Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2012

The Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2nd Edition, released today, reveals that climate change has already held back global development and inaction is a leading global cause of death. Harm is most acute for poor and vulnerable groups but no country is spared either the costs of inaction or the benefits of an alternative path.

Key findings include estimates that carbon-intensive economies and associated climate change are responsible for five million deaths a year, 90 per cent of them related to air pollution, according to an Agence France-Presse report.

“Failure to act on climate change already costs the world economy 1.6 per cent of global GDP amounting to $US1.2 trillion ($A1.16 trillion) in forgone prosperity a year,” said the report, produced by the DARA research centre and released at the Asia Society in New York.

In addition, “rapidly escalating temperatures and carbon-related pollution will double costs to 3.2 per cent of world GDP by 2030.”

According to the report, “unprecedented harm” is being inflicted on humanity.

However, tackling climate change’s causes would bring “significant economic benefits for world, major economies and poor nations alike,” the report said.

The report was published by DARA, and compiled by the World Vulnerability Forum. 45 Mb download of the entire report is here and the page where parts of the report can be downloaded is here - data can be downloaded as well.

It contains complex information and graphics, so is not easy to decipher. Hopefully, I’ll have time to digest the main points and summarise them here. Hat-tip Rob Gell.

Wicked, epic fail problem

Two strategies used in problem solving are reframing and rebadging. A problem can often be reframed or looked at in a different way. Any parent who uses reverse psychology to turn a chore into a game knows that one – Tom Sawyer getting his friends to whitewash the fence for fun is a classic example.

Expert and operating languages around a problem-solution sequence has one or more specific grammars. These terms become the labels for a particular narrative that contains a problem, a process and an outcome. So when Paul Harris, Deputy Director of the HC Coombs Policy Forum at the ANU has a go at wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973) for being, well, wicked – is he rebadging, reframing or is a he just erecting a straw man and flaying it to bits in an attempt to change a prevailing narrative?

Harris’ complaint is about wicked problems. They are everywhere and their number is constantly growing:

Food Security and Climate Change

An excellent briefing from Paul Rogers of the Oxford Research Group on food security and climate change is updating the current global  situation with respect to recent climate events (Hat tip to Jamie Doughney). I’ll reproduce it below after making a few comments.

Most of the briefing concentrates on the conditions of the 1974 food crisis to add a historical perspective. Globally, the US and North America is in the second year of drought, looking at greatly reduced maize production and other other crops. The southwest Indian monsoon is somewhat late and currently at 17% below the 50-year average after a poor year last year. The Horn of Africa is in a delicate recovery stage after last year’s disaster, and efforts to build resilience in the region are ongoing. A recent report from scientists at the UK’s Met Office and the USA’s National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that the number of below average rainy seasons in East Africa could have been attributable to warming in the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans.

Rogers states that economic growth has been patchy, so that the proportion of people under food stress has not changed greatly since the 1970s. This time around though, he nominates climate change as making a significant contribution to that stress. I agree. One part of that is the asymmetric impact of warming on land affecting drier regions. This is pretty well known. The other is that he suggests climate change is accelerating:

The loss of Arctic sea in recent summers has exceeded forecasts using climate modelling and some recent events have been startling in their intensity, including the extent of the thawing of surface layers of the Greenland ice cap during the early part of July.

This is because climate change is strongly non-linear, and there is increasing evidence that the world, or at least much of the  northern hemisphere, is in a warming episode similar to that experienced in 1997-98. The idea that extremes should change gradually on a smoothly changing mean climate is seriously wrong, and if the world continues to adapt based on that assumption, millions of people will continue to be at risk through insufficient adaptation efforts.

I’m champing at the bit to get back to this research because I use different methods to those of mainstream climate science (but also have a truckload of other work to do). However, both lines of research are pointing to a strong climate change signal in recent extreme events, thereby increasing scientific confidence in its conclusions.

Rogers’ briefing is reproduced below.

Feedback from Evans – there is no feedback

After me getting an op-ed in The Age representing real climate science and policy, it’s time for some asshattery, c/- both the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. The Fairfax press has decided to redress the balance of knowledge with some agnotogeny* from Dr David Evans. From his tagline:

Dr David M. W. Evans is a mathematician and engineer who consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005. He says he changed from being a warmist to a sceptic after ”evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself from 1998 to 2006”.

Oh purleeze.

Provoking comment and framing risk

A couple of my recent forays into the media have provoked comment below the articles themselves and in emails sent querying particular points. They are worth unpacking because they reflect on the different between the straight communication of science and framing risk.

One was in reference to a recent op-ed in The Age. In it, I said:

If people accept the 0.0038 and 0.02 degree benefits as valid then they also accept the science behind a 5.3 degrees warming for business as usual (As in the emission scenario created by Treasury for the 2008 Garnaut Review). Who wants to live in a world warming by 5 degrees or more? Major food crops could not be grown in many parts of the world, projected sea level rise would be tens of metres, most of the shelled species in the ocean would not survive, ecosystems would be disrupted as the pace of change outstripped their ability to adapt and millions to billions of people would lose environmental security leading to mass migrations never before seen.

That prompted an email from an earth scientist wanting to know what peer-reviewed reference I was using for the projected tens of metres of sea level rise. I sent back this now famous diagram and a note saying that I wasn’t putting it on a timetable. He then replied suggesting that people could be misled into thinking that the date was 2100 (because that was tied to the two temperature measures) and that I was being alarmist. Because it would take thousands of years to be realised.

Where are the economists?

For those who didn’t catch it, during the week an op-ed of mine was Climate Policy will Stay a Mystery until Silent Specialists Join the Debate was published in The Age. It was based on an earlier post where I detailed the benefits of Australia’s climate policy and the tricks used by opponents to make it look more ineffective than it is likely to be. In the op-ed I ask where are the barefoot economists who will challenge untrue statements about climate and the economy? Text reproduced below (with small edits for clarity).

Benefits of Oz climate policy on The Conversation

Little by little: the benefits of Australian climate policy

By Roger Jones, Victoria University

A catchment threatened by salinity can’t be repaired by one or two landholders. Revegetation designed to lower watertables has its greatest ecological benefit where the plants are, but its net impact on salinity is small and spread over a much larger area. To achieve catchment-wide benefits, many good neighbours need to pay a small amount towards revegetation, with everyone contributing according to their capacity. Landcare – an idea invented in Australia and exported overseas – works exactly on that basis. It is supported by all major political parties, and many Landcare programs are funded by the taxpayer.

For climate, any action to permanently reduce greenhouse gas emissions in one region spreads the benefits across the globe. A global effort requires many good neighbours amongst countries who may not know each other well or trust each other very much.

Spooner’s war on climate policy

John Spooner, cartoonist for The Age has fired his latest salvo in his war on climate policy in yesterday’s (7-7-2012) paper. It mentions me so I feel obliged to provide a response. J’accuse Spooner of being a propagandist.

Yep, that’s me down by the *. Quoted as measuring Australia’s policy impact as being 0.0038°C in 2100. Which would happen if Australia was to reduce its emissions by 5% from 2000 by 2020 and maintain that until 2100. But is this cartoon an accurate and amusing reflection of the conversation Gillard would have with her imaginary friend? Well yes, until the fourth panel. Then it falls away — and that’s worth a bit of scrutiny. And he gets IPCC wrong. What is the IPPC?

LaRaspberry in Oz

Got a call from Rob Gell because he’s co-host in the conversation hour on the Jon Faine morning show on ABC774 Melbourne radio, today July 6 at 11 am EAST. The conversation hour usually has two guests – the guest in question? Donna Laframboise, denialista and author of  the book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert. It is the real story behind the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Apparently the selection of a few lead authors who are not hoary old farts who have gone emeritus, disqualifies the IPCC from saying anything useful.

Preferred IPCC author by those who deny the IPCC is of any use – no young scientists here, thankyou!

Nope – I can’t change your mind on climate

So after last night’s ABC program I Can Change Your Mind on … Climate live blogged here, the answer is a resounding “No, You Can’t”. Minchin in an op-ed in The Age/SMH:

I’m sure I did not change her mind, but I hope she saw that not all sceptics are mad, bad and dangerous; that there remains a lively scientific debate about the drivers of climate change; and that scaremongering about global warming is backfiring on the warmists.

He goes on to say that of Lomborg’s cornucopian solution:

Lomborg instead advocates significant global investment in green energy research and development in order to make green energy so cheap that everyone will want it.

Now, that I can support. If there is to be any common ground between sceptics and warmists, this surely must be it. Let’s work to make green energy a realistic, affordable alternative, instead of stupidly trying to make conventional energy so incredibly expensive that we will stop using it.