Climate cold shoulder

Here's an interesting Radio 4 program on what lies beneath widespread denial of climate change. Laurie Taylor talks to Sally Weintrobe, the editor of the first book of its kind which explores, from a multi disciplinary perspective, what the ecological crisis actually means to people. In spite of a scientific consensus, many continue to resist or ignore the message of climate communicators - but why? What are the social and emotional explanations for this reaction?
 
What is this climate problem anyway? The key stores in the global carbon cycle are shown in the image I've drawn (below, click to enlarge). The arrows representing the flow of carbon between key stores are annotated with the mechanism of transfer.

 

Key aspects to note: Chalk and limestone and fossil fuels are very large carbon stores formed over very long periods but when used they very quickly release carbon to the atmosphere. Burning forests and changing land use by logging and then farming beef or soya both very quickly releases carbon into the air and cuts the rate of carbon removal. Ocean capacity to absorb and store carbon is decreasing as it’s warming up, and oceans are acidifying. The result of this and more: carbon concentration in the atmosphere is rising. 
 
People, especially those living in the most economically developed societies, currently impact heavily on the carbon cycle. Total carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per person per year in the UK are now more than 10 tonnes, when a sustainable level is 2 tonnes. Elsewhere in the economically developed world it can be higher than this eg in the USA.
 
 In constructing homes, factories, roads...people consume huge quantities of fossil fuel and cement (see image). Extracting/producing, transporting and using fossil fuels and cement in itself releases large amounts of carbon.
 
In heating and lighting homes and using many gadgets people consume large amounts of natural gas and electricity (largely produced by burning fossil fuels in power stations).
 
In transporting themselves around by car and their factory mass produced and consumed goods around the globe by heavy lorry, planes and ships, huge amounts of petrol, diesel and aviation fuel are burned, emitting carbon.
 
Demand for land is high and growing eg to feed a growing world population and to meet high demand for meat. Beef farming in particular is land and energy intensive - large scale deforestation (see image) has occurred to make land available for it.
 
One reaction to all this: the UK Climate Change Act, 2008 under the last Labour Govt, which sets a carbon reduction target of at least 80% by 2050 from 1990 levels, and carbon budgeting. However, the Coalition Govt has, amongst a long list of green failures: dropped the pledge to cut EU emissions by 30% by 2020 and is instead getting the EU "back on track" to cutting energy consumption by 20% by 2020; abandoned a planned rise in the renewable energy target; axed a commitment to replace air passenger duty with a per-flight tax; severely limited the scope of green financial products supposed to enable people to invest in green infrastructure; favoured greater reliance on finite and climate change causing natural gas; favoured fracking for shale gas....see here for more. 

Find out more on climate change from: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/sci_nat/04/climate_change/html/climate.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/

Climate: no change

Climate change is rated as a very serious problem. So why has action not been correspondingly urgent? Here's a screencast I've made exploring this question in terms of: visibility; historical precedent; immediacy; complexity; blame; personal impacts.

Goose steps and mass graves? We're only trying to save the world - Telegraph

Brilliant article in the Daily Telegraph from Robert Webb (pictured) 'one of Britain's most popular comedians, [who]brings his wit and imagination to the Telegraph's comment pages with capricious stories of his everyday life.' We need more communication on politics and climate change like this!

When the Martians finally invade and make me Lord High Protector of the Earth, I like to think that my first act will be to have myself arrested. It might be useful if those who spend a lot of time banging on about how much they love liberty ask themselves if they would do the same thing.

What would you do? A quick tweak here and there, and then hold elections? More than a tweak? It's the whole Earth, so there's quite a bit to put right. And you'll need people you trust to help: friends… maybe family! And what about those Earthlings who don't appreciate your efforts? Well, protest is one thing, but when they start to really interfere with your helpful plans for them, then it might be time to be a bit firm – which is just your way of showing how much you love them. So the Friendly Protectorship might go on slightly longer than we first imagined. Best to give it a while: say 30 years? A lifetime?

Yes, you've guessed it: this week's column is about the leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas MP. If you don't immediately understand the connection, then that's because you are sane. To have made the mental leap, you would need to belong to the head-banging libertarian/Ukip fringe who seem to think that all Lefties are born tyrants. You might be tempted to offer them the figure of George Orwell – who spent a lifetime defending the values of the democratic Left against the triple menace of communism, fascism and imperialism – but that doesn't work on the head-bangers, because they think Orwell is one of them. This indicates a psychological problem that experts have identified as "an inability to read a book properly".

Anyway, Lucas – who this week made an attempt to make the House of Commons work more efficiently, and was roundly patronised for her efforts – makes an almost perfect hate figure for the head-bangers, not just because she shows worrying signs of talking about wealth redistribution and actually meaning it, but because of the inevitable scale of aspiration that is part of the Green agenda. They look at her and think: "This woman doesn't just want to keep the 50p rate, she wants to change the entire Earth! This can only mean jackboots."

I say she's an "almost" perfect hate figure because she doesn't have an eye-patch or a hook or wear swastika earrings. In fact, it's a bit inconvenient all round that, when interviewed, she sounds quite sensible. Still, that won't matter. There's a YouTube video posted by "ukipmedia" where, to my ear, Lucas is clearly winning a debate with Ukip spokesman David Campbell Bannerman. At the point where she says, "People are dying from climate change, David", the video then clunkily loops back so we can hear her say it again another three times. The intended effect is presumably to highlight some kind of "gaffe" or standout absurdity, but in fact it reveals far more about the mentality of the poster than the subject. It's the use of repetition that is sinister here, not the thing that's being repeated. "People are dying from climate change" is not a remarkable statement; it is a scientific commonplace.

Given the bitter tone of the environmental debate, I imagine that this last sentence will have made some of you really quite cross. The YouTube clip has inspired seven pages of comments, characterised in the main by unhinged vitriol and references to totalitarian mass graves.

Let me have a go at understanding these people: wish me luck. I suppose that if you really think climate change is a sham; if you really think it's possible for a global scientific community to get together to fabricate a mountainous embarrassment of evidence in support of a particular theory and that, furthermore, they are able to hoodwink successfully – or even secretly conspire with – hundreds of governments and political parties, who are wildly opposed on everything else, so that there is a consensus that something should be done, then I suppose you're going to be quite annoyed when, as a result of this mammoth fraud, someone asks you to turn the central heating down.

Because if what they're saying is true, then our only way out of it is through unprecedented, long-term collective action. And human beings are really not very good at unprecedented, long-term collective action. And, knowing our history, we certainly don't like the look of that word "collective". Or, for that matter, "action". So better to believe the whole thing is a lie: Jeremy Clarkson will back us up, and he's a fun guy.
Believe me – I don't want to be on the un-fun side of the argument. I enjoy a visit to ClarksonWorld along with the next man, but I can't live there. All the rides are free because someone else is paying. And I sympathise with the daunted. I'm pretty daunted. The crushing scale of the thing, the complexity of getting agreements between countries at different stages of industrial and political development, the technological challenges, the whole seeming futility of it makes you want to club Caroline Lucas around the head with a patio heater to shut her up.

But still, I don't "get" where coercion, goose steps and Room 101 is implied in any of this. A failure of imagination on my part, no doubt. Maybe the Martians should appoint David Campbell Bannerman instead. What would he do?

Goose steps and mass graves? We're only trying to save the world - Telegraph

Horizon: Science Under Attack

Great program, very revealing. Climate sceptics/deniers - or at least some of them - put faith and ideology before experiment, evidence and reason. Science is imperfect but faith and ideology tells us not to question and not to test things out to discover what's really going on.

Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded - from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS.
He interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate, and travels to New York to meet Tony, who has HIV but doesn't believe that that the virus is responsible for AIDS.
This is a passionate defence of the importance of scientific evidence and the power of experiment, and a look at what scientists themselves need to do to earn trust in controversial areas of science in the 21st century.

BBC - BBC Two Programmes - Horizon, 2010-2011, Science Under Attack

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jan/25/horizon-science-under-attack-review

Climate Change Denial » Collapse Porn?

Interesting view George Marshall has here - I have a lot of time for his approach...

Climate Change Denial » Collapse Porn?

A movie that is now being launched in the UK called Collapse shows Michael Ruppert chainsmoking his way through visions of social and economic disaster. It is symptomic of the utterly self defeating way that peak oil and climate change are typically communicated

Johann Hari: How much proof do the global warming deniers need? - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

Everything the climate scientists said would happen - with their pesky graphs and studies and computers - is coming to pass. This is proving the hottest year ever. Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.

The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen – with their pesky graphs and studies and computers – came to pass.

This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: there were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Centre puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century.

Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the momentum to stop it has died.

The Copenhagen climate summit evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government determined to pioneer a fuel – tar sands – that causes three times more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the connections. The Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, had been opposed to meaningful action on global warming until he found the smoke-choked air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be irreparable...

more via this link

Johann Hari: How much proof do the global warming deniers need? - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

'Conspiracy theories finally laid to rest' by report on leaked climate change emails

Scientists involved in last year's "climategate" leaked emails controversy, which added to scepticism about the science of global warming, were not open enough with their data and unhelpful with requests for information, an independent review of the affair found yesterday.

They and their institution, the University of East Anglia (UEA), did not embrace the "spirit of openness" enshrined in the Freedom of Information Act, according to a long-awaited report into their conduct carried out by a panel of senior academics.

However, the review found that the researchers concerned, led by the Director of UEA's world-renowned Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Professor Phil Jones, could not be faulted for their "rigour and honesty as scientists", and there was no evidence that they had behaved in a way that might undermine the conclusions of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

(from The Independent)

Climate denial: what is the truth?

How is anyone supposed to take seriously Eddie Smith’s letter (‘Any damage done to our climate was done long ago’, Post, December 8)? In attempting to debunk human- caused climate change he is of the view that the world’s climate scientists either don’t understand or have forgotten Archimedes Principle for goodness sake! Its not hard to find many such examples* - the nature and enormity of the problem is causing many people to search around for reasons not to believe it and to wait for someone else to act rather than take their share of personal responsibility. We see angry outright denial, scapegoat seeking, deliberate boasts about wastefulness, projection of anxiety onto something more manageable, or most common of all – people shutting out all information and just not thinking about the problem.

People are being helped to find reasons not to believe by very poor leadership from politicians who for decades have talked a lot, done nothing and now failed in Copenhagen. They’ve also been helped by the poor state of communication between scientists, politicians and the public. However, none of this changes the basic bio-physical facts. Climate change is an inconvenient truth – and we all have to face up to it. We’ve gone beyond the stage of fundamental dispute about the core science and entered a phase of finding out what it takes for us all to accept both the truth of climate change and most of all - its implications.
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*Eddie also: mixes up toxic smogs with climate change – they have features in common but are distinct issues; talks of a warm period in the middle ages as if the whole globe was involved – it wasn’t, medieval warming was only regional; says the temperature has not risen for ten years – but the last decade has been the warmest in human history according to organisations like the Met Office and NASA and its trends over time that are correct climate science; compares the scientific reports on climate change to the Iraq ‘dodgy dossier’ – the scientific reports are peer reviewed, are many and varied, have appeared over many years, featuring stronger and stronger evidence as time has passed.
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The picture above is taken from a You Tube clip that features David Attenborough and Prof Peter Cox on natural vs human-caused climate change. The red line shows the measured temperature trend, the green line the model prediction using only natural factors and the yellow line the model prediction using human and natural factors. You can see the clip in less than 3 minutes here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ob9WdbXx0

...the crust presented by the life of lies.../A Beautiful Lie

While I was clearing out some paperwork the other day I came across a print out of an email with the quote below from The Power of the Powerless by writer, former dissident and politician Vaclav Havel. Its a great piece of writing that makes me think of how industrial society and our rapidly industrialising world have yet to confront the truth of climate change and act accordingly.

For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, 'The emperor is naked!' - when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game - everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.

My daughter had the song A Beautiful Lie by 30 Seconds to Mars playing at the time. They seem to go together so I've paired them here. See what you think.

Are sea level rises real? If so, what problems are caused?

Changing sea levels reshape whole coastlines, often affecting densely populated areas. Scientists want to understand sea level as thoroughly as possible, given the climate change problem, and have gathered increasing amounts of data. G Best’s letter (‘Where is the evidence of rising water levels?’, Open Lines, 17 Feb) says rising sea levels are ‘scares’ and requests the evidence. Maybe he thinks sea level rise does not exist because he has not noticed it with his own eyes? I can assure him that there is plenty of reliable evidence showing it!

DEFRA, the Environment Agency and South West Observatory data has identified which regional coastal sites and features are most at risk from sea level rise within the next 20 years. Sites at high risk according to them include: Westbury Court Garden, Bossington, Lundy Access Road, Godrevy, Penberth, St Michael’s Mount, Mullion Harbour, Cotehele Quay, South Milton Sands, Black Ven/Lyme Regis, Golden Cap, Studland, and Brownsea. Sites at medium risk include: Middlehope & Sandpoint, Brean Down, Woolacombe, Boscastle Harbour, Wembury, Greenway Quay, Burton Bradstock.

South West sea levels are set to rise between 20-80cm by the 2080s, depending on whether and by how much we all cut or increase emissions. Newlyn in Cornwall has one of the longest sea level records in the UK and sea level here was 161mm higher in 2006 than when records began in 1916 on average. Average wave height increased, from 1.8m in 1962 to 2.3m today (Seven Stones Light-vessel). Such changes may adversely affect sea defences, harbours, homes, businesses, infrastructure, maritime heritage as well as natural assets and biodiversity according to the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory.

The National Trust has published research into the long-term future of the coastline and the impact that climate change (through sea level rise, coastal flooding and increased erosion) was predicted to have on this coast over the next century. In the south west 279 kilometres of National Trust coastline are at risk from erosion, with 852 hectares of Trust coastal sites becoming at risk of tidal flooding.

Information on global sea level rise, published by NASA in June 2006 showed sea level rose, on average, 3 millimetres per year between 1993 and 2005. Half of this was attributed to melting ice and the other half to thermal expansion as the ocean absorbs excess energy. Due to climate change scientists at NASA and elsewhere are particularly concerned about: thermal expansion—the tendency of warm water to take up more space than cooler water; the addition of water to the sea from melting glaciers; and changes in salinity, given that fresh water is less dense than salt water and therefore takes up slightly more space than an equal mass of salt water.

No global warming??

John from Whitchurch seems to think that the brief spell of recent cold weather we’ve had in the UK is evidence that there is no global warming (‘Global warming? You must be joking’, Open Lines, Feb 12). Questioning of evidence is what science is all about and I’m all in favour of it. John seems not to have applied this principle to the evidence he uses however.

His evidence is only for a very, very short period of weeks and days. He refers to information only from the UK. Climate is about decades of changes not short term weather. Climatic change as now discussed, of which global warming is only one aspect (albeit very important), is a phenomenon which is global and which is tracked over geological time (hundreds, thousands and millions of years).

Has he considered whether the recent weather around the globe fits predictions made by the scientific ‘experts’ he scoffs at? Has he looked at patterns and trends over long periods of time and over large areas of the globe as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have in their independent work for the United Nations?

John very properly asks who these ‘experts’ are and what qualifications they have but this information has been very widely publicised for years now. The IPCC were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work last year! There is no doubt that the United Nations are served by very well qualified scientists as are hundreds of governments and thousands of businesses and scientific institutions all around the globe. They have all assessed the evidence and conclude that climate change is real, very serious and requiring urgent, large scale action! However, its not the fact that they are ‘experts’ that convinces me about climate change – it’s the fact that their central evidence and their expertise has passed continual and rigorous testing. This testing rightly continues to be an essential part of the problem solving process.

Loving the car

Interesting to see the online critical responses to letter writer Philip Gannaway. He is concerned about what he calls ‘anti-car rhetoric’ (Soapbox: ‘Learning to love the motor car’, Post 5 Dec).

He would acknowledge I hope that there are many positive reasons for seeking a society with low car use, not least our health, safety, security, stability and quality of life.

The Council and Government should invest heavily in sustainable transport methods as a matter of urgency.

He would acknowledge, if he believes in reason and the real world (terms he is keen to use in his letter), that the best available science says that we must urgently make very large cuts in carbon emissions from cars. The damage done to our climate would, with other measures, then be lower, enhancing the security and stability of life on into the future. Bristol’s carbon emissions are six times the sustainable level, a large proportion of this due to car use.

With car use lowered road safety would be increased. Thousands are currently killed and tens of thousands injured every year.

Fewer cars on the roads means cleaner air, which means lower lung damage and much improved health, especially for children. Tens of thousands die prematurely each year due to toxic air pollution.

Towns and cities more focussed on walking, cycling and public transport would be more tranquil and less stressful places to live. The quality of our lives could thus be enhanced.

We devote so much time, money and land to the car too – why not free up a lot of this and put it to good use in other ways?

Facing up to reality

Today's post about climate change on George Monbiot's site is well worth reading (see extract below). It seems to me that we have made it harder and harder to build the green society we need because we are always behind the times with our assessment of the science, let alone acting on it! Again we have not put the problem of climate change on the right scale and in the right context. This explains the continual lack of action of sufficient seriousness and urgency over decades. We have not faced up to reality.

Turner claims that to keep the temperature rise close to two degrees, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions must peak in 2016 then fall by either three or four per cent a year. A 3% rate of decline is most likely to deliver a temperature rise of 2.2 degrees this century; a 4% annual cut would produce about 2.1%(3). That’s more or less consistent with his 2050 targets.

So far so good. But a recent paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, using the same sources, comes to completely different conclusions(4). It agrees that to deliver a reasonable chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere need to stabilise at a maximum of 450 parts per million, carbon dioxide equivalent (ppmCO2e). But it shows that to achieve this, global emissions of greenhouse gases from the parts of the system we can control need to peak by 2015, then fall by 6-8% a year between 2020 and 2040, leading to “full decarbonization sometime soon after 2050.” Even this, it shows, relies on an optimistic reading of the current data. Turner’s suggested cuts are more likely to produce four degrees of warming than two degrees.

The difference between the two reports comes down to this: Turner assumes that greenhouse gases can rise to 500ppmCO2e before falling back to 450(5). The other paper shows that this is a dangerous assumption. Not only does this mean that the cut comes too late, but far from falling back, the enhanced levels in the atmosphere are likely to trigger more emissions, as the biosphere starts producing more greenhouse gases than it absorbs. We cannot afford to overshoot(6).

Climate change denial

More climate change denial in my local paper, via the letters page this time...

Michael Maddock is wrong in his assessment of the evidence on climate change ('Exploding the myth on climate change', Bristol Evening Post Open Lines, 1 July). Climate change is not a myth as the headline suggests it is. In fact the (Nobel Prize winning) UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch/) does exactly as he suggests scientists should. It continually looks at all the latest and most expert scientific research on climate change. It then periodically issues major assessment reports containing the best available evidence. There have been four assessment reports so far and its fair to say that each time a new report has come out the evidence has pointed out even more strongly the fact that human-caused climate change is real, serious, and requiring urgent action from everyone, lead by governments. What more could we all want than that??

Contrary to what Michael says, many scientists clearly do not state that climate change is not caused by carbon dioxide. If they did it would be in the IPCC reports. In fact what the scientists say is the complete opposite! Its not true to say that warming always happens first, followed by carbon dioxide rise. It has sometimes happened this way but it also, as now, happens the other way around, with carbon dioxide emissions rising, followed by warming. This is a natural feature of the tightly coupled systems that affect our climate. What it points to of course is that the warming we are causing now with our carbon dioxide emissions, will itself go on to cause even more warming on top of warming caused by further carbon dioxide emissions! There are several mechanisms by which it will do this eg warming melts ice/snow, which means the white area reflecting energy back into space is lower, which means more energy is absorbed, causing warming...This feedback effect amplifies human impact along with others.

Scientists will continue to question, investigate, and gather evidence as Michael suggests they should. What concerns me greatly is that Michael, and many others with him, are, despite the very strong evidence, in denial about climate change (see http://climatedenial.org/ ). The sooner we face up to the facts the better. Time is slipping away and it will get harder and harder to reduce the worst effects of climate change the longer we put off what we all know we have to do ie adopt efficient, renewable lifestyles that stay within environmental limits, something that will also make our lives more affordable as it means bigs cuts in our use of increasingly expensive oil.

Sustainable living: an essential not a luxury add-on

‘Sustainable living is all very well, but people also have to get on with living their lives’ concluded Bristol Evening Post feature writer Suzanne Savill’s piece about alternatives to petrol and diesel (‘Think about it’, Bristol Evening Post's Seven Magazine p3, June 7 2008). This is an illogical, contradictory statement since if we don’t live our lives sustainably we will not be able to ‘get on with living’ them. The ‘alternative’ to sustainable living is one that by definition cannot be continued ie its unsustainable.

Her statement sounds to me like a denial of problems that are real, serious, and urgent, like peak oil production and climate change, which are inseparable from soaring food and fuel prices. Best science and economics tells us we have to adjust and adapt our lives, which means fully embracing sustainability’s key concepts: efficiency; renewability; environmental limits; meeting needs; fairness here and around the globe, for both present and future generations.

Sustainability is not an add-on luxury, its an essential – though our government has failed to lead on this, get this message across and make it easier for people to make practical, sustainable choices.