[A-List] Liberals, Labor give up on global warming

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Renfrey Clarke

Green Left Weekly (November 02 2007)


The scientists are horrified. But not being media-savvy publicists, they
generally leave their shocking findings in scientific journals. The
politicians quote cautious statements issued by scientific committees
early in the decade, and worry about scaring off corporate funding. The
business executives look for the chance of new profits, and hire public
relations experts to advise them on cultivating a green image.

Meanwhile, the public drifts in a fog of apprehension, worried, but
hoping that somehow things might still turn out all right. Just once in
a while some hard fact pierces the mist.

In September, for example, it was revealed that Arctic sea ice had been
melting at a completely unanticipated rate. Then in October, climate
author and current Australian of the Year Professor Tim Flannery pointed
out that new data showed total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
already at levels that could cause dangerous climate change.

"That's ... beyond the worst-case scenario as we thought of it in
2001'', Flannery was quoted as saying. "We already stand an unacceptable
risk ... the need for action is ever more urgent".

One signal after another is pointing to a greenhouse emergency much more
dire than is commonly perceived or admitted. A drastic, world-scale
re-organising of economic and social structures and priorities is
needed, starting immediately. But you'd never guess it from the climate
change positions of the Liberal and Labor parties.

After years of denying human responsibility for global warming, the
Howard government finally admits that some response is needed - but not
so far-reaching as to affect economic growth or profits. The federal
Liberals refuse to set any firm target for future Australian greenhouse
emissions. Instead, they promise an emissions trading scheme by 2011.

For true believers like PM John Howard and his deputy Peter Costello,
the market provides all the answers - and if it doesn't, you've asked
the wrong questions.

Kevin Rudd's ALP is only nominally better. Labor too promises a market
in greenhouse emissions, to be operating by 2010. In addition, the ALP
sets the goal of cutting Australian greenhouse emissions by sixty
percent by 2050. But this target - which is to underpin the price of
carbon emissions in Labor's trading scheme - is grossly inadequate.

The truth is that the Liberal and Labor parties, like the top business
circles whose priorities shape their thinking, have given up on global
warming. They simply aren't prepared to take the steps needed to
preserve a planet anything like the one we know at present.

In the business pages of right-wing newspapers, such perspectives are
occasionally revealed with startling frankness. "We should abandon our
fantasies, acknowledge that carbon emissions will continue to grow, and
plan accordingly", an October 18 article in Rupert Murdoch's Australian
concluded.

Needless to say, the politicians don't phrase their thoughts as bluntly
as this. Their statements are full of soothing platitudes about
responsibility to future generations. And to reassure the
sceptical-minded, concrete proposals are generally accompanied by claims
of scientific backing.

The ALP's key document on greenhouse gas reduction is a media statement
entitled "Labor's Greenhouse Reduction Target - Sixty Percent by 2050
Backed by the Science". Issued by the party's environment spokesperson
Peter Garrett on May 2 this year, the statement has since been
painstakingly analysed in a Carbon Equity posting by journalist David
Spratt, available at  http://www.carbonequity.info/docs/alppolicy.html.

Garrett's statement is a strangely evasive piece of work. It has little
to say about the findings of climate scientists, especially in recent
times, and fails to establish clearly why the "Sixty by 2050'' target
was chosen.

Is this target designed to limit world temperature increases to a
particular figure? Is it, perhaps, linked to the increase of two degrees
Celsius - relative not to the present, but to pre-industrial
temperatures - that scientists consider the maximum allowable if we are
to avoid setting off dangerous additional warming mechanisms?

Garrett's statement, however, nowhere mentions the figure of two degrees
Celsius.

What is the maximum level of atmospheric greenhouse gases, expressed as
parts per million (ppm) by volume of carbon dioxide equivalent, that
Labor sees as permissible if further climate change is to be averted?
This is not clearly spelled out.

Garrett cites a number of scientific studies as backing his position,
but the one that is given prominence is a 2000 report by the British
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

Climate science has come a long way since 2000. And as Spratt observes,
the British Royal Commission report itself relied on data from a United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 1995. At
that time, the study of climate change was in its relative infancy.
Predictions of temperature rises and of their impacts were tentative,
and calls to action muted.

While making heavy use of outdated science, the ALP's statement ignores
or misrepresents more recent findings. In particular, Spratt
establishes, the use that the statement makes of a 2006 CSIRO report on
climate change is misleading and deceptive. In citing the report's
predictions for temperature rises, Labor ignores the rise of 0.6 degrees
Celsius that occurred during the Twentieth Century. The difference is
fundamental - between a rise that might be bearable, and one that would
propel global warming to dangerous heights.

Meanwhile, what would the ALP's "Sixty by 2050" target be likely to
result in, if applied uniformly by the countries that are major
greenhouse gas emitters?

When he quotes the 2000 report by the Royal Commission, Garrett in
oblique fashion identifies "Sixty by 2050" with stabilising world
atmospheric greenhouse gases at a level of 550 ppm. As Spratt relates,
the consensus of recent studies is that these gases need to remain at a
much lower level if temperature rises are to stay below two degrees
Celsius. For example, P Baer and M Mastrandrea in a 2006 paper conclude
that "450 ppm CO2-equivalent has a fifty percent chance of staying below
two degrees Celsius; 550 ppm CO2-equivalent has a ten to twenty percent
chance of staying under two degrees Celsius".

British science writer George Monbiot quotes the British government's
Environment Department in 2003 as concluding that "with an atmospheric
carbon dioxide stabilisation concentration of 550 ppm, temperatures are
expected to rise by between two and five degrees Celsius".

Labor's greenhouse reduction target, we may conclude, would almost
certainly see world average temperatures rise far into the danger zone.
Summarising the evidence, Spratt states that "Labor's Sixty by 2050
policy is consistent with a temperature target of three degrees Celsius".

What would a world three degrees hotter than at present be like? It
would not include the Great Barrier Reef, bleached and dead at
temperatures little above those of today. Nor would it have a place for
the forests of the Amazon, even now on the brink of being transformed
into savannah. Nor, after a hundred years or so, would it include large
areas of today's coastal cities, or most of Holland and Bangladesh. The
last time global temperatures were three degrees higher than at present
was in the Pliocene period some three million years ago. At that time,
there were no icecaps in the Northern Hemisphere, and sea levels were
around 25 metres higher than they are now.

Such a planet would be much less capable than now of sustaining billions
of human beings. Most of today's temperate farmlands would be arid, or
would have turned into tropical savannah, where agriculture is
notoriously difficult. The biosphere, drastically simplified by the
extinction of many of today's species, would be radically unstable.

If temperatures were to rise to three degrees above present levels,
would they stay there, and not rise further? We can have no guarantees.

One reason why climate scientists are now so definite on the need to
limit greenhouse gas concentrations is that today's science has an
increasingly sophisticated grasp of "positive feedback mechanisms" and
"tipping points". Earlier analyses often treated climate processes as
"linear" - that is, as involving steady, relatively gradual change. But
in nature, gradual quantitative change often ends in abrupt shifts. As
human-produced greenhouse emissions cause the Earth to heat up, the
danger is that natural processes will kick in that turn the biosphere
itself into a huge additional source of warming.

There are many such potential "tipping points". With only a slight
increase on present temperatures, soils that now are carbon sinks will
become carbon sources. When Arctic permafrost melts - as is now starting
to happen - rotting peat generates the potent greenhouse gas methane.
Other factors to be considered range from the burning of drought-ravaged
Amazonian forests, to possible releases of vast quantities of methane
from cold mud on the Arctic seabed.

Naturally, predictions of how such mechanisms might operate in a very
different future can only be approximate. But the possibilities include
the ultimate disaster scenario - a rerun of the Permian Extinction of
251 million years ago, when only a small minority of complex life-forms
managed to survive.

When we face the potential for such outcomes, there can be no weighing
of profits, or even of general economic prosperity, against the measures
needed to halt further increases in greenhouse gas levels. As Flannery
has indicated, we are already into the danger zone where even with
present emissions concentrations one tipping point or another could be
passed, and runaway global warming could begin.

What is now required if a more or less recognisable planet is to be
saved? In his 2006 book Heat, British writer George Monbiot has
performed the vital work of summarising the recent science and
calculating the emissions cuts that will be needed.

Citing a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact in Germany,
Monbiot concludes that to have a good chance of holding global
temperature rises to less than two degrees Celsius, we need to stabilise
greenhouse gas levels below 440 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent. The
present level is close to 460 ppm.

While still requiring profound changes, the task of cutting greenhouse
gas concentrations to a little under present levels might not seem too
daunting. Unfortunately, things are not so straightforward.

The trouble is that the biosphere is steadily losing its capacity to
soak up carbon. Warmer seas and soils absorb less carbon dioxide, as do
water-stressed forests. Instead of the current four billion tonnes of
carbon locked away each year, the British Meteorological Office predicts
the biosphere of 2030 will be able to absorb only 2.7 billion tonnes.

By 2030, the Earth's population is expected to have increased to 8.2
billion. That means that for carbon stabilisation, emissions must be cut
to no more than 0.33 tonnes per person per year.

Billions of the world's people are currently responsible for emitting
much less than this. If total world emissions of carbon into the
atmosphere now stand at more than seven billion tonnes per year - nearly
three times the level needed for eventual stabilisation - that is
because the developed countries emit much higher amounts per capita,
ranging up to the appalling figure of 5.63 tonnes per person per year in
Australia.

It would not be fair to demand that the world's poorest people give up
on raising their living standards in order to keep the world's rich
driving SUVs. Indeed, any attempt to insist on this would mean that no
country cut its emissions, and that the world proceeded directly to
climatic Armageddon. Consequently, countries like Australia must cut
their emissions drastically by 2030 to meet the stabilisation target of
0.33 tonnes per capita. For Australia, that means a cut of 95%. Our
country has to aim at ending almost all its net carbon emissions over
the next 22 years.

It cannot be that the ALP's policy researchers are ignorant of the real
situation. The "Sixty by 2050" position has been chosen for political
reasons, not scientific ones. Labor leaders have clearly calculated that
"Sixty by 2050" will reassure the public that Labor is responding to the
challenges of global warming, while not putting big business offside by
suggesting that the ALP's climate change policies will substantially
affect profits.

Off the record, Garrett and his front-bench colleagues might argue that
the overriding task is to defeat the Howard government, which refuses to
name any emissions target. But once in office, are the Labor leaders
going to turn around and admit that they lied to voters? And would Labor
confront the corporate rich, who subtly but unmistakably let it be known
that they will fight any move that cuts significantly into profits?
Loyalty to the capitalist class, to its interests and perspectives, is
incorporated into the brains of ALP politicians at a molecular level.

Nor have the Greens, who call for reductions of thirty percent below
1990 levels by 2020 and of eighty percent by 2050, really confronted the
necessities of the age. Of nationally organised Australian political
parties, only the Socialist Alliance with its target of ninety percent
reduction by 2030 puts forward a demand anywhere close to what is needed.

It is not by chance that it is only a socialist party, that takes no
responsibility for the interests of big capital, that accepts the
reality and pledges to act on it.


http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/730/37832


http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp