Australian headlines are designed to scare people into not acting on climate change

Whenever Australia starts to have a serious conversation about addressing climate change, headlines appear in newspapers of an economic apocalypse. This happened again in the Australian this week based on work by a long-standing economic modeller of climate policy, Brian Fisher.

 Whenever Australia starts to have a serious conversation
about addressing climate change headlines appear in
newspapers of an economic apocalypse. 

So, what do economic modelling exercises tell us of the impact of reducing Australia’s contribution to global warming, and more importantly, what do they not? Should we cower in fear of action or embrace the inevitable change and manage the human and economic costs of transition?

Firstly, economic modelling results are not predictions. They are based on hypothetical future worlds. Economists try to capture the dynamics of economic systems in their models to understand the relative impact of different policy options. This means they are always wrong because economists can’t predict the future. Economic modellers are not the crystal ball gazers we read about in fantasy books.

Read the story from The Guardian by Erwin Jackson - “Australian headlines are designed to scare people into not acting on climate change.”

Guilty of neglecting their social responsibility on a daily basis

Writing in “Unprecedented Crime: Climate Change Denial and Game Changers for Survival” Dr Peter Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth said: 

“By failing to inform viewers of the full truth of climate change, TV stations and newspapers are guilty of far more than neglecting their social responsibility on a daily basis.”

'Contrary to Reason' - George Monbiot

One of the curiosities of our age is the way in which celebrity culture comes to dominate every aspect of public life. Even the review pages of the newspapers sometimes look like a highfalutin version of gossip magazines. Were we to judge them by the maxim “great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”, they would not emerge well. Biography dominates, ideas often seem to come last. Brilliant writers like Sylvia Plath become better known for their lives than their work: turning her into the Princess Diana of literature does neither her nor her readers any favours.

Jeremy Lent's  "The Patterning Instinct" is worth reading.

Even when ideas are given prominence, they no longer have standing in their own right; their salience depends on their authorship. Take, for example, the psychology professor Stephen Pinker, who attracts the kind of breathless adulation that would seem more appropriate in the pages of Hello magazine.

I am broadly sympathetic to his worldview. I agree with him that scientific knowledge is a moral imperative, and that we must use it to enhance human welfare. Like him, I’m enthusiastic about technologies that horrify other people, such as fourth-generation nuclear reactors and artificial meat. So I began reading his new book Enlightenment Now with excitement.

Read the latest column by Guardian columnist, George Monbiot - “Contrary to Reason.”

Recycling crisis: True goal is zero waste going to landfill

After years of doing the right thing by separating our garbage so that our glass bottles, newspapers and plastics can be recycled, Victorians are now being told that all that recycling could be, well, a waste of time.

We are facing a potential waste crisis – and a totally predictable one, too.

According to the Municipal Association of Victoria, a decision by China to place a ban on the import of recycling materials from outside the country has resulted in several councils having their recycling contracts cut back by our waste companies.

Read the comment by Richard Fine in today’s Age - “Recycling crisis: True goal is zero waste going to landfill.”

Delving through settlers’ diaries can reveal Australia’s colonial-era climate

Weather diaries kept by Reverend William Clarke in
 Sydney in the 1840s, now at the State Library
of New South Wales.

To really understand climate change, we need to look at the way the climate behaves over a long time. We need many years of weather information. But the Bureau of Meteorology’s high-quality instrumental climate record only dates back to the start of the 20th century.

This relatively short period makes it hard to identify what is natural climate change and what is human-induced, particularly when it comes to things like rainfall. We really need data that go further back in time.

Natural records of climate such as tree rings and ice cores can tell us a lot about pre-industrial climate. But they too need to be verified in some way, matched against some other form of data.

So, we went hunting for some. Over two years, we looked through newspapers, manuscripts, government documents and early settlers’ diaries from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania. We took thousands of photos of letters, journals, tables and graphs. 

We rediscovered handwritten observations from farmers, convicts, sailors and reverends across southeastern Australia, stretching all the way back to European settlement in 1788.

Read the story on The Conversation - “Delving through settlers’ diaries can reveal Australia’s colonial-era climate.”

Print flexible solar cells

Conventional silicon solar cells account for
 more than 90% of global production,
yet making them uses energy equivalent
 to about 10% of their lifetime output.

The future of solar energy depends on a union of new and old technologies. If photovoltaic (PV) devices that turn light into electricity could be mass produced with printing presses, as if they were newspapers or banknotes, they could be affordable and ubiquitous.

Conventional, silicon-based, solar panels are rigid and bulky. Small, thin and flexible PV devices on films are already being made that are lightweight and translucent. These use little material and can generate electricity in low light, even indoors. Integrating them into phones and watches, as well as walls and windows, would transform the world's energy generation, reduce pollution and mitigate climate change.

Yet flexible solar panels face several hurdles. Some are based on harmful substances such as heavy metals, and their manufacture uses hazardous solvents. Others are quick to degrade and inefficient at converting light into electricity. Printers used in the publishing, computing and electronics industries struggle to print PV materials that need to be built with nanometre precision over many square metres. For all these reasons, printable solar cells are yet to find a foothold in electricity markets.

Read the Nature story - “Print flexible solar cells.”