A climate con: Analysis of the "Copenhagen Accord"

By David Spratt and Damien Lawson
21 December 2009
Climate Action Centre Briefing Note

''In biblical terms it looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our future and our people … our future is not for sale.'' Ian Fry, Tuvalu negotiator

"This is a declaration that small and poor countries don't matter, that international civil society doesn't matter, and that serious limits on carbon don't matter. The president has wrecked the UN and he's wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it's at the expense of everything progressives have held dear. 189 countries have been left powerless, and the foxes now guard the carbon henhouse without any oversight." Bill McKibben, 350.org

Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!

Thanks to Gristmill for pointing to this amazing advertisment from a 1962 issue of Life Magazine. Humble Oil later merged with Standard to become Exxon.

And it's all true!
Reporting in the journal Nature in September, researchers from British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bristol describe how analysis of millions of NASA satellite measurements from both vast, polar ice sheets shows that the most profound ice loss is a result of glaciers speeding up where they flow into the sea.

The authors conclude that this ‘dynamic thinning’ of glaciers now reaches all latitudes in Greenland, has intensified on key Antarctic coastlines, is penetrating far into the ice sheets’ interior and is spreading as ice shelves thin by ocean-driven melt. Ice shelf collapse has triggered particularly strong thinning that has endured for decades.

For an overview of the Arctic, check out the Arctic Report Card, released earlier this month.

Copenhagen reality check: 25% by 2020 isn't in the ball park

First published in Crikey, 4 November 2009

Climate policy analyst David Spratt writes:

Columnist David Roberts sees the Copenhagen climate change conference negotiating process so far as akin to "an aquarium full of hamsters connected to rudimentary motors. There's a lot of frantic running, a lot of sweat and heat, but in the end, very little light".

The dim light that does exists flickers on a target for Australia and the developed economies of reducing emissions by 2020 to 25% below the level of 1990.

In Bali two years ago, the European Union proposed a framework that included global emissions peaking in 10–15 years and for developed countries to achieve emissions levels 20–40% below 1990 levels by 2020. The United States, supported by Australia and others, strongly opposed this.

In a flood of tears and acrimony, the final Bali session sat through the night to produce a compromise that mandates "deep cuts in global emissions", with footnote references to the 2007 IPCC report which talks about the developed economies needing to reduce emissions 25 to 40% below 1990 levels to have a reasonable chance of holding warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

The Garnaut report quietly dropped the 40% end of the range and mischievously took 25% by 2020 as being a 2-degree target. The Rudd government followed in these footsteps and went for a 25% target, with highly conditional qualifications, in the revised CPRS in May, abetted by the ACTU-led Southern Cross Climate Coalition.

Now 2 degrees isn't the sort of target anyone with grandkids should aspire to. The research tells us that a 2-degree warming will initiate large climate feedbacks on land and in the oceans, on sea-ice and mountain glaciers and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points.

Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheets; sea- level rises; the extinction of an estimated 15 to 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification and widespread drought, desertification and malnutrition in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

You can bet your house that Copenhagen will not conclude with a 25% mandatory target for all the developed economies, but is it what we need to do, or is the whole of the Copenhagen process wrapped in an enormous delusion?

In September, researchers from Oxford and Germany's Potsdam Institute, produced figures on a carbon budget to 2050. In essence, they estimated how much carbon in total can be put in the air to 2050 if the aim is to not exceed 2 degrees.

From there it's not too hard to work out what each country needs to do, and that what's the Potsdam Institute Director Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber did in his recent presentation to the "4 Degrees and Beyond" conference in Oxford.

Assume the present population, and divide it into the total carbon budget and you get a budget per person to 2050. [This is based in the assumption that each citizen of the planet has an equal right to the budget, a proposition disputed by many in the developing world who rightly point to the historic carbon debt on which the developed world built their economies].



Nevertheless, by taking the per capita allocation to 2050 and comparing it to a nation's current annual emissions per person, you get a clear picture of national responsibilities, and that's what Schellnhuber did in a single chart.

Australia, like the USA, is top of the pops for per capita emissions.

If we maintain that rate, our carbon budget to 2050 runs out in five years. Five years!! Or put in another way, as the chart illustrates, Australia and the USA would need to be at zero emissions by 2020. Just follow the black line.

Not 25% by 2020, but 100% by 2020 for Australia. That's the science, unadorned. God forbid the politics.

A 4 degree world

A recent conference in Oxford attended by the best and brightest of the climate science academy examined the prospects and impacts of 4 degrees of global warming. The prognosis is not good. New Scientist have done a good summary with a Google Earth interactive guide (download .kmz file), but if you have a spare hour listen to some of the presentations available on the conference website; Prof. Schellenhuber's and Richard Betts' from the Met Office are a must.

Copenhagen in a Nutshell

This figure from the Washington Post and statement by Jose Barroso sums up what we can expect from the current Copenhagen process.

As Prof. Prof Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change, said this week the chances of the getting a deal that could keep warming below two degrees was "pie in the sky".

Forget about 2050, we're blowing the carbon budget right now

by David Spratt

Sick of hearing about greenhouse emission reduction targets for 2020 or 2030 or 2050? Now there's a new way to think about what we need to do in Australia, and its a million miles from the Canberra debate: The carbon budget for Australians to 2050 for a 2-degree target runs out in five and a bit years!

Focusing on targets decades ahead has a bad side to it, because it transfers responsibility for action to the future, rather than the here and now. Perhaps that's why the 10:10 campaign in the UK has picked up such a groundswell of support so quickly, because its action time horizon is the next year.

As the world head towards COP15 in Copenhagen this December, the question about how far / how fast emissions need to be reduced is always lurking. The mainstream public debate is still focused on the Kyoto Annex 1 (advanced industrial economies) reducing emissions by 25-40% compared to a 1990 baseline by 2020. But that is the wrong target and the Australian governments proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme won't reduce Australia's actual emissions below the 1990 level for another quarter of a century.

And there are some startling new figures about what we need to do, right now. Earlier this year this blog looked at two new research papers published this week in Nature on emissions targets.

One paper looked at how much carbon "budget" was left to 2050 to keep warming to 2 degrees. Now 2 degrees is not a good idea, but the results were sharp. They found that almost a third of that budget had been used in the first 8 years! From that work, a number of conclusions can be drawn:

• If emissions keep growing at 3.5 per cent a year, then the carbon budget for 2 degrees runs out in 2021. That is, after that time, emissions would need to drop to zero immediately to have a 75 per cent chance of not passing 2 degrees.
• If global emissions reduce 2 per cent a year from now, the carbon budget will run out in 2030 for 2C, and
• With a 4 per cent annual reduction in global emissions, it will run out in 2040.

And in would take a miracle for COP15 in Copenhagen to produce a result that would even stabilise global emissions at their current level by 2020, in which case COP15 will blow the carbon budget to 2050 for 2 degrees in less than 20 year from now.

And that for a target that will that initiate large climate feedbacks in the oceans, on ice-sheets, and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points. Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheet; the extinction of an estimated 15– 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification; increasing methane release; substantial soil and ocean carbon-cycle feedbacks; and widespread drought and desertification in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

Now there's an even more compelling way to look at the issue, thanks to Potsdam Institute Director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber in The Guardian of 10 September: Developed countries are 'carbon insolvent'.

Applying his logic to Australia...

1. The total carbon budget 2050 to have a 2-in-3 chance staying below a 2-degree temperature increase is 750 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2).
2. If you take the world population now at 6.9 billion people (and assume no population increase!) and...
3. Then assume that the world's population has an equal right to emit carbon (a starting point which ignores historic carbon debt and responsibility), then...
4. The carbon budget per person to 2050 is 110 tonnes CO2 (750 divided by 6.9). Of course if you allow for increasing population (estimated at 9 billion by 2050), that figure is lower.
5. We know that Australia emissions today are 20.58 tonnes CO2 per person per year, the world's highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions from energy use.
6. Divide that budget of 110 tonnes by the yearly figure of 20.58 and the result is that:
7. The carbon budget for Australians to 2050 for a 2-degree target runs out in 5 and a bit years!

Or do we reckon that we have some inherent right to pour more CO2 into the air that the billions in the developing world who lack the infrastructure and standard of living that our historically high emissions have bought us?

SEE also discussion in Sydney Morning Herald: Lost opportunities from the crisis.

Punting on coal is a loser, tell the Government

First published in The Age, 10 September 2009

Everyone else can see the folly of propping up polluting industries.

THERE'S an irony in the rushed construction of a new security fence around the Hazelwood power station, in anticipation of a community protest this weekend.

The Government, it seems, is more in interested in protecting Hazelwood from protesters, than protecting our climate from Hazelwood.

Victoria has been shamed as the least climate-friendly state, running three of Australia's four dirtiest power stations. And Hazelwood is one of the dirtiest in the developed world, scheduled to close this year but in 2005 given a lifeline by the State Government to 2031.

The timing is significant, because it reflects the climate policy strategy of the major parties: hang on with dirty coal till 2030-35, and hope that by then carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will work. For now, pour money into CCS research, but stall on serious emission-reduction strategies.

This is reflected in the proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme. Treasury modelling for the defeated legislation shows that Australia's actual emissions don't drop below the 1990 baseline until 2035, when it assumes CCS will be commercially viable. Meanwhile, the ''decrease'' in emissions is engineered by buying carbon credits at the lowest price, likely from Papua New Guinea and Indonesian forest offset schemes, which are beginning to look like scams in the making.

Another indication of the punt on coal is the Federal Government's expansion of Australia's coal export capacity. The two infrastructure projects announced in 2008 will alone result in destination nation emissions 17 per cent greater than Australia's total emissions.

If you are going to bet your house on a horse, you need to be assured that it is going to hit the winning post first. But already CCS is stumbling, and the 2030 timeframe is being pushed further into the future.

Recent analysis from a team at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, whose work was influential in the emissions reduction work published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is startling. Assuming a global warming target of two degrees - now far too high according to IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri - they find that the carbon budget from 2000 to 2050 has already been one-third consumed. If global emissions can be cut 2 per cent a year in Copenhagen, which is highly unlikely, the carbon budget to 2050 will run out by 2030. If emissions keep growing at the present rate, the carbon emissions budget for the two degrees target will run out in 2021!

The increasingly grim observations of global warming impacts demand that we move to a zero-emissions energy system quickly. CCS simply cannot deliver such an outcome in the relevant time-frame, if it is ever proven to work at scale. Recently the British Government admitted that proposals to require existing power plants to fit CCS technology would force their closure on cost grounds.

Retrofitting current generators isn't cost-effective, so CCS depends on building a whole new array of coal-fired power stations, at which point our carbon budget will already be in planet-threatening deficit. Waiting to see if CCS is technologically viable at scale, let alone cost-competitive in two or three decades time, defies the principles of sensible risk management.

It just doesn't add up. A recent Harvard University study finds that electricity costs could double for first-generation CCS plants. At the same time, innovation continues to lower the cost of renewable energy at an estimated 10 per cent a decade, and increasing scale of renewable plants is also moving that cost curve down.

China says it is more interested in spending resources on energy efficiency and building renewable energy capacity than adding CCS to coal power stations.

It plans a national feed-in tariff for large-scale solar plants by the end of 2009, paying up to half of the price of solar power systems of more than 500 megawatts, with support rising to 70 per cent in remote regions. ''The idea that carbon capture has to happen in China is a Western idea,'' says Stanford University researcher Richard Morse.

Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, now his state's trade commissioner in Los Angeles, says time is running out for coal: ''The traditional markets for its product will start slowly shutting down as green energy becomes more price-competitive and public policy continues to demand greener outcomes.'' The result in the US is that plans for 100 coal-fired power plants have been stopped in the past 18 months.

The writing is on the wall. Robin Batterham of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences says that if within three years from now ''we don't see some of these large-scale plants actually happening, then people are going to say, 'This is not a real alternative'.'' Large-scale CCS plants in three years is a pipe dream, a bet on a horse that isn't going to make it to the starting gate.

Clean coal has become a cargo cult for government and the coal industry, but what may descend from the skies is less likely to be salvation than the recognition that the dirty, big cloud overhead is killing our planet's wonderful diversity of life and habitat.

That fence around Hazelwood is locking in a disaster, but it will not keep its critics at bay.

David Spratt is the co-author of Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action, shortlisted for the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

The CPRS aftermath

CPRS emissions will be higher than baseline till 2035

Since the CPRS was defeated in the Senate last week, there has been a vigorous debate amongst activists and on a number of grassroots climate e-lists about this event, what it means, whether the decision of the climate action movement to oppose the CPRS as presented was wise, whether we will now get an "even worse" scheme with Liberal support, and whether a better scheme was possible with Green-Labor negotiations.

[On the last point, Senator Milne's office has indicated that the government has been totally unwilling, on numerous occasions, to seriously discuss the Greens' proposals to improve the CPRS.]

So would the CPRS, even in its current appalling form, be something we should support because at least in moves Australia "in the right direction" (one of ACF's Don Henry's favourite phrases) and start to reduce emissions?

The evidence is clearly to the contrary. The attached chart is drawn from the published summary of Treasury modelling for the CPRS (page 26). I have added the red line which is the 1990 level of Australian emissions (also roughly 2000 level due to drop in land clearing emissions).



The green line is the theoretical drop in Australian emissions, but when we look at the purchase of (cheap, scam) permits from overseas (light blue), we see that actual emissions (mid-blue) are above the 1990 baseline till after 2035!!! And the government has said that if the target is increased to 15 or 25%, then the number of permits imported will be increased, even to the point of the government buying them out of the federal budget to protect the big polluters (in addition to the windfall profits those big polluters are currently gaining from the allocation of free permits).So almost 30 years from now under the CPRS, emissions will be as high as the 1990 baseline!!!!

And would a "slightly better" CPRS means anything other than purchasing even more credits from rainforests not chopped down or some other equally dubious "emissions reduction" scam?

Compare this outcome to the work by Malte Meinshausen from Potsdam Institute for limiting warming to 2C (yes, 2C is a stupid target because it means no Arctic sea-ice, probably Greenland and Himalayas past their tipping points, a third of the Amazon gone, multi-metre sea-levels rises, a global water and food crisis, etc etc) published as: Meinshausen et al. "Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2C" in Nature 458:1158-62. In a supplementary Q&A, he says:

Having a good chance of staying below 2C requires limiting our overall CO2 emissions. Our study indicates that we have an emission budget of a trillion tonnes CO2 during the first 50 years of this century. Of that budget, we already used up a third in the first nine years (234 GtCO2 up to 2006 and more than 36 GtCO2/yr since then). At present rates of emissions, we will use up the remaining two-thirds in another 20 years, by around 2030. We will consume this 2000 to 2050 budget even earlier, if emissions continue to increase according to the "business-as-usual" scenarios.

In that context, the CPRS locks in an emissions trajectory for Australia that ensures by 2030 emissions as high as they are today, when even for a too-high target of 2C they need to be zero!

We are all frustrated, I suspect because the debate in Australia and elsewhere is deeply delusional and getting worse. As the evidence becomes more overwhelming that we are heading for a climate apocalypse if we go on as we are for even another 5 years, the level of cognitive dissonance increases in proportion. Sometimes it drives us crazy too.

The political elite hang even more neurotically to the view that their current policies (clean coal, CPRS, appease the big polluters etc) can solve the problem when in fact they ensure catastrophic failure. They will cling even more stubbornly to these delusions because the other choice -- actually solving the problem -- frightens the crap out of them because it requires a great over-turning of political and economic priorities, transformative leadership, and the re-allocation on at least 5% of global GDP (IMHO, perhaps much more) for decades.

That is the message that we have to hammer. Incremental improvements and "broad but shallow" advocacy that has dominated the climate scene for the past 10 years will not get us there. Yes, we have to drop an "awe and thunder" climate bomb on the political elite (as we tried to do with Climate Code Red) and talk about what really needs to be done and how to get here.The climate movement can't expect politicians and 'the system' in general to break out of failure-inducing incrementalism for as long as we in the movement are locked into the same model. The only way we can break out is to commit to pursuing goals that would actually produce a safe climate in time and then we work like crazy to figure out ways to make these goals bite politically. We can only find these solutions by doggedly and creatively pursuing non-watered down goals.

Part of what we must do is launch psychological warfare on the power elite (because it is also an illusion that they will respond to well-considered rational argument, as we have seen), make in personal and tell them their grandkids and great grandkids will (metaphorically) burn in a climate hell, that even bags of money won't buy oneself a safe place to hide in a world at 3 or 4 or 5 degrees, that now is the hour to make moral choices, and that not to do so will condemn the rest of their careers to irrelevancy and their souls to pergatory.

Of course that is not all we need to do, but it is important. Copenhagen will be awful and we must plan through (and not just up to) COP15 and into next year. We have a chance in the election lead-up to hit some MPs and candidates hard with the full message, to cause sitting members real political pain and get commitments that are less delusionary that the present policy debate. That means carefully selecting the target seats and candidates, coordinating our actions and making sure there is real capacity to make it happen, re-allocating and raising funds to put organisers on the ground in key areas. To some extent, the larger eNGOs have a choice as to whether they will allocate their resources to campaigns and actions that will badge and promote their brands, or whether resources (and mailing lists in particular electorates, etc etc) will be pooled and shared so there is real and effective local organisation and capacity.

The NGOs gathered around the Southern Cross Climate Coalition (ACF, ACOSS, ACTU and Climate Institute) will undoubtedly run cover for Labor. The CI CEO John Connor has said that CI's role is to act as a "minesweeper" (i.e. clearing obstacles) for Labor, and when you put CI in a coalition with Labor luminaries such as the ACTU's Sharon Burrows and ACOSS CEO Clare Martin (former Labour chief minister in the NT) you can only expect pro-Labor twaddle. How ACF will survive being squeezed again by this mob of Labor heavy hitters (as they were on the CPRS, and it cost them very dearly) is another issue.

But we can be certain that cheer-leading for Labor won't help. Adrian Whitehead says politicians generally don't listen until you inflict real political pain on them first. He's basically right, and election year gives us that opportunity. To me, that's more important than tearing our hair out over a CPRS than locks in utter failure.

Has Kevin Rudd taken "a significant step forward on climate change"?

Kevin Rudd's announced changes to the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme has again split the climate movement, and this time it's very serious, with three large, rusted-on-to-Labor groups running cover for an appalling policy that won't guarantee a reduction in Australian emissions for decades.

The grassroots movement, which gathered in Canberra in January with 500 people and 150 groups for the first national Climate Action Summit and unanimously opposed the CPRS legislation, appears uniformly angry. 66 climate action groups have written to the Prime Minister saying that: “We believe that you have abandoned your duty of care to protect the Australian people as well as our species and habitats from dangerous climate change.”

The re-worked proposals for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme announced on 4 May by Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd were described by The Greens as "making the 'worse than useless' scheme even worse and giving another $2.2 billion to big polluters. It also fails on voluntary action" and has an "almost irrelevant green distraction of a hypothetical 25% target to undermine criticism".

John Hepburn of Greenpeace said: "It's clear that Rudd has been listening to the big polluters and this is another shift towards the interests of polluters rather than climate action. We're rapidly running out of time and we'd like this scheme to go back to the drawing board until Kevin Rudd can stand up to the big polluters and take action in the interests of the Australian people."

Friends of the Earth "criticised the raising of the government's hypothetical target range as an exercise in “smoke and mirrors”, aimed at hiding the further windfall for polluters."

But the three climate advocacy groups that have acquiesced or actively supported the government's "clean coal" policies — ACF, the WWF and Climate Institute — again lined up to support Labor, together with the ACTU and ACOSS. Michelle Grattan in The Age noted that "the biggest concessions are the brown ones" and that "Kevin Rudd has stitched key groups in behind a revised emissions trading deal — both browner and greener than before — to put maximum pressure on Malcolm Turnbull".

John Conner of the Climate Institute on behalf of the Southern Cross Climate Coalition (ACF, ACTU, ACOSS and Climate Institute) said it was now time for all parties to pass the scheme.

Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Don Henry told staff:

We have achieved a significant step forward on climate change. The Government has just announced that it will take on a target of reducing Australia’s emissions by 25% by 2020 in the context of a Copenhagen agreement that has the effect of stabilising emissions at 450ppm or lower.

[That is wrong in science, of which more later.]

ACF climate campaigner Owen Pascoe added:

This is good step forward and the positives outweigh the negatives. However there’s a lot more to be done and we’ll keep pushing for our ask of 30 to 40% cuts.

For the record, the changes to the proposed scheme also:

• delay its introduction for a year to 1 July 2011 and set a nominal price of $10 a tonne with unlimited number of permits till 1 July 2012, so there will be NO effective action for another three years;
• increase the permits to the biggest polluters in the first year from 90% to 95% and from 60% to 70% (so that in the first year the biggest polluters will be effectively paying 50 cents per tonne to pollute, as Environment Victoria noted);
• keeps the provision for unlimited outsourcing of Australia's national responsibilities by allowing the purchase of permits from overseas without limit, so that the scheme has no mechanism for ensuring that Australia's emissions (as opposed to domestic permits) will drop by even one tonnne by 2050;
• fails to deal adequately with the question of additionality / voluntary action. As Environment Victoria notes: "The fix to recognise household and business voluntary action through GreenPower is welcome, but the mechanism is awful. By only recognizing additional GreenPower purchases above 2009 levels the Government is guaranteeing the collapse of existing GreenPower customer purchases and therefore jeopardizing the whole program. Furthermore the Rudd Government has failed to recognise the benefit of all other types of voluntary emissions reductions or additional action, which, like GreenPower, can be accounted for."
• • will not, contrary to back-slapping comments by the ACTU, produce an avalanche of "green jobs" because it is not designed to close down the brown jobs. Instead of building a clean, renewable-energy economy and technological capacity, Australia will continue to stumble at the back of the pack.

So why are some of the big climate advocacy groups so keen on this disaster? Is their public position supported by the evidence? Here's a look at the views expressed by ACF and others, and whether it is justifiable.

ISSUE 1. Passing the CPRS is necessary for Australia to be credible at Copenhagen.

No, quite the opposite. If there were no legislation, Australia's position would not be tied by law to Rudd's poor target and pressure would be maintained to catch up with the leading bunch. The targets in the proposed CPRS legislation are out of whack with the major players such as the UK, US and EU, who have agreed to unconditional cut emissions of 34-46%, 20% and 20-30% from 1990 levels respectively. Let's be honest, what happens at Copenhagen depends more than any other factor on what the G2 – the USA and China — strike by way of a climate deal, and what Australia puts in the table has little relevance to that. They are used to Australia behaving badly.

ISSUE 2. If there is a reasonable outcome in Copenhagen, Australia will be committed to a 25% cut by 2020.

As Adam Morton reported in The Age on 5 May: "Kevin Rudd says he now has an ambitious greenhouse target on the table for 2020. And he does: cutting emissions to 25 per cent below 2000 levels will require hard work across the economy. But we know the Government also thinks this almost certainly won't happen. Why? Because Penny Wong told us so in December. Ignore yesterday's spin about recent progress in international climate talks. The Government believes that a new deal won't meet the strict conditions it has put in place for Australia to sign up for a 25 per cent cut. If it is right — and there are plenty familiar with the climate talks who believe it is — Australia's ultimate target will be in the range it was before yesterday: between 5 and 15 per cent. No change, then."

ISSUE 3. The CPRS can reduce Australia's emissions by 25% by 2020.

This is complete bull, regardless of what happens at Copenhagen. By allowing an unlimited number of permits to be bought from overseas, through such dubious schemes as REDD and the CDM, the CPRS cannot guarantee that even one tonne of Australian emissions (as opposed to domestic permits) will be cut. The Treasury modelling assumes no drop in Australian emissions for another 25 years (see Tim Colebatch, "One little word undoes the PM's claims on greenhouse gases", The Age, 23 December 2008).This provision alone should be enough to scuttle the whole scheme. How can this be "a significant step forward on climate change" when it won't guarantee to cut one tonne of domestic emissions? In fact, what the CPRS is doing is locking in, through legislation, for decades to come, a high-pollution economy dominated by high-pollution industries and brown jobs.

ISSUE 4. If the high-polluting nations such as Australia adopted a policy of reducing emissions to 25% below 1990 by 2020 this would likely lead to an international agreement that would stabilise emissions at 450ppm or lower.

Here is a case of "if you say something often enough, you'll end up believing it". Too many climate groups and climate scientists have been saying this so long and so often, yet it is so untrue.

The 2007 IPCC report found that Kyoto Annex 1 countries would need to reduce their emissions by 25-40% by 2020 for a 450ppm target. Note how everybody has dropped the 40% end of this formulation, as if it never existed. Australia, as the highest per capita polluter of the Annex I members, would certainly be at the 40% end of the range, but this is rarely mentioned.

But as I have noted elsewhere the target range of 25-40% by 2020 does NOT include "slow feedbacks" which increase climate sensitivity and require lower targets. Even the IPCC 2007 synthesis report noted that “emissions reductions... might be underestimated due to missing carbon cycle feedbacks” (page 67) and this may require the cumulative emissions budget for the 21st century (the total amount of GHGs than can be emitted for a stabilisation level) to be “about 27% less” than is assumed. But the 25-40/2020 target and other IPCC emission reduction scenarios do not include this consideration!

New research published last week and discussed in more detail here found that to restrict warming to 2C the total carbon budget available to the world is 190 billion tonnes of carbon emissions. Even if the world starting cutting emissions by 2% each year, that budget will run out by 2030 and we need zero emissions from 2030 on to keep to 2 degrees.

ISSUE 5. That 450ppm would reasonably limit global warming to 2 degrees.

No, it won't. Analysis for the 2006 Stern report (p. 195) shows that a 450ppm CO2e target has:
• A 26–78% probability of exceeding 2c relative to pre-industrial
• A 4–50% probability of exceeding 3C
• A 0–34% probability of exceeding 4C
• A 0–21% probability of exceeding 5C

450ppm has a 4 to 50% probability of exceeding 3 degrees!!!! That is not defensible and I can't understand how any body who works professionally on climate change could ever think for one second that it is a reasonable target to utter in public. What are they thinking?

After a careful reassessment of climate sensitivity and climate history data, James Hansen and his co-authors in Target atmosphere CO2: Where should humanity aim concluded that the tipping point for the presence, or absence, of any substantial ice-sheets on Earth is around 450 ppm (plus or minus 100 ppm) of CO2. This means that the CO2 levels often associated with a 2C rise – 450ppm – may just be the tipping point for the total loss of all ice sheets on the planet and a huge sea-level rise.

If you are silly enough to want to talk about a 2C target, then to have a 2 in 3 chance of holding to 2C, atmospheric carbon needs to be held to 400ppm CO2e and that requires a global reduction is emissions of 80% by 2050 (over 1990) and negative emissions after 2070. And with high climate sensitivity, a risk-averse target for 2C is around 350ppm CO2e – just to meet a 2C target that is actually dangerous.

The big groups know privately that 350 ppm and lower should be the target. John Connor of the Climate Institute told Crikey recently that the science leads us to 350ppm, and ACF Council has adopted a 350 ppm target, but this has not yet seen the light of day in ACF's public advocacy.

ISSUE 6. That 2 degrees is a reasonable target to avoid dangerous climate change.

No, it will ensure that climate change is dangerous. A rise of 2C over pre-industrial temperatures will initiate large climate feedbacks in the oceans, on ice-sheets, and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points. Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheet; the extinction of an estimated 15– 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification; increasing methane release; substantial soil and ocean carbon-cycle feedbacks; and widespread drought and desertification in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA. If you don't believe me, read Mark Lynas's book, "Six Degrees".

450ppm is roughly the current greenhouse gas level, and in 2008 two scientists. V. Ramanathan and Y. Feng in On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead found that if greenhouse gases were fixed at their 2005 levels the inferred warming is 2.4˚C (range 1.4˚C to 4.3˚C) and that would be sufficient to result in the loss of Arctic summer sea-ice, the Himalayan–Tibetan glaciers and the Greenland ice-sheet . The loss of Greenland ice sheet produces about a 7-metre global sea-level rise. One conclusion is that advocacy of the 25-40/2020 target, for example by the ACF in its 2008 "Special Places" campaign, will result in the destruction of many of Australia’s “special places” ACF wants to protect; Kakadu, for example, will salinate with a sea-level rise of less than a metre.

NASA climate science chief James Hansen told the US Congress in testimony last year that: “We have reached a point of planetary emergency… climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled… the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than +2 degrees Celsius is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.” But ACF says the government announcement of "a target of reducing Australia’s emissions by 25% by 2020 in the context of a Copenhagen agreement that has the effect of stabilising emissions at 450ppm or lower" is a "significant step forward on climate change".

Take your pick, but I'd rather go with the climate scientist. As Ken Ward, the former deputy Director of Greenpeace USA and an environmental strategist has so acutely observed, we must “stop seeking and celebrating dinky achievements” because “nothing that we are doing, nor even seriously contemplating, comes anywhere near such a massive transformation [as is necessary], yet every actor on the political stage …downplays the terrible realities and trumpet small-scale solutions wrapped in upbeat rhetoric.... We are racing toward the end of the world and have no plan of escape, but it is considered impolite to acknowledge that fact in public.”

ISSUE 7. That if this legislation is passed, it is reasonable to expect that the government will do more and go further than its own legislation.

Pull the other leg.

It appears the strategy of the groups who have endorsed the CPRS is to pretend that we don't face a climate crisis that requires emergency action, so they endorse incremental policies and never talk about the elephant in the room. Which is this: we only get one shot at this, and a trial run (read: locking in bad policy for decades) is not an option.

Today at just less than 1C of global warming we are witnessing of the destruction of the Arctic ecosystem. Eight million square kilometres of sea ice is disappearing fast each summer and may be entirely gone within a few years. Already 80% by volume of summer sea-ice has been loss, and regional warming of up to 5 degrees Celsius may have already pushed the Greenland ice-sheet (eventual sea-level rise of 7 metres) past its tipping point.

Do ACF and the Climate Institute and WWF tell the government this?

We know that the present level of greenhouse gases is enough to increase temperatures by more than 2 degrees Celsius over time. We have already gone too far, there is already too much carbon in the air. At less than 1 degrees Celsius we are on the way to triggering a multi-metre sea level rise than will devastate coastal infrastructure, delta peasant–farming communities and some of the world's biggest cities. Our only choice is to head back to zero degrees Celsius of warming, to halt all emissions and drawdown atmospheric carbon to return the planet to a safe-climate zone.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute and Europe's leading climate scientist, says that “we are on our way to a destabilisation of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realise”, so “our survival would very much depend on how well we were able to draw down carbon dioxide to 280 parts per million”, compared to the present level of close to 390 parts per million.

Do ACF and the Climate Institute and WWF tell the government this?

Put starkly, we either keep warming under the range where carbon feedbacks become sufficiently pervasive as to make further human action futile, or we do not. We have a safe climate or we have a global catastrophe. There are no middle-of-the-road compromises. We must head back towards zero. At 1 degree Celsius the genie is out of the bottle, at 2 degrees Celsius the bottle is broken.

One of the great powers of the climate action movement is our capacity to withhold support from, and actively campaign against, actions of governments that are designed to fail, as the CPRS will. Presently there is political denial, even an arrogance of power that leads governments to believe that they can negotiate with the climate and the laws of physics and chemistry, a land of tradeoffs, where climate is just another issue, the politics partisan, the action slow, all embedded in a culture of compromise and failure. Monday 4 May was a great example.

It is a tragedy that some should glowingly support such failure.

David Spratt
5 May 2009

A new reality check on the global carbon emissions budget

Two new research papers published this week in Nature on emissions targets have been widely reported, including Humanity's carbon budget set at one trillion tonnes, Hit the brakes hard and How The '2 Degrees Celsius Target' Can Be Reached.

And the result: if emissions keep growing at the present rate, the carbon emissions budget for the 2 degrees target will run out in 2021! Call that a climate emergency!

The two articles (by Allen et al, and Meinshausen et al ) asked the same question: how many more tonnes of carbon can humans pour into the air before a 2-degree temperature increase is the result? A commentary by both sets of authors is The exit strategy .

Ignoring, for the moment, the fact that 2 degrees is a really bad target (as is discussed in Climate Countdown), the articles were accompanied in the same issue of Nature by an enlightening summary by Gavin Schmidt and David Archer, Climate change: Too much of a bad thing:

Meinshausen and colleagues (page 1158) take a comprehensive probabilistic approach, combining the uncertainties in climate sensitivity and carbon-cycle feedbacks, and integrating the two over a large range of potential emission pathways. Their target is to avoid a peak global mean warming from the preindustrial level of more than 2C (equivalent to a further rise of about 1.2 C from today). We must note here that there is nothing special about 2C that would make warming of less than this magnitude ‘safe’. It is more analogous to a speed limit on a road, and is a guide to the scale of the problem. With 2 C of global warming (more over land and at the high latitudes), Earth would probably be warmer than it had been in millions of years — a huge change.

Meinshausen et al. find that the maximum temperature that Earth will experience to the year 2100 depends most reliably on the total amount of CO2 emitted to the year 2050, rather than on the final stabilized CO2 concentration. Their base-case estimate is that the total emissions from today (2009) to 2050 need to stay below 190 GtC (equivalent to 700 GtCO2; 1 GtC = 1012 kg of carbon) for us to have a good chance (75%) of staying below 2C (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: The 2C lottery. The black line shows the probability of the peak global mean temperature exceeding 2C above pre-industrial levels before the year 2100 as a function of the integrated emissions from 2009 to 2049. The graph is adapted from the base case of Meinshausen et al., including uncertainty ranges. Also shown are the cumulative emissions under various scenarios. Red, emissions constant at 2008 values until 2050. Light blue, growth in emissions continues at 1% per year until 2050 and then falls rapidly. Green, growth in emissions continues at 2% per year until 2050 and then falls rapidly. Purple, an 80% cut in emissions by 2050 (linearly applied, starting in 2010) from developed countries only, while developing-country emissions continue to grow at 1% per year. Dark blue, an 80% cut in emissions by 2050 from all countries.

And what does a total future carbon emissions budget to 2050 of 190 billion tonnes of carbon mean, when we are presently doing about 10 billion tones a year??

I did some quick figures with three scenarios: emissions keep growing as they have been since 2000 at around 3.5 per cent per year; and emissions are reduced by 2 per cent and 4 per cent a year. And this is based on only a 75% chance of not exceeding 2 degrees!

Here's the conclusions:

• If emissions keep growing at 3.5 per cent a year, then the carbon budget for 2 degrees runs out in 2021. That is, after that time, emissions would need to drop to zero immediately to have a 75 per cent chance of not passing 2 degrees.
• If global emissions reduce 2 per cent a year from now, the carbon budget will run out in 2030 for 2C, and
• With a 4 per cent annual reduction in global emissions, it will run out in 2040.

And that for a target that will that initiate large climate feedbacks in the oceans, on ice-sheets, and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points. Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheet; the extinction of an estimated 15– 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification; increasing methane release; substantial soil and ocean carbon-cycle feedbacks; and widespread drought and desertification in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

So even those folks who want a 2-degree target will need to argue for a 4 per cent annual global emissions reduction (and more in Australia) with zero emissions by 2040!!

Given Australia's emissions are increasing 2 per cent a year, that would be a 6 per cent turn-round on current practice in this country. That is going to require what we don't have now: transformative leadership and action at emergency speed and depth.

As NASA's Jim Hansen testified to US Congress last year:

We have reached a point of planetary emergency… climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled… the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than +2 degrees Celsius is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.

David Spratt
3 May 2009

Background note: Mienhausen et al have also circulated a "Informal Background Q&A on Meinshausen et al. “GHG targets & 2°C" which is here. They canvas questions including a "Why do you start your analysis from a 2°C target?" and "Why did you not focus on the target by Small Island States and Least Developed Countries of 1.5°C?". And this:

Q. If you had included in your emission pathways substantially net negative emissions after 2050, the probabilities of exceeding 2°C were lower?
A: True, substantially negative emissions post‐2050 would somewhat decrease the peak warming expected during the second half of the 21st century. However, temperature levels in year 2050 could obviously not be reversed. For very low mitigation pathways, 2050 temperature levels are already close to their maximum, so that negative emissions could only influence how quickly temperatures decrease after the peak, but not the temperature peak level itself.
Background: In most of the lower emission pathways analyzed in Meinshausen et al., global emissions are only turning to near‐zero levels, with the exception of lower MESSAGE or IMAGE17 scenarios, that exhibit substantial negative emissions by 2100. On the one hand, it is comforting that large net negative emissions could somewhat reduce the probabilities of exceeding 2°C for the medium‐low and high scenarios. On the other hand, large net negative emissions pose an enormous challenge for the involved technologies, and the safety, liability and permanence of stored underground carbon. Furthermore, one technology to achieve net negative emissions, the combination of biomass burning and carbon sequestration and storage, could have large implications to our land use patterns.

The relevant papers are:

• Meinshausen et al. Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C. Nature, 2009; 458 (7242): 1158 DOI: 10.1038/nature08017
• Allen et al. Warming caused by cumulative carbon emission: the trillionth tone. Nature, 458, 1163-1166 DOI: 10.1038/nature08019
• Allen et al. Nature Reports Climate Change. The exit strategy: Emission targets must be placed in the context of a cumulative carbon budget if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. Nature Reports Climate Change, 2009 DOI: 10.1038/climate.2009.38
• Schmidt and Archer, Too much of a bad thing. Nature, 2009,: 458: 1117. DOI: 10.1038/4581117a
• Washington et al. How much climate change can be avoided by mitigation? Geophysical Research Letters, 2009; 36 (8): L08703 DOI: 10.1029/2008GL037074:

Climate countdown

Last night, Monday 20 April 2009, I had an opportunity to debate the topic "Climate Change: What Should the Federal Government Be Doing?" with Kelvin Thompson, the Labor member for the federal parliamentary seat of Wills at a public meeting organised by the newly-formed Moreland Climate Group. The meeting was recorded and a DVD will be made available. Here are the comments I made in the opening half of the meeting. The two speeches were followed by almost an hour of energetic comments and Q and A. Thanks to Moreland Climate Group for putting on a great event, with more than 150 attending.

Thank you to Kelvin for engaging in this public conversation on climate between electors and their member of parliament. It is important to make this happen in electorates across the nation, for the conversations to be public rather than private.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a 2-to-6 degree Celsius temperature rise by 2100. But emissions are going up at an increasing rate and tracking on or above the IPCC's worst scenario, so we are headed for the high end if we keep on going as we are.

Yet neither major political party has a policy as to what the maximum safe temperature rise would be.

The Australian government has a "business as usual", high-emissions plan.
The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme outsources our responsibility, rewards the biggest polluters, and plans no sizeable reduction in national emissions in the next 40 years.

According to resources minister Martin Ferguson:

…although greenhouse gas reduction targets may be necessary, any frank review must conclude that the world’s greenhouse emissions are not going down in the short term: they are simply being shifted from one country to another.

Dr. Vicky Pope, head of climate change predictions at the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre says that:

In a worst-case scenario, where no action is taken to check the rise in Greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures would most likely rise by more than 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

So let's count down from 5 degrees.
.
5 DEGREES: In 2007, former PM John Howard told an ABC interviewer that an increase of 4–6 degrees Celsius would be "less comfortable for some than it is now" but "it's very, very hard for us... to sort of extrapolate what things might be".

Well, it's not that hard.

Five degrees of warming occured 55 million years ago: breadfruit trees grew on the coast of Greenland, while the Arctic Ocean saw water temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius. There was no ice at either pole (today that means a 70-metre sea-level rise), and much of the world would have been desertified.

Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnuhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute and adviser to the European Union and to the German Chancellor, told the Copenhagen science conference in March that a rise to 5–6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial would reduce "the carrying capacity of the planet (to) below 1 billion people".

4 DEGREES: Sussan Ley, the federal liberal shadow for customs and justice told one of her constituents in a recent letter that "I agree with my colleagues that an acceptable increase in the mean temperature would be 1.8–4 degrees C." (see correction by Sussan Ley in comments)

At 4 degrees Celsius hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon locked up in Arctic permafrost – particularly in Siberia – would melt, releasing methane and carbon dioxide in immense quantities, and make further human action to mitigate emissions futile.

In Europe, new deserts would be spreading in Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey: the Sahara will have effectively leapt the Straits of Gibraltar. In Switzerland, summer temperatures may hit 48 degrees Celsius. The sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech will be experienced in southern England. Europe’s population may be forced into a “great trek” north.

3 DEGREES: 3 degrees Celsius is the cap effectively being advocated by Australia’s Labor government. Labor policy is a 60 per cent reduction in Australian emissions by 2050. Sir Nicholas Stern says explicitly that for developed nations this is a 3 degrees Celsius target, telling the National Press Club in Canberra it would be "a very good idea if all rich countries, including Australia, set themselves a target for 2050 of at least 60 per cent emissions reductions" and this would leave us with "roughly a fifty-fifty chance of being either side of 3 degrees above pre-industrial times".

This is the target that both Stern and Garnaut advocated, but Stern now says that “We haven't seen 3 degrees Celsius for a few million years, and we don't know what that looks like”. But from the Pliocene 3 million years ago we know what a 3 degrees Celsius world would likely be: a northern hemisphere free of glaciers and icesheets, where beech trees grew in the Transantarctic mountains, sea levels were 25 metres higher, and probably permanent El Nino conditions.

NASA climate chief Dr James Hansen (PDF) has warned that a 3 degrees Celsius warming "threatens even greater calamity, because it could unleash positive feedbacks such as melting of frozen methane in the Arctic, as occurred 55 million years ago, when more than 90 per cent of species on Earth went extinct".


2 DEGREES: I understand that Kelvin has suggested Australia should set a 2 degrees Celsius or 450ppm target.

2 degrees Celsius has been a target of convenience in international negotiations, but is now losing consensus as the politicians head to 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, and the scientists towards zero.

To have a 2 in 3 chance of holding to 2 degrees Celsius, atmospheric carbon needs to be held to 400ppm CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) and that requires a global reduction is emissions of 80% by 2050 (over 1990) and negative emissions after 2070. For Australia, a 2 degrees Celsius target means a more than 95% cut by 2050.

A rise of 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures will initiate large climate feedbacks in the oceans, on ice-sheets, and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points. Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheet; the extinction of an estimated 15– 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification; increasing methane release; substantial soil and ocean carbon-cycle feedbacks; and widespread drought and desertification in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

Hansen told the US Congress last year that: “We have reached a point of planetary emergency… climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a perfect storm, a global cataclysm, are assembled… the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than +2 degrees Celsius is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.”

1 DEGREE: Today at just less than 1 degree Celsius of global warming we are witnessing of the destruction of the Arctic ecosystem. Eight million square kilometres of sea ice is disappearing fast each summer and may be entirely gone within a few years. Already 80% by volume of summer sea-ice has been loss, and regional warming of up to 5 degrees Celsius may have already pushed the Greenland ice-sheet (eventual sea-level rise of 7 metres) past its tipping point.

At less than 1 degree Celsius there is more frequent and intense heatwaves, ongoing drought in Australia, sub-Saharan Africa and the western US, and the swift retreat of river-feeding mountain glaciers. The eastern Amazon is drying (some tributaries ran dry in the 2005 drought), low-lying island states are on the edge of a precipice, as are coral reefs. Britain’s Hadley Centre calculates that warming of just 1C would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world’s land surface by 2100.

ZERO DEGREES: Yet we know that the present level of greenhouse gases is enough to increase temperatures by more than 2 degrees Celsius over time. We have already gone too far, there is already too much carbon in the air. At less than 1 degrees Celsius we are on the way to triggering a multi-metre sea level rise than will devastate coastal infrastructure, delta peasant–farming communities and some of the world's biggest cities.

Our only choice is to head back to zero degrees Celsius of warming, to halt all emissions and drawdown atmospheric carbon to return the planet to a safe-climate zone.



Schellnhuber, Europe's leading climate scientist, says that “we are on our way to a destabilisation of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realise”, so “our survival would very much depend on how well we were able to draw down carbon dioxide to 280 parts per million”, compared to the present level of close to 390 parts per million.

Put starkly, we either keep warming under the range where carbon feedbacks become sufficiently pervasive as to make further human action futile, or we do not. We have a safe climate or we have a global catastrophe. There are no middle-of-the-road compromises. We must head back towards zero. At 1 degree Celsius the genie is out of the bottle, at 2 degrees Celsius the bottle is broken.

WHAT HAS TO BE DONE: Presently there is political denial, an arrogance of power that leads governments to believe that they can negotiate with the climate and the laws of physics and chemistry, a land of tradeoffs, where climate is just another issue, the politics partisan, and where the biggest polluters are appeased, all embedded in a culture of compromise and failure.

We are treating climate in the business as usual mode rather than the emergency mode with which we respond to fires and natural disasters. We faced by an overwhelming, human-caused "natural" disaster — global warming — yet our government fails to recognise this emergency.

An emergency exists when:

• events threaten to overwhelm
• when the outcome is often, like an election, binary (you either win or lose big time)
• when delay in action comes at a great price, even tipping the system into a different state
• when the imperative is to apply large amounts of resources quickly

This precisely describes the climate threat today.

We need an emergency transition plan, a whole-of-society plan, a vast remaking of how we live that is zero-carbon and sustainable; a just transition, a vast restructuring of jobs and skills and industry and economy. The obstacles to such a plan are not primary economic or tecnological, but political and social.

We have the technologies or they are within grasp. We have the economic capacity: $50 billion has just been spent on two stimulus packages, but not with a climate focus.

We have a Future Fund. Should we use it wisely now to make sure we have a future?I am sure governments do not want to go down in history as having saved the banks but not the planet.

Ian Dunlop, formerly a senior oil, gas and coal industry executive and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, says:

Honesty about this challenge is essential, otherwise we will never develop realistic solutions. We face nothing less than a global emergency, which must be addressed with a global emergency response, akin to national mobilisations pre-WWII or the Marshall Plan… This is not extremist nonsense, but a call echoed by an increasing numbers of world leaders as the science becomes better understood… In the face of catastrophic risk, emission reduction targets should be based on the latest, considered, science, not on a political view of the art-of-the-possible.

WHAT GOVERNMENT MUST DO

1. Be honest about the science, rather than the present approach of downplaying the severity of the problem and celebrating dinky achievement wrapped in delusional, up-beat rhetoric. Remember, Australia's emissions are still rising and the extra volume of coal flowing through two new export facilities, approved by Labor, will increase global carbon pollution by more than Australia’s total greenhouse gas output .
2. Government must have a frank conversation with the Australian people about the problem and how we can solve it together. Contrast the approach of the Australian and US energy Secretaries. US energy secretary Stehen Chu recently told Californians "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California (and) I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going" either, saying the need was billions of dollars for alternative energy research and infrastructure. Then look at Australian energy minister Martin Ferguson's love affair with coal, and his opposition to feed-in tariffs because "it is too early to be picking winners", when the government's "clean coal" initiative is precisely about "picking winners".
3. Start planning and implementing a rapid transition to a post-carbon economy. This requires:
   * Serious funding for safe climate innovation and scaling up of technologies, the drivers of change.
   * A large-scale national, all-sector energy efficiency and plan: many of the actions that can be taken today actually save money in the long-term. And an efficiency programme reduces the amount of new generating capacity to be built.
   * Constructing a smart grid for demand management and a new high-efficiency national grid to effectively hook renewables into the system. Even Garnaut recognise the need for such grids as a public responsibility due to market failure.
4. Plan and implement the rapid phase-out of the coal industry. The coal industry is a toxic asset. Carbon capture and storage is a cargo cult that cannot deliver in the relevant time frame and may not deliver at all. As Guy Pearce notes in his Quarterly Essay "Quarry vision", McDonalds employs twice as many people as the coal industry. We can have a coal industry or we we can have a planet fit for succeeding generations, but we cannot have both.
5. Spend the annual $9 billion subsidy the fossil fuel industry receives to start constructing some of the big building blocks of the post-carbon economy; for example an all-scale gross feed-in tariff to drive the construction of renewable capacity. Spend on public transport infrastructure what we spend on road infrastructure. Since 1996 the Victorian government has allocated more than $9 billion on road network expansion, and less than $2 billion on public transport infrastructure. Letss swap the columns.
6. Provide transformative political leadership. An opportunity exists within the Labor caucus, if not yet in the Cabinet, to stand with the climate action movement, to link people power with a courageous moral stance by parliamentarians. Recently I asked a former senior federal minister what it would take for a group of Labor parliamentarians to publicly argue that the scientific imperatives should be put first and campaign for a rapid transition to a post-carbon economy. The answer was simple: "Some people, including in cabinet, are going to have put their their career second".

What's up with emisions reductions of 25-40% by 2020?

The “25-40/2020” scenario was published in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report Working Group III report, in Box 13.7 on page 776, “The range of the difference between emissions in 1990 and emissions allowances in 2020/2050 for various GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations for Annex I and non-Annex I [Kyoto] countries as a group”, where targets were given for stabilisation at 450, 550 and 650 ppm CO2e.The targets for 450 CO2e were:

Region: Annex 1 countries
2020: –25% to –40%
2050: –80% to –95%
Region: non-Annex 1 countries
2020: Substantial deviation from baseline in Latin America, Middle East, East Asia and Centrally-Planned Asia
2050: Substantial deviation from baseline in all regions

25-40/2020 subsequently became a focus of debate at the COP 13 (Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC) meeting in Bali in December 2007, and then the principal advocacy target in 2008 in Australia for organisations such as the Climate Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Climate Action Network Australia, and for a number of climate scientists who entered the public policy debate. Garnaut talked about a 450ppm target requiring Australian emissions to be reduced to 25% below 1990 by 2020 (noticeably dropping the upper range of 40% range, a sleight of hand he was not alone in undertaking). So how might we assess such an advocacy proposal?

The temperature increase: Analysis for the 2006 Stern report (p. 195) shows that, taking uncertainty about climate sensitivity into account, a 450ppm CO2e target has:
• A 26–78% probability of exceeding 2 degrees
Celsius (˚C) relative to pre-industrial
• A 4–50% probability of exceeding 3˚C
• A 0–34% probability of exceeding 4˚C
• A 0–21% probability of exceeding 5˚C

Using a risk-management approach, it cannot be said that this is even a 2˚C target. And 2˚C is far, far too high, given the now clear evidence that at less than 1˚C of warming we are already on the precipice of climate catastrophe, from the Arctic to the Great Barrier Reef, from the Himalayas to Siberia.

Climate sensitivity: The work of the IPCC generally assumes a climate sensitivity (CS: that is, how much temperatures would increase with a doubling of GHG levels) of 3˚C. Whilst “short-term” CS is well established at 3˚C ± 0.5˚C, there is now a very convincing case that long-term climate sensitivity (including “slow” carbon feedbacks such as ice-sheet albedo, loss of ocean carbon-sink efficiency, loss of permafrost and other soil carbon, carbon release from tropical rainforests drying/ wild-fire, and so on) is closer to 6˚C. There is strong evidence in climate history of the last million years to support this view. This is recognised in the IPCC 2007 synthesis report which notes that “emissions reductions... might be underestimated due to missing carbon cycle feedbacks” (page 67) and this may require the cumulative emissions budget for the 21st century (the total amount of GHGs than can be emitted for a stabilisation level) to be “about 27% less” than is assumed. But the 25-40/2020 target and other IPCC emission reduction scenarios do not include this consideration!

On carbon cycle feedbacks, there is already evidence that the strength of ocean, and especially some land, carbon sinks are weakening and becoming less efficient, and that this will persist into the future. Thus the predictions from climate-carbon- cycle models may be too conservative and CO2 in the atmosphere will probably increase more rapidly than the models suggest, which has implications for the development of policies that seek to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at a given level, including those of the IPCC (Cox & Jones).

The IPCC gives a CS range of 1.5–4.5˚C and warns that “policymakers may want to use the highest values of climate sensitivity... to guide decisions” (and virtually admits it is higher than the 3C the IPCC chooses to assume). This precautionary warning has apparently been ignored by those who advocated the 25-40/2020 target during 2008.

If long-term CS is 6˚C, then 450ppm would produce a temperature increase of 4.1˚C, enough to melt all ice sheets and produce a 70-metre sea-level rise, amongst many impacts that would end life on this planet for most people and most species.

After a careful reassessment of climate sensitivity and climate history data, James Hansen and his co-authors concluded in a 2008 research paper that the tipping point for the presence, or absence, of any substantial ice-sheets on Earth is around 450 ppm (plus or minus 100 ppm) of CO2. This means that the CO2 levels often associated with a 2˚C rise may just be the tipping point for the total loss of all ice sheets on the planet and a huge sea-level rise. Yet this is what the principal advocacy was by “our” side in 2008!

[For a more detailed discussion of climate sensitivity, see the discussion on pages 15-16 of the
Climate Safety report published in late 2008 in the UK]The impacts: 450ppm CO2e is roughly the current GHG level, and in 2008 Ramanathan and Feng found that if greenhouse gases were fixed at their 2005 levels (and assuming the IPCC CS of 3˚C), the inferred warming is 2.4˚C (range 1.4˚C to 4.3˚C) and that 2.4˚C would be sufficient to result in the loss of Arctic summer sea-ice, the Himalayan–Tibetan glaciers and the Greenland ice-sheet (based on Lenton et al). The loss of Greenland ice sheet produces about a 7-metre global sea-level rise. One conclusion is that advocacy of the 20-40/2020 target, for example by the ACF in its 2008 Special Places campaign, will result in the destruction of many of Australia’s “special places” ACF wants to protect; Kakadu, for example, will salinate with a sea-level rise of less than a metre.

The scenario is out of date. The scenarios in IPCC 2007 WGIII Box 13.7 were prepared in 2005 or earlier.
• The 450ppm scenario relies heavily of the work of Del Elzen and Meisnhausen, presented at a 2005 UK Met conference (and then published as chapters 28 and 31 in Avoiding dangerous climate change, Schellnhuber (ed.), CUP). Since then, emissions from non-Annex I nations have grown beyond all expectation, which means that emission reductions scenarios need to be re-visited.
• Thus in recent powerpoints, Meinshausen has crossed out the words “Substantial deviation from baseline in Latin America, Middle East, East Asia and Centrally-Planned Asia” and pasted over “–15% to –30% by 2020” for non-Annex 1 nations, a recognition that the 2007 propositions need re-working.
• In addition, the IPCC methodology (and emissions reduction scenarios generally) implies that climate change is a linear event, where predictable changes in emission levels will have predictable outcomes and impacts. But events such as the “big melt” in the Arctic summer of 2007 are non-linear and unpredicted events that can turn climate science knowledge on its head and demand that the whole question of what needs to be done and what are appropriate targets be urgently re-assessed in light of new data, including evidence that carbon cycle feedbacks are kicking in sooner than expected. The Arctic shows that tipping points for dangerous climate change and large sea-level rises have already been passed, a fact that the IPCC did not recognise in failing to include any emission scenarios for less than 2–2.4˚C in its 2007 report.
• It is noteworthy that IPCC author Bill Hare, in the climate chapter for the 2009 State of the World report, includes detailed modeling by the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects of a 1-degree stabilisation scenario (the first I have seen), and sketches the actions for a 300 ppm target. It will be interesting to see if Hare’s views, which in the past have been influential in groups such as CANA and Greenpeace, will be embraced.
• Potsdam Institute head Hans Joachim Schellnhuber says previous predictions about climate change and its catastrophic effects were too cautious and optimistic. “In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than it has been assumed up until now,” Schellnhuber told the Saarbruecker Zeitung newspaper in an interview published on 29 December. “We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize.”
A safe-climate target

James Hansen told scientists at an American Geophysical Union conference in December 2007 that: “We either begin to roll back not only the emissions [of CO2] but also the absolute amount in the atmosphere, or else we’re going to get big impacts ... We should set a target of CO2 that’s low enough to avoid the point of no return.” In order to achieve the return of the Arctic sea-ice, we have seen above that Hansen and his co-authors have identified the target as in the range 300–325ppm CO2, well below the current level. Given the key role the Arctic plays in the global climate system, a precautionary approach would therefore suggest a long-term target of 300ppm CO2e.

This would rule out a domino effect of sea-ice loss, albedo flip, a warmer Arctic, a disintegrating Greenland ice sheet, more melting permafrost, and further knock-on effects of massively increased greenhouse gas emissions, rising atmospheric concentrations and accelerated global warming.

Any proposal for a target higher than 300ppm would imply confidence that it is safe to leave the Arctic sea ice melted, and an assumption that this would not bring about the train of consequences just described. This is, implicitly, the view of all the major nations and organisations involved in setting climate policy. Accordingly, they must be challenged to provide a reasoned argument as to why leaving the Arctic Ocean free of ice in summer is safe. If they cannot, the only acceptable course of action is clear.

David Spratt
March 2009