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Australia 21 Limited is a non-profit R and D company that seeks to address major challenges for Australia this century.

Founding donors: Berkley Group Financial Consultants, Canberra and The Pratt Foundation, Melbourne

Volume 1, Issue 10 August 2003

ISOS Conference focuses on Climate Change

During August the theme for the ISOS progressive internet conference “In Search of Sustainability” has been Climate. The ten papers collectively make disturbing reading.

In the keynote paper Dr Graeme Pearman of CSIRO writes that reductions of 70 percent or more in global greenhouse gas emissions are necessary in order to stabilise the atmosphere, and that merely slowing the rate of emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will not stop the increase of its concentration and thus climate change.

"Reduction of 70 per cent or more is an enormous challenge," he says. "We have probably only a matter of decades, or at most this century, to get stabilisation under control. Yet there are an existing two billion people who currently do not have access to levels of energy that those of us in the developed world use to meet the standards of living we enjoy. And energy, at least currently, means carbon dioxide emissions.” He adds that by the middle of this century, human population is likely to rise by further two billion people, each aspiring to the amenity that the utilisation of energy providesv

Human induced warming is happening

Pearman sums up the evidence from the International Panels as concluding that there is now a collective picture of a warming world: Concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols continue to change the atmosphere; Observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to be due mainly to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations; Human influence will continue to change atmospheric composition in particular carbon dioxide throughout the 21st century and global temperature and sea level are projected to rise by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees centigrade between 1990 and 2100.

“What is different about this century is that, for the first time we've been able to observe that a new change has commenced and can anticipate that change will continue throughout the century. A key challenge is to provide greater guidance as to the definition of what is dangerous climate change” says Pearmanv

Rapid climate flips when a new threshold is reached

In another paper Professor Tony McMichael, Director of the National Centre on Epidemiological and Population Health at The ANU, notes that data from Greenland and Antarctica ice cores reveal that climate change in past millennia has not been a gradual process, but rather a largely threshold phenomenon. When a critical point is passed the climate may flip to another state. "We may be taken by surprise by global climate change – which is a much less smooth process than we previously thought," writes McMichael. "The paleo-climatic record, recently much elaborated, reveals a story of often-hectic swings in Earth’s temperature on a decadal and centennial scale. This signifies that the climate system is rather complex and non-linear in behaviour, and therefore somewhat unpredictable. In Australia we should expect that extreme weather events – droughts, bushfires, floods and perhaps cyclones – will become more severe as the total energy in the climate system increases. A sudden plunge in global temperature of three to four degrees centigrade 65,000 years ago reduced human numbers from around 100,000 to 10,000. The human impact on climate provides a wild card. We need to recognize the complexity and unpredictability of complex systems. We are not simply turning up the world thermostat. We could be pushing the system to a new threshold and flip. There are uncertain, but potentially great risks, not as yet fully definable by scientific research and we need to adopt the precautionary principlev

Our science is not yet adequate to the challenge of accurate prediction

In a third of ten papers on this theme, Dr Chris Mitchell, chief executive officer of the CRC for Greenhouse Accounting, writes that we need to further develop both scientific and institutional systems that are capable of tracking changes to the earth. "But, none of this can be achieved in the absence of far-reaching institutional changes to the science system and the development of new economic instruments that enable returns from investments for sustainability," Mitchell says. "We also need to recognize that the science required to navigate us to a sustainable future successfully does not yet exist. We need to develop approaches that accept that uncertainty beyond some bounds is not yet achievable. We have not successfully developed adequate observations of earth systems. We are not adequately assessing the risk to

systems and are too likely to consider separately issues such as water futures, land use, biodiversity, energy supply and climate changev

Our democratic system is failing us on this issue

Professor David Shearman, President of Australian Doctors for the Environment points out that after six years, the modest Kyoto protocol remains unimplemented despite the greatly strengthened evidence of significant climate change detailed by the 2001 report of the intergovernmental panel. He argues that neo-liberal forces which have disregarded and undermined environmental needs in favour of market forces have undermined democracy. Nevertheless, some corporations accept the science and recognize that the costs of conversion to alternative energy systems will not be prohibitive. He believes that they have a major opportunity to invest in technology in developing countries and especially in China where a government system will act quickly and decisively. Shearman concludes that we need to consider how democracy can be modified to achieve effective decisions on the urgent threats facing the world community and suggests that we may need to curb individualism and market forces in favour of collective safetyv

Climate change impact on biodiversity

Michael Dunlop, Mark Howden and Lesley Hughes from CSIRO report that climate change is already having an effect on biodiversity in Australia. The impact will increase as we are locked into further climate change. In the short-term, our goal should be to protect species which are particularly vulnerable. In the longer-term the aim should be to facilitate adaptation to inevitable climate change and ultimately the goal should be to reduce the magnitude of climate change through mitigation. The authors say that all existing biodiversity conservation programs should be viewed through this dynamic lens. Impact and adaptation assessments must be linked to an integrated risk management approachv

Public Understanding is still inadequate

Franzi Poldy, also from CSIRO believes that the central issue in the climate change debate is that current rates of emission are already at least twice as large as rates at which natural processes can remove the offending gases from the atmosphere. This means that the mitigation is not a marginal trade-off problem. Unless we can reduce emission rights to below one-half of the current level and keep them there, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will continue to increase. He argues that this is not a problem to be resolved by weighing up costs and benefits. It is a physical problem that requires the best possible understanding of the nature of the risk and timing of possible disruptions to climate systems. Much greater efforts are needed to improve public and political understanding of the climate change problemv

Boiling frog analogy

Medical and environmental academic Dr Colin Butler argues in his paper that most of the world’s policymakers are behaving on the issue of climate change as though they are the slowly boiling frogs in the fable about the slowly cooking amphibian. Most of the world’s human frogs, he says, remain ignorant, indifferent and powerless to slow global climate change. Butler also states that adverse climate change threatens to increase the number and plight of politically failed states now grudgingly recognized as foci of crime, terror and disease. He thinks we need to be as concerned about ”wilding” as about warming. The indifference by most high income populations about climate change is symptomatic of a widespread indifference towards populations that are less affluent than we arev

Read all about it at www.isosconference.org.au

Readers of this newsletter can access the 80 papers and forums now on the internet conference by registering for the monthly registration rate of $10 per month. Other thought provoking papers on the climate change theme include

· Climate Change – A weapon of Mass Destruction? by Jenny Goldie

· Estimating climate change by Edward Linacre

· Coping With Climate by Valerie Yule

“First Steps” Conference Canberra November 14^th

We invite you to register to attend the face-to face meeting on Friday November in Canberra in The Shine Dome when all of the keynote authors will speak briefly to a First Steps communiqué which they are helping to draft which seeks to identify the immediate challenges facing Australian communities and policy makers on the issue of sustainability.

www.isosconference.org.au/novconf.html