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.”

Time for honesty on climate and energy policy

Ian Dunlop - we need honesty
from our national political
leaders on Australian climate
and energy policy.

Recent weeks have seen unsurpassed dishonesty and irresponsibility from national political leaders on Australian climate and energy policy – the biggest issue we now face.

The mantra trotted out continually by federal government and opposition alike is that "coal is part of the national and international energy mix and will be so for decades to come", parroting coal industry leaders and lobbyists.

Strictly true, but it is a rapidly declining part if we are to meet the requirements of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, which Australia ratified on November 10. The International Energy Agency's latest analysis indicates global coal demand falling 50 per cent by 2040. But facts are irrelevant as this mantra is used to spruik rapid expansion of our own coal production, to maintain "energy security" domestically for example in SA, and to "alleviate poverty" with international exports by developing numerous new coal mines including Adani's megamine in the Queensland Galilee Basin.

The essential point ignored in this posturing is that we now face risks from global warming far beyond anything acknowledged officially here or overseas.

Read Ian Dunlop’s thoughts in The Sydney Morning Herald - “Time for honesty on climate and energy policy.”

Our Climate and Energy Dilemma; The Case for Emergency Action

Ian Dunlop - he says we need
emergency climate action.

Ian Dunlop explains the wicked problem that is climate change and illustrates unequivocally the need for emergency action.

The former oil, gas and coal executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and a member of the Club of Rome, was the guest speaker at the recent Big Conversation staged by Engineers Australia.

The Big Conversation, staged at the University of Technology Sydney, was entitled “Our Climate and Energy Dilemma; The Case for Emergency Action.”

Watching it will consume two-hours of your life, but it is loaded with information that each of us simply must hear, understand, and do something about.

Combatting climatre change demands WW2-like national unity

Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party
upside down by appealing directly to the voters
 and rejecting many of
the principles of the party that he will represent.

Here in Australia, we continue to witness the negative consequences of factional party politics and the corruption of good government by the money of vested interests. The Australian community is disaffected and relatively uninvolved in the decisions which will determine our future.

And yet we urgently need a government that can take firm decisions, supported by the population, about a number of issues that are being largely ignored. Ian Dunlop, ("Citizens awake – we are being taken for fools") argues that the climate crisis is so important that we need a government of national unity of the kind that we had during World War II, where all parties worked together to help to win the war.

Read The Sydney Morning Herald story - “Has party politics become destructive to the public interest and the public good?”

Peter Costello has 'lost the plot': Ian Dunlop

Ian Dunlop, he says Peter
Costello has "lost the plot".

The former chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Ian Dunlop, said reports that the Future Fund was considering financing of Adani’s controversial coal mining project in the Galilee Basin suggested its chairman Peter Costello has “lost the plot.”

Reports emerged this week that the Future Fund had been approached by the Indian company to provide finance, after more than a dozen international banks refused to lend money to the project. The reports suggested that Indian Foreign Minister Arun Jaitley is scheduled to meet Costello, the former Howard government treasurer, this Friday.

“It is extraordinary that faced with the structural decline of thermal coal and even a basic understanding of climate change, Peter Costello would entertain the possibility of funding Adani’s Galilee Basin coal mine,” Dunlop said in a statement.

“It seems remarkable, but perhaps the former Treasurer hasn’t noticed the coal boom has ended. One would hope that his fellow board members would have greater foresight.

Read the RenewEconomy story - “Ex-coal chief tells Future Fund’s Costello: the coal boom is over.”

(Just a few weeks ago Clive Hamilton, an Australian author and public intellectual who, since 2008 he has been Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, spoke at a Melbourne public function questioning the Australian Government's perverse interest in and fascination with coal, suggesting there was a certain madness afoot in Canberra. He noted, as does Ian Dunlop in the RenewEconomy story that governments around the world are stepping away from coal – Robert McLean.)

Science 'book burning' continues in Australia: Ian Dunlop

(Just two years ago a former international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors who is now a member of the Club of Rome, Ian Dunlop, wrote about the disembowelling of Australia’s science ideals and although we now have a different Prime Minister, the same values still apply and so he continues to be concerned enough to remind people via Twitter of what he said in 2014 and how his concerns have changed little for we continue to plunder our science institutions – Robert McLean)

Ian Dunlop was worried about our "burning of
our science books" in 2014 and two years
later nothing has changed to ease his mind.

Australia has an enviable reputation for Ian Dunlop extending long before the heyday of the CSIRO in the 1950s under the visionary leadership of Sir Robert Menzies and Sir Ian Clunies-Ross. On the hottest and driest continent on Earth, our prosperity would be non-existent had it not been for the enlightened application of science. So it has been of mounting concern over recent years to see governments of all persuasions adopt increasingly anti-science agendas.

The federal government is taking anti-science to new heights. Its scorched earth approach discards virtually everything not in line with narrow, free-market ideology, centred on sustaining Australia’s 20th century dig-it-up and ship-it-out economic growth model. 

Read what Ian Dunlop wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald in 2014 - “Tony Abbott is gutting science just when we need it most.”

The call is still about us waking from our slumber

Three years ago the Shepparton-based Slap Tomorrow organized and staged a forum entitled “A wake-up call” and still today people continue to encourage us to wake from our slumber.

Jenny Goldie, from Michelago in New South Wales, wrote about that need for us to “wake up” in the Melbourne Age on December 19 under the heading: “Heed wake-up calls before it's too late.”

She wrote:

Ian Dunlop's superb article ("Rational climate and energy policy", 13/12) is a wake-up call. If we are to have several metres of sea-level rise this century, then we have to vacate the major cities of the world (New York, London, Shanghai). No amount of adaptation will be possible. The Australian government has to do its bit to minimise global warming. It has to increase its emission reduction targets to at least 65 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030; ban all new coal mines; immediately close down power stations based on brown coal, such as Hazelwood, and phase out the rest; increase climate funding to $1.6billion a year from new money, not the existing aid budget; phase out all fossil fuel subsidies (while compensating food producers who would lose the diesel fuel rebate); promise to keep the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency; and significantly increase subsidies to the renewable energy sector. There is no hope unless we make a complete shift away from fossil fuels before mid-century.

Meanwhile, Jenny Henty, of Canterbury, in arguing for us to consider how we talk about climate change wrote today in the Age under the heading: “Seasonal change”:

I agree with Terry Hastings that the term "bushfire season" is problematic (Letters, 3/1) but for different reasons. In the new reality, spring, summer and autumn are all potentially bushfire seasons. With the advent of global warming our language has to admit to the changed climate: only then we mobilise our wills and determine a course to a clean renewable energy future.

And again today, arguing that “Farmers do their bit”, John Marriott, of Point Lonsdale, wrote:

While it is a fact that livestock are emitters of greenhouse gases (Letters 3/1), many livestock producers also carry out farming practices and revegetation programs that sequester carbon – in fact some are net sequesterers, unlike the transport industry. Don't cancel the weekly visit to the butcher too soon.

Ian Dunlop calls out Australia's elites on climate change

I

an Dunlop calls it as it is.

Ian Dunlop - calls out the elites.

A director of Australia21 and a Member of the Club of Rome has directly levelled Australia’s inadequate response to climate change at the country’s elites.

Mr Dunlop, formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chairman of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, has written the Melbourne Age calling out Australia’s elites for their inaction.

In his is piece in The Age - “The Australian elites have fundamentally failed us on climate change” – he writes “This is reinforced by the fact that not a single board chairman or CEO of a major company, bank or investment manager has spoken out against the federal government's blatant climate denialism, and in particular, the government's undermining of the new low-carbon industries on which Australia's future depends.”

Have we gone mad? New report illustrates we are becoming increasingly delusional

H

ave we gone mad? A new report released today explains why contemporary climate change policy-making should be characterised as increasingly delusional.

David Spratt.

As the deadline approaches for submissions to the Australian government's climate targets process, there is a flurry of submissions and reports from advocacy groups and the Climate Change Authority.

Most of these reports are based on the twin propositions that two degrees Celsius (2°C) of global warming is an appropriate policy target, and that there is a significant carbon budget and an amount of "burnable carbon" for this target, and hence a scientifically-based escalating ladder of emission-reduction targets stretching to mid-century and beyond.

A survey of the relevant scientific literature by David Spratt, "Recount: It's time to 'Do the math' again", published today by Breakthrough concludes that the evidence does not support either of these propositions.

The catastrophic and irreversible consequences of 2°C of warming demand a strong risk-management approach, with a low rate of failure. We should not take risks with the climate that we would not take with civil infrastructure.

There is no carbon budget available if 2°C is considered a cap or upper boundary as per the Copenhagen Accord, rather than a hit-or-miss target which can be significantly exceeded; or if a low risk of exceeding 2°C is required; or if positive feedbacks such as permafrost and other carbon store losses are taken into account.

Effective policy making can only be based on recognising that climate change is already dangerous, and we have no carbon budget left to divide up. Big tipping-point events irreversible on human time scales such as in West Antarctica and large-scale positive feedbacks are already occurring at less than 1°C of warming. It is clear that 2°C of climate warming is not a safe cap.

In reality, 2°C is the boundary between dangerous and very dangerous climate change and 1°C warmer than human civilisation has ever experienced.

In the lead up to the forthcoming Paris talks, policy makers through their willful neglect of the evidence are in effect normalising a 2.5–3°C global warming target.

This evidence in "Recount: It's time to 'Do the math' again" demonstrates that action is necessary at a faster pace than most policy makers conceive is possible. Decades of procrastination mean there is no longer sufficient time for an incremental and non-disruptive reduction in emissions. 

Ian Dunlop - global leaders
guilty of" wilful denial".

Only a whole-of-society rescue plan, understood as action at emergency speed outside of the business-as-usual political mode, can provide hope of retaining a livable planet for ourselves and future generations.

In a foreword to the report, Ian Dunlop, the former Chair, Australian Coal Association and CEO, Australian Institute of Company Directors, says that: For the last two decades global leaders have been guilty of willful denial regarding human-induced climate change, none more so than in Australia. Despite much rhetoric and endless negotiations, human carbon emissions continue in line with a worst-case scenario.

Unfortunately the years of procrastination have cut off options to solve the climate challenge with a graduated response – emergency action is now inevitable if potentially catastrophic and irreversible impacts are to be avoided.

Such views are dismissed as extremist by political and corporate incumbencies, and by most activist NGOs and investors. However, there has never been an honest official acknowledgment of the real climate challenge; as a result realistic solutions have not been forthcoming.

Climate change is happening faster and more extensively than officially acknowledged and sensible risk management requires far more stringent action. This paper explains why. Download "Recount: It's time to 'Do the math' again".

Ian Dunlop's observations promote flurry of letters to The Age

T

his group of letters in today’s Melbourne Age are worth a few minutes, they are all about climate change and Ian Dunlop's observations –

Ian Dunlop’s warming

Ian Dunlop's warning (Comment, 7/4) is especially sobering. The slowing of atmospheric temperature rise over the past 15 years or so, used by climate change sceptics to debunk the work of the IPCC, is, on the contrary, evidence that the solar energy delivered to the Earth is being absorbed by the oceans. The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are acting as giant dampers to contain temperature rise in the oceans. When both of these ice sheets melt away in the next decade or so, the rise in both ocean and atmospheric temperatures will accelerate rapidly and demonstrate that the passing of the tipping points that Dunlop expresses concern about has, indeed, occurred.

There can hardly be clearer evidence that the future of our planet is squarely in the hands of our politicians. Dunlop  calls on Australian "stateswomen to step forward". I think it will need concerted action by statespeople of both genders and probably all political persuasions to haul us out of the dangerous intellectual lethargy into which we have been led.

Associate Professor Maurie Trewhella, Victoria University

We had a stateswoman

We had a stateswoman, Ian Dunlop. Her name was Julia Gillard. Everything she did to tackle climate change has been dismantled and reversed by this draconian government. I despair for my grandchildren and fail to see how supposedly intelligent parliamentarians can be so shortsighted, given most of them also have families.

Carmen Hilton, Hampton Park

Reasons to be optimistic

In contrast to the pessimism of Ian Dunlop, I think there is every reason for the global economy to continue to grow until all citizens reach the West's standard of living. Climate change need not be feared. Modern coal-fired power stations are more than three times as efficient as they used to be,  while the significantly reduced emissions can be liquefied and then used, increasingly, in greenhouses and chemicals such as formic acid and fuels, or, at worst, permanently sequestrated under a layer of silt and 3000 metres of seawater. All this can be done while reducing the cost of electricity by 10 per cent. Meanwhile renewable energy is constantly advancing. The greening of the planet can occur through the piping of fresh water using large, flexible plastic tubes to areas that need it. But Dunlop is correct that current government actions are not enough and that more needs to be done.

John Martin, chief executive, Docklands Science Park 

We must break party political deadlock

George Marshall speaking in Melbourne this year.

I recently attended a workshop run by George Marshall, author of “Don't Even Think About It: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change”, where he showed us a video of one of Maggie Thatcher's speeches and how she communicated her message on climate change. Her audience was the Conservative Party room. She appealed to the values of the group with words like balance, stability, fairness, reality, leadership, duty, respect, health, faith, freedom. It was seen to be an issue we care about – us, not them.  It was not a science-based argument. The ownership of it was  a strong part of the attraction,  and it drove the emotional connection behind the Conservatives then determining to take action.

Now, not believing in climate change is a stronger identifier of those who consider themselves conservatives than gun control and the "right to life". With such entrenched party positions, perhaps Dunlop is right and the only hope we have is to take a different tack – look at it with a gender lens. We must shift this "right/left" way of seeing the greatest threat to all our lives.

Carolyn Ingvarson, Canterbury

It's time for our stateswomen to step forward - Ian Dunlop

M

argaret Thatcher helped ignite a market system that worsened climate change, but at least she was aware of the dilemma.

Ian Dunlop.

The fact that the late British Prime Minister was conscious of climate change three decades ago, has prompted Ian Dunlop to suggest in today’s Age that is is time for our “stateswomen to step forward”.

The former international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, who is also a Member of the Club of Rome, says, “Time for stateswomen to step forward on climate change”.

Formerly of the 'dark-side', now a champion climate change activist

Ian Dunlop.

Ian Dunlop was once an integral part of the “dark-side”.

The former international oil, gas and coal executive has twice unsuccessfully south election to the to the BHP Billiton Board with aim of encouraging BHPB to take greater leadership in addressing the risks and opportunities which climate change.

Although he was once shoulder deep in the fossil fuel industry, Mr Dunlop is now a climate change activist and just this morning was on Radio National talking with Breakfast show host, Fran Kelly.

The interview: “BHP climate change readiness challenged” leaves no doubt in listeners' minds that the efforts of BHP are largely “greenwash”.

Burning science books didn't work then and it doesn't work now - Dunlop

Ian Dunlop writes about how the burning of science books didn’t work in the past and is not working today.

A former international oil, gas and coal executive and chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Mr Dunlop is critical of the Abbott Government for its taking of “anti-science” stance to new heights.

In an article published by the Centre for Policy Development he said: “Its “scorched earth” approach discards virtually everything not in line with narrow, free-market ideology, centred on sustaining Australia’s 20th Century “dig-it-up and ship-it-out” economic growth model”.

Mr Dunlop is a member of the Club of Rome, a Director of Australia21 and a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development.

His article is headed: “Burning the science books. Didn’ t work then, won’t work now”.