Sorry to disappoint climate deniers, but coronavirus makes the low-carbon transition more urgent

Climate deniers have been hanging out for the United Nations’ next big summit to fail. In a sense, the coronavirus and its induced policy responses have more than satisfied their wildest dreams, precipitating a global recession that they no doubt hope has pushed the issue of the low-carbon transition well down the political and policy agenda.

The next round of international climate negotiations – the so-called COP26 in Scotland – has been delayed until 2021. Presumably, climate sceptics hope governments and policy authorities will now be consumed by, in the words of our prime minister, the need to “cushion” the impact of the recession and ensure “a bounce back on the other side”. 

Deniers argue that further disruption to economies and societies will be avoided at all costs. 

Sorry to be the harbinger of denier disappointment, but there is every reason to expect that the virus crisis will strengthen and accelerate the imperative to transition to a low-carbon world by mid-century.

Read the story from The Conversation by John Hewson - “Sorry to disappoint climate deniers, but coronavirus makes the low-carbon transition more urgent.”

Climate and the Coalition’s new denialism

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has become adept at evading questions on climate change and its links to bushfires, and judging by his satisfied expression as he fronted up for ABC’s 7.30 recently, he remains confident he has a form of words that, like armour, journalists will be unable to penetrate. To date, he has been largely proved right.

“It is, and always has been, the policy of our government to understand the need to take action on climate change and the impact that has on the world’s broader weather systems and climate systems,” Morrison told presenter Michael Rowland.

Always has been? This is debatable, even if you set aside that his party removed Malcolm Turnbull twice on the eve of emissions deals – the carbon pollution reduction scheme and the national energy guarantee – to prevent them; killed the emissions trading scheme and the climate change portfolio; tried to kill the renewable energy target and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation; defunded the Climate Council; supports Adani’s massive proposed coalmine; has no significant emissions-reduction or energy policy; and is populated with climate deniers.

Read the story from The Saturday Paper by Nick Feik - “Climate and the Coalition’s new denialism.”

(To read the whole story you need to subscribe to The Saturday Paper)

The Oceans Are Warming Fast, and Our Lives Are About to Change

Climate deniers want you to believe otherwise, but the basic physics of climate science is as solid as the basic physics of gravity (or maybe even more solid, since the graviton, the elementary particle that mediates the force of gravity, still has not been detected). But there are plenty of unknowns in Earth’s climate system, such as exactly how much each ton of carbon dioxide we emit warms the atmosphere, or how different clouds can cool (by reflecting away sunlight) and warm (by trapping heat) the Earth. These uncertainties don’t mean that scientists don’t understand how burning fossil fuels cooks the planet. But it does mean there are still scientific nuances that could make the risks we face from climate change lower than scientists now anticipate – or higher.

Sea ice melts on the Franklin Strait along the
Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Last week, an important uncertainty was resolved – and, like most news about climate change these days, it’s not a happy story. A paper published in the journal Science shows that the Earth’s oceans are warming at a rate that’s about 40 percent faster than indicated in the 2013 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Because the world’s oceans work like a giant flywheel, capturing heat energy and then spinning it out over time, warmer oceans have huge implications for everything from the rate of sea-level rise to hurricane intensity for generations to come.

Read the story from Rolling Stone magazine by Jeff Goodell - “The Oceans Are Warming Fast, and Our Lives Are About to Change.”

Time to Grill Rex Tillerson on Climate Change

Rex Tillerson - his suggestion
that climate change warrants
"thoughtful action" is "dog
whistling" for doing nothing.

The dominant issues at Wednesday’s hearing on the nomination of Rex Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, for secretary of state are likely to be Mr. Tillerson’s ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin and any potential conflicts of interest arising from Exxon’s extensive global operations. But members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be sadly delinquent if they do not press him on the issue of climate change.

Mr. Tillerson, who concedes that climate change is a problem, has been seen as a bright spot in the bleak lineup of climate deniers that Donald Trump has named to other cabinet positions. But that’s a very low bar, and if Mr. Tillerson has any hope of raising the issue to the prominence it deserves, and changing the mind of a president-elect who has already called global warming a “hoax,” he will have to be tough and tenacious. And he won’t be unless he really cares.

Read The New York Times story - “Time to Grill Rex Tillerson on Climate Change.”

2017: Trump Peddles Climate Doubt in a World Sold on Action

When Donald Trump takes over the U.S. presidency
 from Barack Obama he will face a world already
committed to climate change action, and his hostility to
science and action could cause diplomatic ripple effects. 

President-elect Donald Trump may dismiss the Paris Agreement and pack his cabinet with climate deniers, but once he takes office, he will face a world that takes the climate crisis as seriously as he does not.

He will enter a complex web of diplomatic relations, where issues like trade, finance, migration, security, poverty, food aid and disaster relief are all intertwined and all have important links to the climate agenda. It's a world already dealing with significant climate impacts and sold on climate action.

"I am struck by the shift over the last few years in how the global community puts climate change on its agenda," Jonathan Pershing, President Obama's special envoy on climate, told InsideClimate News. "It is now virtually everywhere."

Since the signing of the Paris Agreement a year ago, addressing climate change has remained a major imperative for most of the world's nations. Enough countries quickly ratified the accord so that it entered into force early, in November. Shortly after Trump's surprising election, delegates from virtually every country in the world gathered in Marrakech to start putting the Paris treaty immediately into action.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “2017: Trump Peddles Climate Doubt in a World Sold on Action.”

The silliest arguments, freshly baked by Senator Malcolm Roberts

One of the silliest arguments of climate deniers goes like this: the atmosphere with its greenhouse gases cannot warm the Earth’s surface, because it is colder than the surface. But heat always flows from warm to cold and never vice versa, as stated in the second law of thermodynamics.

The freshly baked Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts has recently phrased it thus in his maiden speech:

It is basic. The sun warms the earth’s surface. The surface, by contact, warms the moving, circulating atmosphere. That means the atmosphere cools the surface. How then can the atmosphere warm it? It cannot. That is why their computer models are wrong.

This is of course not only questions the increasing human-caused greenhouse effect, but in general our understanding of temperatures on all planets, which goes back to Joseph Fourier, who in 1824 was the first to understand the importance of the greenhouse effect.

Read the piece from Real Climate - “Can a blanket violate the second law of thermodynamics?”

Graham pens another letter of protest - let's join him

Beneath the Wisteria supporter, Graham Parton, also disillusioned by the recent publication by Melbourne’s Age of a comment piece from John McLean, has penned at Letter to the Editor.

Here is Graham’s letter:

 

Less than a week after the overwhelming rejection of the climate deniers view put forward by Maurice Newman you publish another one, this time from John McLean of the widely discredited “International Climate Science Coalition”. Unfortunately this just perpetuates the notion that there is some kind of “debate” about whether or not the climate is changing when in fact we’ve known for years that it is and that it’s humans who are causing it. You’d think after the hottest year since records began and all the other hottest ever records being broken we’d be ready to move on to what we are going to do about stopping it rather than still hearing from people who don’t even think it’s happening.

 

Beneath the Wisteria supporters are encouraged to write letters to local and national newspapers, along with taking the message about the need to mitigate our carbon dioxide emissions to their local members of parliament, State or Federal.

Beyond, the message also needs to be heard by Local Government and so your councillors also need to hear about the unfolding difficulties that will arise from climate change.