Two trends that I have been going on about for a while now are now becoming clearer; the consolidation of power by large commercial interests and ongoing climate weirding are connected.

The latest revelations in the News of the World Hacking Scandal show the extremes that a newspaper can sink to in the cutthroat world of UK tabloids. Payments to police, hacking into and deleting messages from the voice mail of a missing girl who was later murdered, hacking into the phones of relatives of terrorist victims and dead soldiers amongst many others. It is now clear that this was not one or two rogue reporters but widespread in the company. More worrying is the fact that Prime Minister David Cameron’s former press spokesman was editor at the newspaper and resigned amidst concern about his involvement.

The Stanford prison experiment in the 1970′s showed that we are very susceptible to peer pressure, and will abuse and torture others quite willingly if it is accepted by the whole group. The same sort of thing seems to be happening in the pressure cooker world of our corporate giants, who pursue profit relentlessly apparently without regard to any ethical standards. Add to this the size and power of the largest companies and their undoubted influence over governments and it is easy to see why the interests of the general population are being eroded. Even now with the whole of the UK baying for blood, the PM is still resisting calls for a judge to lead the investigation he has just pledged to call, raising more concern over corporate – government links.

Respected meteorologist Jeff Masters believes that the weather during 2010 has been the most extreme since 1816, the “Year Without a Summer” which was caused by the largest volcanic eruption in centuries. Although we are well into 2011, which looks to be continuing the trend, it has taken Masters this long to collate the very long list of extremes, which are documented in detail in the link above.

So what are the connections? Simply put:-

• Big business is obviously wedded to perpetual growth and business as usual and will manipulate the political process in their favour and against our interests. You only have to listen to the chorus of business flacks predicting that the sky will fall and we’ll all loose our jobs if a carbon tax or a mining tax or whatever is implemented. Studies after the event have shown that these predictions are usually wildly exaggerated.
• Governments have become much more cautious, not to say timid, and there is much more cross fertilization between public servants and industry which naturally or unnaturally reinforces the commercial bias. It is also naturally difficult to prioritise actions that are painful now and only show benefits decades from now when you are elected for a three or four year term.
• Media companies are out to make money, and pursue profits without regard for those old fashioned concepts of truth and balance. They therefore give much more prominence to the loony fringe of the Climate Deniers (the potty peer Lord Monckton who is the subject of another excellent climate denial crock of the week below, positively springs to mind) than they deserve. How can a man who claims to have invented a cure for everything from the flu through malaria and muscular sclerosis to HIV-Aids be taken seriously, when he rightfully deserves to be treated as barking mad (as even he seems to agree in the video below). More and more scientists and even some politicians say they are not getting their side of the climate story out because of media bias. Will Steffen, executive director of the ANU’s Climate Change Institute and the only climatologist in the advisory group to the multiparty climate change committee, is bemused, frustrated and appalled by the debate in Australia. On Monckton he says ”He is not taken seriously in the UK, yet he gets 10 times the media coverage of James Hansen, one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world [and who visited Australia last year].”

So we look like being stuck in this rut, with those in power determined that the economy must grow continuously, while the environment, meaning everything from the climate down to the human systems of city traffic, electricity and water supply, and even neighbourhood social links gradually degrade. Eventually this will come to a head, but fortunately, with a bit of luck, I suspect we can stagger on for quite some time before the wheels completely fall off. This might give us time to gradually get used to the idea and accelerate the painfully slow start we have so far made.

The scientific community, while they can fight bitterly amongst themselves, are usually reticent when making public statements, but this is starting to break down. James Hansen has been involved in several protests and even arrested, saying he couldnot bear the thought that his grandchildren might hold him responsible for a burned-out planet. The Guardian has an interesting article on the subject including a video which proves that a PhD is no ticket to music stardom. All power to them regardless.

I have been reading James Lovelock’s latest book “The Vanishing Face of Gaia” which I strongly recommend. I found this book was a key to understanding his thinking, though the first part of the book is irredeemably gloomy.

Finally the Climate Denial Crock of the Week, featuring the “intellectual rape” of James Delingpole, and of course, Moncton’s medical madness.

There was a hope that the global financial crisis and its associated recessions would cut carbon emissions and maybe give us a bit more time to get our act together. That was dashed recently with the news from the IEA that global emissions increased by a record 1.6 gigatonnes to 30.6 GT. This prompted Faith Birol the chief economist of the IEA to suggest that the chance of staying under 2 degrees is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”. Lord Stern was equally direct:-

“These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100 … Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.“

Birol made it clear however that it is still possible to stay under 2^o, though the chances are decreasing each year “If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding”.

So the biggest recession in 80 years failed to stop the increase, and we continue the great experiment with our environment (though I sometimes think it looks more like a problem gambler’s last desperate throw of the dice).

After decades of a few brave souls crying in the wilderness it does seem that more and different folk are adding their voices to the warnings. 17 Nobel laureates have recently signed a memorandum calling for “fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales in order to stop and reverse global environmental change”. They say:-

“Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. … We can no longer exclude the possibility that our collective actions will trigger tipping points, risking abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems. We cannot continue on our current path. The time for procrastination is over. We cannot afford the luxury of denial.”

Even the press, who I think have been remiss in the they way they have portrayed the issue, have some commentators who are becoming more forceful as witnessed by Richard Glover’s tongue in cheek suggestion that climate change deniers have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies so that their grandkids could take them to task. He does also suggest that those on the other side of the debate might help by not breathlessly welcoming each environmental disaster, and that we both need to get real and understand that we need only pay a relatively small price to minimise the damage. Another SMH correspondent who has been consistently calling for action is Ross Gittings who despises those who encourage people who today live in the most comfortable and prosperous of times to feel poor. This is a common cry by those opposed to a price on carbon who refuse to acknowledge that it will have a relatively minor effect and the neediest should be over compensated. Gittings says “It’s a sore test of faith when people put power bills before their children’s future.” and “The one thing humans are meant to care about above all is the survival of their young. Yet people with the highest standard of living in history are whingeing that they couldn’t possibly afford to pay a bit more for their electricity.”

Of course the person who has been the most consistent in his warnings is James Hansen who was in NZ recently. I strongly recommend you watch the video of his talk to the University of Canterbury even if you don’t think you have half an hour to spare. He covers the problem and what we need to do about it, and while not an accomplished public speaker his message resonates because he explains the issue clearly and obviously knows his subject, while as a good scientist he takes great care not to make statements he cannot support. He makes the point that we are likely to use the rest of the available oil and gas, purely because it is so convenient and cheap but that we must stop using coal and unconventional fossil fuels such as the Canadian tar sands. He is also clear about his wish for a simple rinsing carbon fee or tax rebated equally to all consumers rather than an emissions trading system. He likes the simplicity of the tax and the fact that there are no bankers to get rich on the margins as well as the fact that the major emerging economies of China and India will not agree to a cap while they are considering a carbon tax. Well worth watching.

Trading schemes have the disadvantage that the price can be very variable and easily manipulated especially in the early years as shown by the sorry history of the European trading system. As I see it the only disadvantage of the tax is that it will need annual adjustment by government in exactly the same way as income tax rates. If, as is absolutely necessary, the bulk of the proceeds are returned to the population there should be minimal pressure on government to stop them adjusting the tax as needed.

Those who believe that a market driven solution can be transparent and operate without distortion should look at the recent history of speculation in food, which increased from $13bn to $317bn between 2003 and 2008. While as I discussed in my last post the fundamentals are driving the cost increases they are being much amplified by the speculation which now represents about 80% of the total trading and thus dwarfs the real trading of basic foodstuffs, increasing the suffering of the world’s poor while making rich traders and bankers even richer.

This recent Earth Day eCard ticked my fancy though I admit its worrying when ones taste in humour is almost entirely of a darkish tinge.

The scientific community has been working for years on the thorny question of if and how much increased levels of carbon dioxide contribute to the extreme weather that seems to be much more common of late. Not an easy task, but they are starting to make comment, with more of these very careful folk believing that we are seeing the thin edge of some very nasty weather coming our way because of our emissions.

And the weather has definitely been quite extreme of late, with the USA taking its turn after Russia, Pakistan, China, Australia, Europe and others with a massive set of tornadoes and floods driven by near-record sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico (high sea surface temperatures were the immediate cause of the Queensland floods earlier in the year) while North Carolina has had its second “500 year” rainfall in 11 years.

Water and climate scientist Peter H. Gleick has an article on the tornadoes in the Huffington post which makes his view very clear. Firstly the title is “A Cost of Denying Climate Change: Accelerating Climate Disruptions, Death, and Destruction” and he finishes with the statement

“The science community knows that we’re affecting the climate; in turn, that will affect the weather; and that, in turn, will affect humans: with death, injury, and destruction. There is a cost to tackling climate change, but there is a real, growing, and far larger cost of continuing to deny it.”

There is a clear and interesting description of how scientists are determining what effect the changing climate is having on weather on the Yale website. Basically the process is split onto two parts. The first is easy as it’s clear that what used to be highly unusual events are now becoming more common, while the second involves running climate models with and without high levels of carbon dioxide to see if there are differences. This is trickier as many of the models are not yet detailed enough to show regional rather than global weather patterns, and most scientists are not yet ready put an exact number on the increased risk though Peter Stott and his team from the UK’s Met Office did show that emissions had doubled the chances of the 2003 European heat wave. He says “Natural variability does play a role, but now so does climate change. It is about changing the odds of the event happening”.

Many more studies of this type are underway, but they are complex and time consuming but in the same way as last year was the first year many people started to comment on the changed weather, this year will be the one when many start to accept that we are to blame.

Kevin Trenberth who leads the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado told the NY Times, “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both”.

The most comprehensive study of “outsourced emissions” has just confirmed that most western countries are outsourcing their emissions by buying increasing amounts of manufactured goods from overseas. Europe has reduced CO² emissions by 6% but this drops to 1% if outsourcing is included. Of course those countries like the US who have done very little are even worse off with a 17% increase becoming 25% when imports are included.

China is of course the main emissions exporter, meaning that they often get blamed for others sins. It is often said that they are now the worlds largest emitter, but excluding their exports reduces them by almost 20% and puts them well behind the US, despite their very much larger population. China accounts for a massive 75% of the developed world’s imported emissions.

Australia also exports more emissions than it imports though the numbers are not in China’s league. Our nett exports less imports are enough to reduce our emissions by about 15% although they have still increased by 16% since 1998 and are among the highest in the world on a per capita basis.

Hot Topic carries news of another worrying Paleoclimate study. They analysed mollusc shells dated to the early Pliocene (3.5 – 4 million years ago) from a Canadian lake which suggested that summer temperatures were as much as 15ºC higher than at present. Given that CO₂ was 400 ppm at the time, not much more than our current 392 ppm this is another indication that we have increased greenhouse gas concentrations so quickly that significant warming is already “in the pipeline”. It also helps confirm climate model predictions that warming will be much more extreme at high latitudes, increasing the dangers of runaway warming due to albedo and methane release feedbacks.

Another trend towards extremes is on the way, with crude oil prices again on the rise. Not very surprising when even the very conservative International Energy Agency keeps revising the global production numbers down. The latest comment from their chief economist Fatih Birol is simple and clear. Five years ago they thought total world production might reach 120 million barrels a day, but they now believe it will only reach 96 million barrels a day. Birol states:-

“Existing fields are declining so sharply that in order to stay where we are in terms of production levels, in the next 25 years we have to find and develop four new Saudi Arabias. That is a huge challenge.”

Swedish peak oil expert Kjell Aleklett said the agency’s assumptions about future oil flow rates were impossibly optimistic and that total world production passed its peak a year ago.

This might have something to do with the fuss in the US where the putative Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is talking about the current high oil prices. Have a look at this wonderful interview which is definitely still on the title subject. His answer seems to be to threaten Saudi (and OPEC in general?) and “repossess” Iraq. Below are two quotes, though I suggest you read the whole transcript or view the video to get the complete flavour…

Look at what’s going on with your gasoline prices. They’re going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, “Fellas, it’s time.  It’s over.  You’re not going to do it anymore.”

“George, let me explain something to you.  We go into Iraq.  We have spent thus far, $1.5 trillion.  We could have rebuilt half of the United States.  $1.5 trillion.  And we’re going to then leave.  So, in the old days, you know when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils.  You go in.  You win the war and you take it.”

In case you think this is an aberration here is a video of his speech in Las Vegas…

As it look increasing obvious that the Kukushima plant will take months or years to sort out, Tepco admits missing checks and storing too much spent fuel in the storage pools while the US nuclear regulator has quietly dropped the requirement for equipment to prevent hydrogen explosions which was imposed after the Three Mile Island problem. You can trust business to continue to cut costs anyway they can, and to harass governments into changing the rules. Hardly a great way to run anything that can go bang in a big way, especially as the risk and the reward are assigned to different people.

News seems to me to arrive in two main forms; that related to climate science, ecological or resource limits is almost always unremittingly bad, while there is a surprising amount of good news about new techniques and technologies which we could use to reduce the impact of the first, but somehow never quite get motivated enough to have a decent crack at. This post demonstrates the effect nicely.

Professor Ross Garnaut, the Australian government’s climate change adviser, has recently updated the 2008 report on the science of climate change. He states:-

“Observations and research outcomes since 2008 have confirmed and strengthened the position that the mainstream science then held with a high level of certainty, that the Earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause.”

“The statistically significant warming trend has been confirmed by observations over recent years:”

• global temperatures continue to rise around the midpoints of the range of the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the presence of a warming trend has been confirmed;
  
• the rate of sea level rise has accelerated and is tracking above the range suggested by the IPCC; and
  
• rates of change in most observable responses of the physical and biological environment to global warming lie at or above expectations from the mainstream science.
  

“There is increasing discussion in the legitimate scientific literature of the possibility that large damage will occur at smaller increases in global average temperature than the IPCC focus and United Nations (Copenhagen and Cancun) agreement…”

“Despite the increased scientific understanding of climate change, and confidence in the science’s conclusions about climate change, public confidence in the science seems to have weakened somewhat in Australia and some other countries since 2008.”

To translate: – we are sure about what is happening and its getting worse faster than we thought. The chances of catastrophe are increasing and yet we still don’t care enough to do anything serious about it.

While on the subject of government advisors Lord Nicholas Stern has warned that his original report “underestimated the risks” and that

“On its current carbon emissions path, humanity faces a 50-percent chance of warming the planet a whopping 5.0 degrees C by the end of this century”
and

“What we’re talking about here — this the cost of inaction, the cost of not doing much — is a transformation of where we can be. Over a hundred, 120 years, we can’t be that precise, a serious risk of global war, really, because you’ve got hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people moving. That’s the cost of inaction. It’s potentially immense.”

Lonnie Thompson who has spent his career drilling equatorial glaciers to chart historical climate near the equator states

“There is now a very 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.”

Whether or not we are past peak oil may have become immaterial, as it is clear that minor disruptions to supply (Libya is 2% of world crude production) have major effects on price. The British Bank HSBC thinks we have les than 50 years of oil left at current consumption rates, while demand continues to surge. They don’t see any substitutes being effective below $150 per barrel. George Monbiot explains why western counties are so quiet about calls for more democracy in Saudi Arabia, and Exxon’s annual financial report states that for every 100 barrels they have pumped in the last decade they have found only 95. Interesting also that the west (and the UN) can get worked up about Libya but not, for example, about Zimbabwe. I suspect we are now in a position where any major growth in the global economy will boost the price of oil until it slows the growth. Time to think outside the box.

I have been surprised by the number of new and improved processes and techniques that are being reported at the moment, despite the relatively small amount of research funding. They are coming right across the spectrum of S.W.E.S. (Solar, Wind, Efficiency and Storage), surely the key immediate elements of a new energy industry. Nanoscale manufacturing seems key to improvements in solar cell efficiency and battery storage and allowing a breakthrough in adsorption chillers which might allow residential air conditioning to be powered by solar hot water systems while wind turbines are getting more efficient as they get larger and we may be able to generate significant amounts of power from the mixing of fresh and salt water in estuaries. A Californian company has found a cheaper way of producing LED’s and it even seems possible to reduce livestock methane emissions by changing their diet.

So we are improving the technology we need to move to a sustainable energy system, just not quickly enough.

Grist reports on a survey that might make you chuckle a bit, where the researchers found a large difference between how Democrats and Republicans responded to wording. Democrats treated the words “global warming” and “climate change” almost identically in the survey while Republicans on average showed a major difference between the two phrases with 44% of Republicans agreeing that “global warming” is real, while 60% said the same of “climate change. Wishful thinking anyone?

While the climate scientists are starting to communicate clearly (see below) the government is not. I know I have used this Marc Roberts cartoon before, but it’s just too perfect for this post.

Here in Australia we are going through another attempt by the government to implement a price on carbon. The previous attempt, by the Rudd government was voted down by the opposition Liberals and Nationals and the Greens either because, as conservatives, they either deny climate change or despise government intervention in the market, or because the Greens felt it overcompensated the polluters and would have had little effect. The current attempt is demonstrating an extraordinary level of vitriol, misinformation, and an amazing lack of competence on the government’s part. As such it’s a pale echo of the nastiness going on in the USA.

Julia Gillard is leading a minority government which has repeatedly flip-flopped on the subject and now has to succeed to survive. It is strange therefore that her government is not selling the project at all well, to the point where the cynical might wonder if they want to fail. While the opposition is almost rabidly attacking the project and its supporters, the government announcements have been lame and unfocused. As none of the real decisions on how much and who pays have as yet been made, only the principles of the matter can be sensibly debated.

Folk tend to think of a tax as a cost and therefore as purely a negative thing, but it is always a redistribution of wealth, taking from some and giving to others. The problem, as with many of the tragedy of the commons type problems, is that those who pay can clearly see the loss, while the gain is often diluted (and sometimes wasted) so that most folk don’t see the same benefit. This requires clear and simple communication by any government implementing a new tax, and that is exactly what we don’t have.

The key questions at this stage of the debate are:-

• Should we put a price on carbon now or wait till other countries do more?
• Should it be a Carbon tax or a Cap and Trade mechanism?
• What will the money be used for?

• It is clear we need to act now. Australia is the highest per capita emitter of carbon other than some of the much smaller Gulf States. A recent study shows that we are way behind the pack when it comes to doing anything about reducing our carbon footprint. It calculated an implicit carbon price for Australia and five of our major trading partners and concluded that Australia’s price was $2.34 while the US was $5.05, China was $8.08 and the UK was $28.46. These numbers are calculated at market exchange rates, and are even more unbalanced if purchasing power parity exchange rates are used with Australia now at $1.68 to China’s $14.22. We are also the most likely of the industrialised nations to be badly affected by climate change and are already seeing unprecedented predicted extreme weather events, while our agriculture is at serious risk.
• While most governments initially favoured cap and trade, for its supposed efficiency, the early signs in Europe have not been good, with widespread rorting and wildly fluctuating prices just two of the problems. A tax is much simpler, and while it needs adjusting yearly to ensure carbon targets are met, we seem to be able to manage this with income tax. As such it seems a good starting point. Crucially it drives change in Australia, rather than allowing international offsets, which are usually so subject to fiddling that they are not effective in reducing emissions.
• The government says “Every cent raised from pricing carbon will go to assisting households, helping businesses manage the transition and funding climate change programs”. But in what proportion? The previous ETS was very generous to industry of all sorts, reducing the incentive to act quickly, and allowing companies to increase both prices and profits during the transition. Given that, as shown above, our major trading partners are all doing more than we are and that our industries, far from being in danger of going overseas, are actually benefitting from our cheap dirty power and failing to keep up with overseas advances, we need minimal compensation for trade exposed industries. As for the massive giveaways to the electrical industry proposed in Rudd’s ETS, they are simply ridiculous. As in so many cases simple is good. A proportion of the money should be extracted for funding climate change programs and the rest should be returned to the human population as a cash refund. Prices will rise, but most folk will be more than compensated and the rest will have an incentive to change, which is the whole point of the exercise.

There is only one problem with this, most recent governments have acted as if they are elected by the corporates rather than the people, and the current incumbents are no exception, having recently caved in on the mining tax to the tune of about $6 billion per year. So we can expect a lot more waffling until the detail comes out later in the year and a lot more bleating from industry about how hard it will be and how many jobs will be lost. The fact that most of this is shown after the event to be the purest bullshit is conveniently ignored by the corporately owned media. The Greens will have the balance of power in the Senate during this period and are already signalling that they want to minimise industrial compensation. Hopefully they hold their nerve.

The opposition, continuing with the tactics they have used successfully since the election is against anything and everything and promising to repeal the tax if they gain power. Given the Greens balance of power in the Senate this would require a further double dissolution election.

Interesting times, but unfortunate in that we are missing out on the start of a real shift in power generation. Both Europe and China are putting real money into renewables and the effects are starting to be seen. While it was only for one day, Spain generated 75% of its electricity from renewables on January 6^th. (It was 35% for the whole of 2010) and Portugal has gone from 17% renewable to nearly 45% in the last 5 years. Australia has a better supply of renewable energy than either, and our peak electricity loads come during those hot summer days when solar is going to be available, making it much more attractive.

On the dirtier side of the fence, a recent study from the Harvard Medical School quantifies the health costs of coal to the US economy at between $140 billion to $242 billion per year. This is just the health costs with no accounting for carbon emissions but would still be enough to more than double the cost of coal.

Climate Science is now able to show that global warming is responsible for exacerbating the extreme weather that we are starting to see, though it takes a considerable time to analyse the data, so they are reporting on events that are years old, rather than the recent deluge of events. One of the studies mentioned above showed that Climate change doubled the likelihood of the devastating 2000 UK floods. Separately a study shows that the risk of abnormally wet or dry seasons has doubled in the south-eastern US in the last 30 years, while the massive reinsurance company Munich Re states that the number of weather-related disasters have more than tripled in Germany over the past 40 years.

To finish, if you have an hour to spare and want a feel for the massive changes we need to make have a look at this video (it assumes we need to stabilise at 450ppm while recent thinking indicates 350ppm so the job’s rather harder than portrayed!). If you prefer a bit of dark humour try this recent bill declaring that global warming is natural and “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana”.

I don’t think I can top that.