If you thought my post on the recent Copenhagen conference of scientists was gloomy, George Monbiot has topped it:
Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.
This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last week. It’s more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government. It is the obvious if unspoken conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with four degrees of warming by the end of the century. At the moment emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows? (Emphasis added)
That’s a backdrop to mention a few happenings, global and local, on climate change.
Nature has a special issue on The Climate Crunch.
The editorial says it’s not too late, but close. We need to stop emitting, work on adaptation because there will nevertheless be negative effects and start researching geoengineering to cool the planet.
In a feature article Richard Monastersky looks at evidence that keeping carbon dioxide beneath dangerous levels is tougher than previously thought. It is a very clear line of reasoning, ending with the notion that we have a budget of the remaining carbon that we can put into the atmosphere, and it’s not large.
The rest is behind the paywall, but there are reports here and here and here.
What is being attacked here is the notion that in 2050 or some future point there is a safe level of emissions. Almost everyone will tell you that India is well under that level in per capita terms. What is being said here is that we should look at the emissions as cumulative. The notion that India and others have the right to pollute there way to prosperity is out the window, because if they do we’ll all go down together. If we, the world, use up our budget in the next little while we’ll have to come to a sudden grinding halt.
India’s emissions have to go down from where they are now.
Malte Meinshausen says we need to start reducing emissions by 2015 if we are to have a reasonable chance. Coming to think of it, the IPCC said that in 2007.
Jo Romm at Climate Progress was not impressed. From there a link to New Scientist. Both are worth a look.
Elsewhere this week Obama’s mob have been hosting a further meeting of the dirty 17, the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, a new version of a body created under President Bush that brings together 17 of the world’s highest-emitting countries for discussion and dialogue.
I gather the meeting was mainly about technology, though I haven’t been able to find out much yet. In this article Germany’s Herr Gabriel gives the Americans some free advice – tell your people there is money to be made. He worries about what China is really up to.
China has a “very ambitious” renewable energy program and “we shouldn’t underestimate what technological leap-frogging China is capable of,” he said.
Apart from their renewable energy drive and their emphasis on energy efficiency, which they appear to be plugging hard, they are burning coal like there is no tomorrow.
A mere 30% increase in the consumption of coal by 2015, that’s all!
I was going to tell you about the Senate Committee hearings in Brisbane where the main feature was a succession of energy companies. I’ll save the colour and movement for another post, but a major question was whether gas should be seen as part of the problem or part of the solution. In other words can we bypass gas and go straight to renewables? One bloke was sitting on two gas-fired power proposals worth $1.8 billion. His financers won’t budge until the politics is resolved. If they don’t move soon the lights may not be on all the time in about three years time.
But gas too, in little old Australia, is part of the world’s remaining budget of carbon.
Hint – the low hanging fruit is in energy savings, where there was a presentation that for me made the sore backside worthwhile.
A ten year program of the green refurbishment of commercial buildings would create 108,000 jobs and save 140gt of CO2.
Update: I checked, but missed the post at RealClimate. Thanks to Peter Wood at Climate Dilemma for the headsup. This quote is telling:
We feel compelled to note that even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, calling 2°C a danger limit seems to us pretty cavalier.
From a link from there to a German site and an article by Stefan Rahmstorf, there is a
neat graph from Malte Meinshausen showing the effect of starting early or late:
Climate stabilisation options
Brian, that is the conclusion that I have drawn as well. All those past and present politicians who have made this inevitable should take note that they will be pillaried in the historical records and scorned by the living, once the the environmental decline gets fully under way.
This is my list of the obvious….Howard, Bush, Prebble (NZ), Merkel (Germany), and now Rudd,…so far.
BilB, I didn’t realise I’d come to a conclusion
I ran out of puff last night, but the green buildings presentation was by Ms Romilly Madew, CE of the Green Building Council of Australia and her strapper, Jeff House, National policy & Public Affairs Manager. They were exemplary in they way they handled the situation.
I couldn’t find their Senate C’tee submission but there is some information on their site here and here.
Their proposal is seen as something separate from the CPRS and unfortunately as a second phase thing by the Ruddster. It would actually save industry money, but I gather requires some leadership and seed money from the Feds.
I’ve got to go out now for a bit, but will try to do an organised update later from my notes, probably tonight.
The average Joe Blow really doesn’t think that 4 degrees warmer is a big problem because if its 20 degrees, 24 degrees is nicer. However we forget that 44 degrees is very unpleasant and 48 degrees is too hot for human habitation.
Most people don’t realise that a century ago the average temperature on this planet was 13 degrees its now 14.2 degrees so 19 degrees is a big change that will see the planets foodbowls turned into deserts
Billie @ 3.
Its not just the temperature that is the problem, it’s the energy that this represents. 4 degrees C rise represents a vast injection of stored energy into a chaotic oscillatory system. This will manifest itself as extremes of hot and cold and as high and low pressure systems that will drive cyclones and such. One problem is that because it is a chaotic system it is difficult to establish a cause and effect, all you can do is look at the long term trends. Too late she cried.
Huggy
The more fundamental point of Monbiot’s piece is that:
I’ve got some friends working in climate science and they all have the same mindset: their job is just to churn out the science, it’s up to politicians to decide what to do.
I understand this is a traditional scientific thought pattern – Marie Curie had it, too – that science is separate from the rest of the world and shouldn’t get involved in its squabbles.
The trouble when it comes to issues like this is that if scientists don’t want to let their hands dirty and rely on politicians to do the work, it becomes a political problem and not a scientific one.
It was only when Al Gore (scientist turned politician? politician turned scientist?) et al get out there popularising climate change that the pressure for political change happens.
I’m fine for scientists outsourcing action to politicians. But the converse of that, if the action doesn’t happen, is not to blame politicians.
They can’t have it both ways.
Monbiot is correct. Its over.
RE: green buildings: I’m (hopefully) doing a major renovation later this year. I’d love to spend money on insulation, high-spec glazing, efficient appliances, solar gadgets etc, but the reality is, all my green $$$ will go into Council approvals, engineering and architect fees, bushfire protection etc. When the financial crunch comes I’ll dump the green stuff because if its a choice between finishing the build and solar panels, I’ll finish the build.
Sorry Brian, that was Monbiot’s conclusion that I concur with. But, frankly, I do not believe that geo engineering is a solution at all. Further, I believe that there are dangers equally as large as the problem that they seek to solve in the supposed geo engineering solutions. That effort should be applied to continuing, albeit belatedly, to building the real machinery of Carbon based energy production elimination.
Mehitabel, I have to disagree re politicians. They are every bit to blame when they ignore the advices of technicians, ingnore the mood of the public, and attempt to steer events down paths of self interest. To me this is a failure of duty to the point of criminality. And on this particular issue history will certainly conclude the same. The massive loss of life yet to come will frame the issue in a manner that none of these current egotistical foot draggers ever imagined possible. I see no difference between someone who intentionally ignores the warnings of thousands of scientists and continues the expansion of the use of coal while intentionally preventing or frustrating the development and implementation of alternatives, and Pol Pot. The outcome will be the same, hundredds of millions of deaths, only the blame will be divided amoungst a group of equally culpable “leaders”. But each will share a burden that will make Stalin appear as a bit player in history’s annals.
Good comments all.
mehitabel, one of the issues coming out of Copenhagen was the interface between Scientists and policy makers in the political arena. It was highlighted by the PM of Denmark asking the conference at the end what exactly he should be aiming at. Of course there was no clear, simple goal coming forth that he could hang onto.
Katherine Richardson of Copenhagen University who pulled the conference together had something to say as did the New Scientist. Sensibly the latter say that politicians should stop looking for easy answers.
In Britain with the role of the Chief Scientist the interface is perhaps working better than elsewhere. Angela Merkel in Germany has the scientific background and is supposed to be advised by Schellnhuber, who is the big cheese at Potsdam, but the results have been disappointing.
Obama has appointed a whole raft of clued up people and we’ll have to wait and see how they perform. To me, they seem to be locked into the 2C guardrail and 450ppm and stabilise by 2050, which the article by Richard Monastersky was at pains to show was inadequate. But faced with relying on the IPPC 4AR report or Hansen’s stuff about real climate sensivity being 6C rather than 3C, they opt for the former.
I thought the science was settled – consensus!
CO2 reduction will have an effect or CO2 reduction is a waste of time?
Who to believe???
I say if governments at Copenhagen fail to meet at least the acceptable scientific minima to give us a fighting chance our our grandchilddren having normal lives – then we declare “state failure” on the issue.
namely:
1. that we declare we are ruled by failed states that no longer protect human life (let alone liberty and happiness) and that
2. As our ‘representatives’ in fact appear to represent the passing, epheremal and irresponsible interest of clearly redundant and damaging industrial elites, rather than their consitutencies, that we, as responsible global citizens, will take responsible collective action to
3. obstruct key exemplars the most polluting industries in each of our countries, in non-violent, globally co-ordinated acts of civil disobedience, such that
4. Disruption of the most polluting industries becomes a constant incovenient truth about unsustainable energy practies.
Honestly, our descendents will look at us as youung Germans view their previous generations: what did you know, and what did you do then, Grandad? They wont have lucky, pleasant lives like ours – thanks to our failures. We’ll be cursed – some as criminals (major polluters, apologists like Howard and Bolt) and the rest silently questioned – what did you know, then?
I know we’re all hopelessly inadequate – but buggger it. Let’s get up em! let us question – US style – the fundaments of any alleged ‘right to govern’ while fundamental rights, truths we hold self-evident – are in constant breach.
Go for it Lefty!!
Meanwhile, that jester’s bauble, Barnaby Joyce, was on QnA banging on hysterically about “what about the coal miners’ mortgages?”. The Greens Sarah H-Y gets it, as does Christine Milne: the thing is to take it on as an economic opportunity. But what a useless lump Garrett is, I’m sure the remnant of his conscience pains him, but I can’t find any sympathy for his self-selected plight. He throws in they’re putting up 500 mill for the REDP program, which is an exaggeration for a start, and Mer’n Fer’s'n is dragging the chain about announcing who’s getting what, in what was prolly just just an exercise in wording the press release about was in big bucks industrial reality of a few foregone favored player conclusions. Compare that to the 2005 $5.4 billion Coal Transport Infrastructure Investment Program Beattie coughed up, gimme a break. Oh yeah, and they’re gonna give us pink batts and pv ponies.
What part of Utility Scale Renewable Energy @$2K a kW, and a lot of that going to wages, don’t they understand? The “that doesn’t fit in with existing unions’ power plays, it was the unions that bought us government, they must be pandered to” part? Faceless men? Brainless, gutless, and heartless as well, pretty much 100% a–hole. And the other lot are worse.
Lefty, it’s the Chinese who really scare me. How are you going to get at them?
BilB, I don’t think about whether the situation is hopeless. But there’s a quote that goes something like:
“The situation is hopeless; we must take the first step”
Razor, I’m still trying to work out whether you could actually be as stupid and obtuse as you seem to be.
Yo seem to have completely missed the point of the post and the ensuing discussion.
Try reading it all again, this time for comprehension.
Isn’t there something in the Bible about children cursing their parents etc? I’m not a believer, but sometimes prophets get things right.
Sadly, none of this surprises me.
PB: Exodus 20:5, “For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me.”?
carbonsink.
We’re building a new home at the moment. Rendered strawbale, double-glazing, R10 ceiling insulation, etc. We score 49 points on FirstRate. You need only 11+ points to get a 6-star rating.
There are so many costs involved in getting 49 points, including architechural fees, special engineering, specialist trades, expensive fittings, etc.
The all up cost of a green house is much greater than for tract housing in the subdivisions.
Having said that most people could green their new house simply by facing it in the right direction and adding verandahs to west, sw, and insulating the ceilings properly.
ps. I’ve found that councils are a source of interminable delay rather than merely a cost item.
I tend not to take seriously anyone who believes in global warming but categorically objects to nuclear power. For instance, thorium shows huge potential as a long term, efficient and safe source of power. It has the added advantage of consuming large gobs of the current stockpile of nuclear waste and produces almost none of its own. What waste it does produce tends to be short lived ( relative to some of the existing stuff ). What’s not to like about it?
Thorium is a very abundant mineral in the earth’s crust. The LFTR has a liquid fluoride salt core instead of the usual solid core. The liquid-salt type of reactor was developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory between 1950 and 1976. The LFTR would use thorium-232 rather than uranium as a basis of its fuel cycle. Thorium is subjected to neutron radiation inside the core of a reactor, and then undergoes a nuclear transformation that produces fissionable uranium-233. The LFTR is 200 to 300 times more fuel efficient than standard reactors. Given the abundance of Thorium and the efficiency of the LFTR, the combination offers abundant energy as long as people will want a massive energy source. Calculations, based on ORNL estimates from the 1970′s, are that it will cost between $2.5 to $5 billion to develop LFTR technology to the point which where commercial prototypes can be built. Again based on ORNL cost estimates, plus known savings in the cost of labor, interest, and a standard calculation for the cost savings from the learning curve in serial production, the LFTRs will be between $1 and $2 per watt of generating capacity. The LFTR will be cheap enough to produce mid-load and peak power, And unlike the conventional reactors the LFTR can do dynamic load balancing for the grid. Why heck, the LFTR can even provide electrical backup for solar and wind, but why anyone would be so crazy as to install solar and wind generating facilities if they had LFTRs is beyond comprehension. The LFTR is very safe, can be designed to control itself without human intervention, produces little waste, and can destroy the waste from other reactors as it generates electricity. The LFTR can produce electricity for a cost that is lower than the cost of coal using carbon capture and storage, or the cost of wind and solar generated electricity.
Taken from the Thorium Blog. LFTR stands for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.
Danny @ 17,
No, its a New Testament thing, in Matthew, a prphecy apparently made by Jesus about the end of the world.(Not the one about Titus’s sacking of Jerusalem in 70 AD.) What I call the Pell Theory of Climate Change. He said, during Benny Whatever’s recent visit, re climate change, “There might be another explanation,” or words to that effect, and being versed in the subtle nuances of Catholic eschatology, I figured he was talking about the end of the world.
Well, I guess I asked for that.
I agree, Brian, with positive steps whole heartedly. I am no quitter. I ran for election in NZ in 1992 proposing a carbon tax and moves to alternative energy. I am not changing my position now, nor do I see any indication that my conviction was wrong. But I feel that there is no alternative but to prepare for a different world. So I have kicked into life a number of design projects which I feel will improve my family’s survival prospects. And I will layout the revealable parts of my plan later on. But as an indication. For me flexibility and mobility are everything. So the first part of the plan is the smallest, and is a folding bicycle with some very special features. There are a lot of folding bicycles around and many are really good. But the one feature that none of them have is the ability to adapt to carrying a load when not being ridden ie sack barrow style. I’ve started this design exercise a number of times but have never reached a satisfactory solution. I saw an excellent folding bike minimal solution on the web a while ago and that triggered me again, but this time I have it fully thought out and will start prototyping soon. As an indication of the differences the peddle hub is also a planetary gear box (instead of the chain derauler). I looked at shaft drive but that does not allow some of the folding options required. The final design is an interesting one which by all of my reading will be very rideable, even with the smaller wheels that I have selected.
Collapsable, carryable pedal power is the first part of a plan that anticipates a move to less reliable motive fuels, and a greater reliance on mixed mode travel.
And there’s the problem. You can build a huge project home for $300K. An architect-designed solar-passive, green home with the same floor area might cost you twice that. The average punter isn’t gonna put themselves in debt for an extra $300K just to save $100/quarter on energy bills.
We really need to get the project home builders designing better houses and using better insulation, glazing, heating and cooling, but there’s no incentive.
As I’ve said many times here before, governments aren’t prepared to punish us for using more energy (and they’re certainly not going to regulate the supremely-powerful construction sector into submission) so we have to use carrots. The recent stimulus packages were a massive wasted opportunity to engineer a cleantech investment bubble in Australia.
From above: “….what did you know, and what did you do then, Grandad?”
I’m a grandad.
And the double-barrelled question above is a very good one.
I know we are in deep s..t, getting deeper.
And that we are not doing enough about it.
That’s bleeding obvious.
Its the second half of the question that has me stumped, sort of.
I do what I can.
For years I [that is really 'we', friends and rellies involved] planted native trees about [15,000 with a 10% success rate] on our property.
The grandkids have helped.
So about 100 acres is a little better than it was previously.
But then we looked out at the land around us, we live on the Murray and front about 3000 acres in total, and in the last few years have seen that land killed because of the stupidity, greed and selfishness that characterises the land use of that river system.
And quite frankly its bloody depressing.
We have slogged our guts out to try and improve a few acres and along the river over-irrigation is killing millions [?] of acres.
I was involved for years in a govt funded NGO environmental group that coordinates regional land improvement programmes and the like.
I left because it was largely, and to some extent deliberately, not efficient at achieving its nicely worded aims.
Lots of talk. Not much done.
I sat at a meeting one night and wondered what we were really achieving and how much less would be achieved if I left, or get done if I stayed.
And I concluded that I was making no difference and that it was really mainly just window dressing.
I do a few other things, such as support the Greens politically, you know, leaflet, staff polling booths that sort of thing. Type stuff at places like this.
But that doesn’t seem to make much difference really does it?
So I dunno.
What can I do?
Cos we have to do something.
“What did you do Grampa Kev?”
“Let me just say…”
One could say that Carbon Capture Storage has already been perfected, with Parliament House being the Proof of Concept, with it being almost fully captured by Carbon dioxide polluting interests.
My point is that action NOW (according to the article leading this thread) is already too late.
So it’s not what politicians and scientists are doing NOW that’s important (or though it might be to people living fifty years from now).
Action needed to be taken ten years ago.
What have the scientists – who knew that then – been doing in that time? Leaving it all up to the pollies?
I don’t think saying to the grandkids “I published an article in New Scientist in 1998 saying all this was going to happen and just look, I was right!” is really going to cut the mustard.
Hannah’s Dad, you’re already doing it. By talking openly, publicly, impromptly, and especially embarrasingly about environmental issues, you are doing the hard yards towards solving the problem. Because until every one is talking about this together, at the same time, government will not change. I thought that we were at that point at the last election. Apparently not. So keep talking. We have to keep it up until there is no option for government but to abandon the deception.
I think that you are heaping a lot on individual scientists there, Mehitabel. Science has been working to prove beyond doubt that there is a prcoess under way that puts humanity in harms way by its own actions. This process came to a head wth the IPCC study of ALL of the evidence and making a judgement that there is an undeniable need to act against those human sctivities that exacerbate tha problem of climate change.
This was the point from which those who ignore the warnings are acting against the interests of all of animal kind. And this is the point that Rudd should consider very carefully. He is still a young man, and will be alive to see the consequences of his foolish coal consuming behaviour. And will be alive long enough to be punished appropriately by the surviving international community.
BilB @ 27
You are in for an uphill battle. I am sure I read somewhere recently that skepticism had increased in recent times in much of the west. Most of the developing world has barely heard of it, and those that have will find it almost impossible to convince their fellow citizens that they need to stay poor to save the world.
Thats what I thought BilB, about ‘doing my bit’ and the ’07 thingy.
But it’s not working is it?
I’m really thinking something like Lefty E’s #3 and #4 at 11 above are what is required.
Danny @ 13, Doug Cameron was insisting that everyone bleed for the cause – bosses with their ‘stranded assets’, workers, shareholders, the lot. The old union warhorse especially enjoyed giving stick to the bosses of large resource companies from a position of power, until you realised that he’s merely a senator and the ‘government’ is something else.
28 Look, I realise I’m being a tad over the top, but what you’re saying, BilB, points to part of the problem – by the time scientists had worked out that there was a consensus position, it was already too late to act.
Notice that most posters here are still talking about upcoming actions when the leading article is saying that all of this is too late anyway.
I’ve been working on the peripheries of climate science for at least five years now. The scientists I work with don’t do media – it’s so degrading – and won’t give politicians advice on policy – that’s not their job.
So where are people going to get their information? And how are politicians supposed to understand the urgency, if the scientists they’ve been talking to won’t take policy positions?
(“I really should tell the Premier to stop mining coal, but I don’t know if I’ll have the courage. It’ll just upset him” – almost direct quote)
“Lefty, it’s the Chinese who really scare me. How are you going to get at them?”
.
You have said it before and I’ve agreed with you before but this point needs to be restated and repeated so often that we will all look like cranks.
Hopefully the GFC will slow down the industrialisation of the western provinces a bit but from what I have read the chinese governments- central and provincial and it’s web of companies plan on burning more coal than ever before to provide the energy for the move of 100s of MILLIONs from rural subsistence to grinding , polluted urban wage slavery.Progress at it’s most glorious.
Nature is viewed in such a different way – in Hong Kong it is source of irritation. The humidity is debilitating so all the houses and offices have aircon all the time.Not enough land? Fill in the sea , build malls and shops which allow you to avoid the exterior and nature is no longer a hassle.
It’s hard to know if they are just way ahead of the trend sometimes – maybe we will all end up having to “interiorise” our lifes?
At the same time I have tremendous sympathy for the efforts being made to educate and feed the same 100′s of MILLIONS that have lead quietly desperate lives hoping the future will be better for the children to come. What a sad paradox .
The only point I’d like readers to think about is the idea we need to get “at ” the chinese . For all sorts of profound historical and cultural reasons this won’t ever work- it has to be co-operative and gentle , a shared understanding .Then we need to think just how comfortable will we be dealing with a such a totalitarian mind set? Some think our political system isn’t up the tasks ahead but just what actions will we tolerate – think of force movements , population control measures and the like that can all be spun as being for the greater good.
With regard to Lefty E’s questions , I’ve already started apologising to my children but they aren’t happy at all. Each apology is met a glum countenance and soon after a request for lots of money!
Jsut chipping in two cents about green buildings:
Current regulation focuses on operational energy and ignores embodied energy.
So it isn’t surprising that the trend in house construction at the moment is to build brick and concrete bunkers that have good thermal properties and reduce heating and cooling bills, but entail more energy use in construction (I would think that cost of construction is a very coarse proxy for embodied energy).
On top of that, there is no discounting of energy consumption in the greenhouse accounting: what is worse, using 1000 units of energy gradually over 50 years? or using 1000 units of energy right now in one big hit?
Given that (hopefully) energy supply will get greener, i would think that using 1000 units of energy now is worse for greenhouse that using it gradually.
So that means that building high embodied energy homes with better thermal properties and low operational energy consumption might not be a very good idea. Or maybe there is a bowed curve: improving thermal standards is good for greenhouse to a point, beyond which more stringent standards make things worse by increasing embodied energy.
But that is what we are doing – ignoring embodied energy and increasing thermal standards.
We can’t even get the simple stuff like energy efficiency right, and in fact we haven’t even set up an appropriate measurement apparatus to decide what right is. I’m trying not to, but i’m swayed by the ‘its already too late’ argument.
what we need is a pandemic to wipe out about half of the worlds population. Preferably we need this pandemic to take immediate effect in wealthy countries where people like to do energy intensive things like flying to poorer countries to have cheap holidays.
On green housing – built our first green house in 1984. North facing, fully insulated. Cheap as chips.
Built our second one in 1989. Same kind of deal.
Commenced our third one in 1990 (I know, a bit of a frenzy happening there). Rammed earth, double glazing, concrete floor (heat bank), water tank, etc. Cheap as chips – used local materials, did our own double glazing, etc. Not sure where all the extra expense comes in, I think it cost $40 000 all up (we did the labour).
Ramming earth is labour intensive, but not energy intensive.
Orientating the house to face north, fully insulating it and making sure there are no westward facing windows are all minimal expense items but make major differences in the house’s efficiency.
33
This sort of attitude is exactly why they will ignore you. You obviously have never seen rural poverty. ‘grinding , polluted urban wage slavery” is a big step up for them. You have obviously never seen any of the now millions of Chinese holidaying throughout the rest of Asia and Europe who seem to have escaped that grinding slavery as well. They understand what many in the west have totally forgotten – poverty sucks big time. You may or may not be successful in sending the rich west broke but all you will be doing is dooming your children to what they have recently decided to avoid. Your children will hate you for that – and probably ask exactly what role YOU played in that.
BTW: Off topic, but we drove past Lake George the other week. Lots of wind turbines on the distant hills. Are they all broken or something? Because none of them we moving an inch. On the way back, two days later, the same. Not one.
I imagine the thousands of families driving past each day.
KIDS: “Wow look – windmills – our future energy supply!”
Mum and dad smile and look across the lake to where the kids are pointing and then glumly turn to each other.
Mehitabel
I also think you should spread the blame around a little more – to all of us. The ABS recently published the stats on how many people are paying for greenpower – almost nobody apparently. Voting for the Greens ? Buying smaller cars, not flying to overseas holidays ?? etc etc.
I imagine many scientists are forbidden by employment contracts from speaking directly to the mass media.
Mehitabel,
The need is not to just stop using coal right this minute. It is to dynamically start the process of winding back the use of coal. And that is not as hard as it might seem. Many of NSW coal power stations are up for renewal now. They can continue for some time but planning their replacement is imminent. That simply has to be a renewable commiment rather than a coal powered one. The process of windback will be a progressive one over a 30 year period.
If you were talking about Nathan Reese, then I would have thought that he would be open to that sort of advice. If you were talking about Peter Beaty then I suspect that he got that advice, realised that he had made a massive mistake in his backing of coal and resigned. If you were talking about Victoria then the issue is not so clear cut as Victoria is not in the solar optimal belt nor over geothermal hot spots. So Victoria has to look to the federal government for guidence on how to proceed, as they would need to place their investment in another state and that provides a number of problems which would require a federally involved mechanism to provide compensation. For SA it is simply a matter of sinking some wells and sucking up that steam. For WA the complication is one of distance, but considering how much WA means to Australia from a minerals point of view Canberra should not think twice about supplying the high voltage direct current power lines to move the power around.
So your friend does not need to give advice so much as promote discussion. And for anyone with a premiers ear this should be a natural and accustomed process.
I just read a paper suggesting that emissions were measured in terms of consumption, then China’s 2006 emissions would be about 30% lower than when measured by production. The paper also suggested that the majority of the growth in China’s emissions has been production related.
The problem of getting China to take on targets is a tricky one. Their April 2009 submission to the UNFCCC called on all developed countries to take on net emission reductions of at least 40%. If developed countries were willing to do that then getting China to accept targets would be much easier. I doubt that will happen in the near future however.
I think that one thing needed for the Copenhagen agreement is some mechanism by which 2020 targets can be tightened.
Is this it?
http://www.rpv.com.au/
It says the windfarm will be operational “by mid 2009″. So presumably it’s not quite there yet.
murph the surf said:
“Hopefully the GFC will slow down the industrialisation of the western provinces a bit”
.
You obviously don’t live there or live in real poverty. Either that or you’re no better than a colonialist that thinks the people there deserve to live in poverty whilst you live in comparative luxury.
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“Nature is viewed in such a different way – in Hong Kong it is source of irritation”
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Another weird claim. Who uses more energy per person — People in HK or Aus? Which country do only a tiny percentage of the population own cars? Similarly, try comparing urban sprawl in, say, Brisbane, versus the 70/30 split of natural versus urban areas in HK. Who’s worse on any tangible measure? Are people in Brisbane going to live in the same area as people in HK if the population gets to 7 million or are we just going to see urban sprawl like every other Australian city? I know where my bets lie.
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“At the same time I have tremendous sympathy”
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Obviously so, that’s presumably why you hope they stay poor.
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“The only point I’d like readers to think about is the idea we need to get “at ” the chinese”
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Until Australians think (and act) in their own backyard, I really doubt the Chinese are going to care what Australians say or think, and nor do I really see any reason why they should.
I doubt you could get a brick dunny built for $40K in Sydney these days.
Besides its not latte-sipping inner city greens, or DIY home builders that need to change, its the big project home builder who build the vast majority of new homes in Australia.
Here’s a thought, instead of Rudd handing money to vendors via the First Home Owners Boost, why doesn’t he give builders $21K to spend on insulation, better glazing, more efficient heating and cooling etc?
You know it makes sense.
The Chinese are issuing vouchers for washers and dryers at the moment to stimulate domestic demand, because the Yanks and Euros have stopped buying.
Free clothes dryers for a billion people. Now there’s a scary thought.
Like Monbiot said: Its over.
Brett @ 41
Yes that’s it. I take my minor snark back on that one!
Thanks for the info.
On building standards, have a look at this one in Portland, VIC – 8.3 stars!
http://www.energised.com.au/projects_aquarius8.asp
Peter: I don’t know whether you’ve been around to read the old debates, but we’ve discussed nuclear power fairly extensively. I’m a supporter on the basis that nuclear waste is an infinitesimally small problem compared to greenhouse gases.
The thorium fuel cycle sounds great in principle. However, like all these things, lots of ideas sound great on paper; until we actually build a prototype or two (and that’s something that somebody should be doing) I wouldn’t get too excited.
There’s any number of advanced reactor designs around, by the way. Pebble-bed reactors. The IFR. Hydride reactors. Accelerator-driven systems. Even miniaturized versions of the standard light-water reactor. That they’re not all being pursued with vigor is a shame.
HD30,
For me the only proper action for Australia is to create an arms length from government Environmental Authority manned by scientists, engineers, software people, economists, and (ugh) policy making legal people. Such an authority would operate independently and establish the operating parameters of the country from an environmental safety point of view. Reserve Bank style. This authority would work in concert with similar bodies in various other key countries, and the UN.
Robert @ 47
Agree on all points. It’s a crying shame that the nuclear debate was poisoned years ago with a lot of misinformation. Though I am a bit of a climate skeptic I fully support the move to cleaner ( reliable!! ) energy. I can’t help feeling that scary scenarios is the wrong way to go about that.
Steven Schneiders “So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” statement probably didn’t help even though I know that wasn’t the full context of his message.
Hanson’s hockey stick debacle and his refusal to hand out his data to Steve MacKintyre until virtually forced to, was also a disgrace. Steve also recently requested some data from an article by well known climate scientists and after quite a bit of stonewalling was told the original data was deleted! That doesn’t inspire confidence. Nor does with the shocking state of many temperature sensing sites, and a ‘we can fix that in software’ attitude.
I also have to say I get different messages from the same scientists!
So for years now I have been running the ‘we don’t need to close down all coal but reduce our dependence on it’ argument.
Then the scientist who taught me all about this tells me that we should cut down all coal stations immediately!!
If I’m confused, no wonder the pollies are…
(and the scientist got the Premier’s ear in the first place because I did the jumping up and down….)
Carbonsink: “The Chinese are issuing vouchers for washers and dryers at the moment to stimulate domestic demand, because the Yanks and Euros have stopped buying.”
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Yet another “how bad the Chinese are for doing exactly what we do and wanting exactly what we have” comment. I’ll bet the amount of consumer junk bought per person based on the Chinese stimulus package is far less than that from the Australian $900 one.
Yawn, Peter – you’re repeating tired old talking points that have long been discredited. Go digging through the archives of Tim Lambert’s blog to see how each of these “facts” all turned out be non-facts.
Next you’ll be telling us that all those climate scientists Robert was talking to were all lying through their teeth and feigning despair in order to get more funding.
Facts are stubborn things. Mate, isn’t it past time to admit that in this particular case the coalition of dirty f***ing hippies and statist libruls turned out to be scientifically correct, while the coalition of right wing blogs and astroturf industry fronts turned out to be full of dishonest crap?
I don’t blame the Chinese for wanting what we have, but the govt subsidising clothes dryers is insane, perhaps evil.
Definitely. Its a tragedy that we missed an opportunity to stimulate the cleantech sector in Australia. Instead we handed it to middle class families who either paid down debt or splurged on imported “consumer junk”.
Good on you, Mehitabel, for jumping up and down. I’m all in favour of an empassioned argument. The scientist was, of course, right. We should shut down all coal powered stations now. Reality check on power line 1!!! That is not going to happen, so the best we can realistically work towards is a staged shutdown. Hang on, my Rudd phone is ringing…..what’s that?….. over your dead body Mr Prime Minister????…Oh, well thankyou for your input.
By the way, your house projects sound very exciting. That was a lot of building that you did all those years ago. It would have been very satisfying to live in a house of your own construction, particualrly one built to be efficient.
We can’t shut down coal-fired power stations overnight, but we could shut down the smelters with relatively little economic impact … well, compared to not having electricity anyway.
Does anyone know how many people are employed at the smelters and what economic contribution they make?
derrida derider @ 52
Got out of the wrong side of the bed today eh? I’ve already said I support the move to clean, reliable power, so it matters little if I am skeptical. Writing an article in support of something, then immediately destroying the data that made your case, is not very scientific. I am sorry you cannot see that. You may be surprised that Steve McKintyre is NOT a skeptic – he’s quite sure something is going on.
“Instead we handed it to middle class families who either paid down debt or splurged on imported “consumer junk”.
We saved ours. Will buy lots of stuff – investments mainly – after the deflation has hit.
at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I present the Climate Futures Bill 2007
See John Kaye’s closing speech for a good summary of the depth of denial in both major parties.
Peter @ 49, I’ve just come in and haven’t read the whole thread, but really, how can we have any confidence in you?! In the space of one paragraph you’ve muddled up a whole heap of things. The ‘hockey stick debacle’ wasn’t a debacle, the graph of temperatures quoted by reputable sources for the Northern Hemisphere for the last 1000 years looks suspiciously like a hockey stick, except for the one in the IPCC A4R report, which looks like an ice pick.
And it was Michael Mann’s, with colleagues, not Hansen’s (note the spelling).
The data thing you refer to was, I think, a kerfuffle about whether NASA GISS had changed the highest temp year from 1998 to 1934. Nominally they did, but statistically speaking nothing changed, because before and after when you took the margin for error into account the temperatures were the same both times. That was supposed to be the end of AGW as we know it, but they were talking about effectively nothing and a nothing that related to 2% of the planet’s surface, where there happened to be a warm patch in the 1930s.
Steve McIntyre (note the spelling) makes a lot of fuss about things that are not all that important IMHO.
Yes you are quite right about the names. Not the data thing though. More recent.
“Does anyone know how many people are employed at the smelters and what economic contribution they make?”
If you’re talking about aluminium smelting, it employs 5,500 people and contributes 0.1% of GDP.
It makes up 6% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.
It gets $250 million a year in cheap electricity subsidies.
https://www.tai.org.au/file.php?file=DP44.pdf
Isn’t George Monbiot a British version of Robert Manne? Why are we even discussing what he thinks?
I’m an average ‘joe blow’ and I think most of the people who write the stuff on this blog must live on a different planet to me. It is a load of garbage. There is one simple fact – if you want clean energy and you want to retain your existing lifestyle then you must go nuclear.
If you want to live like a cave man then go ahead but I don’t.
I have heard all the scary stories for years now and not one has come to fruition. The junk that has been peddled here is just more scary stories. Let’s hope the majority catch on before people such as yourselves ruin our economy and our way of life.
You are a bunch of self serving cranks.
Funny you admitted to being a bit of a climate skeptic, Peter – On reading your first comment, my immediate thought was that I don’t tend to take seriously people who are skeptical about climate change but enthusiastic for nuclear energy. Given that nukes (like renewables) are vastly more expensive than coal power, and come with a set of problems of their own (which, although they have been exaggerated, are not negligible) it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to adopt them unless there’s a serious problem with coal fired power (i.e. climate change).
That said, I agree with Robert that they have to be kept on the table as an option, although there are such significant opportunities for reducing emissions in the short term through efficiency, substituting gas for coal and increasing the renewables contribution to the grid that in my view, we don’t need to make a decision yet that nukes are required in Australia. But for the countries that have already adopted nuclear energy, expanding it is a no-brainer, since they’ve already got the risks.
But like a lot of the commenters on this thread, I’m leaning more and more to what Lefty E said.
Meh, dont waste your time with denialists: they’re either cranks, idiots, or cheap cash-for-comment whores. There’s no ‘respectable’ ones left.
Yeah, Im for it – we symbolically occupy the most polluting site of each country if Copenhagen doesn’t deliver the scientific minima for hope.
They have to learn: They are not ‘pragmatic’ – they’re hopelessly out-of-date romantics in love with an unsustainable past – one with no future.
They are not ‘defending jobs’ – they are defending dead-end industries subsidized to the hilt by endlessly passing clean-up costs to the public. Couldnt stand on their own two feet without it. Stop rewarding failure. Its over for this tech.
Steam train drivers and scythe-men all lost their jobs too – boo-hoo, its called progress. Get over it.
They are not “sensibly balancing x and y ..bler bler” – they’re fiddling while Rome burns – not because you’re right, or that there’s even any doubt – but because they’re just too scared to face facts, and would rather believe comforting lies.
No, the future of this debate doesn’t lie with them – I suspect it lies with convincing those who do understand that our govt’s just arent up to it – not wihtout a big mass-movement booting humiliating them every day from dawn till dusk with clever and highly inconvenient non-violent protests.
Lefty – what world do you live in. I am fascinated – it is certainly very different to the real world I live in. >>>>> highly inconvenient non-violent protests. Bring it on and see what real people do back. You are obviously a loser.
What – are they gonna biff me, Barge? I’ll press assault charges. See how “real” that feels!
The coppers might arrest me, sure. that’s a price to pay.
Of course, it’ll hard to arrest 5000 people. Or 10,000.
Forty years ago, Australian states legislated the Environmental Protection Act. The object: “To provide for an Environmental Protection Authority, for the prevention, control and abatement of pollution and environmental harm, for the conservation, preservation, protection, enhancement and management of the environment and matters incidental to or connected with the foregoing.”
For forty years the Act has been manipulated, abused, ignored and corrupted. The “Polluter Pays” principle, written into the preamble is a farce. The Departments of environment have been held captive by the big end of town. They continue to protect the big polluters – not the environment. On community appeals against the pollution, ecological desecration and human health impacts wrought by the culprits, Departments of Environment defend the polluter – not the environment or taxpayers. Billions of dollars have been spent to prop up these departments.
Why are we not demanding that the current legislation be enforced? Why are we not asking why limits to carbon emissions are excluded from the conditions of licence? Why isn’t yet mandatory for polluters to implement scrubbers and pollution prevention measures to mitigate their stack emissions? And without conditions in a licence, the Act is unenforceable and that’s the way senior bureaucrats and industry plan to keep it.
When are we going to charge state and federal governments with crimes against humanity? A citizens’ revolt is well overdue but the sheeple remain asleep at the wheel. Why?
Whoops I forgot……it’s the economy stoopid!
It’s what it’s going to take Lefty E. You’re writing really well at the moment.
What I find most baffling is why we (as in our government) aren’t paying more attention to Obama’s radical shift sharply in the opposite direction to Dubya on climate. Is it too much to ask that our government is smart enough to learn something from Obama’s far more ambitious climate change domestic program – not to mention his pragmatic and welcome grasp of the fact that the solution to the GFC is the same as that for climate change. Could we at least just ‘me too’ with the USA on policy in this area, just like we did in welching on attending the anti-racism conference?
Here’s the words of his Energy Secretary, Nobel Prize winning Steven Chu, announcing $193 million USD for renewable energy R&D:
“The task is clear: To renew the U.S. economy, respond to global climate change, foster the nation’s energy security, and help provide the energy necessary to sustainably power global development, America must transform its outdated energy policy. Innovation and its commercialization must move to the center of energy system reform. The nation must move urgently to develop and harness a portfolio of clean energy sources that are affordable enough to deploy on a mass scale throughout the U.S. and the world. In short, we must make clean energy cheap.
The more I read of what the Obama administration is implementing and how clearly they tie the solution of the GCD and CC together, the more I feel my country is profoundly stupid, in particular it’s leadership. But we have to take responsibility for who we elect too. And we might just be forced to do so in the way Lefty E describes.
gah that should be GFC last para.
Aha! Someone sees the light!
Making dirty energy expensive just isn’t going to happen, so we need to make cleantech cheap.
“The more I read of what the Obama administration is implementing and how clearly they tie the solution of the GFC and CC together” – right on, Myriad.
Lots of jobs, new tertiary industry, and opportunities going begging. I call that a failure of political and economic leadership. Australia is at risk of being stranded nowhere, with no mates on this issue.
Biff away, Bargey! show us all how that ‘peaceful’ thing works. I’ve dealt with developers’ goons before, and you’re not even in their ballpark, sunshine
And I got bigger fish to fry….
#35
“what we need is a pandemic to wipe out about half of the worlds population. Preferably we need this pandemic to take immediate effect in wealthy countries where people like to do energy intensive things like flying to poorer countries to have cheap holidays.”
That comment really says it all for the doomsayers. Its not the first like comment that I have seen on threads like this. The poster is wishing for half the world’s population to perish. He/she will obviously not be in that unfortunate half or he/she would have committed suicide by now.
He/she then slags those in wealthy countries that fly to poorer countries to have cheap holidays.
This from the mob who flew in their thousands to Bali to complain about how emissions were going to destroy the planet. The hypocrisy is staggering by any measure.
Now that you have accepted that the game is over maybe you will now go away quietly and allow the rest of us to live our lives without your meddling and interference.
Sorry for getting up Lefty on this blog but I just can’t believe the garbage that is written here. It’s like walking in on a left wing wank. Nobody is challenging anybody else’s ideas. Somebody writes some crap and everybody has a good wank about it. Doesn’t anybody think about the consequences of what they are advocating on real people in a real world. It just seems like you are talking about a theoretical world. Don’t you question anything – are you true believers without even a second of thought.
You complain that your ideas don’t get through to the average person – maybe you need to understand why. Your ideas are so far left that they will never resonate with the average person. Most people have families, need a job and want to live a decent life.
Getting up developers is like pissing in a wet suit – warm feeling but nobody notices. The problem you have is that very few people believe your far left policies. If you want anything to happen then you have to argue your case. Leftie’s hard nosed attitude will never succeed (it probably makes him feel like a martyr but that’s about all it achieves).
OK barge, you’ve convinced me maaaaate. All we need to do is ignore all the scientists, shit, they’re only experts, and everything will be OK.
We’ll just call everyone who dares to disagree with us wankers, that’ll show them and just continue as normal.
Have any kidies do you barge? Shit mate, who cares if they have an habitable world to live in.
adrian – I have not been convinced by “your” selected scientists. Open your mind old son. There are more ideas out there then exist on this left wing blog. As I have experienced – everything that is written here is not published – only the selected material.
There is no ‘decent life’ if temperature rise 4 degrees Barge.
If you dont like hearing that – well…sorry. But I just dont give a shit.
>>There is no ‘decent life’ if temperature rise 4 degrees Barge.
Just by saying it though Leftie doesn’t make it a fact. That’s what you have to understand.
I saw QandA last night, well some of it before turning it off – Goward trying to explain how models was invented by science last week and it’s early days and then Joyce ranted on behalf of his coal mates something about planet cooling as I hit the off switch.
I’m afraid no-ones giong to take notice until something does grab them
I was thinking, that it took a Martin on the telly all dressed up in his nice uniform to pretty much cark it on telly over a period of 6 months before we got the message that asbestos wasn’t the greatest shit the mine owners make it out to be.
So pretty uniform and dead person moved onto an idea of digging up James Cook and may be a few of the crew members of his 3rd voyage and using the Endeavour replica, sail the North West Passage summer next year. Maybe even picking up the 20,000 pound reward the original voyage was going for. Gruesome enough for the veg heads to follow? Maybe convince some of the “I don’t know what’s going on” crowd? Or galvanise some of the pollies who should know better to do something?
Where on earth has Prue Goward been? I remember being in a tutorial on modelling in The Practice of History, of all things, in my honours year in 1982. And that was nearly 30 years ago. And I imagine they were being used some time before then. One would imagine modellers have got a fair idea of what they’re doing by now so long as it isn’t garbage in, garbage out. And that includes climate change modelling.
Brian,
thanks for posting this asap, because it was extremely useful. I have a model (originally built in 2004, but deveoped since) tuned on the simple climate model used by the IPCC but with a different structure, which allows somewhat different questions to be asked. So I was able to have a look at Meinhausen et al.’s paper and judge what it suggests. Am busy writing up papers on this very topic so was very interested to pull the Nature paper apart.
The news is not all good. The MM paper had to be very scientific, so they used all climate scenarios. The problem is that the scenarios that gave the odds on coming in under 2C are on the lower half of emissions. These represent a different world to the one we’re on. They also did not distinguish between reference (no climate policy) and policy scenarios. So the whole idea of agency, or risk management, is blended in with do nothing. I think if the analysis was restricted to addressing scenarios based on the real world, rather than many different storylines from the literature, the odds would be worse. I’ve been running these odds on my models so I’m not surprised. Their analytic side (the science) is fine.
This says nothing different to what I’ve said on LP before. We need overshoot scenarios. It will probably get above 2C but if we can continue reducing then it can dip below this. A temporary warming may be ok for the ice sheets, but risks positive feedbacks like methane from permafrost.
I think there are three policy futures
1. Incremental change a la CPRS. This will deliver us a long term future with melted ice sheets etc. We won’t drown this century, but the changes once committed to will be very difficult to reverse. If above 3C by 2100 we’re fucked (this is a highly scientific conclusion)
2. Risk management, social learning and creative destruction a la Schumpeter. Trouble is, this has never been done by design and governance before. I think if carried out well, it offers the greatest amount of success. This is what I’m working on. The current lot of pollies don’t give confidence
3. Emergency management a la Code Red and WWII. This is not likely to happen until the emergency is here (too late), and while it may work, option two done properly would be better.
Want to see if these ideas are communicable (very few people think in terms of option 2 for example), so you lot on LP are some of my guinea pigs for the moment.
Option 2 is bloody hard to get if one’s head space is not there. Most of the world works on option 1, some of the environmental movement now on 3. Fire away.
Peter Wood @ 40 said:
A good point. I did a post last year pointing out that Britain’s emissions looked different when you took account of the industries they’d exported and air travel. I’m hoping to do a post on the Olympic Dam expansion, which raises the same thing. The mining can only be done here and it seems that even the processing is going to be done in China, but the stuff will be consumed largely elsewhere. But it is going to be big enough put a dent in our emissions policies.
mehitabel @ 50, it is probable, I think, that in the space of the past few years many scientists have changed their views about how much coal we can afford to burn. In 2006 when Lovelock’s book The revenge of Gaia came out he was off by himself. Now there is lots of scary stuff out there.
Lefty E @ 67, 10,000 isn’t going to be enough. More like the 100,000+ anti-Vietnam crowds you prollie don’t remember. I think it was Bolivia a while back where everyone banged kitchen saucepans until the president resigned, which eventually he did! Now if we could get 100,000 to sit down in each of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane…
But we won’t, which is why I really like Roger J’s option 2. All the Monbiot thing says is that scientists think danger is unavoidable. So there will be risk. But there is still a path forward and we must take the first step.
I’d be more than happy with a Climate Code Red approach and go into emergency mode. But it needs an early shock the the world power centres can’t ignore. When Philip Sutton was in Brisbane I asked him how we would get China on board. He said that Shanghai is under sea level threat, and they’d get the message. But the latest stuff says that melting ice sheets take about 50 years to have any effect the other side of the equator, so they aren’t really in the front line.
But how do we mobilise Roger’s option 2? I’m wondering whether we shouldn’t get him to flesh it out a bit more and run it as a new post.
A few years ago my wife and I left home on a Saturday morning to meet some friends and rellies in the heart of Adelaide to protest at the yet to occur invasion of Iraq.
We had hopes that a reasonable crowd might turn up and that there would not be an embarassing lack of people which the media could essentially ignore.
We hoped for some thousands, maybe 5-10,000, having helped a bit in the planning for the event we were aware that the organisers were hoping for about 10,000.
Driving into the CBD we noticed that the bus stops seemed to have more than the usual numbers of people waiting at them.
When we got to the city we helped a bit with the organisation and our ute came in handy for transporting stuff to Victoria square.
Which was jam packed.
Absolutely incredible response.
At least a 100,000 people. All willing to give up a Saturday to try and send a message to little Johnny and his mad mates.
Message sent but ignored of course.
Still, it was an amazing turnout, particularly when added to the hundreds of thousands around OZ.
Never underestimate the people of Australia.
As time goes on and the seriousness of global warning becomes too big for the OO, the COALition and their mates to hide from the people action then people will exercise their democratic rights and take to the streets, again, if necessary.
Course it may be too late by then, if, as Brian’s post says, it isn’t already.
hd, I think the Iran thing failed because there simply were not enough people on the streets in the US. I forget the actual numbers, I think it was in the order of about 15 million nationwide, but remember thinking that if there had been 10 times as many, or even 5 times, Bush would have had to take notice.
If LE, you and others want to organise something, I’ll be there, but meanwhile Roger’s option 2 might be a path to follow.
Can I say again, the Monbiot thing doesn’t mean it’s too late, it just means there will be overshooting, and danger, inevitably. But that depends where you put the bar. For myself, I’m not happy with the warming and the climate we’ve got now. When you consider that the full effects will take some time to come through, personally I think we’ve overshot. That doesn’t mean there is no path back to a safe climate though.
“Just by saying it though Leftie doesn’t make it a fact. ”
Yes it does. I have special fact-making powers beyond your understanding.
Send money now!
hello….i’m sorry but….they are already doing it…..it’s call “atmospheric geoengineering”…..chemical trails people….”chemtrails”…..they mix something with the jet fuel…….look in the sky people THEY ARE ALREADY DOING IT
http://www.infowars.com/the-government-is-already-geo-engineering-the-environment/
they are trying to create an artificial sunscreen.
geoengineering it’s REAL, and it’s happening right now
“I don’t blame the Chinese for wanting what we have, but the govt subsidising clothes dryers is insane, perhaps evil.”
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Since essentially every apartment in huge apartment buildings (which is basically what everyone lives in in many parts of China) has a washer/dryer, all this means is that the purchase of these will be brought forward for some, so I don’t see the problem — how else do people get their clothes dry in either high humidity (Southern China) or extreme cold (Northern cold)?
I might point out here that this is exactly the same as Australia, except these are generally put in when building the apartment (and we have very few of these buildings — but big blocks of land are hardly better), and Australians certainly arn’t willing to get rid of these for the sake of the climate. So obviously people think that having a washer/dryer (and car, big house, etc.), are such an essential part of life, global warming can take a back seat (even if they either ignorantly or hypocritically profess to wanting to stop it). Given this, I don’t see how people can complain or ask the rest of the world not to have what are obviously (based on people’s behavior) essentials. If other governments subsidize crazy things — so what — the Australian government subsidizes the car industry, and what could be worse than that? This is why Australians should concentrate on inventing new energy sources and not whine about other nations doing things.
I find it interesting that most of the posters on this blog are still concentrating on mitigation, despite the lead article basically saying that horse has left the stable.
I’ve found this often discussing climate change — people will chat happily about mitigation and what should be done (usually by others) but as soon as you say that, no matter what steps are taken now, the climate is going to change regardless and we need to adapt to this, everyone goes all quiet and starts shuffling their feet.
Some start attacking you.
It’s as if you said you didn’t believe in climate change at all.
This experience is not unique to me – my climate change scientist friends report the same response.
Why is adaption such a dirty word? Are people still in denial about the inevitability of climate change and want to believe that all they have to do is switch off a few lights and take the train to work for things to go back to normal?
Yes, mitigation is important if we don’t want things to continue to deteriorate (in about twenty years time). But adaption is crucial, because climate change is happening now, yet noone seems to want to discuss it.
Roger Jones @ 81,
Roger, what does cloud cover do at the various temperature rises? Is there a point where solar power becomes compromised as atmospheric moisture increases?
The point is, not everyone in apartments in China have clothes dryers already, so its creating new demand for energy, not just bringing forward demand for appliances.
Hang them outside on the balcony, like people have been doing for centuries. I always hang clothes out. Its not like hanging out clothes is somehow denying the Chinese a western decadent lifestyle!
I couldn’t agree more on Australians investing more in cleantech (we have a huge comparative advantage in solar for example — lots of space, lots of sun) but why should that preclude me from pointing out really bad policy in other countries?
P.S. Its not hard to get 100,000 to protest against a government taking us to war. Its near impossible to get 100,000 to protest for making energy prices higher in the midst of a serious recession.
P.P.S. People, don’t engage the denialists.
mehitabel@88
Adaption? Do you mean build 100m sea walls? Live in floating nuclear powered domes on the surface of the green weed sea? Graft our brains into the bodies of specially bred giant cockroaches? Cover the deserts with reflective bobbles? Build a Dyson sphere?
What exactly?
Huggy
mehitabel @ 88, an interesting comment about adaptation. I’ll have to think about it and observe, but I wasn’t sensitive to such attacks. It’s just that mitigation theoretically renders adaptation unnecessary, but you’re right, there has to be adaptation now. Like the future official Murray-Darling plans are mostly about making irrigation more efficient, not preserving a viable river when there is next to no water.
dk.au’s point @ 5 is pertinent.
But when you are looking at a 4C world (don’t miss this image), or the kind of scenarios outlined by Jo Romm at Climate Progress, adaptation takes on a different dimension. It has to deal with humane ways of getting world population down and horrendous problems of people movement, security and state failure.
Once you comprehend these possibilities, and the risks in current policies of them being realised, the focus properly moves back to mitigation.
How anyone in South Australia can be a climate change denier after the last two summers we’ve had here is beyond my reckoning.
“Its near impossible to get 100,000 to protest for making energy prices higher in the midst of a serious recession.”
.
I think that’s the wrong assumption. If the trillion in the US that got spent on bailing out bankers had been spent on alternative energy, at 10 billion a power plant, that’s 100 power plants (some of which would have replaced others that needed decommissioning anyway). Clean energy would be cheap and plentiful, and no-one would need to deal with failed States anymore. Even if part was spent on clean energy, it would have brought energy prices down. No doubt that would raise demand somewhat, but much more energy would then be from clean sources.
Even in Australia, a similar pattern exists. People seem far keener on spending money on faster broadband than clean energy — 50 billion would have gone miles (say, a big clean energy plant in QLD, NSW and VIC.).
So I think the real problem is not that people care about higher energy prices — it’s that people don’t care about global warming since most will be dead before it gets too bad.
Brian92,
That 4 deg C map is a good reminder of what this is all about. Even if only partly true people are not registering that we are heading towards a total collapse of our industrial system. Industry is so interdependent on so many other parts working harmoniously that a shutdown of just 5% of businesses in electronic component manufacturing would trigger a rolling shutdown first of all machinery using electronic components (and that is nearly every single one of them) which would lead to massive short supply of components for just about every piece of equipment that we take for granted. This would coincide with increased military action by a number of countries which would in itself lead to governments requisitioning key manufacturing structures, causing further shortages of productive capacity. And all of that is hoping that some idiot does not set off an atomic bomb destroying scarce land or infrastructure.
The problem with all of this is that the Barge’s will not believe this to be a possibility until it is a reality, at which point it is way past too late to change. It is at the point now where you are advised to start contemplating in which hemisphere you want to set your family seat for your children and grand children. Travel from one hemisphere to the other may in 60 years be very difficult.
Well if it ever got really serious, I guess we could do what they did in WW2 – ration petrol. Took a month or so because it was paper based – so I suppose a computer based system might take a year or so. Nonetheless, one of the highest sources of carbon emissions was reduced in less than a year.
Do it over five years alongside a massive public transport build-up, and there you go. Almost painless really. (Oh no! I’d have to WALK for ten minutes to the tram – gasp shock horror!)
Similarly, IF it ever got serious, then we could stop subsidising people spawning little carbon footprinters – heck there’s six billion of us all over the planet. (But gasp, it’s my right to push out as many small consumers as I want, AND the Government and industry should subsidise me – and not even consider that in carbon policy).
However, I figure that while most people want everyone else to do something about it and motor deities and having little carbon polluters are no-go zones, nothing much will happen. People can blow as much wind about how they believe in AGW as they like – but until people on the ground actually start giving up their cars and kids and power hungry knick knacks (whoever heard of a yard broom when one can get a petrol powered blower for example?), and stop blaming industry or nasty coal lobby groups, nothing but nothing will change.
Probably the best strategy is the Government’s at the moment. Draw the process out for so long that there will be no investment in power generation of any sort, and let supply shortages and the need to retire elderly power stations on their last legs do the trick. Faced with constant brownouts people will find ways to economise on power. It’s all we have at the moment.
Nope – as a society we are NOT serious.
Oh, and since even the most optimistic estimates of fossil fuel stocks are a small proportion of recorded history, one does not even have to believe in AGW to work out that reducing our use of fossil fuels is a good idea. Skeptics or not, people should be conserving HARD.
Cf Brent’s comment @ 93. I guess the problem is that there is still a chance that the big dry in southern Australia is part of an extended drought or is it part of a new pattern? But when you consider that Mike Young, Adelaide climate scientist, came back fro a conference earlier this year and reported the same pattern world-wide (SW USA and Spain were the ones he mentioned) AND it fits in with climate forecasts associated with the expanding tropics and other general features of world climate change, plus things like the increase in number and intensity of wildfires, retreating glaciers everywhere, a turtle in North Queensland running out of habitat, crocodiles appearing in the Burnett (that’s the Bundaberg hinterland, for those who don’t know, well south of Rockhampton) ice shelves collapsing etc etc.
I guess the problem is that none of these things is big enough and clear enough in itself to penetrate the minds of the power elites so that they feel the urgency in their gut’s. For Wong, Garrett and Rudd, it is still an intellectual challenge to be tackled steady as she goes by steering a middle path. The problem is that one side of their middle path is the greenhouse mafia, the denialists/delusionists, and those who say that whatever Australia does we are so small it doesn’t matter.
At the Senate C’tee the other day, the denialists sat to the right of the chair on the panel, and many of the witnesses/presenters were spruiking, we are too small, so why shoot ourselves in the foot.
Quiggin made a comment about denialists being more effective for longer here than in Britain, and Boswell sort of roared at him, “That’s outrageous” and told him to get back inside his economist box.
I doubt if there really is an adaptation strategy to 4C rise that could be achieved without a Global Fascist Dictatorship, given the mass consciousness that prevails at this time. We let the US rape and pillage in Iraq, we are doing the same in Afghanistan. With 4C rise we are going to have at least 100 million displaced persons on our very doorstep. Another few billion or so Globally
There is no fucking adaptation strategy – full fucking stop. Get that through your heads you lot.
BTW on a lighter note:
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/endless.htm
We can now have our very own thorium reactor in our refrigerator
Huggy
Marks@96: “whoever heard of a yard broom when one can get a petrol powered blower for example?), “
Never saw these things in the UK (probably because of the much higher fuel cost); then I moved here in 1994, and they were everywhere. How stupid, pointless, noisy, and wastefully emissive can you get? I am amazed that they are legal, and don’t think that they should be.
Brooms and rakes work, people, and are far less damaging.
The idea of failed states on climate change issues also gets at the poor tools we have in terms of international governance.
Obama is right – you could build a whole new wave of economic boom on clean energy investment. It wouldn’t worry me if every existing coal miner in the country was retrained in new energy tech jobs, on full wages.
Amortiser @ 73…in your search to be indignant about something, you really seem to have misinterpreted my comment. oh well.
LeftyE@100
Yes you could. But what will the incumbents say? Will they be like the forestry workers in Tazzie who having the most golden opportunity to leverage themselves into really cushy environmental jobs in return for giving up on forest destruction turned to bashing greenies?
Will the coal mine owners relinquish their private property ? Will the rentiers and parasites give up?
Nothing short of a social revolution will turn things around. Maybe I should join the Trots – maybe not while I have a vestige of sanity left.
Huggy
andyc @ 99
People buy blowers instead of rakes to save time, so they can do other things. Just like people use driers etc. That’s why they are called labour saving devices.
You should visit a poor country sometime and watch women pounding rocks on the side of the road to make gravel for the new road base. They work all day and end up with a tiny pile of gravel which they then sell. For maybe 10 cents.
oh and in case I DO need to clarify, I was not wishing that half the world’s population will be wiped out by a global pandemic, I was merely musing about the amount of media the flu was getting given that it seems to be a global problem that actually has a solution ie: anti-viral medication, compared with a global problem in which a significant number of people believe the solution is not something we should impose on society because we will suffer economically. Those people seem to believe that if we ignore it, and continue down the same path we have been following, there wont be a human toll. [??]
Brian,
I don’t think people care too much at all for the denialists anymore (and that’s probably true to a far greater extent outside Australia and the US — try asking some of your Euro friends about attitudes to denialists in placing like France). They remind of creationists — fairly few in number, but they create a lot of noise. At least in rich countries like Australia, I think the problem is basically the same as many public health ones — many people simply don’t care about events in the unknown future and nor are they willing to do anything to stop them, even if they know there is reasonable risk in their behavior and even if they are relatively easy to fix. That’s of course why so many people die or have their quality of life wrecked by easily preventable diseases. An obvious example is that more than half population is overweight despite many of the direct consequences being obvious to the individual and despite there being chronic effects which many such people live with every day — the problem has nothing to do with evidence or likely outcomes. With global warming, this is further compounded by the fact that unlike health consequences, the consequences are shared far more over the population than the individual than with health things. That’s why I think the problem is not all the anti-science people, finding a middle path with various groups, the effects not being obvious enough (how much more obvious do you want them?) etc. I think the problem is an educational and awareness one, something which has always proved tricky in rich countries, let alone poor ones. Until someone succeeds at that, I don’t think people will care much for these sorts of issues.
conrad @ 94:
Agree with all of that, and if the end result was cheap clean energy for all, it would make a real difference.
I still don’t think you’d get 100,000 to protest against climate change anywhere in Australia at the moment. Its like protesting against your own lifestyle. When I see Aussies out protesting against cheap airfares I might change my mind, but not before.
I find it impossible to believe in the scenarios of inevitable climate disaster (such as a 4-degree rise by 2099), not because I disagree with atmospheric physics, but because we will inevitably develop the capacity to “air capture” atmospheric carbon in great quantities long before then; and this will be a mere side-effect of a revolution in nanoscale technologies which will pose its own threat to the world.
Let us estimate that one E. coli bacterium weighs 7 x 10^-16 Kg and can replicate in thirty minutes. The mass of anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere is about 5 x 10^14 Kg. So if E. coli could keep multiplying without running into resource constraints, the mass of its offspring would equal that of all the carbon we’ve put into the air after about log 2 (10^30) = about 100 doublings, i.e. after about two days.
So if one is willing to entertain the possibility of the technologies at the radical end of nano speculation, such as self-replicating nanomachines which live off air, water, and sunlight like a plant, but which are made of microscopic diamond components rather than protein… even if it’s a hundred times slower than E. coli, such a device will take less than a year to replace the problem of climate change with the problem of an Earth smothered in diamond dust.
If we forget about the obvious mortal threat which such a technology poses, and suppose we are merely concerned with getting atmospheric carbon dioxide back to 300 ppm, we have here one extreme of a continuum of solutions. At one end, we just do nothing and wait for natural carbon sinks to draw it down, something which takes centuries to millennia, too late to prevent climate change. At the other end, we build these carbon-eating nanodevices, and in less than a year (I’ll even stipulate a decade, if we’re trying to do it in a controlled fashion) the problem is history. In between lie approaches like reforestation, biochar, carbon-negative concrete, Lackner’s atmospheric scrubbers, accelerated mineral carbonation, and nanotech approaches not based on free-living aerovores. These approaches form something of a continuum because at bottom it’s all just chemistry, but they differ markedly in terms of rates achieved, current and future feasibility, and current and future cost.
To the extent that I’m still thinking about approaches to the problem of climate change, this is where I’m focused now: on this continuum of methods, on looking for bridges between all forms of air capture and the forms of capture-at-source which make up the CCS portfolio of technologies, and finally at hybrid policies which combine the current emphasis on emission reduction (true of both cap-and-trade boosters and Code Red radicals) with the air-capture approach. Given the dimensions of the nano threat, one logical “combination” would be to ban nanotechnology entirely, and prescribe some nano-free solution to the climate problem. However, there are likely to be other methods on that air-capture continuum which do not involve free-living artificial life but which nonetheless achieve comparable rates of carbon drawdown (such that the problem is over within a decade or two).
I would especially be interested to know whether air capture is on the agenda of Rudd’s new Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a website yet.
Speaking of cheap airfares, Virgin is offering $999 BrisbaeLA. Got to love it. It’s now down to $800 SydBankok. Europe about $1400 ( I’ve heard )
So many places to visit, so little time.
Peter@103: “People buy blowers instead of rakes to save time, so they can do other things. Just like people use driers etc. That’s why they are called labour saving devices.”
???
From what I see, people spend just as much time blowing leaves from point A to point B as they would raking/brooming them, and the blower does not actually help with gathering up said leaves and putting them somewhere useful. All that is saved is a bit of musclepower.
And I pointed out that they are not heavily used in other developed countries, (e.g. the UK) where petrol costs a lot more. So your example of stone-breaking in the Third World is entirely irrelevant.
Your example of driers as “labour-saving” devices is equally poor. You can dry washing faster with a drier than on a line, but are actually less able to leave it unattended for long periods. Negligible labour is saved by drier use.
Please endeavour to target your condescension where it is actually needed.
andyc
Re the drier. Unless you actually stand watching your clothes dry, by labour saving I meant it takes a lot less time to throw your clothes into a drier than to hang them on a line. Your assertion that that you need to attend to a drier may be true for a really cheap one but a decent one has sensors to dry them exactly right, even ironing ready if you are into that. You also conveniently ignore rainy days, needing something washed urgently etc.
Next you’ll be trying to convince us that a dishwasher is not labor saving either. Or a lawn mower.
My condescension arises from your knee jerk reaction that blowers should be banned. This banning things they don’t like is almost always the reaction of the left. You can see it in spades in the comments of this very post.
BTW. Your assertion that blowers aren’t used much in lots of other developed countries because petrol costs more, is laughable. They don’t use much at all. A few cents worth at a time at the most. Do these people not use lawnmowers because they are too expensive to run?
andyc.
Again re the blowers. I guess you would have to agree that they are useful in some circumstances – large properties, farms etc. Perhaps you would have more luck if you suggest a blower license scheme instead. Should employ quite a few.
I get the feeling someone has grown quite fond of his turbo charged blowing device.
I don’t own one! But I wouldn’t presume to tell someone who does, that he doesn’t really need it – and is wasting resources, to boot. My dad lives on a farm and uses one to sweep the drive after mowing. It’s silly to say a broom would be just as fast. It takes him about 3 minutes to blow sweep a pretty large area.
Adaptions such as:
* identifying areas which are not going through ‘drought’ but are (in the light of climate change) no longer ‘viable’ agriculturally and providing farmers in these areas with exit strategies (which might mean amalgamating farms or relocation);
* identifying areas where water will simply not be available and either supplying water somehow (pipelines, desal plants, whatever) or relocating;
* identifying appropriate crops/industries for areas and encouraging the changes from current practises to ones more suitable for the future climate;
* switching Australians eating habits from a reliance on carbon intensive foods to less carbon intensive (e.g. replacing beef with kangaroo)
* encouraging community gardens to lessen food travel;
* educating people about climate friendly gardening and how climate changes will affect their current gardening practices (less lawns, more climate appropriate natives)
* adapting present structures to future realities – insulating, double glazing. lined curtains, boarding up west facing windows, preparing for likely disasters such as increased risk of fire, windstorm, etc (area appropriate);
* preparing ‘after the emergency’ plans for areas, which identify likely future events, plan for dealing with them and set out the actions which must take place immediately after the disaster (people are more likely to move from a fire prone area immediately after a fire than either before it or once they have started rebuilding);
* retrofitting communities to recognise new realities – that is, to minimise reliance on cars, trucks, etc.
Recognising that, even if we achieve zero carbon emissions tomorrow, climate change will still happen and keep on happening for the next twenty years.
(Sorry if my examples are country weighted, it’s what I know).
Is it just me, or have characterisations of TEH LEFT been especially facile on this thread, compared to the average?
Possibly, LE, but the sample is too small to mean anything!
conrad @ 105, popular awareness is one thing but the problem we have here in this country is how thick denialists and delusionists are on the ground amongst the political class. In the senate it matters. It looks as though Rudd is going to try to do a deal with the Coalition if he wants his CPRS legislation through. He’s probably got the message that doing nothing is not an option. The energy providers and their bankers won’t make decisions unless there is a resolution, it seems.
Mitchell Porter, were you at the Senate hearings in Brisbane? I identified a retired engineer as a fellow citizen, but that’s all.
You’d be interested in news from Singapore (Jackie Ying) where they’ve developed a method of converting CO2 from the atmosphere to methanol at room temperature for fuel and feedstock in the chemical industry without using toxis metal ions in the catalyst. The snippet in the New Scientist doesn’t say how.
Dongke Zhang at U of WA is developing a technique for doing the same using high-frequency electromagnetic fields or plasmas to activate the gas.
I wanted to comment about leaf blowers. Perhaps in the morning, or more correctly after some kip.
Mehitabel,
I think that your first point is crucial. It is distressing in the extreme for people in that position, and distressing fo the rest of us to see others in that position. It is not right to say “well those people chose to live there”, when many are following the destiny handed to them from their parents and which was originally handed to their ancestors by the colonial government. If the Brian92 (4 deg C temp rise) scenario becomes even partially real then many country people will be facing a long slow decline to inevitable disaster. And should that become the reality then your other adaptions are things that we would all be well advised to learn. I find it particularly encouraging that tending a garden plot is one of the skills taught in primary schools here in NSW. I would like that programme to be enhanced.
mehitabel @ 114 a good list. Further to
there is a residual landcare issue. I heard someone on the radio describing a cattle property near Lake Ayre which was the size of Belgium. It carries 15,000 head in a good year, whereas Belgium has 3 million beasties. So it’s not making much of a contribution to world food needs. Probably it should be closed as a commercial enterprise, but we have to be aware that the land has been under human management for perhaps 45,000 years. If we just let it return to “nature” this will mean a mess of weeds and ferals. So we need to extend our notion of environmental care to unproductive lands and pay someone to do it.
See what I mean.
The single most damaging act any individual can perform is to hop on a plane, yet it is wildly popular and getting cheaper all the time.
Nothing is going to reverse that trend, short of peak oil. Nothing. You won’t see Aussies protesting against cheap flights to Bali anytime soon.
I’ve heard of a method of capturing and sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere, that requires nothing but sunlight, water and dirt. Its entirely self-sustaining, self-replicating, and restores the natural ecosystems the same time.
carbonsink, we don’t of course know how expensive the methodologies being developed by Ying and Zhang are and whether they are scalable. But interesting nevertheless.
Long-term techno-fixes no doubt offer much. The real problem is what happens between now and 2030, with a lot of heat being injected into the system, most of it elsewhere rather than on the surface where the temperatures are measured, and whether we trigger some tipping points. I had a bit of a look at the ‘good’ news we had on methane the other day. I might be missing something, but I found little comfort. Must post on it soon.
Last year you’ll recall I got a bollocking when I reported that I was off to Europe and Canada on a family reunion trip. Starting with going down the Rhine, I was impressed by how much ‘stuff’ was on the move. Barges up and down, trains on both sides of the river in places and in Cologne flying over our heads.
From Munich driving to Ulm, new roadworks everywhere.
Driving later from Ulm to Erlangen we had to negotiate Nuremberg, which is smack in the middle of Europe, everyone seems to drive through it and it is surrounded by four spaghetti junctions. On the road huge lines of toe to tail trucks in the ‘slow’ lane. My brother and his wife were taken on a trip to the Erzgebirge over East and suffered several bouts of “Stau!” – traffic jams that stack up for 60-100km. When they were taken to Frankfurt airport their hosts started out 4 hours earlier than necessary to factor in the Stau possibility.
We flew into Frankfurt from Nuremberg, a village over the other side of every hill. We had a 10 minute bus ride from where the the plane landed, walked for miles inside to gate 65 of terminal whatever. Rivers of people everywhere we flew and we avoided London and New York.
Toronto – wide roads, cars everywhere and our hosts spoke with pride about the tar sands developments which meant that they would not run out of oil. Sensible people on the whole, but I chewed my tongue down to a stump.
On the whole, just a bit depressing. But you wouldn’t believe the bicycles in Amsterdam unless you saw them. And in Germany travelling to Heidelberg, seeing a cycle track parallel to the highway. Impressive cycles also in Vancouver.
Carbonsink @ 119
“The single most damaging act any individual can perform is to hop on a plane, yet it is wildly popular and getting cheaper all the time.”
Not sure about then when you stand near any freeway heading into a major city – fpr example, does someone who commutes for a couple of hours from the burbs to the Sydney CBD use more than if they headed off to Melbourne. And they do it every working day!
Another little gem: For all the energy used by the water industry, three times as much is used in heating up water – if ALL water used was from energy intensive desal plants, water heating energy would be still twice as much. People could individually make a big difference right now….and the water industry has had water and power saving drives on for years…with how much impact? *snort*
Save the world on the one hand, or take ten minutes longer in the shower on the other – no prizes for guessing which alternative people choose.
However, it would really be symbolic would it not if climate scientists did not jet round the world to Bali and Copenhagen etc etc? And handing ABolt a bludgeon to smack them about the head every time.
Or what about the Australian Parliament meeting virtually? Or videoconferencing from the various State Parliament houses? ( Most Parliaments in the country are occupied for only a fraction of the year in sitting – fit a few screens and schedule State and Fed sittings around each other, and hey Preston (and Camberwell) not only do you save on all that jetting around of Parliamentarians, you save on the cost of the flights, you improve the utilisation of existing State Parlt buildings). However, there is one big problem – MPs would lose frequent flyer points. Oh well, guess it’s impractical then.
furious balancing @ 104, every time someone suggests reducing the world population there is an asinine remark, usually suggesting that the writer volunteer for termination. Yet according to Ronald Wright in his Massey Lectures a few years ago we passed the point where we were taking more out of the earth system than what it could replace sometime in the 1970s.
Unless we continue outrageous inequities it seems inevitable that we need to reduce population over time. My answer is what might be called “the wisdom of women”. Empower women everywhere to control their own fertility and to have equal opportunities in career development. The population level will look after itself over time.
I think, Brian, that Carbonsink was talking about trees. As for Europe I am impatiently waiting for more electrical vehicle content. On the low power end, here in Australia if it has more than 200 watts (not even enough to power a good fart) it is illegal unless it is fully registered. Every where else in the world the limit is 600 watts. We must have some of the most brain dead beurocrats in the world. It is so depressing.
I hope that your tongue has recovered.
Marks @ 121, two years ago the dams in the Brisbane area were at 16.75% capacity and heading for Armageddon. Water was limited to 140 litres per person per day, with plenty of publicity, home help where you could get a water audit, a new shower rose, a timer to measure your 4-minute shower, tap washers checked and limiters installed, all for $20. You still can.
High users were sent a please explain, with severe action threatened if they didn’t shape up.
At that time usage was a bit over 120 litres pppd.
Now with improvements in supply and some rain, dam levels are at 59.3% and we are allowed 200 litres per day. Look at the morning paper every day and you’ll find that usage languishes at around 133 litres per person.
Something happened to change habits. We still collect water in the shower to use in flushing the toilet and collect water in the kitchen to water the pot plants, and have 16,000 litres of tank storage which we use first in preference to town water for such things as laundry, toilet and such garden watering as we do.
The much-maligned Qld Water Commission did an excellent job IMHO and are getting the chop as a reward. But habits can be changed as we’ve shown in this little insignificant place.
Good point, Marks. At the A380′s .024 litres per passenger klm it is 17 litres each way to Melbourne per passenger. An SVU returning 10 klm/litre and doing a round trip of 200 klm/day is using 20 litres per day, every day. Brian’s Europe trip would have used 408 litres per family member each way. Which means his feet got a little bigger. But the average person will consume the same fuel doing the long commute every 6 working weeks as Brian consumed on his world round trip, commuting to work by car (SVU car) is a big carbon deal.
Personal disclosure: BilB uses around 35 litres per week commuting to his factory 7 days.
The tongue is in good shape, thanks BilB, but I try to let my fingers do the talking.
Im all for international air travel, but Id like to see airfares reflect the actual costs of the pollution involved.
Currently, the whole industry passes those on to the global public and future generations.
Call me old-fashioned, but I was brought up to believe you pay your own costs, and dont bludge off others. Apparently its not a popular point of view among today’s public-fed alleged “entrepreneurial class”.
The whole industry currently works on handouts – from the public, who have to to (or will have to) clean up their mess.
Hey airlines: stand on your own two feet, bludgers!! They need a global environmental levy on them for carbon reduction offsets, to help them out of their welfare dependence.
I agree with the sentiments of 127. The idea should be extended to all aspects of the economy as well. Roads, rail, health, education. The list is long.
I’m glad Lefty E realizes there is very little ‘free’ in markets today.
Perhaps the airlines should look at this:
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0671667
Actually do something about their carbon footprint.
Ammonia in an air crash? I think there are other things to warry about and any-way its not as flammable as jet fuel.
Huggy
These are old reports but they demonstrate that the military were researching ammonia 40 years ago!
Presumably to deal with supply problems.
http://www.dtic.mil/srch/doc?collection=t2&id=AD0671667
Now ammonia is not as good as a real mans hydrocarbon as it has no carbon (cahones). It should be possible to inject this girly stuff into aircraft turbines once they have altitude.
Get busy Qantas.
Huggy
BilB @ 125: You’ve swallowed the aviation sector’s spin hook line and sinker. Monbiot demoilished this argument years ago.
Everyone is in denial about aviation. Everyone.
Disclosure: I’m taking the family on a cheap flight to Bali in July.
Good, we’re all in agreement. No more voluntary offsets purchased by consumers. Enviro-levy on all airfares – today!
Yeah, double all airfares today!
I can see Rudd going with that policy at the next election … not.
Lefty @ 132.
Why limit it to airfares?
How about petrol, diesel and gas as well?
And coal and gas power?
Add a component for the environmental cleanup to be collected by the airlines, petrol companies and power companies. Then let the money stack up on their books only able to be spent on environmental remediation. Those funds would build up and be overwhelmingly tempting to most of those companies, and they could only get their hands on the $$$ if they were able to demonstrate the expenditure resulted in real carbon footprint reduction.
Just imagine now if Oldhen and Frord had a few tens of bill on their books ONLY able to be used to produce environmentally friendly vehicles?
Well, maybe they should be doubled. I mean, if we’re serious, we will send price signals.
And then, as Marks says, they will come.
One thing that gives me hope : successful capitalists are not stupid people. They’re much smarter than denialists, as a rule. I suspect they see them as useful fools – and will of course accumulate dirty while the going’s still good.
But they’ll also accumulate clean, if we make them.
Lefty, we’re not serious. You hadn’t figured that out yet?
Lefty, you don’t ‘send’ price signals. That’s not how it works.
States can, and do send price signals to alter behaviour Peter. Ever noticed ciggies getting more expensive over the last decade? Or did you think that was diminishing supply?
Carbonsink: quite. Hence global citizen action back at 11!
Lefty E: successful capitalists are not stupid people
Do you have any evidence for this, or do you just regard it as tautological? Viz, possession of wealth is evidence of intelligence?
I suggest that some successful capitalists are extremely stupid people. Alan Bond springs to mind, as do the people who drove Enron into the toilet. Yes, they made a lot of money and are still rich, but they do not appear to be happy or respected. Depending on your precise definition, Princess Diana Spencer and Paris Hilton might also be successful capitalists, as are the people who star in Jackass and many famous sports stars. They all exploit the capitalist system in ways that make sense to them and are regarded as successful by many, yet are in many cases also regarded as stupid, in some cases profoundly so.
Meanwhile, the death of civil society extends to the ABC and the appalling standard of reporting continues unabated.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/01/2557754.htm?section=australia
Is it just me or was there a time when journalists were actually obliged to seek some kind of independent analysis of this rubbish?
Now journos – they’re not stupid. Just bone lazy. You can almost smell the Exxon press release there dk.
I like this bit:
“In a submission to the Senate inquiry, Exxon Mobil says that means it will have to absorb some of the costs of the scheme.”
No kidding, brainstrust! Thats the whole point. ‘Oh fie! I now have to paid *10%* of the costs I normally pass on to others to clean up for me’. Except you wont – you’ll just pass to consumers anyway.
F*ck me, what a bunch of whingers. Hey Exxon loser – I pay ALL my bills. And if I make a mess, I clean it up. My 5 yo is learning to do the same.
Go tell someone who cares.
I want to join Lefty E’s New Weathermen.
Carbonsink131,
I wasn’t trying to justify anything, I was simply doing some sums. The reality is though that Mobiot’s comment
It means that journeys around the world must be reserved for visiting the people you love, and that they will require both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations
is falacious with repect to travel speed. Slow travel is less efficient than air travel. Take the Melbourne journey. An SVU giving 10 kpl will use 80 litres, perhaps less, for that journey. If it is full, 4 passengers, then the fuel distance cost is the same or more than air travel in the newer generation of aircraft. You would have to do the trip in a far more fuel efficient vehicle to make any significant difference. And the slow travel Sydney London trip would be even less effective from a CO2 efficiency point of view. Has anyone done some comparisons on shipping CO2 emissions compared to air travel with respect to passengers? The banana boat jouney may become the new norm.
The only real hope for slow travel is for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles which in turn requires the rapid adoption of solar origin energy (wind wave csp etc). Not about to happen in this country.
Monbiot’s comment about trip justification is more meaningful. It could lead to a whole new world of COMPASSIONATE CORPORATE EXECUTIVES. How the love will flow.
Moz139,
I think that your challenge is fair and warranted. Lets not forget Warrick Fairfax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warwick_Fairfax
which, I was surprised to see, includes Malcolm Turnbull in the sorry saga. I’m going to have to do some more reading on this connection.
BilB @ 143:
Not always. I travel from a well-known green enclave in far northern NSW to Sydney 2 or 3 times a year. With a family of 4 in my late model turbo-diesel I’m using about 1.25L per passenger per 100km. The most efficient airliner does about 3 on a long haul flight, and this is a relatively short flight (long flights are more efficient per km than short flights)
Of course, the big difference is air travel allows you to travel much, much further and burn that fuel much faster than you ever could on the ground. I could fly to Europe 4-5 times a year easily, but I’d have to drive hundreds of kms every day to cover that same distance in a car over a year.
Finally, there are huge distortions in favour of aviation that virtually no-one is aware of. Aviation fuel is taxed at 3c/L domestically, compared to 38c/L for petrol/diesel, and there is no tax at all for international sectors.
If the general public was aware of this distortion, would they care? I doubt it, apart perhaps from widespread calls to tax petrol at the same rate as aviation fuel.
Everyone is denial about aviation. Everyone.
Slow travel could be by train, remember that? I understand that the high speed trains travel at over 150 miles per hour , use half the fuel per passenger mile that road or air use and run on electricity. I remember coming out of the channel tunnel in France and passing all these Mercedes and Peugots on the freeway – fun.
The US is going to build a high speed rail link (maybe). We already have them in Europe and every-where else.
Many overseas bullet trains — most powered by overhead electricity lines — run faster than that. In France, for example, the TGV (“Train a Grande Vitesse”) covers the 250 miles between Paris and Lyon in one hour, 55 minutes at an average speed of about 133 mph.
In Japan, which opened the first high-speed rail in the 1960s and carries more passengers than any other country, the Japanese Shinkansen trains hurtle through the countryside at an average of about 180 mph.
“Super-fast trains also run in Germany, Spain and China, at speeds up to 140 mph, according to a 2007 survey in the trade publication Railway Gazette.
The only rail service that qualifies under America’s lower high-speed standard is Amtrak’s 9-year-old Acela Express route connecting Boston to Washington, D.C.” http://www.savannahnow.com/node/707717
Comparisons between SUV’s and Aeroplanes?WTF ?
The Ruddster should build a high speed rail service from Melbourne Sydney Brisbane, even Adelaide. Then Robert can propose that coaches and horses can be used for the last 10 miles
Huggy
Carbonsink,
Airbus say that the A380 returns 40 passenger klms per litre (1/.025), you’re getting 67 passenger klms per litre (100/1.25). Certainly an improvement. But that improvement diminishes when you take into account flight path versus drive path. Sydney Melbourne flight distance 720 klms, driving distance 869 klms, an extra 20% which puts a big dent in the improvement. And I feel duty bound to point that on the fuel tax thing that not many jet air craft are using our road system the funding for which is meant to be paid for from the tax, its main purpose. No denial there.
Where it might be pointed out that not all aircraft are efficient A380′s on long haul flights, the balance to that is that not all cars are efficient turbo diesel’s on country trips. And whereas planes sit in takeoff cues (something can be done about that), cars sit at traffic lights (something should be done about that).
Good point HuggyB
Huh? Airlines shouldn’t pay for airport infrastructure through taxes?! Last I heard, expanding airports, and building new airports near major cities wasn’t cheap! Denial indeed.
But of course, we flog off our airports to the likes of Macquarie, giving them a nice juicy monopoly so they can slug us just for entering the building.
Not even close on a per-passenger basis. Note that the airline spin-meisters always compare a car’s L/100km number with the L/passenger/100km number for a fully-loaded plane. Why compare a car with one-quarter to one-fifth of its carrying capacity with a fully loaded plane? Because it distorts the truth that’s why. Just adding a single passenger doubles a car’s fuel efficiency per passenger.
Now consider a typical 800km/1 hour short haul flight. At least a third of that flight is spent climbing, descending and circling, where the plane is going to be using nowhere near the claimed number cruising @ 10,000m. Twice that consumption would be conservative.
When I quote the 1.25L/passenger/100km that its for the entire trip, including sitting in traffic at either end.
Consider also that CO2 and water vapour emitted at 10,000m has 2.7 times the global warming effect as CO2 emitted at sea level.
Adding all that up, I reckon an A320 (not an A380) doing a 1 hour short-haul flight would use closer to 6L/passenger/100km fully loaded (not the claimed 3). If the plane is (say) 80% full, that reduces to 7.5L/passenger/100km. So that’s 6x more fuel consumed per-passenger than my car. If we say the warming effect is double over the course of the flight, then that’s 12x the global warming impact of driving. Finally, my car takes me from my home directly to my destination, whereas I have to get to and from the airport at either end if I’m flying, which consumes more fuel and emits more CO2.
You’ve been sold a lie BilB and you’ve bought it. Deep down we all want to feel that aviation isn’t that bad because we all love it so and would hate to be denied affordable air travel.
You’re heading off into space with your figures. I know several jumbo captains, I will seek better quailified information. Please understand that I am thinking out loud here, not justifying.
The most important thing to appreciate with all of these issues is that NOTHING WILL CHANGE IF THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO MOVE TO. That goes for energy, personal transportation, public transportation, international transport, food supply, water supply, lighting, etc, etc.
Don’t tell me that I have been sold a lie. I am fully aware of what is going on, and what the consequences of my actions are. Your condemnation should be addressed at the “market solution” that makes air travel ever cheaper exacerbating a perilously dangerous global environmental problem. The focus has to be on the elephant in the room that ever expanding coal consumption is. Flying off on tangents simply serves to diminish the effectiveness of the CO2 reduction message in the same manner as endless attacks on the Greens over Marihuana have served to sideline their message over many elections.
I think it’s great that cars can be as efficient as aeroplanes at their best. It’d be even better if you were comparing like with like, because it’s not often that people can fly from their home to their destination without multiple intermediate modes. So that “plane” trip needs to include the car or train travel to and from the airport as well as waiting time. And the car trip needs to include the half an hour at 15kph through the city as well as the motorway sections.
I had a salutary lesson this recently travelling from Melbourne to Sydney. I was in a hurry so I flew. But just after the bus left Southern Cross Station JetStar rang to say my flight had been cancelled. Of course, the bus wasn’t going to turn around and there was another flight in two hours, so I might as well stay out at the airport. A couple more cancellations later I finally made it to Sydney just before the evening curfew and was changing trains at Central just on 12.5 hours after I left Southern Cross. For comparison, it takes 12.5 hours to do that trip on the train.
Annoyingly, using ships for international travel is often worse than using aeroplanes because of the extra time and endpoint travel involved. Plus it can be hard to find and get on the ship.
Huggy @ 146:
Not true I’m afraid: Cars are more fuel-efficient than trains
Slow trains are very efficient, but fast trains use a lot of energy to push air out of the way at sea-level.
Of course, a nuclear-powered TGV emits very little CO2, as would a solar-powered Aussie VFT, but if you’re burning coal to make the electricity, fast trains are no better than flying, and possibly worse.
Why? A short haul flight for a plane is like a short drive in traffic for a car. You use a lot more fuel per km in traffic. The 2.7x warming effect number comes from the IPCC. You can find typical load factors for short-haul domestic flights yourself, but I can guarantee you that planes are not as full as they were a year ago!
Oh please. Jumbo captains are not going to give you an objective opinion. Their entire livelihood depends on the continued growth in aviation!
See my comments about aviation fuel @ 145.
I agree, the main game is coal, but the rate at which aviation is growing, and the fact that there is no alternative to jet fuel on the horizon, means it will become an increasingly significant problem.
Stopress: Rudd to announce a delay to ETS scheme, today?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/04/2559899.htm
Please note I’ve put up a new post on Monbiot, air travel and targets. I’m not asking you to move discussion there. I just wanted to highlight the context in which Monbiot was writing. If I did an extended comment here on past form you would simply step over it and keep slugging away. Well, civilly discussing in vigorous style.
Also some people may have abandoned this thread. So please continue here and/or there as you wish
Let’s roll, Wbb!
We discussed air travel last August where I quoted Monbiot’s relative calculations thus:
Monbiot is usually pretty thorough in his research. Not sure how this affects the argument here.
FWIW, Ive put said Global Citizen Climate Manifesto online at BmL.
All revisions, derisions, incisions welcome.
One side issue is that it’s quite tricky to power a plane from renewable energy, or even carbon neutral energy. Technically a nuclear powered plane is possible, but there are political barriers. So we’re left with biofuels of various sorts, but the current state of the art is not great… you can run a plane off food that people can eat.
Trains at least can run off electricity quite easily, and given the width of the total path needed for VFT there’s no reason not to put a row of windmills down the middle of a double track. It also makes for great promotional photos
But overall, we’re going to have to travel much less. Well, the choice is more like “do we keep shipping food around, or would we rather travel ourselves?” I’m happier with food miles myself, because I quite like rice and tropical fruit despite living in Melbourne.
Monbiot’s 1.2 tonne limit would be pretty tricky, at least in part because we don’t currently have the social setup to make it possible. If everyone had to do it then we’d see a lot more low-carbon food available for instance, but right now it’s a bloody expensive hobby because most of the low-carbon food is organic and premium-priced.
Brian, Monbiot’s numbers are quite different to the Lancaster University study. Still more or less the same order though. I’m almost certain Monbiot’s numbers for trains refer to regular ‘slow’ trains and not high-speed TGVs and similar.
Hold the phone, folks: major ETS revisions afoot- http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/04/2559899.htm
Lefty E, I’ve put up a new post.
I’ve done an update at the end of the post saying that I checked, but missed the post at RealClimate. Thanks to Peter Wood at Climate Dilemma for the headsup. This quote is telling:
From a link from there to a German site and an article by Stefan Rahmstorf, there is a
neat graph from Malte Meinshausen showing the effect of starting early or late. Please go to the post update to see the graph.
WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH ,THE RADICALS NEED TO GET SCIENCE RIGHT ,THERE IS NO RELATION TO WARMING AND CO2 AT ALL AND THEY KNOW IT THE PAST SHOWS THAT VERY CLEARLY ,ARE YOU SAYING IF ITS 2 DEGREES HOTTER THEPOLES WONT HAVE MINUS 50 DEGREE WINTERS ?YOUR IN DREAMLAND THE SUN IS THE HEAT MORONS ,C02 USED TO BE AN AVERAGE OF 1000-1200 PPM NOT 380 LIKE NOW AND IT HAS LAG ON HEAT OF 800 YRS ON ALL THE GRAPHS OF THE PAST ,ITS A GIANT TAX SCAM NOTHING MORE AND THEY SHOULD BE ARRESTED FOR FRAUD ,THATS WHY WONG HASNT GOT ANY EVIDENCE ,THERE IS NONE FR A FRAUD.STOP THE CHEMTRAILS .
Brian@157
Can I direct you to some transport figures here?. Use the navigation to look at UK figures through to page 132.
Very interesting.
Just on the qurstion of non-violence LeftyE @ 158 I was watching the final episode on Tony Robinson’s series on ‘Justice’ where they described the Chartist movement’s deamnds for electoral reform.
Their slogan was Peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must. Your manifesto isn’t quite as sharp as that of the Chartists all those years ago.
Thanks for saying so, Fran!
Looks like Melanie needs some orgonite dolphin balls and associated paraphernalia to start stopping those Chemtrails.