Engineers Australia to host climate change roundtable

Engineers Australia will host the Engineering Responses to Climate Change Roundtable in Sydney this Wednesday, February 26.

The roundtable will bring together leaders from industry, the scientific community, governance and academia, including Arup, AECOM, Baker McKenzie, WSP, CSIRO, Standards Australia, ANSTO, Planning Institute of Australia, ClimateWorks, Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, Australian Building Codes Board, Climate Science Centre, Business Council for Sustainable Development, Green Building Council, Infrastructure Sustainability Council and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation,

Engineers Australia CEO, Dr Bronwyn Evans, said delegates would explore practical ways in which engineers can accelerate the low carbon transition and reduce the impacts of climate change on our communities.

“Engineers have multiple important roles: as practical implementers, as innovators developing novel solutions to address constraints, as motivators for change and as technical advisors to decision-makers. 

Indeed, we are in the privileged position of being trusted because of our evidence-based approach,” said Dr Evans.

The Engineering Responses to Climate Change Roundtable arose from the recognition that engineers have a vital role to play in concert with a wide range of contributors.

“Dealing with climate change requires urgent action on two critical areas that engineers, society, industry and governments must address together: reducing net emissions and adapting to the effects of climate change,” said Dr Evans.

“No single organisation, government or technology will solve the myriad issues related to climate change. Action on climate change is a team effort, and Engineers Australia is asking: what is the most effective role for us?

“By asking the right questions, exploring the answers, and by working together we can resolve the issues associated with climate change.”

87 Percent of Americans Unaware There's Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

Nearly 90 percent of Americans are unaware that there is a consensus within the scientific community that human-caused climate change is real and threatens the planet, a new report says.

According to the report published last week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, only 13 percent of Americans were able to correctly identify that more than 90 percent of all climate scientists have concluded that climate change is real.

The annual survey of 1,266 adults compiled in May and June failed to note that it is actually 97 percent of climate scientists that concur that human-caused global warming is happening. 

The most common but incorrect response from the survey was that there is a 50 percent consensus among the scientific community that global warming is real and human-caused. One in four responded that they did not know.

Read the story from The Weather Channel by Pam Wright - “87 Percent of Americans Unaware There's Scientific Consensus on Climate Change."

A Postmortem for Survival: on science, failure and action on climate change

Failing to learn from past mistakes is the only truly unforgivable mistake in science. And on climate change, the scientific community (by and large) has been criminally negligent when it comes to observing — and especially learning from — its own track record. This blog post is a postmortem in 4 acts: an anatomy of failure, so that we can hopefully learn, act and change. Fast.

Dubious anatomical science: Zodiac Man from Fasciculo
di medicina by Johannes de Ketham, 1495 CE (via Moxham
 & Plaisant, 2014).

Act 1: Science as success

Let’s get one thing out of the way, shall we? The physical science of climate change has been a resounding, phenomenal, triumphant success. As a colleague from the University of Leeds recently put it, “We’ve been right for decades.” This makes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first Working Group (on the physical science) assessment reports an absolute dawdle to write up: “Still right!” [That’s a joke, by the way. There are always absolute stacks of new science to report on: just the large lines of it have not budged at all.] So there is not much to learn from there in terms of failure. Well done, physical scientists, you’ve observed & modeled external reality. You aced the case.

Read the story from Medium by Julia Steinberger - “A Postmortem for Survival: on science, failure and action on climate change.”

Farm tree clearing like a birthday party without a cake

After a marathon debate in Parliament,
 the Palaszczuk Government's
 vegetation management
amendments have been voted down.

This story should be accompanied by the sound of the near inaudible sobbing of Australia’s environmental groups.

Farms without trees are a little like a birthday party with a cake.

The world’s scientific community has conclusively illustrated that a farm’s reason, and its viability, is to be found in its trees.

Queensland’s farm lobby groups either don’t understand that or prefer to see themselves as the State’s last generation of farmers as their short-term views will make farming so difficulty that the next step is extinction.

Read the ABC Rural story - “Farm lobby claims victory as bid for tighter tree clearing controls felled in Queensland Parliament.”

'Barbie girl' back in Canberra

Pauline Hanson, Michael Gove, and Donald Trump.

Along with Aqua’s “Barbie Girl,” Pauline Hanson has long stood as a grim reminder that the second half of the 1990s was much worse than the first half. And now, 18 years later, Hanson finds herself back in Canberra.

Hanson’s racist agenda will be a stain on the Senate just as surely as the views she represents are a stain on Australia itself. For that reason alone, her return is a cause for dismay. But it is not the only cause.

Both Hanson herself and her wider party have a vocal sideline in science denialism: the view that expert consensus on various topics is corrupted and unreliable.

Hanson has pushed the myth that vaccination causes autism, and wants a royal commission into the “corruption” of climate science, declaring that “Climate change should not be about making money for a lot of people and giving scientists money”.

At the time of writing, it’s quite possible Malcolm Roberts, who has the number two slot on the One Nation Senate ticket in Queensland, will be joining Hanson in Canberra. Roberts is a project leader of the Galileo Movement, a lobby group who deny anthropogenic climate change and insist the global scientific community and governments are corruptly hiding the truth from their publics.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University, Patrick Stokes - “Please don’t explain: Hanson 2.0 and the war on experts.”

Obama speaks up and puts climate deniers down



Barack Obama - he has 'dissed'
those who deny climate science.

President Barack Obama dissed those who deny the science around climate change during his last State of the Union address.

"Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it," Obama said. "You’ll be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it."

Read the Huffington Post story - “Obama Disses Climate Change Deniers.”