Malcolm Farnsworth has pretty neatly summed-up the vapidity of the News Limited/Coalition attacks on Cate Blanchett’s appearance into the Say Yes Australia climate change ad.
That said, I’m not really sure what the point of the ad itself – and its timing – is.
The ad says nothing about the science of climate change; it’s not an attempt to convince the denialists. Fair enough; the hard-core denialists are a waste of time (and are mostly dyed-in-the-wool conservative voters). It appears to be an attempt to convince those who accept the need to do something, that a carbon price is the right thing to do.
But until the carbon price committee actually puts out a concrete proposal, it’s virtually impossible to put meat on that proposition. Vague generalities about “helping people struggling with bills” are, frankly, pretty weak stuff when you’ve got Tony Abbott running around claiming that electricity bills will rise by – what is it this week, ONE MILLION PERCENT? And, while we all know that the proposal that comes out of the climate committee is not going to do any of those things, it can’t be definitively refuted until there is an actual proposal put out into the public domain.
I don’t have access to the research behind this ad campaign, but my gut reaction is that if the Say Yes Australia group really wanted to run ads now, it might have been better off just reinforcing the need to act.
Elsewhere: it seems Peter Lewis, director of essential research, takes a similar view:
All of which should provide a few clues to those seeking to mobilise public opinion: focus on the science first, second and third – and then start talking about the impact on our carbon-exposed economy if we wait for the rest of the world to act first.
High profile actors are always going to grab headlines; but it will be the less glamorous set of voices, the voices of people who wear lab coats and aren’t into grandstanding, that will be critical to the outcome of this debate.
Maybe, and we certainly need to see more detail in the yes case when its there – but there really needs to be some politics aimed at the ill-informed here. let’s face it, that what ‘no’ case substanitally consists of: Just a ‘no’, and some generalsied fear, pitched at people who arent following closely.
For all its faults, it mentions 1. that big polluters pay and 2. compo for price rises. You wouldnt necessarily pick that detail up through the media.
Some general message pitch before the detail wont hurt, is my opinion.
Id like to see an ad on what the rest of the world is doing. Contrary to some elite media opinion, it wont help the no case much at all.
Say yes to an election: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw1mWOlmk58
Gobsmacked, I invite you and whomever devised that video to spend a few minutes in a room containing around 10% carbon dioxide and then tell me how harmless the stuff is.
Of course the comeback to that advert is “say yes? Take us to an election then so we can choose yes or no!”
You mean, like the election we didnt get until after workchoices was introduced?
get real.
No Lefty E. A valid election (in the eyes of News Ltd at least.) We need to keep having elections again and again until the RIGHT result happens. (I can’t blame News Ltd and friends for this strategy as they had major success toppling Rudd and then nobling the mining tax. No wonder they feel like king makers.)
Good post Rob. I hadn’t seem the tvc before and I thought it was just Blanchett and Caton. It’s been so misrepresented. But, I agree that I can’t quite see what it wants to do.
I’m very wary of celebrity endorsement as I think it can backfire as it has here. Now the story is all about Blanchett. Arguably, the hard-core deniers are so pernicious that they’d find ways of misrepresenting a tvc no matter what it said, anyway.
I’ve been thinking about the whole matter of advertising this week. One of my Masters students has just done a literature survey which indicates that there is only very weak evidence that television advertising works i.e that it changes patterns of consumption. I’ve done a bit of work on tvcs and have friends who make them as their primary job. One thing which has always struck me is that they talk about success in terms of how interesting a tvc was to produce creatively, how much fun they had, how many awards it was nominated for and, of course, how well it paid. I’ve never heard anyone say, either producers or ad agency execs, “this was a great ad. It increased sales of Product X, Y percent.”
It makes me wonder how effective this form of advertising is at all for political campaigns. We may just be confirming already held ideas. How do we know it’s responsible for any changes in behaviour? It’s very difficult to isolate one factor, out of many that may change behaviour over time.
Lefty E said:
I agree that would be very good to see publicised. Also re-iterating what our per capita emissions are compared to the rest of the world.
I suspect that the ads are generally just meant to reinforce support for *anything* to be done. There must be concern that if it gets too unpopular and with the government concerned about opinion polls that they will either drop it, or water it down so much that its pointless.
One of my Masters students has just done a literature survey which indicates that there is only very weak evidence that television advertising works i.e that it changes patterns of consumption.
I would be interested to read that indeed, because it would be nearly revolutionary. Television ads work – why do you think companies spend millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars on them in any given year. Private companies don’t through that kind of money around without expecting a gain. In terms of consumer goods, you can see a clear and definite spike in the 24 hours following an advertising launch.
More broadly, the ads are more of that stupid, Get-Up, preaching-to-the-choir feel good nonsense, and BAD pr. They should have got insurance company CEOs, product CEOs etc talking about the price of no action. Just as fatuous, of course, but those are the figures that change minds in the audience segment they’re trying to shift.
Blanchett is, for better and worse, a walking cosign of lefty elitism, and an idiot could have seen how News Ltd would jump on this. Now, their goal may simply have been to stir up coverage, but if so, I would argue they’re pretty dumb when it comes to Communications.
For god’s sake Labor, all you need to explain is that the mums & dads out there will be paying ZERO TAX. That’s right, those little aussie battlers are not going to pay any of this tax. None. Zilch. No increase in taxes. Easy! A handful of companies pay this tax, not actual voters. If some nasty company tries to up their prices to offset the tax, switch to another company. It’s called competition.
This a comment that I posted on the Drum
As I’ve pointed out in lengty discussion at Larvatus Prodeo, a $20 per tonne CO2 carbon price will add about .1% to the cost of my product for the electrical component, and I suspect no more than another .2% for the accumulation of other price increases. So an increase of .3% is a very marginal cost and will not cause me to increase my prices. And in reality I expect to see no real increase for anything other than electricity that is fairly based on the cost of carbon.
That is my expectation for my business turnover for materials. Families will be hit a little bit, a very little bit, harder and this will provide some minor pressure on wages.
But remember that electricity prices have already risen to reflect the anticipated CPRS, and there is no real reason why they should increase further for a carbon price. If they do then this is price gouging by the electricity industry.
The other thing to remember, regarding Kate Blanchet, is that she is seriously concerned for our environment. She is being a good citizen with her support for the Carbon Price, and this is not the first initiative that she has undertaken. You should recall that she has previously initiated the installation of an energy saving solar system for the theatre for which she is a director. Go Kate!
“In any event, it is not certain that a carbon price will have a high impact on energy bills. Its effect will be at the wholesale energy supply end, but the wholesale price — the price at the power station or gas plant — is only about 40 per cent of the final consumer price. And, if certainty over carbon policy allows stalled investments to proceed, there should be no more rapid price rises of the kind we have recently experienced. ”
http://newmatilda.com/2011/05/31/carbon-tax-wont-blow-household-budgets
I’m getting a bit sick of the widely expressed view that we’ve got to check everything against a yardstick of what News Ltd may or may not think.
It’s about time that they were treated as the rogue organisation that they undoubtedly are – most of their supposed power and influence is derived from the fact that they are treated as influential by politicians and other news outlets, particularly the ABC.
If we were to treat their pronouncements, distortions and downright lies with the contempt they deserve, it may just get to the point where their influence diminishes in tandem with their circulation.
Chris @8:
It is not a government ad.
I agree with Lefty E. I don’t think much of the ad, and don’t think it contributes much to public understanding of the issue. Nor do I appove of the use of celebrities in this type of advertising. On the other hand, it has at least succeeded in the last few days in promoting public discussion of the need for action on climate change in terms other than a ‘great big new tax on everything’ that’s going to wipe Whyalla off the face of the earth and spell the end of the Australian car industry.
zoot @ 14 – I never said it was a government ad. Doesn’t mean that the people funding the advert weren’t trying to support government policy, or even more simply support the parts in the government that are a lot more likely to do what they want done compared to what the opposition would do.
My take is that Barnaby and his mates have helped convert an ad that was unlikely to have much effect into something more powerful. The attack means that more people now understand that the ad was not a government ad and that Cate did the ad free of charge. it has also given Cate the opportunity to explain in reasonable terms why she supports climate action and to push her effective “I want to be able to look my children in the eye” line. It has also given the skeptics the opportunity to demonstrate once again that that they are sleazy bastards that will anything to destroy the credibility of anyone that disagrees with their Tea Party.
In some ways too Dick Smith’s admission that he was “too gutless” to be part of the ad because of his fears of the way that the Murdoch press twist what he is doing into a personal attack of the sort that Cate has had to put up with is in its own sweet way effective support for climate action as well as an attack on the Murdoch press.
Chris @16: My apologies. When you wrote
I thought you were saying the government might change the ads.
Apparently you had something else in mind.
Zoot @ 18 – no I meant that the ads are in part designed to both influence and support what the government is doing. Reading back on what I wrote it was unclear – “by the drop it or water it down” I meant the carbon tax scheme, not the ads which they can’t since they didn’t do them.
JohnD, it really does appear that since Bob Brown’s polite ‘outburst’ people everywhere are feeling confident to assert that they’ve had enough of the Murdoch spin and aren’t going to take it any more.
And the ‘look your children in the eye’ point and the comparison of Cate’s treatment to the miners have had more airing as a result of the confected outrage of the dinosaur right
The ad doesn’t *actually* say or show anything – I think it’s just supposed to wash over us, with its vapid positive messaging. Did other people notice that the happy-climate-safe future depicted at the end of the ad still has a dirty coal-fired power station?
The $3 million of paid advertising space (from donations and dues to green groups and unions); tens of thousands more for the focus groups that were run to confirm ‘ordinary Australians’ respond adequately to the ad; could have been better spent.
@10 – Mike – if they aren’t paying the tax, why do they need to be compensated?
“focus on the science first, second and third”
OK – global emmissions increased by an amount equivalent to four times Australia’s total annual emmissions last year. What we do is but a drop in the ocean and willmake no difference to global climate change. We are wasting our time with out the large global emitters makng significant cuts, which is not going to happen.
How does exporting coal at an increasing rate to China help reduce gloabl emmissions?
Razor @ 21, since you obviously haven’t been paying attention, it works like this:
The big polluters (etc) pay a carbon price (not a tax), some of which is then returned (particularly) to low income earners to offset any increased costs which are passed on to them by the polluters. This gives them an incentive to reduce energy use if possible, as that way they get the money without incurring the extra costs.
I thought you believed in the magic of the market.
“In terms of consumer goods, you can see a clear and definite spike in the 24 hours following an advertising launch. ”
Really Patrickg? All of them, after every advertising launch?
Personally, I regard the ad as a raging PR success. As repulsive and predictable as has been the response from the Murdochracy it really has people talking about the issue.
It has driven the right nuts — which is as good a measure as anything that it’s working. For all their shrill denunciation, it helps them far more when people, intimidated by the high dudgeon and vituperation, stay silent and leave the proponents of a price on Co2 isolated and apparently twisting in the wind.
People speak of “preaching to the converted” but really this is more like affirming to all the converted and sympathetic that the cause is there to be won or lost, and that they make a difference. That’s very important. If we can speak up loudly — and I certainly plan to by attending at Prince Alfred Park Sydney at 11 AM this Sunday — then we will get closer to a proper scheme rather than the horrible dog’s breakfast that Rudd authored with the Libs and the polluters in 2009.
To paraphrase an old line: let cowards flinch and traitors sneer — we’ll keep the green flag flying here.
I think it was fabulous that Cate Blanchett came forward. Well done her. I’ve watched her perform just once (with Ricky Gervais on Extras) but she has definitely risen in my estimation.
Occam your statement that nothing Australians do will make a difference is an obvious fallacy. By making that absurd claim you show yourself to be either an idiot, a selfish elitist prick, or just arguing in bad faith (or all three).
Actually what Australia does will make a difference. Everyone, in every country, who reduces their carbon footprint will make a small difference. All those small differences will add up.
If the carbon footprint of humanity as a whole is ever to be reduced, it will be done by individual humans reducing emissions, as regulated and enforced through their nation-states.
Occum’s Ineffective (Blunt) Razor,
OBR, the carbon price does effect the price of exported coal, even though that would be a good idea. The Carbon price is on CO2 emitted. ie you may have a mountain of coal in your back yard, but you only pay the emmission charge when you burn it and release CO2 into the atmosphere. Although the government may say that if you have it you will burn it and charge you for the anticipated emissions in advance.
Correction …does NOT affect the price of exported coal…duh.
@ 26:
Would you like a biscuit, Fran?
Tara @ 21: If people want to donate money to the organisations that ran the ad, who are you to stop them? I don’t understand why people shouldn’t buy ad time if they want. It’s a free world.
I think the quoted comment “High profile actors are always going to grab headlines; but it will be the less glamorous set of voices, the voices of people who wear lab coats and aren’t into grandstanding, that will be critical to the outcome of this debate.” is seriously mistaken.
Actually there’s no shortage of science and scientists, but many people are closing their eyes and ears to them, white coats notwithstanding, for reasons which have more to do with psychological resistance to challenging and stressful thoughts. Those people don’t need scientists in white coats with their graphs and numbers and computer models. What they actually need is friendly faces to tell them it’s OK! It’s OK to face up to the challenge; that if we do some simple things then it can still actually turn out OK!
The fact that it’s generated such a backlash from the right is a good thing, because it presents an opportunity for people to leverage their respect for the positive-sounding Cate Blanchett into a healthy disrespect for Abbot, Bolt, Joyce, et al.
They really should have used a poor person that nobody has heard of.
tens of thousands more for the focus groups that were run to confirm ‘ordinary Australians’ respond adequately to the ad; could have been better spent.
Did they spend money on focus groups, Tara? How do you know? How much money? Sheesh, this is the kind of lazy thinking we need less of.
Really Patrickg? All of them, after every advertising launch?
Well, Fine, I’m not in the business of making calls I can’t back up, so I don’t know if all of them, after every advertising launch. But that certainly is the orthodoxy, and it has been born out with thousands of products over decades, with a lot of facts to prove it. I think the problem is you’re overestimating the irrationality ruling many purchases (see here for a funky example), and the triviality of them.
There are plenty of studies showing that when it comes to media people tend to sniff but not inhale, so to speak. But when it comes to advertising, a sniff is all that’s necessary facing a range of choices that can be unclear or essentially equal.
I humbly await one Jack Thompson (yes, he of the acting fame) getting a lofty good slapping down for coming out in the effort of protecting Rock Art. How bloody dare he?
Good for the goose is good for the gander surely?
Fran, as a matter of interest, is it possible you might soon be barracking that the new carbon price mechanism that makes it into law is never repealed, to thus never become an ETS, even though that means the failure of the best laid plans of Garnaut and co.?
Not that I really care at this point if you are channeling the Greens’ secret longterm plan to screw over Labor in the next parliament by stopping the implementation of Phase 2 or whatever it’ll be called.
Just as long as your party realises it can’t blow up Phase 1 as a way of securing a better deal than Gillard is about to offer. There is no after-Gillard if nothing is passed by the end of the year, there’s just a long deathroll until the election.
If that happens I pray that when the Kate Ellis govt. takes office and revives the carbon tax her cabinet is at least willing to dust off that BCA submission of $10-a-tonne as a baseline. Maybe they’ll even have the presence of mind to adjust that monetary figure to 2025 real dollars.
Is it now OK to tell all the rich commentators that said Cate was too rich to be allowed to comment to shut up because they are too rich to talk?
Or all those people who have never been on the dole who want to stop welfare for the poor?
Or….?
Sorry Nick, but I’m wondering about your point. This very afternoon, Christine Milne said:
Does that clarify matters for you?
Having read through the latest iteration of Garnaut, I confess I have some reservations*, but unlike the 2009 Rudd-Turnbull-polluters’ and rent-seekers cartel farce, it does at least appear to be better than nothing.
* specifically the overly generous provision for industry assistance and the rather inadequate provision for households close to the current LITO.
PS: While one can easily disagree with Garnaut, there’s no doubt that if most of our political protagonists approached their duties with the intellectual rigour he brings to bear, this country’s polity would be in far better shape. I would still be miffed a great deal of the time, but the idea that rational argument was always getting a hearing would be a great consolation.
On Q and A on Monday, Kate Lundy was explaining – again – how the carbon price would work, when she was interrupted by George Brandis, who told her that she should call it a carbon tax instead, because that is what Julia Gillard said she was allowed to do. Brandis was so adamant, but his reason was so feeble. The right are desperate to call the carbon price a carbon tax because it misleads the public into thinking that they will be paying directly for it.
Actually, Gillard has to take some of the blame. I remember her being asked in an interview whether it was actually a tax, and she said you could call it that. That was politically naive of her. She should have insisted on the use of the term “carbon price” then and there.
I recall Tony Abbolt winding up the teabagger crowd outside Parliament House by telling them that “if anyone tells you that the carbon tax will fall on the power generators, don’t believe them – it will fall on everyone.” It was a big fat lie.
Terangeree
Ta for the bicky — I recall the ad but didn’t know this was Blanchett. Celebrity doings and gossip are always my weak suit at trivia nights. I know almost nothing of actors, pop stars, who won an Oscar, who has had whose baby … and am embarrassed that I know even the little I know.
Absolutely Silky … this is as clear as day. It’s astonishing that the ALP could miss this. It also shows that the trolling “a carbon ‘tax’ would be less unacceptable and more saleable than an ETS to business” which we heard quite a bit of in 2009 was utter bunkum. It was a sucker punch of similar standing to the campaign they ran to have Julia replace Kevin, and tidily from my POV, dealt with in just the same way when their aspiration seemed to have been realised.
Interestingly, Howard’s initial proposal for an ETS also had a fixed price period, which somehow escaped being described as a “carbon tax”.
Regrettably, the carbon tax meme also finds its way briefly (albeit parenthetically) into Garnaut. Shame on him.
Interestingly, Brandis’ response to Lundy acknowledges that the nomenclature is still a matter of contest. Time to roll this one back.
maybe caton’s final comment in the ad gives a hint “say yes ‘cos that’s what australian’s do best”. so: ‘yes’ to action, ANY action that’s necessary to save the planet (in it’s current form). that’s a pretty worthy reason.
the american’s put a man on the moon one day back in ’69. all it achieved was that we now know THAT particular spot on the moon ISN’T made of cheese. and it cost millions (millions was a lot of money back then!)
so in summary i think it was a plea for us to have some guts and not give in to the naysayers, by not even trying.
“What we do is but a drop in the ocean and willmake no difference to global climate change. We are wasting our time with out the large global emitters makng significant cuts, which is not going to happen.”
OBR, youre smarter than this. You dont think Australia’s actions would have an influence with the 35 other countries who emit about 1-2% of global emissions? Of course it will. Especially if we offer an easy route to saying there’s no point acting at that level of emissions. That just means we cant criticise them for not doing anyting. Add it up – that 40% of gloabl emissions untouched, all by countries just like us.
Even the Herald Sun today was listing China’s and California’s emission redctions targets and plans. If those bozos can google, why not you?
“How does exporting coal at an increasing rate to China help reduce gloabl emmissions?” this, OTOH, is a more sensible comment. Indeed it does not help.
@27 – you can hold your breathe until you are blue if you want but it won’t change the fact that if China, the US and other large emmitters don’t do anything to stop the growth in emmissions or even just hold the current levels (which isn’t going to happen) then we are just pissing into the wind. The science supports this. Unlike the Science, the politics are not “settled”. The US is will not do anything in the next 5 years at least and is unlikely to do much in the next decade. China is increasing emmissions at an increasing rate (despite the spin about their growing renewables yada yada yada). The science also says that any benefit might not be realisable for at least a century. Have a think about what changes have occurred in politics, society and science in the last 100 years. We can’t even agree to get rid of nuclear weapons or to stop killing each other – and you want us to commit to a political and economic path that, as NoHopenchangen so decisively demonstrated, is off with Alice in Wonderland. Get a grip on reality.
@28 – I know the proposed measures don’t get applied to the coal we sell except how it effects costs of production. If you hadn’t already noticed, I was pointing out the blatant screaming in your face hypocrisy of the situation. If it really is such a moral imperative, why, in the name of whatever it is we atheists pray to, aren’t we just stoppinmg mining coal?
Because the ALP want to have their cake and eat it. Either carbon dioxide emmissions are evil and should be stopped, or they are acceptable and emmissions reduction is political spin. It is as if the opium poppies we grow in Tasmania are processed in the regulated manner they are here in Australia and yet we happily allow the farmers to export heroin to other countries for the druggies. Imagine the uproar if that situation were to exist and yet that is the position on coal.
OBR there’s some truth in @46. It’s similar in its doublethink to Australian uranium mining policies (specifically ALP but in practice the Coalition seem to do similar). But we know stopping coal mining completely and immediately is ‘crazy talk’ – it’s the sort of thing you’d accuse Bob Brown of advocating.
So we expect policies that allow for adjustments in the structure of our economy and our ‘energy security’. The argument that we can export the coal and let the emissions be someone else’s problem is self serving but it gives some space for adjustment while we make some pragmatic progress.
You could argue that the environment outranks the economy – that an economy without a livable environment would be pointless but in our enlightened world who’d believe that? We can only save the environment if we do it in such a way as to preserve the economy (and maintain our comparative economic position – better to die rich than live poor?). But the sooner we start adjusting the more likelihood of a win-win outcome.
OBR said:
Usage sidenote: About 300 years ago this phrase was commonly the other way about — one would have spoke of people wanting to eat their cake and have it too. I find this formulation to have greater clarity and felicity.
Because the discussion concerns the public interest rather than “evil” in a metaphysical sense, discussion focuses on how to scale back emissions to the biosphere in a way that is verifiable and maintainable. Garnaut is correct when he calls this a “diabolical problem” (even if I deprecate the metaphysical reference). Regrettably, large parts of the world economy are configured to take advantage of the chemical energy to be had from the lifecycle of fossil hydrocarbon fuels. As with narcotics, detox is a difficult process.
It’s true of course that part of this difficulty lies in the politics of “detox”. That’s an artefact of democratic society, and sovereignty more generally. It’s an overhead one accepts without denying the scientific rationale for detox. We must find a way foi taking the public at large with the actual public interest, and schedule, cost, technical, operational and ecological feasibility make this a tough task.
Razor @ 45,
“Imagine the uproar if that situation were to exist.”
That situation does exist for alcohol and tobacco. Duty is charged on it here, but it is exported duty free. Why? Because if Australia charged an export duty, overseas customers would just purchase from elsewhere and the duty would be ineffective.
Same with coal. It is not “hypocrisy”. Just a matter of doing what is effective.
O(I)BR @45,
Tasmania would be happy to export opium to other countries if it were not an ILLEGAL import into every other country. What Tasmania does export would be done under the rules and regulations of the importing countries. That is the way that we do things here in Australia, mostly.
Slightly tangengial, but thought I’d link to John Kinsella’s poem dedicated to Cate Blanchett published on the Drum today. I particularly liked the stanzas:
Seems wonderfully evocative of the relationship of Australia’s people to their country.
We cant afford a CO2 price! we’ve got all these climate-change affected natural disasters to pay for!: http://www.theage.com.au/business/economy-hit-by-dive-in-exports-20110531-1feqy.html
OBR – China and even the do -nothing US have a far higher effective CO2 price than we do. for all its failures, the US invests much more in renewable research than we do. They are empirically doing more than us. Your point is a shallow one derived from shit media coverage which simply doesnt report what is happening internationally.
Not to mention (because it would destroy your point) UK and EU countries who are indisuptably taking major action, and together constitute the 3rd largest emitter at 14%.
We dont have to stop mining coal, btw, but we *can* addd a CO2 price at the point of export. This will encourage others to do the same. China will still buy it.
There’s a reasonable summary of China and US efforts here: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/garnauts-cry-from-the-heart-for-honesty-20110531-1feky.html
As is absundantly clear, the critical idea that the world is doing nothing is abject piffle, and merely a sign of how poorly informed our public debate is.
Indeed, Garnaut concludes that international efforts are essentially on track and can be made to work.
he moreover tackles the argument that Australian must be followers here.To think so is to presume we are a nation of ‘pissants’, with no influence, who no one would wish to emulate. I disagree, and so Garnaut.
and, hypothetically: why the hell would we *want* to emulate any given country that lplans to do nothing about this crisis? This seems to me to be the point where the do-nothing arguments become completely child-like and illogical.
Lefty – what’s really funny is the fact that the Age is trying to say that this clobbers another chance of an interest rate rise in the foreseeable future.
I read an interesting article in the Fin yesterday that basically argues that markets are really underestimating the balls of the RBA, and ignoring the fundamental reasons for the downturn in exports. The RBA’s rhetoric seems to be saying that they’ll need to raise rates anyway, since that loss of exports earning is really just from all the coal mines that were shut down, and thus is only temporary.
When did economists take leave of the fundamental principles of market modelling?
The point being made on ABC radio this morning in a really interesting interview (kudos to Deb Cameron) was that we can’t continue to export coal and expect the rest of the world buy it, as it transitions to a carbon reduced world economy. It will be like trying to sell typewriters in the age of computers.
So the sooner that the big polluters learn to adapt, invest in R&D and catch up with the rest of the world, the better. And stop complaining.
The point was made loud and clear that the economic cost of inaction will be catastrophic in the medium term, whereas there are major business opportunities for those willing to embrace change.
This is the positive message that the government needs to be reinforcing, and stuff the dinosaur business leaders and their media lackeys.
Thats right Adrian. This shit has all the foresightedness of those who mourned the passing of the steam age.
May they live long enough to wish they hadnt put their name behind the embarassing anachronism that was coal-fired electricity.
PS List of US state targets here. Obviously, these can change with govts, but its a useful anti-BS device: http://www.pewclimate.org/what_s_being_done/targets
Further to Lefty E @ 52, I’ve done a separate post on the Garnaut Review.
So we should offload as much coal as we can now before demand for it drops?
A very large percentage of coal, and especially Australian coal, is used in the production of steel from iron ore and of concrete, not for generating electricity.
If China, India and SE Asia continue to industrialise, and it is reasonable to expect that to go on well into the forseeable future, there will be a continuing and growing demand for coal for those purposes.
Lefty E
As you know, I support the introduction of a carbon price now, so I hope you will take this in the right spirit. Obama may have a stated goal of reducing emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 but the chances that the US will achieve a reduction anywhere near that is slim to zero. The policies announced so far do not go close to achieving cuts of that magnitude (state level policies are too patchy as well) and the US political climate is not conducive to significant progress over the next few years. IMHO the US will be lucky to hold emissions at current levels by that date.
Further, those targets underscore the difficulty of achieving meaningful reductions with largely direct action policies. First, there is nothing to guarantee that that direct action policies sum up to the announced targets. Second, without a longer term abatement framework (preferably an ETS) that is difficult to change, direction action mitigation policies are too subject to the whims of politicians that won’t be around to be held accountable to the targets. There is simply no mechanism to hold governments accountable to the targets they are announcing.
In order to get 10% Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, the current levels of 0.0385% would have to be raised 25,974 times the current levels. Now that is a scare tactic if I ever saw one. Greenhouse levels can be raised up to 1% CO2, and that is a multiple of 2,597.
And no, I don’t think the ad worked. It has talked to the converted and further angered us engineers and scientists who reject the findings of the IPCC. Simple, isn’t it? The science is most definately not settled.
You’d be able to meet in a phone box without it being a squeeze, gobsmacked.
Also, spellchecker is your friend: the word is “definitely”.
Fran @47 – that’s a reasonable analysis because as Gobsmacked @62 shows, the first hurdle remains one of “belief”. Either you believe CO2 emissions are a problem or you don’t. The vast majority of scientific opinion expresses one belief, but skepticism remains and is reinforced by the politics of business and life as usual, hence it appears to be far easier to influence public opinion in the negative. I think the attack on intellectual opinion is quite deliberate in terms of persuading the public at large to forget about global warming, but it also represents a “dumbing down” of the public in general.
At some point you start to despair and wonder if we aren’t just frogs in a slowly warming pot of water after all.
Gobsmacked @62,
With you this will have to be worked through step by step.
Step one
In your opinion, Gobsmacked, is the Earth flat or is it round?
@ Gobsmacked – We’ve been over this ground before in these threads. Just because you’re a scientist or an engineer, it doesn’t automatically follow that you know diddly-squat about the climate system, climate models or climate science, any more than the average joe who has read a couple of climate threads.
In fact, I’ve found that engineers that I’ve met who claim to disbelieve climate science have failed to show me that they even understand that much. Their opposition seems to consist of ‘I’m a scientist/engineer, so that makes my gut feeling better than yours’, which of course is complete bullshit.
Climate science is a complex topic, and you’ve a snowflake’s chance in hell of understanding it by reading a few articles on the internet.
lol I love the phone box comment. I will use that.
I don’t think that ordinary people who post on LP or anywhere else for that matter will resolve the science. Safe to say that the science is not settled. Any statement like “the science is settled” is deliberately misleading, and that is what concerns me about our current PM. She is an utter failure and a disappointment as a leader. I cringe every time she pops up making yet another silly public statment or utterly symbolic and stupid gesture. She must go. I want an election on this matter.
Moderator note: so that this thread doesn’t get hijacked yet again by having to do Climatology 101 with a doubter, let’s give Gobsmacked the opportunity to cite specifics either from an IPCC report or from one of the explanatory posts on realclimate.org as to exactly what findings sie finds are unsupported, in hir view of the actual science submitted for peer review rather than a WUWT-style cherrypicking of the abundant bad science-reporting.
Unless and until sie can cite specific objections based on at least that level of background knowledge, then hir arguments are merely a distraction that should not be allowed to derail the thread.
In this post I made reference to John Cook and Haydn Washington’s new book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sandand Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Follow the links there.
The first contains answers to the tired old talking points we are all thoroughly tired of hearing. In the second, they say sceptics may be entitled to their own opinions, but now to their own facts. The main planks of climate science are indeed beyond reasonable doubt.
The central issue revolves around climate sensitivity. I invite Gobsmacked to check out Will Steffen’s report on the latest research on this topic in The Critical Decade and earn himself a Nobel prize by refuting the science there. Quoting Lindzen and Choi or Monckton doesn’t count.
Then he might take the long view of paleoclimate science and tell us how Curt Stager in his book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth got it all wrong. (See comment 6 in the post I linked to in the first para above.)
When Gobsmacked has refuted all those sources in peer-reviewed journals, then let him return here and legitimately report on the new scientific paradigm of climate science. Short of that let him take his humbug elsewhere.
In a related development, NSW Liberal Upper House Whip Peter Phelps has hired Graeme Bird as his speechwriter.
Gobsmacked tried a cliched hijack with
Gobsmacked is right in one sense. Advocates of business-as-usual raise this all the time in an attempt to mislead people by blurring the lines between GHG-forcing, Charney sensitivity, anthropogenic provenance, the certainty that ecosystem services to humans will be very significantly degraded over time if concentrations are not stabilised and reversed on a fairly short timeline etc which is settled, and regional climate impacts and feedbacks, the precise efficacy of policy responses on various timelines attached to which there continue to attach significant error bars.
It’s rather like saying that the science of aerodynamics is not settled because there is continuing morbidity associated with air travel. Nobody can predict with certainty where the next plane crash will be or what the loss rate will be — but there is a strong relationship beween air miles or passenger miles and morbidity.
Meow.
Is science ever settled? 1930 Solar System = 9 planets; 2006 Solar System = 8 planets. Mnemonic anyone?
Mercury
o
Venus
Earth
Mars
Yupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto?
I think the phrase “the science is settled” can reasonably be taken to mean that it is highly unlikely that there will be any future changes in scientific theory such that policy actions taken today to mitigate carbon emissions will, in retrospect, turn out to be unnecessary. I don’t know if that is the case or not.
But, in any case, policy is always made under conditions of uncertainty. What really matters is that the probability of the science being substantively correct exceeds the ratio of the cost of mitigation to the cost of unmitigated global warming. I would think that is certainly the case, especially given that the costs of mitigation are quite modest.
Indeed I&U …
One might add that the incidental non-AGW-assuming benefits of rational policy responses would themselves exceed the costs of mitigation, and so mitigation is really a no regrets set of measures, if done in an orderly way.
Grigory, idiots like gobsmacked bring out my inner pedant.
I’d put it this way: that the probability that the current climate science is broadly correct is sufficiently high that policymakers would be grossly imprudent not to take policy actions to mitigate emissions today.
Apart from anything else, his remarks were a clear Godwin’s.
Fran,
“the incidental non-AGW-assuming benefits of rational policy responses would themselves exceed the costs of mitigation”
I don’t think that is true. Whereas there certainly are incidental benefits (eg from better energy efficiency, tax reform etc), these benefits could also be obtained from targeted policies unrelated to carbon mitigation. Indeed, it might be argued that the urgency of carbon policy is putting other much-needed policies (like tax reform) on the backburner.
Still in prudential mode, I’d also point out that individuals, organisations and governments routinely expend considerable resources on insurance and prophylaxis measures against risks which are both considerably less probable, and considerably less potentially costly and damaging, than those associated with AGW.
Paul @76,
Agreed. That is what I was trying to describe in my second para @73.
In short: “the science is sufficiently settled”
“What are we saying yes to?”
The choice is clear. The government wants to do something that acknowledges AGW. The opposition wants to do nothing that acknowledges AGW.
Are the measures proposed by the Gillard government sufficient to reverse AGW, were they to be adopted on a world-wide scale? Probably not.
But that isn’t the point. This campaign is designed to get Australians to acknowledge that something must be done. Only then will it be possible to have the debate about what and how much must be done.
Cate Blanchett serves to accommodate Australians to the necessity of action.
BTW, I’m fascinated by the scoffing fury of the Right Wing noise machine over Cate Blanchett and her alleged Hollywood lifestyle. This smear campaign is copybook politics of envy, which the Abbottistas say is a Bad Thing.
Katz,
“Are the measures proposed by the Gillard government sufficient to reverse AGW, were they to be adopted on a world-wide scale? Probably not.”
Why “reverse AGW”? I thought the realistic objective was to limit temperature increase to 2 degrees. If Gillard were to adopt Garnaut’s recommendations, the answer to your question using that objective would surely be “probably”. Wouldn’t it?
Yes I&U, limiting CO2 emissions to +2 degrees C is the “realistic” objective, meaning the politically achievable objective.
Please forgive the following derail.
However, that politically achievable objective will not enable a sustainable life-style for 10 billion people. Either the world’s population must fall dramatically, or patterns of energy use must change dramatically, or most likely, both.
But this thread isn’t about the future of the world, it is about the battle for the hearts and minds of Australian punters.
So now we are back on track.
I&U said:
This is a distinction without a difference. If we carry out policies that satisfy the concept of “sustainable cities”, or biodiversity protection and revegetation, for example, it doesn’t matter why we are doing it. e.g. resource, depletion, energy independence, human amenity or Co2 abatement. The benefit follows.
It’s clear that if the economy is progressively and systematically “decarbonised” in an orderly way, we will be deprived of a lot of incidental pollution, will spend less time commuting, spend less on energy per capita and per unit of GDP, be less affected by price shock inflation inflation associated with disruption to fuel supplies etc.
These benefits need to be put into the credit column for abatement since they are inseparable from any serious abatement program.
Here are the sort of people who are saying “NO”.
Fran @84,
“These benefits need to be put into the credit column for abatement since they are inseparable from any serious abatement program.”
I agree. I just don’t think that they outweigh the costs in the “debit” column.
That commo rag the China Daily is reporting
Still, if you don’t believe the case for AGW is sufficiently proven, then sleep easy…
@87 – because there has never been drought before, or floods, or tropical storms – it is all human caused global warming.
I don’t think you’re assessing the costs and benefits accurately, I & U. See Katz above.
DI @89,
I’m not sure I follow. Could you elaborate?
Perhaps I misunderstood, I & U, but you seemed to be saying that the costs of abatement outweighed the benefits. Katz @ 83 pointed out some other costs you may not have considered.
DI,
my point to Fran was essentially that, if it were the case that AGW did not exist, the costs of (nonetheless) decarbonising, would outweigh the (incidental) benefits.
In particular, it is relatively costly to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy and the incidental benefits of doing so are quite modest.
“if it were the case that AGW did not exist, the costs of (nonetheless) decarbonising, would outweigh the (incidental) benefits.”
In the short term possibly but in the long term definitely not unless you subscribe to the theory that fossil fuels are inexhaustible.
In a not-getting-it moment worthy of Alan Jones and laser broadband, I remember reading in some forum a few years ago an earnest chap talking about how even if we run out of fossil fuels here on earth we could just send colonists to the Moon and Mars so we could go mine fossil fuels there and send them back.
He had no idea why everybody was howling at the idea.
I&U said:
I don’t agree. If you relieved people of half the burden of maintaining cars, half the burden of car-based commuting, half the burden of their energy use (albeit at an increased cost per unit), reduced atmospheric pollution from PM and VOCs by half, removed half the long haul heavy vehicles from the road etc … the benefits of that would far exceed the higher cost of renewables.
Of course in the case of Australia, “renewables” would include geothermal, perhaps augmented seaboard pumped hydro with CCGT, increased use of waste biomass etc …
More expensive — but not that more expensive. And as others point out, sooner or later, fossil fuels become sharply more expensive in real terms.
Pollytickedoff,
Well, you are right, in the long-term we must decarbonise when fossil fuels run out. So the choice is whether to do it sooner rather than later. Since the cost of renewable energy is likely to fall considerably over time, I would think that (in the absence of AGW), later would be better than sooner.
Fran,
Apart from reducing atmospheric pollution, none of your incidental benefits has anything to do with decarbonising. All have to do with making energy use more efficient. Why not do that, but still use fossil fuels for the remaining energy needs?
For future reference, I’m officially uninterested in any aspects of a ‘non-AGW-assuming’ case.
File under ‘irrelevant’.
If people want to debate differing models of acting on the scientific consensus, Im all ears.
Lefty E,
Not irrelevant if you are seeking to persuade those who do not believe in AGW to take (or not oppose) mitigation action nonetheless.
Garnaut asserts that the microeconomic benefit of tax reform that would be facilitated by a carbon tax would amount to about half of the productivity cost of imposing the tax. Throw in Fran’s vision of a car-free idyll and you could get even the hard-head deniers over the line.
Incurious and Unread @ 92,
Substantively false statement there, I&U. Renewables are very cost effective for most areas of human endeavour, and the process of transition from oil to renewables would not even be felt if there was sufficient time to perform the transition naturally as old oil systems ended their commercial life.
I&U
Not only more efficient in the narrow sense of less-energy for each specific activity, but less call for the activity (which I grant improves efficiency per unit of GDP).
Apart from the question of atmospheric pollution — which you note — Australia is a net importer of refined oil products. So there’s a trade argument for reducing reliance on liquid fuels. The transport of liquid fuels both across water and land has entails environmental hazards, as we know. The heavy reliance on these fuels also makes the local economy somewhat a hostage to oil price volatility.
One could also argue that if Australia consumed less coal it could export more — so again, there would be a trade argument for cutting coal consumption.
The question of atmospheric pollution is not a trifle either. Apart from mercury toxicity, and the release of radioactivity from flyash, there are a range of disabling respiratory diseases associated with the other particulate.
In places like China, the advantages would be even greater, since their pollution from the minehead all the way to the end use point is even worse than ours, and they also have serious costs associated with moving the coal across their roads. In the US coal freight is a major burden in rail (about 40% of goods moved on rail IIRC). I read that morbidity associated with coal and oil combustion in the US may be as high as 150,000 per annum. I’m not sure what the cost in lost working days would be there, or in China or Russia but it would be large.
Andf if it really is the case that fossil fuels are both finite and hard to replace, the argument for sparing use becomes quite strong. We don’t exactly know how much or RARs will prove economically feasible to recover, (and at what environmental cost) but at some point we, or our successors, will find out and one suspects the changes that forces won’t be pretty. A smoother wind down of the supply would make this event easier to deal with.
Then of course there are the arguments from equity and governance. Right now fossil hydrocarbons are making a small number of people very wealthy indeed. Not a few of them are on the list of people guilty at best of human rights abuses on a serious scale, or of acting corruptly in concert with our governments. It’s scarcely a secret that “oil security” was at the heart of the escalation of armed intervention in Iraq and the surplus deaths of perhaps 1,000,000 Iraqis. As someone famously, if Iraq’s principal export had been broccoli … The fight over oil and the associated politics has been key to the configuration of politics as long as anyone alive can recall. If the per capita demand for oil were half what it was now, it’s hard to escape the impression that the world would be rather more than twice as well off. Had cities in the US been configured from the 1950s to minimise the call on oil and fossil fuels more generally, not only would they be healthier and a lot less frequently unhinged. We might by now have seen a positive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an absence of Israeli involvement in the Lebanese Civil War. Mossadegh might never have been overthrown in favour of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iraq in the early 1950s. Perhaps there’d have been no US support for Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athists from 1958. Egypt would not have endured a long dictatorship as a US client. The Saudi monarchy might have made way for something more like 20th Century governance and so on. The cost per capita of war and the tools to wage it and the domestic security state corresponding to it would have been a fraction of what it is today.
I call these pretty significant benefits.
In short, one doesn’t need to accept mainstream science on CO2-forcing to warrant pretty much all of the measures one would want to take if one accepts the mainstream science. One might merely want a cleaner biosphere, healthier populations or a more just and less violent world and justify it on that basis.
“In short, one doesn’t need to accept mainstream science on CO2-forcing to warrant pretty much all of the measures one would want to take if one accepts the mainstream science. One might merely want a cleaner biosphere, healthier populations or a more just and less violent world and justify it on that basis”
That is worth repeating every morning, and wispering to your children as you tuck them in for the night.
There is a beautifully written paper by Ugo Bardi on The Oil Drum
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7924
at present, which sums to the conclusion
“we cannot win against entropy, but we must behave as if we can”
, and thought provoking extract from the writings of Marcus Aurelius.
If they don’t believe it’s because they choose not to. Why waste your time trying to persuade them to be sensible when they’ve demonstrated wilful ignorance already.
@9
That’s a very weak argument, i.e. because companies spend millions on ads they must work. I’d like to see a lot more empirical evidence that for the efficiency of advertising. I mean a measure of how many opinion are changed or how much demand is created or how many brands are switched per unit of advertising effort.
@dave No 64: it is not a matter of ‘belief’ for me. I have not seen one convincing case that shows the link between increased carbon dioxide and temperature.
@BilB No 65: Ad hominem attacks are one of Aristotle’s logical fallacies.
@Jess No 66: I am an engineer, with a Master’s degree, so I know a bit about experimentation, and how models must match the physical measurements, or one must reconsider the hypothesis. When I learned that the ‘hockey stick’ graph was based on one tree species of tree called the bristlecone pine, and learned that the cross section of this sort of tree is not round, but irregular, then it became doubtful to me whether this tree could serve as a reliable proxy. Subsequent to that discovery, the ‘hockey stick’ by Mann could be obtained by any random data input, as the manipulation of the data did not need an ‘actual’ problem with increasing temperature to create the appearance of a temperature increase. I suppose that got me started on a private project of rational scepticism. Just so you know.
@tigtog No 68: see comments above, as to what findings I began to doubt (hockey stick) and why.
@ Fran Barlow No 71: I don’t accept your analogy as remotely applicable to climate science. The science of aerodynamics relates to how aircraft can remain airborne. That science derived from wind tunnels is confirmed by actually flying planes. The science of AGW relies on the hypothesis that ‘increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere create dangerous temperature increases’. No data supports the hypothesis; only models support the hypothesis.
@ Grigory M – “meow”
@ I&U @ 73: politicians make political decisions, and sometimes must make decisions when not all of the facts are in. This is a huge reform, and if the hypothesis as per above has not been shown to be true in physical measurements, then a significant reform should not be embarked upon. This is only my opinion, it does not mean I have a character defect.
@David Irving (no relation): please see comments on ad hom’s above
@Fran Barlow 95: A carbon tax will artificially increase the cost of providing power derived from coal, and this will then allow ‘renewables’ to be supplied at inflated prices, perhaps seemingly economically sound. The consumer ends up paying much more for power, for no good reason. See science not settled.
@Lefty E 97: A significant majority of Queenslanders do not believe the globe is facing dangerously warm temperatures. We have had our coldest season since the 1950’s, hardly a physical tick for the AGW hypothesis. But you can ignore if you please…
@I&U: totally agree. It is easy to speak to the converted, but to sway someone who does not ‘believe’ in AGW, and requires some proof aside from computer models does take some work.
I object to the use of the term ‘denier’.
@Paul of albury 103: See comments re: ad hominem
But, of course, I digress. No Australian has had a chance to say YES or NO as they see fit.
That is why I want an election on this very important economic reform, which is taking place, in my view, for no good reason.
Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.
Gobsmacked, in your elaborations, have you remotely considered your capacity to Master (degreeishly) engineer us collectively out of the ‘remote’ chance of the shit to hit the fan? We would be very interested to hear your plan.
Ok Gobsmacked I now think you are a troll – that’s ad hom even if true.
But my previous comment, speaking to I & U, was not meant to be ad hom, just a statement of the futility of arguing with people who’ve decided not to accept something because they don’t want it to be true, not because they’ve engaged with the evidence.
Now if you can engage with and disprove the hypotheses Gobsmacked, you have a duty to do so publicly in the scientific arena – as you say it’s extremely important – and you’ll earn the gratitude of a relieved world. But unfortunately I doubt you can succeed outside the comfort of your ‘private project’. But I’ll be very happy if you succeed.
If the scientist/engineer/polymath is still here, I hope he may volunteer to settle this CO2 IR absorption thing whilst being filmed. Put his finger in front of a CO2 laser (we can organise this) and when it fails to burn it off, the ability for CO2 to absorb and re-radiate energy in the infrared will be debunked. If it does then I will have much respect for his original convictions and hope he can see where his thinking is wrong.
–
Paul@70 – a clear Godwin – is it possible to hope that we’ve now seen peak stupid.
–
Tigtog@68 concur – unless a denier publishes a valid refutation of Tyndall and successive scientists in a peer reviewed journal – OR – has a finger cut off by a CO2 laser then I would also like it gone – as if there isn’t enough rot like Phelps/Joyce about already.
Hi all. Bit of a scattergun approach there by Gobsmacked @ 105.
David McRae @ 108, just what is the relevance of your CO2 laser comments vis-a-vis CO2 emissions and the proposed Carbon Tax?
That seems to me to be tantamount to saying that receiving information via a microwave link is the same as cooking my hand in a microwave oven.
Just doesn’t make sense.
Gobsmacked @105 – Thanks I forgot engineers don’t believe things, they simply know them to be facts…unfortunately “a significant majority” (evidence?) of your fellow Queenslanders (and I assume they are your fellow Queenslanders from your comment)
Which as far as I can tell just restates my original claim, ie “the first hurdle remains one of ‘belief’. Either you believe CO2 emissions are a problem or you don’t.”
Gobsmacked,
I would like for Tony Abbott to be an honest, positive, shrewd and innovative thinking, potential statesman.
You want …”an election on this very important economic reform, which is taking place, in my view, for no good reason”.
It is certain that neither of us will be satisfied in any way for these political desires.
“Gobsmacked: @Lefty E 97: A significant majority of Queenslanders do not believe the globe is facing dangerously warm temperatures. We have had our coldest season since the 1950’s, hardly a physical tick for the AGW hypothesis. ”
If the Gulf Stream is affected by warmer seas (as scientists predict) Britain may enter a new ice age. We’re talking about climate disruptions from global warming. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/nov/13/comment.research
Anyone who says “its cold = no AGW!” just isn’t keeping up in class, Im afraid, and probably should be moved on to less intellectually taxing material. Hardly a big tick for ‘the majority of Queenslanders’, (though as one of them myself, Im not sure why we’d get a huge say in the science).
Gobsmacked, when someone points out you’re a fool, that’s not an ad hominem attack, it’s merely a statement of fact.
That’s all very well Lefty, but if a significant majority of Queenslanders don’t believe the globe is facing dangerous warming, then surely the data and inferences of scientists ought to be discarded, don’t you think?
It’s just typical of lefties I’m afraid that just when Queenslanders are saving the world from global warming by believing things are hunky dory (not to mention believing they will keep winning the State of Origin) that we have to put the world at risk by ranting on about what scientists say. How does that help? I tend to agree with scientists, but out of civic duty, I stay here in NSW. I don’t want to make the problem worse!
To be fair, a significant majority of Queenslanders believed in Cyclone Yasi and the Brisbane floods and I think they have to take responsibility for that. It’s a shame that before these happened Queenslanders didn’t reject them as mere spin. A lot of trouble could have been avoided.
@Gobsmacked, your simplistic and ill-informed arguments really are making it rather difficult for others to resist mocking you when you make them with such a forceful conviction that others have simply overlooked what you consider to be obvious.
Remember what I said above, about being able to present good evidence that you understand the basics before we should take you seriously? Anyone who trots out “but it’s still cold this winter, therefore global warming can’t be real” simply hasn’t done the basic homework on how atmospheric/oceanic heat gets distributed from the equators to the poles, how the efficiency of that distribution can vary in the short term due to factors like jetstreams and El Nino / La Nina etc, and how those short term variations differ from long term trends.
oh noes!!!
This just in …
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/03/3234342.htm?section=justin
Apparently, signficant majority of Australians believe climate change is real and most think it’s casued by humans.
This is the problem with science. It’s the silent majority that ruins everything. If only they’d kept their opinions to themselves and left it to Queenslanders to work out. Now we could be in real trouble!!!
@62: (emphasis added)
Further angered? Really? You and all your fellow “scientists and engineers who reject the findings of the IPCC” were angry before the ad came out, and now you’re even angrier? Losing some objectivity, aren’t we?
It’s a most un-Masters of Engineering type of reaction to get angry about a matter of fact, Gobsmacked.
By the way, ad hominem argumentation is only a logical fallacy. It is not an empirical fallacy, and we are discussing an empirical matter.
If I were to say “Tony Abbott is a dickhead, and the sky is blue”, the ad hominem nature of statement A has no bearing whatsoever on the empirical status of statement B.
Now you’ve completed your Masters of Engineering, go back and try Philosophy 101.
BTW, for those reading along at home, here is the BOM’s report on the coldest autumn in Australia since 1950.
@116 – Fran, Fine, Patrickg
Right — that survey proves it — the ad worked!
P.S. What about the opinions of Western Australians, @gobsmacked?
Hello all,
Deceit tends to make ordinary people a bit angry. The willful deceit of the ad is quite obvious.
1. It is not CARBON, which conjures up images of black, sooty material. It is CARBON DIOXIDE, which is colourless and odourless and at the current concentrations, beneficial to human and plant life.
2. No coal fired power plants emit black soot. They emit steam, carbon dioxide and a tiny bit of carbon if the scrubbers are dirty. Nowhere in Australia does one see the images as presented in the ad.
3. Batterslea has been shut down.
4. Implying a CARBON TAX (lie – ’tis actually CO2) will improve the health of children is a flat out lie.
5. Implying that a CARBON TAX (lie) will make the sun shine and the skies clear is another lie.
There are more but I will let the gentle readers consider the points above.
gobsmacked, you forgot:
6. Al Gore is fat!!!11!1!
Which, I submit, is even more compelling than your five points.
Gobsmacked, so now the topic is deceit in advertising?
@dave 123: How can one say YES when one has been first deceived? Say YES to deception in a rush, regret the assent for generations to come.
@David Irving 122: Have you got a response to any of the points above re: deception, rather than Al Gore’s appearance, which is irrelevant.
Also, the point made about the Bristlecone Pine being used as a temperature proxy. Please, readers, do a google search of the tree, and find the images. The tree is not a tidy, round tree, and therefore could not possibly be a reliable temperature proxy. That is the thing that got me started – investigating whether or not the ‘hockey stick’ claims of dangerous temperature increase were plausible.
Yes, as Fran points out, the majority of QLDers almost certainly dont deny AGW: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/03/3234342.htm
Indeed, its more likely that Gobsmacked is hanging out with the 6% of fruitloops who can be described as ‘true climate change skeptics’.
Thats a relief isnt it ? Worth bearing in mind we’re talking about a statistically insignificant fringe group in the population.
@Gobsmacked, seriously? “Untidy” trees don’t have trunks that grow evenly outwards from the core? Any evidence at all for that, or just another “feeling”?
True sceptics know the climate changes, we just doubt the impact of human activity on the climate. Mother nature will deal with us as she pleases, no matter what the new ‘belief’ of climate change demands of us. Indeed the power of nature is evidenced by earthquakes than can flatten major cities in less than 60 seconds, and tornadoes which reek utter destruction – neither of which coincidentally have anything to do with AGW. I am curious as to whether the sun’s activity drives the wild weather we are experiencing now.
Gobsmacked @105:
Proof positive that Gobsmacked is a troll.
Right @Gobsmacked, you’re not even answering people any more, you’re just Gish-Galloping us. Moderator warning: start answering people who are responding to you instead of just info-dumping more claims, or you can start enjoying permamod.
BTW, here is a photo of the actual rings of a bristlecone pine. [source]
Actually, Gobsmacked aka City Slicker, you are now in permamod anyway for morphing. Your last extended appearance here involved disrupting a thread on boat-people with displays of vast ignorance, and I’m leaning towards thinking you’re just playing at being contrarian on the internet rather than seriously engaging.
Bristlecone pine tree rings are just one of a dozen or more data sets relied on as proxies for pre-thermometer temperatures, as Gobsmacked would know if (s)he was actually interested enough in the truth to do some basic Googling. Others include ice cores from mountain glaciers, coral cores, sediment deposits, tree rings from other species and from frozen or preserved trees – the list goes on and on and is constantly being added to as the field of paleoclimatology expands.
As for the claim to engineering qualifications… Steve Fielding has ‘em too – surely clear evidence that ideologically blinkered credulity is compatible with training in engineering. Or maybe Gobsmacked is actually the soon-to-be-ex-Senator?
Are you sure you’re not actually a lawyer gobsmacked? The carbon/CO2 argument is pure syntactic pedantry (and wrong anyway). The black smoke / Battersea is all in the past is irrelevant to whether AGW is happening – or are you denying they ever happened. And a tax will not make everything perfect, we know that but it doesn’t mean it won’t help.
I’m so disappointed. I’d hoped you were going to disprove the science, now I discover all you can challenge is the marketing.
@ Gobsmacked: Not at all. The proxy reconstructions are based on more than just bristlecone pines.
These kind of know-it-all statements about how accurate measurements are (without actually considering that people might have considered this already) are what prove that you have no clue what you’re talking about. Better to be silent and all that…
Ok, everybody. The Gish Galloper has been permamodded, I think everybody can stop responding to it now.
@Gobsmacked/City Slicker, comments introducing new claims by you will not be approved until you substantively address rebuttals on the claims you have already made .
6% is more than ample to swing an election. Abbott is staking his political career on it. That’s what he is saying ‘yes’ to.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the cost of solar continues to decrease:
From Scientific American: http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=132510
Yeah Mercurius, but I think that particular 6% are already voting for him, or at least preferencing him ahead of Labor or the Greens.
@130 and 131
Your blog, your discretion as to what comments and from whom get through, fair enough.
But please, less of the faux outrage about “not answering people” as the rationale for modding people out. As anyone with the slightest acquaintance with this blog is well aware, the cardinal sin triggering exclusion is that of disagreement with the prevailing ideology. Making other excuses is merely preaching to the choir.
[Moderator note: Claim that Wozza knows the exact reason that a comment of his wasn't published last week deleted. @Wozza, if you want to know, ask via email.]
Grigory M@109 “just what is the relevance of your CO2 laser comments vis-a-vis CO2 emissions and the proposed Carbon Tax?
That seems to me to be tantamount to saying that receiving information via a microwave link is the same as cooking my hand in a microwave oven.”
No – it’s tantamount to denying microwave transmissions can occur whilst cooking your hand in a microwave oven.
The CO2 molecule has many vibrational modes that absorb and re-emit energy (radiation) in the IR spectrum. Some of these modes are exploited by CO2 lasers. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_spectroscopy for more info on spectroscopy, but one can stick IR spectrometers on satellites. We’ve been doing that since the 70s, pointing them at earth and noting the apsorption bands we know to correspond to CO2 – H20 also but it’s mostly of different wavelength bands being a different molecule. We can also get an IR spectometer and point it at the sky and gues what, you’ll see those bands radiate back at you.
Now, Tyndall did not know this in 1859 when he measured the IR absoption capabilities of CO2 accorss a broad band, but this is what’s going on.
I got more info and references at http://galahs.blogspot.com/2010/04/carbon-dioxide-laser.html if you’re really keen on the workings of a CO2 laser.
When this gear is denied by ratbags that have not the first clue of molecular chemistry and physics, when ratbags think they’re smarter than every national scientific academy and every climate scientist*. When these ratbags don’t even know most of what they’re denying can be eaily demonstrated. When these ratbags cannot be arsed to look at a high school or 1st year uni text on atmospheric physics yet feel they’re in full knowledge (one wonders how gifted they think they’re at neurosurgery) then .. I don’t know. What can you do with the wilfully ignorant, dumb arses at the top of their voices. But after the Phelps thing, I think I’ve had enough.
Every single argument of the deniers are over at http://www.skepticalscience.com/. Every denier repeats those same arguments, and when demonstrated false, they continue to repeat them. So I would like to see the mods delete any retransmission of denier points covered in SkepticalScience – or just a link to skepticalsceince. Unfortunately, what happens now is often the denier is successful in thread jacking to that ratbag’s denier cut and paste. The denier’s aims achieved.
People are entitled to opinions, not facts. Balance – Dara Obriain says it best “There’s a kind of notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who’s been a professor of dentistry for 40 years doesn’t have a debate with some idjit who removes his teeth with string and a door!”
(*there’s 3 of the thousands of climate scientist who do not deny the physics, but assert** there are negative feedbacks that will counter the CO2 warming and the 1st order positive feedback of H2O))
(**no data to support, so many lines do not. Iris effect was the last published hypothesis nearly a decade ago and then not in decent journals)
But yeah – can’t get a denier to stand in front of a laser, nor tell us why not. Maybe yourself or gobsmacked?
Gobsmacked — you’ve been a but naughty here @121. This is a direct plagiarism of The Blot in the Daily Telegraph of June 1 (What an Act – alarmist ad truly a disgrace).
While I accept that you have the right to misrepresent reality, I think it’s unbecoming for someone with a Masters Degree in anything to plagiarise or fail to acknowledge their sources. All this means is that you think
a) The Blot is a lot sharper than you
b) Saying that you rely on copying and pasting from The Blot would make you look stupid
You are almost certainly correct in both inferences, but that’s no excuse.
Sorry Tigtog … didn’t see your comment about responding. I still think it’s worth identifying the provenance of its posts.
Adrian,
Whilst I agree with your broad premise that solar PV is getting cheaper, care must be taken in interpreting claims that it is, or will be, “cheaper than coal generation”. Typically in this case, apples are being compared with oranges, with the production cost for PV being compared to the retail price for conventional electricity.
The production-only cost of coal-fired generation is around 4-5c/kWh. Based on the article you link to, PV would not fall to this cost until after 2030. The remaining cost in the retail tariff covers transmission, distribution, retailing and peaking generation costs.
Now it is true that, unlike coal generation, solar PV can be located at the point of consumption. But because solar is intermittent, one still needs either distribution networks or local storage to ensure that electricity supply is maintained overnight and on overcast days, as well as to cover peaks in consumer demand.
To compare like with like, the cost of these should be included, which they are typically not in claims of this kind. That could (at a guess) typically add 10c-15c/kWh to the real cost of solar PV, making it much less competitive than at face value.
@132: I totally agree that Bristlecone pines were only one of many temperature proxies, if the mod lets this comment through. McIntyre and McItrick have shown that if the Bristlecone pine proxies are removed from the data, the hockey stick upon which politicians relied has disappeared. My source is here. http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf (page 11-12) Obviously it is up to the moderators to let this through. I am not up on being silenced. What is the word? Ah. permamod.
I reiterate: Australians have NOT had their say on this matter. An election would clear this up, and I say YES. To an election, to bring this thread back to it’s original question.
Gobsmacked @ 144, I’ve let your comment through although it doesn’t meet the criterion set by tt @ 135 because I happen to be at home and have time to deal with it.
As recommended upthread, your first step should be to go to this site at Skeptical Science. scan down to item 15 and click on the text. There you’ll be told this:
Followed by the most succinct outline of what really matters about the reams of stuff written about the topic. I’m afraid that your response in cherry picking what McKitrick said in 2005 just doesn’t cut it. At best, lazy and slack.
Then you need to understand that the Hockey Stick was about northern hemisphere temperatures and is not as central to the whole AGW debate as some people seem to think. @ 69 I invited you to address the science about climate sensitivity, which is central.
I’ve just posted a longish comment on the new thread on the issue. It’s one of those where the basic science is quite settled. We know that doubling CO2 will give you a temperature increase of about 3C with the uncertainty mainly on the upside. What is emerging is that the true value longer term is probably considerably north of 3C.
But really, trotting out McKitrick vintage 2005 and ignoring everything since is exactly the kind of humbug we can do without.
@Brian 145: By referencing McItrick I was attempting to explain the first item which caused me to doubt the hypothesis that carbon dioxide emissions were causing dangerous ‘global warming’. Nothing more, nothing less.
@133: there is a difference between ‘carbon’ and ‘carbon dioxide’. One is a solid, the other a gas. Just so you know it is not a syntactic pedantry.
To all gentle readers here, you are welcome to review any of my posts to check for yourself as to whether I have resorted to the namecalling and ad hominem attacks, evidenced by other op’s who simply disagree with what I have said.
Sad, isn’t it?
Gobsmacked, it’s really not of much interest as to what started you on the path of scepticism/denialism/contrarianism. What we need to know is whether you have any solid scientific reasons for your current position.
But GS, the science isn’t affected by whether the general public talk about C or CO2. it’s a debating trick, attacking the terminology, not the substance.
So far, your evidence against global warming is that you saw a picture of a tree like one that was used in some of the research and didn’t like it. Good luck with that.
Ross McKitrick is an economist, not a scientist of any stripe, and has had an anti-environmentalist agenda for years before he latched onto this subject. There is no reason why Mr/Ms Smacked or anyone else should take anything he says/writes seriously.
Yes, it is sad the way denialists habitually evade/deflect with confected outrage over ‘ad hominem’ (rarely used correctly) and namecalling, instead of presenting the evidence they discovered in their basesment that will overturn the AGW hypothesis, win them the Nobel Prize, and answer the question we are all dying to know; which stunning and blindingly obvious point has been hitherto overlooked or conspiratorially suppressed by thousands of climate scientists throughout tens of thousands of person-years of research..?, so we can all breathe easy and burn as much coal as we like.
As my former boss from Kansas used to say: “pee, or get off the pot…”
@Paul of Albury – I stand by my view that there is a significant difference between talking about ‘carbon’ (occurs in crystalline forms as diamonds and graphite, and in amorphous condition as charcoal) and ‘carbon dioxide’ (a colourless heavy gas).
If one is saying that charcoal causes global warming, that is a different thing to saying the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere causes global warming.
I am simply using the long standing dictionary definitions of each term.
If using well accepted and recognised dictionary definitions is somehow offensive to you, well then I will ignore your posts, and you are free to ignore mine.
@ Helen – you are using a character assessment rather than telling me what is wrong with McItrick’s analysis, but that goes back some way, so I won’t expect a response. My remark on the McItrick article was meant to be a historical ‘ah ha’ moment for me and in no way represents the sum total of my reading on this issue.
@Mercurious
Science is about putting forward a hypothesis, then those who put forward the hypothesis either proving or disproving that hypothesis through observation.
What you are saying is that laymen or the general public who reject the current hypothesis need somehow to disprove it. Non, mon ami. It is up to those who put forward the hypothesis to prove it, through observation, measurement and analysis that can be replicated by other scientists.
What I am saying (and I can only speak for myself) is that from what I have read, there is nothing other than a computer model and unreliable temperature records that purport to prove the hypothesis.
That, in my view, is why the science is neither settled, nor safe.
In your view, what is the single most important piece of evidence (not computer model) that supports the hypothesis? That is the question, and this question has not been answered sufficiently.
Here is what I understand the AGW hypothesis to be:
“That human-produced carbon dioxide being released to the atmosphere causes dangerous global warming”
And I certainly don’t say ‘burn as much coal as we like’. I think that we need to use our resources wisely, and respect the environment.
I believe that the AGW debate takes us away from real environmental problems like the use of chemicals, the poisonous tailings from mining activity, environmental issues around the CSG industry and so on.
I say, lets start from a true consensus position to deal with climate change.
Climate changes. We know this because of the widely accepted cycles of la Nina and el Nino which occur naturally in this land of drought and rain. If we start from a true consensus position (and nominate the most dominant and well understood climate cycles), we can take rational steps to adapt and mitigate to climate change. Look at what happened with the Brisbane floods. Tim Flannery predicted that it would never rain again, so no steps were taken towards dam mitigation, and look what happened. We got what we deserved by listening to someone who was making false and downright foolish predictions on unsafe and unsettled science, rather than relying on well understood climate cycles.
Continuing down this divisive path of ‘chicken little’ versus ‘ostrich’ is quite ruinous.
I am thankful for being able to put my view forward, and try not to name call. I must say once again that I reject the use of denialist as an adjective for this debate. I have explained my position before, and the use of the term in answer to my post could be seen as provocative.
Gobsmacked has done it again, folks. I think tigtog had the right idea.
Dave McRae @140
Huh?
Poetic, Helen.
Grigory M, Dave McRae has (for about the thousandth time) outlined a very simple test of belief: if you do not believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas, stick your hand in front of a CO2 laser. It’s all about the physics.
I wouldn’t do it, but I understand enough of the physics to realise how stupid it’d be.
Smacko @128:
How is this any different from the Christian Conservative explanation that climate change is caused by God?
“Carbon Pricing: It Works, Bitches“
Gob Smacked @128,
“neither of which coincidentally have anything to do with AGW”
…not necessarily so. Just as an earth quake can adjust the earth’s rotation, AGW influenced changing distribution of ice and water masses can affect the pressure on techtonic plates thereby altering the timing of earthquakes. Tornadoes and cyclones can also be induced by AGW influenced atmospheric moisture and energy content.
On your Carbon confusion, the atomic weight of carbon is the same regardless of which form it is in, beit in a log of wood, a graphite block, a diamond, or as a component in Carbon Dioxide.
I went looking for a simple experiment for you to perform to prove or disprove CO2′s influence on the atmosphere, but came up with some reading for you instead, Gob,
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm