climate policy

dissonance

First published in Dissent magazine Autumn 2011 as

When the climate breaks bad, will there be answers?

Image: Beach recession, Old Bar, NSW, March 2011

When the climate breaks bad, will there be answers?

by David Spratt
Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or its completely useless Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (1)

What price carbon? Professor Ross Garnauts climate update for the federal government are helping to set the parameters for the Great Carbon Price Debate of 2011. The signals are clear: Garnaut was appalled at the triumph of rent-seekers in the 2009 CPRS draft legislation but now seems less sure, he favours a fixed starting price, and says policy delays in recent years now mean a higher initial price. He has previously made the case for complimentary measures: As long as the price, now and expected in future, is insufficiently high to ensure that Australia lives within the national emissions budget, a case can be made for other measures, such as a mandatory renewable energy target, during the transition to an environmentally and economically rational emissions price. (2) A greater challenge for Garnaut will be connecting the scale of solutions to the science, an issue which dogged his first report. The 2008 Garnaut Climate Change Review included an orthodox survey of climatechange science and policy prescriptions, consistent with the 2007 report of the IPCC. The problem, which Garnaut belatedly recognised but did not fully explore, was that some critical elements of the IPPC report were too conservative. These ranged from the likely rate at which the polar caps would melt (and hence the rate at which sea levels would rise), to the sensitivity of the climate system and the role of positive feedbacks (warming which triggers events that produce more warming) in driving the system. The Reviews own work, which found that future emissions paths in Asia would be higher than most target policy research had assumed, added to concern that beyond the core of his work, there were what Garnaut termed bad possibilities in his post-launch public appearances. In response to a babble of deniers in the period

before the Reviews final publication, Garnaut explained that he was simply telling the story as it fell out of the analysis, when the emissions growth suggested by the Reviews own work was applied to centre of the road scientific judgments on the relationship between carbon dioxide concentrations and temperatures... I did not then talk about some of the possible shocks that I am discussing now: shocks that until recently were a fair way along the possible but not very likely end of the probability distribution, but have been moved closer to the centre by the Reviews work on business-asusual scenarios. Some shocks that would be severe and damaging that were once near the edges of the distributions are now near the middle. (3) It was only in his final chapter that Garnaut gave some expression to the bad possibilities, and to the consequences of failure at the Copenhagen climate conference, then 15 months ahead: If things go badly (at Copenhagen), they could go very badly. When human society receives a large shock to its established patterns of life, the outcome is unpredictable in detail but generally problematic. Things fall apart..... (3) Unmitigated climate change, or mitigation too weak to avoid dangerous climate change, could give human society such a shock, wrote Garnaut. We know that immense shocks unsettle basic institutions, with unfathomable consequences. We know that the possibilities from climate change include shocks far more severe than others in the past that have exceeded societys capacity to cope, and moved societies to the point of fracture. Here we are talking about global fracture. (3) That made Copenhagen a fateful decision; an effective global agreement would allow reconsideration of ambition once it has been demonstrated that mitigation is consistent with continued economic growth. But if there is no such agreement, the outlook is an unhappy one... On a balance of probabilities, the failure of our generation would lead to consequences that would haunt humanity until the end of time.(3) This talk of things falling apart, global fracture

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and haunting consequences in the concluding chapter gives voice to the bad possibilities that had shadowed Garnauts review but were not analysed in the substantive chapters. It was if Garnaut belatedly realised that he been fed a somewhat reticent view of the science. His concerns have been made explicit in a damning, final section, Reflections on scholarly reticence, ofn the Garnaut Climate Change Review 2011 Update paper #5 on The science of climate change, released on 10 March. He wonders whether the reason why most of the new (climate change) knowledge confirms the established science or changes it for the worse is scholarly reticence. In characteristic understatement, Garnaut says There must be a possibility that scholarly reticence, extended by publications lags, has led to understatement of the risks We should, however, be alert to the possibility that the reputable science in future will suggest that it is in Australians and humanitys interests to take much stronger and much more urgent action on climate change than might seem warranted from todays peer-reviewed published literature. We have to be ready to adjust expectations and policy in response to changes in the wisdom from the mainstream science. Behind all of this, one detects a deep concern that Garnaut feels let down by a good deal of the advice he has received from some of his senior science advisors. The alarm was two-fold in nature. The first was political failure, both at the domestic and global levels. The second was about the science. A number of climate impacts were happening more quickly and at lower temperature increases, compared to the orthodoxy. And the benchmarks above which climate change would be dangerous had been set too high by political decisionmakers over two decades, and needed urgent revision. And the science and the politics were heading in opposite directions. At a public meeting presentation in Paddington in mid-2008, I asked Garnaut from the floor what it would mean for his policy prescriptions if the bad possibilities were to come true. His response, as best I remember, was that his prescriptions would not be relevant in such circumstances. So why spend so much effort on a Review cast in the methods of risk management and probability distributions, if policy responses at the bad end of the spectrum didnt rate? A defence is that the terms of reference given to Garnaut by then opposition leader Rudd were narrowly defined around designing an emissions-trading scheme. But there is a larger contradiction that Garnaut, like Nicholas Stern before him, could not reconcile. And it was simply that if the up-to-date science was put at the centre of ones thinking, what need to be done was far beyond what the political system and its masters wanted, or could bear, to hear.

In his 2006 report for the British government, Stern had recommended policies and targets based on stabilising temperatures at a warming of no more than 3 degrees Celsius (C), roughly equivalent to 550 parts per million (ppm) of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, even though the consequences are catastrophic. This was because constraining greenhouse gas levels to 450ppm means around a 50:50 chance of keeping global increases below 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, but keeping levels to 450ppm is already nearly out of reach because 450ppm means peaking in the next five years or so and dropping fast (4) . In other words, it would require immediate and radical action that Stern judged to be neither politically likely nor economically desirable. In 2009, Stern reflected: Looking back, (my) review underestimated the risks and underestimated the damage from inaction... Emissions are growing much faster than wed thought, the absorptive capacity of the planet is less than wed thought, the risks of greenhouse gases are potentially bigger than more cautious estimates, and the speed of climate change seems to be faster. (5) This is a pattern in danger of repeating itself. Likewise, Garnaut was drawn to the politically pragmatic in his work. Whilst it was clear by the end of 2007 that 450 ppm was far from a reasonable target, the Review did not heed strong calls from climate action advocates to model and consider a safer 350 ppm scenario, and like Stern it stuck to the 450 and 550 ppm targets. And whilst describing the action necessary for Australia to play a reasonable part in holding to 450ppm, Garnaut suggested that as interim measure, pending global agreement, Australia should act only for the 550ppm target, acting out the curse of the prisoners dilemma he had so eloquently described on other occasions. Within a year, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of less than 350 ppm had become the scientific orthodoxy for a planetary safe boundary (the actual level is now approaching 400 ppm). In the most significant climate research paper of 2009, published in Nature, 29 of the worlds leading climate scientists proposed a framework based on planetary boundaries (which) define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the Earth system. In particular, they proposed that human changes to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations should not exceed 350 parts per million by volume above preindustrial levels. Transgressing these boundaries will increase the risk of irreversible climate change, such as the loss of major ice sheets, accelerated sea-level rise and abrupt shifts in forest and agricultural systems. (6) The research identified what the IPCC report of 2007 had not included: current climate models may significantly underestimate the severity of long-term

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climate change for a given concentration of greenhouse gases. Most models suggest that a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration will lead to a global temperature rise of about 3C (with a probable uncertainty range of 24.5C) once the climate has regained equilibrium. But these models do not include long-term reinforcing feedback processes that further warm the climate, such as decreases in the surface area of ice cover or changes in the distribution of vegetation. If these slow feedbacks are included, doubling CO2 levels gives an eventual temperature increase of 6C (with a probable uncertainty range of 48C). This would threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and would severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies. (6) The terms of the debate had been re-written around a safe boundary of not more than about 1C of warming , rather than the 2C that remained the currency in political circles, and at the Copenhagen climate conference, where in deference to those who would be drowned first by rising sea-levels, some hats were tipped in recognition of the still unsafe target of 1.5C of warming. [In his 2011 science update, Garnaut recognizes There is a case in managing the risks of climate change for seeking to reduce emissions concentrations below 450 ppm carbon dioxide equivalent, but that would first require a credible programme to get to 450 ppm.] In early 2011, NASA climate science chief James Hansen one of the signatories to the safe boundary paper reinforced its conclusions. In new research, Hansen concluded that at the current temperature, and warming of just 0.8C above the pre-industrial baseline, no cushion is left to avoid dangerous climate change, and that the Australian government target goals of limiting human-made warming to 2C and CO2 to 450 ppm are prescriptions for disaster (7). The question Hansen raises is direct and brutal in its implications: is the planet already entering a zone of dangerous climate change? One final element needs to be considered. The failure at Copenhagen in December of 2009 is but one of many which have led us to the present condition whereby even if all nations were to implemented all their current climate mitigation (emissions reduction) commitments, the world would still be about 4C warmer than the pre-industrial baseline by 2100 (8). Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that this is what Australias Office of National Assessments deputy director Heather Smith told US embassy officials in Canberra in a confidential discussion on the national security implications of climate change. Such a realitycheck has so far evaded the lips of government ministers (9). A 4-degree world cannot be discussed politely. It is one in which:

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The world would be warmer than during any part of the period in which modern humans evolved, and the rate of climate change would be faster than any previously experienced by humans. The worlds sixth mass extinction would be in full swing. In the oceans, acidification would have rendered many calciumshelled organisms such as coral and many at the base of the ocean food chain artefacts of history. Ocean ecosystems and food chains would collapse. (10) Half of the world would be uninhabitable. Likely population capacity: under one billion people. Whilst the loss will be exponential and bunch towards the end of the century, on average that is a million human global warming deaths every week, every year for the next 90 years. The security implications need no discussion. (11) Paleoclimatology tells us that the last time temperatures were 4C above pre-industrial (during the Oligocene 30 million years ago), there were no large ice-sheets on the planet and sea levels were 6570 metres higher than today. Whilst ice sheets take time to lose mass, and the rise to 2100 may be only 12 metres (or possibly a couple more according to James Hansen), the world would be on the way to 6570 metres. (12) 3C may be the tipping point where global warming could be driven by positive feedbacks, leaving us powerless to intervene as planetary temperatures soared. James Hansen says warming has brought us to the precipice of a great tipping point. If we go over the edge, it will be a transition to a different planet, an environment far outside the range that has been experienced by humanity. There will be no return within the lifetime of any generation that can be imagined, and the trip will exterminate a large fraction of species on the planet. (13) So while much discussion is nominally about 2 degrees of warming, the scientists are telling us it should be kept to under 1 degree, and the planet is heading actually towards 4 degrees due to chronic political failure. This is the world the Garnaut Update and the Great Carbon Price Debate will inhabit. With current greenhouse levels rising fast and already above the safe boundary, the task is clear, and the solutions available: build a zero-emissions economy, deploy techniques at scale to draw down atmospheric carbon, and probably deploy some geo-engineering because it is the least-worst option. Timeline: as fast as humanly possible, within a couple of decades. But it would be a miracle if the political debate got within shouting distance of these non-negotiable imperatives. Climate policy delusion. Cognitive dissonance. Denial. The terms are many, the madness stark.

The widening gap between (scientific) necessity and (political) possibility has been well articulated by Garnaut. He has noted that ...the diabolical nature of the policy challenge and the widespread view, based on the science, that the risks of dangerous climate change and the risk of abrupt climate change, are already at unacceptably high levels at this point means the issue may be too hard for rational policy-making in Australia because the vested interests surrounding it [are] too numerous and intense, the relevant time-frames too long. (14) In 2008, James Hansen noted that weve reached a point where we have a crisis, an emergency, but people dont know that... Theres a big gap between whats understood about global warming by the scientific community and what is known by the public and policymakers. (15) A year earlier, Tim Flannery told Lateline: I feel as if it is 1939 and theres an enormous threat on the horizon and we need to act in a way that isnt the way that we act normally. Under normal circumstances, our economic wellbeing and whatever is what we put first and foremost. When you are faced with a dire crisis, thats not the first thing that we address. (16) But the most explosive exposition of the elephant in the room the dissonance between science and politics has come from Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, and Alice Bows, in an essay (17) introducing a special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society on 4 degrees and beyond, and which Garnaut acknowledges in his 2011 science update. Anderson says that current analyses of mitigation significantly underestimate what is necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. Nevertheless, and despite the evident logic for revising the 2C threshold (downwards), there is little political appetite and limited academic support for such a revision. In stark contrast, he says, many academics and wider policy advisers undertake their analyses of mitigation with relatively high probabilities of exceeding 2C and consequently risk entering a prolonged period of what can now reasonably be described as extremely dangerous climate change. Put bluntly, while the rhetoric of policy is to reduce emissions in line with avoiding dangerous climate change, most policy advice is to accept a high probability of extremely dangerous climate change rather than propose radical and immediate emission reductions. Anderson and Bows provides a penetrating analysis of reports, including those by Stern and the for-profit company Climate Change Capital (CCC), who constrain the maximum emissions reduction each year to levels thought to be compatible with economic growthnormally 3 per cent to 4 per cent per year, which are considered

politically feasible. CCC believes that rich developed economies need to start demonstrating that a low-carbon economy is possible and compatible with economic prosperity, but acknowledge that it is not now possible to ensure with high likelihood that a temperature rise of more than 2C is avoided. Anderson and Bows concludes that ...given the view that reductions in emissions in excess of 34% per year are not compatible with economic growth, the CCC are, in effect, conceding that avoiding dangerous (and even extremely dangerous) climate change is no longer compatible with economic prosperity... In prioritizing such economic prosperity over avoiding extremely dangerous climate change, the CCC, Stern... and similar analyses suggest they are guided by what is feasible. However, while in terms of emission reduction rates their analyses favour the challenging though still feasible end of orthodox assessments, the approach they adopt in relation to peaking dates is very different... the logic of such studies suggests (extremely) dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged, at least temporarily, for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 (developed) nations and a rapid transition away from fossil-fuelled development within non-Annex 1 (developing) nations. It is a damning analysis about privileging economic growth over future human welfare, let alone a few million other species, if Andersons assumptions are correct. Anderson and Bows conclude that his paper offers a stark and unremitting assessment of the climate change challenge facing the global community... not intended as a message of futility, but rather a bare and perhaps brutal assessment of where our rose-tinted and well intentioned (though ultimately ineffective) approach to climate change has brought us. So is economic growth incompatible with real action on climate, at the scale and speed required? Is this the elephant in the room that sits between scientific necessity and political possibility, rapidly expanding that gap into a great crevass? Are there other fundamental flaws in the contemporary climate policy paradigm? Garnaut says that: The interaction between strong and broadly-based global economic growth and risks of climate change is throwing out the defining challenge of our time (18) , but can in be resolved by putting western economics core value growth on the chopping block? I suspect Anderson is correct. Building the new economy requires the same presently carbon-intensive inputs as other similar industries: steel and glass and concrete and construction materials and transport. Schematically, if you wish to reduce carbon emissions by 5% a year and growth is 4%, then the carbon intensity of production must be cut by 9%. If there is no growth, that

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figure is 5%. Such a paradigm shift, away from the growth fetish, is one of many that are necessary. Economies in rapid transition are generally characterised by strong leadership, very significant state intervention and planning, and constraining private consumption in order to provide a greater share of the national economy for investment. This is true of the war economy, of Chinas economic transformations, and of the Asian tiger economies. It would also be true of an economy rebuilding its energy and transport systems, and much else, at a speed that the science now demands. But today the market rules, intervention has been pushed to the margins and planning excised from the economic dictionary. In the post-modern developed economies where consumption triumphs over production, identity is gripped by an over-inflated sense of selfentitlement, the future is discounted by markets fixated on short-term value, and politics reduced to poll-gazing, none of the conditions necessary for a society to engage in tackling the biggest threat and challenge of all time appear to be present. Garnaut calls our current condition The great Australian complacency (19). Ken Ward, a US environmental strategist, identifies a consensual public policy hallucination that abrupt climate change can be addressed without great conflict (20). Climate policy is trapped in a culture of failure and low expectation, a fog in which the major policy players stumble from post to post. Honesty about this challenge is essential, otherwise we will never develop realistic solutions, says Ian Dunlop, formerly a senior oil, gas and coal industry executive and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Dunlop believes that we face nothing less than a global emergency, which must be addressed with a global emergency response, akin to national mobilisations pre-WWII or the Marshall Plan (21). Its hard to disagree. Like Flannery evocation of 1939, the task is transformative action, and I can see no other approach that will get us there. Perhaps a starting point is, like Anderson, to understand the structural obstacles, to analyse the real drivers of the dissonace between science and climate politics. If we can paint some stripes on the elephants so that their form can be identified, perhaps we will prevent them from stampeding us. Sources:
(1) Stephen Leahey, Four Degrees of Devastation, IPS, 9 October 2009, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48791 (2) Ross Garnaut, Will climate bring an end to the Platinum Age?, The inaugural S.T. Lee Lecture on Asia & The Pacific, ANU, 29 November 2007 (3) Ross Garnaut, Garnaut Climate Change Review, Cambridge, 2008, chapter 24

(4) Nicholas Stern, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, UK Government, 2006 (5) Climate expert Stern underestimated problem, The Age, 17 April 2008 (6) Johan Rockstrom, Will Steffen et al., A safe operating space for humanity, Nature 461:472-59; David Spratt, NASA climate chief: Labors targets a recipe for disaster, Crikey, 27 January 2011 (7) James Hansen and Makiko Sato, Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change (draft, January 2011), http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/ mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf (8) Richard Betts, Mathew Collins et al., When could global warming reach 4C, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369:6784; New, Liverman et al, Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369:619; http://climateinteractive.org/scoreboard; http://www. climateactiontracker.org (9) Philip Dorling and Richard Baker, Climate change warning over south-east Asia, The Age, 16 December 2010 (10) Vince Gaia, How to survive the coming century, New Scientist, 25 February 2009; James Lovelock and Lee Kump, Failure of climate regulation in a geophysiological model, Nature 369:73234. (11) Jenny Fyall, Warming will wipe out billions, The Scotsman, 29 November 2009; http://climatecongress.ku.dk/ speakers/schellnhuber-plenaryspeaker-12march2009.pdf (12) James Hansen, Scientific reticence and sea level rise. Environ. Res. Lett. 2(024002): doi:10.1088/17489326/2/2/024002; Rohling, Grant et al., Antarctic temperature and global sea level closely coupled over the past five glacial cycles, Nature Geoscience, 21 June 2009; James Hansen and Makiko Sato, Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change (draft, January 2011), http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_ MilankovicPaper.pdf (13) James Hansen, Tipping point: Perspective of a climatologist in The State of the Wild 2008: A Global Portrait of Wildlife, Wildlands, and Oceans, E. Fearn and K.H. Redford (eds), Wildlife Conservation Society/Island Press. (14) Ross Garnaut, Will climate bring an end to the Platinum Age?, The inaugural S.T. Lee Lecture on Asia & The Pacific, ANU, 29 November 2007; Ross Garnaut, Measuring the Immeasurable:The Costs and Benefits of Climate Change Mitigation, Sixth HW Arndt Memorial Lecture, ANU, 5 June 2008 (15) Chris Kenrick, NASA scientist cites globalwarming emergency, Palo Alto Online, 22 November 2008, http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story. php?id=10155 (16) Tim Flannery interview, ABC TV Lateline, 2 February 2007 (17) Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 366:3863-3882 (18) Ross Garnaut, Will climate bring an end to the Platinum Age?, The inaugural S.T. Lee Lecture on Asia & The Pacific, ANU, 29 November 2007 (19) Ross Garnaut, Growth, cycles, climate and structural cgange: Two hard decades ahead:, address to ATSE Australia 2030 conference, 11 November 2010 (20) Ken Ward, Its time to accept dire climate realities, Grist, 18 April 2007 (21) Ian Dunlop, Global warming is a global emergency, Crikey, 25 February 2009

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