculous neoliberal thinking which has become entrenched lately, but probably cannot do much to weaken or destroy the old dirty energy industry, and the wider commercial perception that we can continue to pursue ever increasing profit at the cost of the environment on a planet is even now struggling to support our numbers and our methods. We even have a slight occasion to smile as the dissentients loose another of the straws they continue to clutch at.

Unfortunately we are also being reminded that we are now almost certain to exceed the 2 degree “safe” limit for which this blog was named, the extreme weather keeps getting more extreme, and every climate science report that is published seems to be worse than the last.

Let’s look at the good news first.

George Monbiot has a cracker of an article discussing whether executives are worth their millions. He quotes studies that show most high flying traders results are no better than chance, and that many executives score higher psychopathic scores than the psychopaths locked up for violent crimes, and goes on to show that most folk have gone backwards of late while the very rich have done very well. A couple of quotes will give you the flavour, but please read the whole thing. “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire” “Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers across Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin”.

The success of the occupy movement is welcome. It has gone global, is being supported by many high profile celebrities and more importantly causing a wave of supporting comment in the press (here and here for example). Annie Leonard with perfect timing has come out with a new video called the Story of Broke very much from the American perspective but looking at where the money they don’t have is being spent. Worth watching.

A curious quiet followed by a fair bit of mumbling greeted the final results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST). This study, funded by the oil powered Koch brothers was the last hope of the dissentients in showing that the naughty scientists had been exaggerating the scale of the warming. Not only did the study show that the previous numbers were reasonable, they concluded that they were on the low side!

“We find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s…. our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.”

Given that this study was funded by outspoken oil barons who are consistent funders of denialists and headed up by Richard Muller who has often sounded rather dissentient himself despite being a real scientist, though not a climatologist, this drives the last nail in the “we aren’t warming” coffin. Muller now says “The existence of global warming is pretty much beyond dispute now”. Climate Denial Crock of the Week has this excellent video which details the whole sorry story. This of course is not exactly good news as it confirms we are headed for trouble even quicker than we thought. To any who would still prefer to ignore the real world I commend this elegant little ditty called the denial tango.

The World Resources Institute has published their Climate Science 2009-2010 review, and there is no good news. 2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record, ocean acidification is proceeding faster than expected and multi-year winter sea ice area decreased by 42 percent in the 4 years to 2008!

The respected Meteorologist Jeff Masters reports on a large ozone hole which has opened in the Arctic. This was unexpected as the well known Antarctic hole is supported by the colder stratospheric temperatures caused by intense circum-polar winds there, and the Arctic has only seen slight ozone losses in the past. It appears that a much colder than normal vortex in the Arctic has caused the hole, which in turn may be due to the same changing weather patterns which gave the northern hemisphere such cold recent winters. And yes both the colder stratosphere and the changing patterns are predicted causes of global warming.

And to cap it all that conservative industry focused organisation the International Energy Agency is warning that if we don’t stop building fossil fuelled power stations in the next 5 years we are stuffed. They don’t put it quite like that of course, but they do point out that the emissions from new fossil power stations built to service our inefficient homes and factories will over their expected lifetimes destroy our last hope of staying under 450ppm of CO2. Please note that many scientists no longer regard 450 as a safe level and are instead shooting for 350. Put another way they say “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

The chief economist at the Agency, Fatih Birol, said. “I am very worried – if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum. The door will be closed forever.”

Eleven of the world’s large engineering organisations have issued a statement saying that we already have all the technologies we need to cut emissions by 85% by 2050, but we are just not developing them quietly enough. They say:-

“While the world’s politicians have been locked in talks with no output, engineers across the globe have been busy developing technologies that can bring down emissions and help create a more stable future for the planet. “We are now overdue for government commitment, with ambitious, concrete emissions targets that give the right signals to industry, so they can be rolled out on a global scale.”

It’s possible the cartoons below describe why.