So good news, but we are unlikely to spend the same amount of time and money on all species.

Laura, yes less (if not no) meat and dairy, but who is going to tell the Chinese?!

Paul at 8 I think we’ve had the best of times. It’s our grandchildren I really feel for.

wbb at 27 it would be good to see Garrett given his head. But I suspect the Wong is there to deal with Martin Ferguson.

Charlie Veron a former Chief Scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville did a piece at Online Opinion. He says:

On present forecasts, the worst bleaching year we have had to date will be an average year by 2030. And it will be a good year by 2050.

But ocean acidification is an even worse threat:

We know that we will observe the effects of acidification in colder and deeper waters first. That is already happening in the Southern Ocean. On our present trajectory, we can expect acidification to start impacting the Great Barrier Reef by around 2030.

It must be said that Online Opinion followed Veron’s article with a debunking piece from Walter Starck as they do. Starck is from the AGW denialist paradigm and I don’t propose to comment point by point on his article. He does have a point, I think, in criticising this statement from Veron:

Corals speak unambiguously about climate change. They once survived in a world where carbon dioxide from volcanoes and methane was much higher than anything predicted today. But that was 50 million years ago. The accumulation of carbon dioxide then took millions of years, not just a few decades. Then there was time enough for oceans to equilibrate. And for life to evolve solutions.

I think the reference here was to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) which Wiki says occurred over 20,000 years. James Zachos reckons we are putting a similar amount of carbon up there, but thirty times faster. He thinks the time frame was 10,000 years.

The point is that the PETM was not a great extinction event although the temperature spiked, Wiki says 6C.

I’ve heard Veron talking at length on the radio. From memory he was emphasising that reef ecologies are always evolving. I think his point here is that it had time to adapt. Now it doesn’t.

In general, I think I’d back Veron and the the 17 authors of the Science Magazine article rather than Starck, professor though he may be.

“550 ppm of CO2e which would give a 50% chance of going above 3C”

In the Interim Garnaut Report Section 3.1, p24 he says:

A stabilisation target of 450 ppm CO2-e gives about a 50 per cent chance of meeting this objective (Meinshausen, 2006).

In the next paragraph he says:

t would be more likely to be achieved, but be associated with much higher risks of dangerous climate change. 550 ppm is the level to which implies a 50 per cent chance that temperatures will increase 3°C above pre-industrial levels.

He footnotes this with

Based on a ‘best estimate’ climate sensitivity of 3C, stabilisation at 550 ppm is likely to lead to an equilibrium global mean temperature increase of 3C above pre-industrial levels, with a 21–69 per cent chance of exceeding 3C (IPCC, 2007c; Meinshausen, 2006).

I haven’t checked the IPCC, but the Stern Review Executive Summary at Figure 2 you can read the values in the lines at the top of the chart where the vertical lines represent the 50th percentile point. He gives his various sources, but I suspect the chart is a lift out of Meinshausen which I haven’t seen.

Stern in a recent paper (Section 2.1, p9) makes reference to this material and says in a footnote:

Work by the Hadley Centre and the IPCC (Murphy et al. 2004 and Raper 2001) suggests that 550ppmv CO2e is associated with a 24% probability of exceeding 4C, a level at which it is projected that significant and irreversible changes in the world would occur. Stabilisation below 500ppmv CO2e would be significantly less risky (11% probability of exceeding 4C). For details see Stern p. 220.

These risks are simply outrageous, but it’s worth checking out the Stern reference, where you’ll find nothing much on p220. The place to go is Chapter 8 Box 8.1, especially the chart on p195.

I’ve figured out that the generalised quotes we started with are the average of a range of studies, probably of varying quality. If you look at the Hadley predictions it will scare the pants off you. For example, at 550 ppm they give 99% chance of exceeding 2C, a 69% chance of exceeding 3C and a 24% chance of exceeding 4C.

Even at 400 ppm, the Greens’ favoured number, you have a 33% chance of exceeding 2C and 1% chance of frying the planet at 1C. Again these numbers are unacceptable.

Remember that Garnaut notes that these figures are based on climate sensitivity of 3C. So it is the Charney climate sensitvity concept we are dealing with, which is based on quick feedbacks only, not the long feedbacks that Hansen reckons are beginning to surface.

People like Garnaut and Stern are smart enough to know what they are telling us and more importantly what they are not telling us. I can’t say the same yet for Wong and Garrett.

Wong gives the impression that this is just another job. She doesn’t show any passion or interest in the detail.

The ALP only got up to speed very recently when they saw that they could outrun Howard on the issue. It’s very much all still news to them in the main.

If Wong were serious about the issue she’d be talking about it to the public. She’s not. Shuffle time. Garrett was kept out of the job because he’s not an able politican - but this is an issue where there’s no point treading the fine line of electoral compromise. Every month that passes there is less and less politics in it as the urgency increases. Let him do it.

Instead we are stuck with perfectly intelligent people like Wong saying they won’t review for eg their 2050 60% reduction target because “it was an election promise” fer chrissakes.

myriad, that’s about the size of it, I think.

Myriad and tim, Wong gives the impression that this is just another job. She doesn’t show any passion or interest in the detail. She wasn’t in the position when the election policies were set. Whether Garrett is really on top of the issues is also yet to be demonstrated.

Quiggin has an interesting post on core promises and whether changes should be made in the light of changed circumstances.

Also, I suspect Wong would have some difficulty in dealing with Martin Ferguson.

According to this modelling, the climate part of which is based on recent CSIRO prediction models, none of the species assemblages we currently know will survive past this century..

Agree and entirely get your point Brian, sorry should have made that clearer. I just wanted to point out that the Greens are the only Party who have policy and objectives in remotely the right ball-park, and who also respond to the science by updating their policy.

If the media paid any attention to this, that alone would generate a much-needed nationwide debate about what temperature rise Australia can afford -both from a national interest perspective (ie impacts of 1 degree, 2degrees rise or greater on us) and thus also in terms of what we can contribute towards stabilising the global temperature rise…

Instead we are stuck with perfectly intelligent people like Wong saying they won’t review for eg their 2050 60% reduction target because “it was an election promise” fer chrissakes.

myriad, the exchange between Christine and Penny is linked off this post. Brian, the point Christine was making is that the government are so far behind that they haven’t even thought about, it seems, the first step of setting temperature target.

We know now that 2C looks to be too much, although we also know that the likelihood of being able to come in below 2C, given how much warming is locked in now, is very slim indeed. Drawing down carbon has got to be part of the game and quick smart, whether that’s through agrichar or something else (what??? Not carbon-muncing bacteria, I hope, for anyone who’s read either Zodiac or Kim Stanley Robinson’s science in the capital series).

If everyone ate koala

God I love teh Interwebs.

The next question, of course, is ‘WTF is an anacando?’

And the little buggers aren’t even native to the island. It’s all the Victorians’ fault. As usual.

BUT Hansen is stressing the importance of albedo changes in the Arctic ice. There are estimates that this alone is worth 0.3C globally. Hansen is also suggesting that there is 2C in the system with the albedo stuff and other long term factors, not included in the models of climate sensitivity. That is the temperature will go up 2C even if we stop emitting now.

That’s why he is now suggesting that we need to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. Garnaut (and Stern) ignore this more recent science, I think because it would wreck there narrative that we can fix things at little cost to GDP. But it would also play them out of the game in government policy terms, and I think this is the best construction on the game they are playing.

tim, gotta go, I’ll have a look tonight after we flog the Kiwis.