What lies beneath? The scientific understatement of climate risks

David Spratt.

Ian Dunlop.

Three decades ago, when serious debate on human-induced climate change began at the global level, a great deal of statesmanship was on display. 

There was a preparedness to recognise that this was an issue transcending nation states, ideologies and political parties which had to be addressed proactively in the long-term interests of humanity as a whole, even if the existential nature of the risk it posed was far less clear cut than it is today.  

Read the Climate Code Red story - “What lies beneath? The scientific understatement of climate risks.”

Why is emergency-scale action necessary? - Melbourne meeting

David Spratt will explain tomorrow why emergency-scale action is necessary to counter climate change.

David Spratt.

Spratt, a Melbourne businessman, climate-policy analyst, and co-founder of Carbon Equity, is one of those who will speak at the Victorian Climate Action Network (VCAN) meeting.

That meeting will discuss “Why is emergency-scale action necessary?”

David, who is also the co-author of Climate Code Red, has extensive advocacy experience in the peace movement, and in developing community-campaign communication and marketing strategies.

Tomorrow’s four-hour meeting at which David will speak will be at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital on the corner of Victoria Parade and Nicholson St, starting at 12:30pm.

'Turnbull has betrayed his own words' - David Spratt

In 2010, Malcolm Turnbull said: "Our efforts to deal with climate change have been betrayed by a lack of leadership, a political cowardice, the like of which I have never seen...". Nothing has changed. Turnbull has betrayed his own words.

Australians understand an emergency: a situation of threat or escalating threat with severe consequences for life and property that requires urgent preventive intervention.

Our climate is getting hotter and more extreme, with sea level rises already in the system set to inundate our coastlines. A hotter climate will undermine global food and water security, and challenge how and where we live and work unless we take big steps right now.

We are out of time for slow, gradualist policy. The emergency action call is increasingly being taken up by leading scientists and responsible leaders around the world as extreme events escalate. “This is an emergency and for emergency situations we need emergency action," said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon almost a decade ago.

More than 20 prominent Australians supported a statement published in The Age on 23 June (pictured above) saying it was time to declare a climate emergency.

Read the story by David Spratt on Climate Code Red - “Emergency action is only sane response to escalating climate impacts.”

'Wrong on both counts' - David Spratt

David Spratt.

It's taken a hundred years of human-caused greenhouse emissions to push the global temperature up almost one degree Celsius (1C°), so another degree is still some time away. Right?  And there seems to have been a "pause" in warming over the last two decades, so getting to 2C° is going to take a good while, and we may have more time that we thought. Yes?

Wrong on both counts. 

The world could be 2C° warmer in as little as two decades, according to the leading US climate scientist and "hockey stick" author, Dr Michael E. Mann. Writing in Scientific American in March 2014 (with the maths explained here), Mann says that new calculations "indicate that if the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise to 2C° by 2036" and to avoid that threshold "nations will have to keep carbon dioxide levels below 405 parts per million", a level we have just about reached already.  Mann says the notion of a warming "pause" is false.

Read the David Spratt story on Climate Code Red  - “Two degrees of warming closer than you may think.”

Phillip Sutton talks about meeting the climate challenge

A

uthor and climate strategist, Phillip Sutton, recently shared his ideas on how societies could rise to the climate challenge as it confronts us in 2015. 

The “Striking Targets” author and “Climate Code Red” co-author’s strategy aims to address the scale and speed of change needed, at the 11th hour, to provide the maximum possible protection for the world's people, species and ecosystems.

Phillip talked about his concept at a September Breakthrough Forum presented in partnership with the Australian-German Climate and Energy College, University of Melbourne.

Watch Phillip had to say – “Post Paris: sketching a new approach”.

The common rhetorical escape - 'I'm not a scientist'

-      Robert McLean.

David Spratt is he co-author
of Climate Code Red.

“I’m not a scientist” is the common rhetorical escape for most with influence, but who deny climate change.

Not many of us, of course, are scientists with the qualifications to make informed comment about climate change, but all of us do have a sense of what is right and wrong, most of us can understand basic graphs and charts and most of us seem to instinctively know when something is going astray.

Climate change is damnably difficult to pin down in detail, but strikingly simple when considered broadly and applied to the human experiment.

David Spratt, the co-author of Climate Code Red, understands the scientific realities of climate change, but takes his readers on an understandable journey and has warned that “Two degrees of warming closer than you may think”.

Yes, I’m not a scientist, but it is clear to me that climate change is happening and bringing with it significant difficulties.

'We are now making the least-worst choices' - Spratt

Concluding his 2013 piece “Is Climate Change Already Dangerous” David Spatt said: “We are now in a world of making the least-worst choices”.

The on-line editor of Climate Code Red and co-author of a book by the same name, Spratt says there is no simple answer to what the world is presently experiencing.

“There is no simple answer, and we do not yet know all the questions in detail, let alone all of the answers. Nobody ever does at the beginning of an emergency response. That’s what makes it an emergency,” he writes.

“But we do now know, with clear evidence that climate change is already “dangerous”, that we are heading towards a “catastrophe”, that we are in an emergency and, yes, we do face “…an unavoidably radical future.

“And we do know from past experience that once societies are in emergency mode, they are capable of facing up to and solving seemingly impossible problems.”, he says.

Klein calls for radical social movement

Naomi Klein - she believes the
 mitigation of climate change
needs a radical social movement.

The idea of civil disobedience has been discussed Beneath the Wisteria, but never advanced.

Now, interestingly, U.S. socialist writer and activist Naomi Klein, has argued that any radical greenhouse gas reduction policies will only succeed when supported by an equally radical social movement.

Climate Code Red reported in a story headed: “Naomi Klein: Radical GHG emissions policies need radical social movements to back them” on Klein’s ideas being presented to a London conference.

David Spratt continues to warn us of earth's difficulties

David Spratt taking his
message to the people
in Melbourne.

David Spratt continues to warn us about the implications and ramifications of climate change and his latest missive - Dramatic lessons from theArctic big melt of 2012: It's already too hot, as Greenland melt record is smashed – sees him again warn of the earth’s difficulties.

Spratt is the energy behind "Climate Code Red".