Why I think there's still hope for the climate in 2017

Optimism has always been in short supply in conversations about global warming. Only for the briefest window – after the Paris climate agreement was reached in December 2015 – did the words “climate” and “hope” look reasonable next to each other in headlines. Then came 2016.

A defiant mood has emerged in response to
countless setbacks. Illustration: Sarah Walsh.

And yet, in spite of these past 12 months, I remain optimistic.

Yes, I know that Donald Trump – a man who has dismissed global warming as “very expensive … bullshit” – was elected president of the world’s second biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. His actions since his inauguration have only confirmed his intentions to halt progress to reduce the vast emissions produced by the US. 

And I know that in the UK there’s yet more cause for concern. A series of U-turns has transformed the UK from a world leader to a world let-down. The Department of Energy and Climate Change has been scrapped. The country is expected to miss its 2020 climate targets. And the weakening of the European Union, caused by the Brexit vote, may jeopardise climate action across the continent.

These are serious developments, but I’m not convinced they’re big enough to unsettle progress.

Read Adam Levy’s story on The Guardian - “Why I think there's still hope for the climate in 2017.”

Obituary: Piers Sellers, astronaut who warned of global warming risks

Piers Sellers awaits the start of the
 mission's third space walk, 2006.

Piers Sellers, a British-born climate scientist for NASA who remained optimistic about the fate of the Earth, despite the grim climate change models he oversaw, and who gained US citizenship to fulfil a childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, has died in Houston aged 61.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and went public with his diagnosis in a New York Times column. He wrote that, while he had hoped he would see solutions to the problem of climate change in his lifetime, he was devoted to continuing his climate research until he died.

"There is no convincing, demonstrated reason to believe that our evolving future will be worse than our present, assuming careful management of the challenges and risks," he wrote, sounding a note of optimism, despite increasingly drastic changes in the global temperature and precipitation patterns that he studied. "History is replete with examples of us humans getting out of tight spots."

Read the obituary in today’s Melbourne Age - “Piers Sellers, astronaut who warned of global warming risks.”

Record winter rain brings hope to drought-ravaged western Queensland

Three years of severe drought and then
 the wettest winter on record.

The wettest winter on record in Longreach has lifted spirits and seen optimism return to a region ravaged by three years of severe drought.

"The whole town was excited and I haven't experienced that before," said Sue Hegarty, from Colanya Station.

"That's how bad this drought was. It was affecting everybody ... there was so much relief when it finally decided to rain."

The Longreach airport recorded 262mm of rain over winter, more than five times its average for the season.

"Whatever that green does, it's just so much easier on the eye," grazier Mary te Kloot said.

Ms te Kloot and her husband John live at Marmboo Station, about 100km north-west of Longreach

Read the Rural ABC story - “Record winter rain brings hope to drought-ravaged western Queensland.”

Keeping climate change optimism alive is challenging

-       Robert McLean

Canada's wildfires (bushfires) make it difficult
to remain optimistic that
our response to climate change will be adequate.

Keeping one’s optimism alive can be challenging when humanity’s collective response to the dilemma of climate change is inadequate and embedded in the false hope that some as yet unknown and untested technology will rescue us.

The signs of climate change abound and yet despite some pockets of resourceful and innovative thinking, we (that’s humanity) continue burning fossil fuels, remain strong in our allegiance to an economic system (capitalism) whose success erodes the Earth’s capital and are without the bold and resourceful thinking escape from this crisis demands.

Look for example at what is happening in Canada – “Canada’s huge wildfires may release carbon locked in permafrost” – where forest fires driven by conditions unquestionably worsened by climate change have brought chaos to the lives of thousands.

Minor by comparison, but another example of difficulties brought on by climate change is this retail twist happening in Melbourne, and no doubt everywhere else – “Shopping centres wary of unseasonably warm winter weather”.

The latter is actually of little consequence compared to Canadian events, but surely it is sufficient to make at least these retailers realise that the consistency of season they once enjoyed is slipping away.

It is critical we understand and address the optimism/pessimism dichotomy dilemma for whichever has precedence then determines how this predicament will evolve.

There are, however, various realms of optimism and what prevails is that which has brought on the conditions that have led to climate change and the broader degradation of the Earth and what is needed, right now, is an optimism that humanity can find its way out of this difficulty.

The seriousness of climate change is both misunderstood and underestimated and beyond a handful of people, relatively speaking, few have any grasp of how extreme our response needs to be.

Conditioned by centuries of a life of plenty brought on by the bounty of energy resulting from fossil fuels, humanity generally sees every solution through growth and “more”, while the thinking people see it in a planned degrowth, that is a more restrained way of living where the emphasis is on human wellbeing and thriving, rather than profit and growth.

However, until we can fracture and dislodge that hold neoliberalism has on the human dynamic, we have little hope of changing our way of thinking or doing things.

I’m optimistic we will change, but pessimistic about how that change will come about – it seems that humanity will only change its ways when we have no other option, but sadly that will only arrive at a cost in both lives and property.

In all that, we need to avoid pessimism for that mostly simply freezes people into inaction and breeds an “Oh well, it’s all gone to hell, let’s just live for now”.

Climate change is happening, in human life terms, dreadfully slow, but in a geological sense, it’s coming upon us at lightning speed and that is a terminal-like problem for humanity.

All that said, let’s be optimistic for there is no other way.

Optimism and pessimism merge to become realism in Paris

O

ptimism and pessimism have already mutated to become the realism expected to emerge from the U.N. climate conversations in Paris.

Herman Daly wrote
decades ago about what
 the world needs to be
agreeing on now in Paris.

Dare I make a call now with the conference just one day old?

Many will declare the event a wonderful success, but the outcome, I suggest, will be inadequate as the world’s prevailing economic system will not by touched in any way or restructured as it should be to remove the emphasis on profit and ever-expanding growth; capitalism’s reason and the root cause of climate change.

Maybe my expectations were a little too high, I had allowed my ambitions off their leash and my utopian thoughts allowed full reign?

After all why have such high expectations when the world’s nations have gathered to discuss how they could best save humanity from a rather questionable future?

Surely, to quote Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, when he was making a political point-scoring proposition about our tax system, “all options” would be on the table, but that was about money and it seems that in the view of most world governments “all options” is a position reserved only for those moments when the economy is threatened.

New flash! Climate change is the greatest threat the world economy has ever seen and beyond that, and even more importantly, it threatens the wellbeing of the entire world community.

The idea of capitalism is so entrenched and embedded in our psyche that it is a rare soul who can see that there is another way.

One of those who could envision “another way” was the American ecological economist and professor, Herman Daly, who argued for a steady state economy, which Daly explained was an economic system fit for purpose on a finite planet.

Daly’s work has always been considered impossibly radical and unworkable by mainstream economists; the same people who are urging the world community toward a precipice over which is will most certainly tumble, unless the conversation in Paris changes and makes an abrupt about turn.

 

- Robert McLean.

Can organic agriculture mitigate climate change?

J

Organic farming - playing a role in
mitigating climate change?

ulius McGee asks, “Can organic agriculture mitigate climate change?”

Writing on the Guardian he says: “If you were to simply Google the question – which, being a millennial I have done – you would be led to believe that it does.

“I love a good underdog story and, like The Little Engine That Could, I think a lot of things are possible through optimism and hard work. But advocates of organic farming, like the United Nations Food and Drug Administration, think that it can mitigate climate change without the hard work necessary to truly make it happen.”

Read McGee’s story - “Organic farms don't have the tiny carbon footprint they like to tout. But they could”.

'Shorthand' confuses Australia Prime Minister

Tony Abbott is confused about many things, among them what growth is really “shorthand” for.

According to Australia’s PM, “…. economic growth is really just economists' shorthand for more jobs, higher pay, new industries, and the better life that only greater wealth can provide."

It’s not. It’s actually shorthand for a worsening of what he has called “darkening times”.

Economic growth, despite his optimism, is simply about inequality and the strengthening of a social malaise that favours less than one per cent of the world’s population and, critically, further disrupts the world’s deteriorating climate.

In today’s Mark Kenny story in The Age, Mr Abbott said, "Our G20 goal is to boost output by an extra 2 per cent over the next five years to create millions of jobs and to generate trillions in wealth right around the world.”

"Likewise the post-2015 Development Agenda should focus on economic growth because growth makes every other social goal, even tackling climate change, easier to accomplish,” he said.

Convincing others of climate change is complex

Paul Biegler.

Convincing people about the reality of human-induced climate change is as much about the mysteries of human cognition as explaining the facts.

The facts, it seems, as rather too brutal for most as they prefer optimism and to see life through rose coloured glasses.

The intricacies of addressing what is unquestionably the most significant threat to ever face humanity seems even more complex than the difficulty itself.

Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics at Monash University, Paul Biegler, wrote about that challenge on The Conversation in a story headed: “How we evolved to reject climate science”.