Please excuse my very doggy (and dodgy) Latin, which might loosely translate as “They warned, We ignored, We will suffer”.

However if the recent extraordinary range of extreme weather events continue and the very faint swing of public opinion continues towards the worried end, it might be replaced by a rather optimistic “Monēbant videmus Mutemus Mundum” or “They warned, We now see, Let us change the world”.

And the weather has been extraordinary China is going through its worst drought in 60 years, The Amazon basin has just been through its second “100 year drought” in 5 years during which it swapped from absorbing 1.5 billion tons of CO² per year to releasing over 5 billion tons, or roughly the same as the USA economy. Thus the forest has probably emitted more CO² than it absorbed in the last 5 years. This change from sink to source is exactly what climate science has warned would happen in a warming world. And it’s not just the big storms floods and droughts in Australia, Pakistan, Russia, Europe and the USA; it seems there is extreme weather almost everywhere as this Grist Post describes, while Arctic Ice extent over January was the lowest since satellite records began, suggesting that albedo feedback is also under way.

Craig Fugate, head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency recently stated “The term 100-year event really lost its meaning this year.”

Ross Garnaut is clear on the link, saying “The greater energy in the atmosphere and the seas can intensify extreme events and I’m afraid that we’re feeling some of that today, and we’re feeling that at a time when global warming is in its early stages” He also said “the presence of uncertainty in the range of possible climate outcomes strengthens the case for climate change action”.

I believe that we are seeing the start of the major climate feedback mechanisms, as well as a taste of the extreme weather predicted.

Now the $64 Trillion question? What are we going to do about it? So far we are rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, squabbling amongst ourselves (both within and between countries) while the climate builds up a good head of steam. Once it picks up speed we don’t have a hope of stopping it.

Here in Australia there a few hopeful signs coming out of the federal government’s Climate Change Committee, with the Greens taking a hard line on compensation to business. This is important two ways. Firstly whatever agreement is reached is just the start of what needs to be a rapidly increasing price on carbon. If the agreement is complex, susceptible to financial manipulation, or does not refund the full cost of increasing energy prices to the least well off, then there will be a backlash and government will lack the guts to push forward. Secondly our major industrial companies are massive emitters of carbon, who have so far not considered it worthwhile to make significant changes in their operations. While ever there are loopholes, offsets etc etc they will find it cheaper to fudge the figures rather than getting on with the job. Compensation in the context of an initial (and probably minor) price on carbon allows them to take their time and see what happens next. Given that we actually need a massive emergency effort similar to putting the country (and the world) on an all out war footing, a sharp shock to the commercial system is the least we can do.

Most economists are quite relaxed about environmental and climate matters, as their faith assumes a generally increasing wealth, so future generations will be better able to handle the cost of our problems than we are. Personally I find this similar to belief in the tooth fairy but never mind. Martin Weitzman is more pessimistic, arguing in a recent paper that the “Fat Tail Distribution” makes all the difference. He argues that most economic costings of climate change ignore the less likely but catastrophic options which are the fat tail of the bell curve. If these are included the potential costs become overwhelming. He says “to ignore or suppress the significance of rare tail disasters is to ignore or suppress what economic theory is telling us loudly and clearly is potentially the most important part of the analysis”. He defines a 6^oC increase in temperature in the next 100 years as the extreme, and assigns a probability of 3% to this on the basis of IPCC-4. Of course IPCC-4 is now long in the tooth and almost all of the research since then has increased the risks. Given that most economic reviews have already concluded that the cost of action is less than the cost of business as usual, we would surely be truly insane to continue as we are?

While discussing rationality, a university study in the US has found that sitting in a hot room increases the number of people who think climate change is a problem. We continue to discover that our treasured rational thinking is actually nothing but a bunch of stuck together ad hoc survival rules, exactly as you would expect from evolutionary theory. Unfortunately this is the century that will require us to be not only rational but committed, consistent and efficient.

However disaster is not inevitable, however likely it looks at present. Another report, this one from the WWF, suggests that a 100% transition to renewables by 2050 is possible. They say:-

“We have found that an (almost) fully sustainable energy supply is technically and economically feasible, given ambitious but realistic growth rates of renewable energy sources.”

“However, the path to this future world will deviate significantly from ‘business as usual’ and a few (difficult) choices will need to be made on the way.”

All we have to do is transform our energy infrastructure. We’ve done it before at least twice, during the transition from wood to coal, and from coal to petroleum. Third time lucky.

All the major temperature recording institutions have now reported on calendar 2010 and found it to be the equal hottest on record. NASA GISTEMP temperature data showed that 2010 was so close to 2005 that they were statistically a tie, despite a deep solar minimum and a strong La Nina in the second half of the year which should both act to depress temperatures. More importantly all showed that the 2010 decade was the warmest on record, and all of the 12 hottest years are within the last 15 years. The Global Historical Climatology Network stated that 2010 was the wettest year on record, in terms of global average precipitation which is not too surprising given that increasing temperatures are forecast to increase the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere as Kevin Trenberth explained:-

“I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”

In case you are wondering he made these statements in June 2010 well before the recent devastating floods in Australia and Brazil. Sea surface temperatures in the Australian region were the warmest on record during 2010 (Jan–Nov) which undoubtedly helped fuel the floods.

The mainstream press reporting of the floods virtually ignores any mention of global warming, though to its credit the American ABC broadcast this video. On it Richard Somerville says:-

“This is no longer something that’s theory or conjecture or something that comes out of computer models. We’re observing the climate changing. It’s real. It’s happening. It’s scientific fact”.

And the studies keep coming. We usually accept that the warming due to a doubling of CO² is about 3^o C, but this is just the “fast” warming and ignores all the slower feedbacks (ice sheets, methane releases, vegetation changes). James Hansen suggested in 2007 that the warming over decades to a century would be 6^o C. Now Jeffrey Kiehl from the National Center for Atmospheric Research has just published a study which reinforces this view. Talking about the period 35 million years ago he says:-

“The paleogeography of this time was not radically different from present-day geography, so it is difficult to argue that this difference could explain these large differences in temperature. Also, solar physics findings show that the Sun was less luminous by 0.4% at that time. Thus an increase of CO2 from ~300 ppmv to 1000 ppmv warmed the tropics by 5° to 10°C and the polar regions by even more (i.e., 15° to 20°C)”

The Gaia hypothesis suggested that ecosystems act to stabilise the climate, and a recent study comparing ocean ecosystem diversity and climate reinforces the evidence. The carbon cycle was chaotic for about 6 million years after the major extinctions which ended both the Triassic and the Permian ages, and the re-stabilisation of the carbon cycle coincided with the formation of a new diversified ecosystem. Jessica Whiteside, one of the authors said “There is evidence that food web collapse is starting to occur in some marine ecosystems. It will take a long time for systems to recover.”

And its not just scientists doing the warning. Peter Sinclair who produces the excellent Climate Denial Crock of the Week videos has found this 1989 video of the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov bemoaning the fact that just because they had a hot summer and a drought in 1988 “everyone” was talking about the greenhouse effect when he had been stressing the issue for twenty years.

I guess we’ll keep ignoring the warnings till something really nasty happens.

The UN has reached a modest agreement in Cancun, which did not look too likely just a few days ago. As Marc Robert’s cartoon implies, it is well short of what the science requires, but is certainly better than nothing. The agreement promotes measures to reduce deforestation and to encourage renewables in developing countries as well as a fund to help mitigation, and agreement that emission reductions should be subject to international inspection but does not improve on the inadequate reductions promises made so far, or even lock them in any legal way. Not surprisingly, there has been limited media coverage (though the Guardian provides a good summary here).

So better than nothing but certainly no gold star… “Three out of ten – must try harder” as my old schoolteacher might have said. Hot Topic has an article covering the recent UN report which concludes that the current commitments will lead to an increase of up to 4 degrees centigrade, and even on the most optimistic reading the current pledges are only 60% of what is needed to limit warming to two degrees.

Meanwhile the science hardens, and more respected scientists are becoming more strident in their warnings. Lonnie Thompson, who has probably done more work on tropical glaciers than anyone else, recently stated:-

“There’s a clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible. This pattern emerges not, as is so often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.”

NASA has published its monthly temperature statistics, showing that November was the hottest on record, as was the December 2009 to November 2010 meteorological year despite all the snow in Europe. James Hansen has an interesting piece on this, pointing out that while Europe was colder than the GISS average, places like Hudson Bay were more than 10 degrees centigrade hotter than the 1951 to 1980 average. He believes that calendar year 2010 will either be the hottest on record or tied with 2005. You might note that the dissentients do seem to doing rather less bleating about the recent global cooling trend, which is at least a minor blessing.

Hansen is also optimistic about China, explaining in this piece that political leaders there are well aware of both the dangers of climate change (China is particularly at risk) and the potential economic benefits of a clean energy push, and that action is not being impeded by commercial interests as it is in the States, and even suggesting that China and Europe might eventually come to an agreement on a rising price of carbon and impose tariffs on the US if they do not follow suite.

Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, admits that the US has lost the leadership in high tech manufacturing, and that China’s green energy push is already bearing significant fruit in this YouTube video put together by Peter Sinclair who produces the excellent Climate Denial Crock of the Week. Well worth watching.

Only slightly off topic, the defence of Wikileaks mounted by a group of “hackers” called Anonymous on Paypay, Visa and MasterCard is interesting as I suspect that the voluntary subscription to a Botnet is a template for many future online protests. Basically someone modified some Botnet code so that users could relatively simply “subscribe” to the cause. Taken to its logical extreme groups like Getup or Avaaz could ask their members to participate by loading similar but rather more sophisticated software which would, under decentralised command flood a company or organisation with masses of perfectly legal requests (obviously chosen for maximum disruption). As long as these are normal packets, it would be difficult to prosecute individuals for this, and given that the hackers (who don’t appear to be very coordinated) managed to bring down the credit card sites with about a thousand people, it could cause significant damage.

Finally the Wikileaks release is showing that the major multinationals are deeply imbedded in the political system (at least in Nigeria) and I suspect much more widely. It will come down to an arm-wrestle to ensure governments actually act in the best interests of their people, and I suspect the Voluntary Botnet will become a popular and effective method of protesting against corporate excess.

The right has won its expected victories in the US midterm elections, though they fell short of winning control of the Senate. Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, never spoke a truer word recently when he said “Climate is gone”, though his interpretation might have been a little different to mine. It certainly means that the US will not support any international agreement on Global Warming in the next two years unless the icecaps really fall off. It will be interesting to see what the Republicans come up with now that they have the obligation to craft legislation rather than hurling abuse from the wings.

Rachel Maddow in a 14 minute video rant comments on the fact that the right wing media in the States can no longer be debunked, however ridiculous the accusation, because as soon as it is aired on one channel or web site, it is taken up by a screed of others, all repeating the story without any fact or sanity checking. Unfortunately we have seen this elsewhere as well, and on all sides of politics, though the US Right does seem to have polished it to a gleaming art form. We have also unfortunately seen Australian politicians take any opportunity to smear their opponents, generally with total disregard for the facts. Taken a few steps further and we will have two separate cultures that never interact other than via abusing each other. The electorate is almost powerless in this case, even at election time, as neither side needs to develop real policy. Unfortunately we are already a long way down this road. The real winners are the major corporations who are able to influence or browbeat government and their management and board members who in supposedly austere Britain are able to cream off 55% more than last year.

The Sydney Morning Heralds published an interesting speech by Vandana Shiva, who is an Indian physicist, in Australia to collect her 2010 Sydney Peace Prize. She points out that the economy is still mainly engaged in a war, on nature, on competitors, and on people. She quotes the names of the Monsanto herbicides as an example of the thinking including “Round-Up”, ”Machete”, ”Lasso”, ”Pentagon” and ”Squadron”. She ends “We have to make a choice. Will we obey the market laws of corporate greed or Gaia’s laws for maintenance of the earth’s ecosystems and the diversity of its beings? People’s need for food and water can be met only if nature’s capacity to provide food and water is protected. Dead soils and dead rivers cannot give food and water. Defending the rights of Mother Earth is therefore the most important human rights and social justice struggle. It is the broadest peace movement of our times.” Marc Roberts manages to say the same thing in fewer words in the cartoon below.

Ever expert in stating the obvious, the UN recently warned that Climate change and consumerism are the biggest threats to future human health and happiness, while it’s recent convention on biological diversity in Japan couldn’t even be bothered to issue a printed final report while the draft contained no binding obligations (which to confirm my comment above about a content free media, didn’t stop several newspapers hailing it as ‘Countries join forces to save life on Earth” and “Historic”, “a landmark”, and “much-needed morale booster”).

You may be wondering why this blog seems to be concentrating on the politics rather than the science of late. Very simply, the science is being refined, but not overturned (despite half the new Republican congressmen denying the existence of manmade climate change). The icecaps are still melting, temperature records are still being set, and weather patterns are still changing, mostly to our detriment and people continue to die due to it all. Oxfam was brought before the advertising standards body in the UK for saying as much, and they were recently vindicated. It’s just not “news” any more.

Finally someone has found an appropriate use for Twitter (thanks Hayes). This chatbot searches the Twitter-stream (something too horrid to contemplate as a human) looking for debunked arguments about climate change, and responds with a correction including links to the science. If only they would implement the walking talking versions to follow certain well known people about…

First a quick video from the Natural Resources Defense Council which frames the problem, which is getting worse rather than going away.

In most technological areas (with IT as a prime example) the Hype Cycle is well known.

A new process is discovered. Well before anyone can review it critically it is hailed as the next big thing.

Some time afterwards, some disadvantages become obvious and most are keen to trash the technique. However a few are working away in the background to eliminate the problems, usually without a lot of outside attention.

At roughly the same time as the “trashers” get bored and move to something else, the improvers get to the stage where they can tell if the technique actually has commercial potential, and it either goes mainstream or dies quietly.

This has clearly happened in areas such as wind generation, which are now almost accepted, and it is likely that most of the renewable energy generation techniques are somewhere in the cycle. But is the cycle also appropriate to thinking about Climate Change in general? I suspect it is which would be generally good news.

If so, then Copenhagen would represent the low point of the trash phase, and we are getting close to the production phase, with just a few tardy countries such as the USA and Australia still hanging back. Not soon enough, but it’s pleasant to look on the bright side occasionally.

One important shift which does seem to be happening is a move away from using strict net present value calculations to judge the worth of major long term projects. The Australian national broadband network is a prime example which clearly does not pass NPV while being accepted by most experts. Oliver Letwin, a UK minister for state makes the point that many of the great past projects would not meet financial hurdles while speaking at the Conservative party conference.

“NPV is an extremely valuable tool for taking short-term investment decisions which are single generational decisions. But the most important decisions society has to make are intergenerational decisions, and those economic and accounting tools we have break down at that point and you’re forced back on much deeper considerations.”

This NPV thinking is at the heart of industry’s reluctance to commercialise renewable power. When we decided to install a solar PV system which would cover our electricity needs I calculated that it would payback in 12-18 years (the future cost of electricity was the major variable). Given that the panels, which are the most expensive part, come with a 25 year warranty this seems to be a sensible thing to do, but from a financial point of view I should have left the money in the bank. As it happens I have probably grossly underestimated the increases in the cost of electricity, and we now have a feed in tariff both of which have considerably reduced the payback period.

Given that companies are in it for the profit, governments need to fund the multi-generational shift in energy generation, or change the rules so it becomes profitable, or ideally both.

After all what is not to like about reducing our dependence on imported energy, reducing smog and its many dangers (coal emissions have recently been linked to the major increase in autism) and reducing the long term cost of energy. The only folk that don’t like the idea are the current energy companies, and those who see short term cost increases as threatening their bonuses. Unfortunately these are the very folk who have great influence in government circles.

Hopefully the new Australian Climate change committee will recommend action closer to the original Garnaut report or ideally a simple carbon tax that is refunded to all Australians equally. This last minimises the chances of financial manipulation and leaves the less well off better off even if they do nothing giving no excuse for complaint. Most members seem well chosen, though at least one is rather too close to the “industry position” for my liking.

Also mildly encouraging is the news out of the latest round of Climate talks in China, with less posturing than previously. Kelly Dent of Oxfam commented “It was good, I was mildly surprised … At the risk of sounding like an optimist, what I saw today was a willingness to sit down and start working.”

Two less comfortable items to finish with.

Micah White suggests in the Guardian that failing to deal with global warming quickly will lead to the rise of authoritarian or eco-fascist regimes. He quotes James Lovelock “I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.” Pentti Linkola, a Finnish ecological philosopher says “An ecocatastrophe is taking place on earth” and “discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression” are the only solution. Well worth a read, and suggesting, along with the rise of the extreme right in the USA, that we will polarize to one of the extremes as things get worse.

Finally an article in the Washington Post on what future generations may find unacceptable about our current behaviour. Kwame Anthony Appiah starts:-

“Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.”

He feels that most of the practices which become condemned show three signs while still active.

• All the arguments against the practice are well known.
  
• Defenders don’t offer moral counterarguments but invoke tradition, human nature or necessity.
  
• Supporters are in denial avoiding truths that might force them to face the facts.
  

And then he goes on to suggest four likely current issues, including the environment, industrial meat production, the prison system and institutions for the elderly. A least the first two rang all my bells.