Now, climate scientist, Peter H Gleick of the Pacific Institute has provided a statement posted at Huffington Post, admitting to being the source of the documents, of obtaining all but one by deception:

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.

Gleick has apologised, saying:

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

As reported by Teh Grauniad, this is likely to turn the climate wars up a notch. Amongst the funding details were what are claimed to be ex gratia payments of US$1,667 per month to Australia and New Zealand’s own Bob Carter. Actually the payments are for the production of the NIPCC (not the IPCC) report detailing the non-science of climate change. The budget over three years is US$1,593,000. This is an effort to develop a “scientifically credible” alternative to the IPCC reports. Fat chance. Carter’s efforts in using statistics to try and prove climate change is not happening would fail a first year climatology exam.

Update: Crikey’s Amber Jamieson is Heartland leaker a hero or villain? A good summary of different views and some of the fallout.

by Professor Roger Jones, Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES) at Victoria University and FAQ Research writer. Cross-posted at Crikey.

There are conflicting interests around land use, there is uncertainty about the factual basis of the debate, there are apprehensions that governments will roll over in the face of a $40 billion industry. And the debate can often become very clouded by claim, counter-claim, framing and spin.

For some time, a group of bloggers and analysts have been working on a model of analytical and interactive journalism which will hold such a debate accountable to fact. Led by Mark Bahnisch of Larvatus Prodeo, other LP bloggers Brian, Kim and Robert Merkel have partnered with some leading researchers and bloggers, among them John Quiggin and moi, FAQ Research has been launched.

First cab off the rank is a major media project being launched to coincide with the Queensland election campaign, in which Coal Seam Gas and its impacts is a very live issue.

Our mission is to facilitate a better informed and more interactive public debate around key issues in Australia, holding the PR, political and media spin to account, disseminating fact and research on which citizens can make informed value judgments, and involving as broad a field of folks as possible in the conversation.

In collaboration with Crikey, a website, Coal Seam Gas: Behind the Seams, was launched yesterday (Monday February 20th).

A number of articles by experts, key stakeholders and citizen journalists. More content, which will be released progressively, will be enhanced by a daily blog digesting the news about CSG and testing it for truth and reliability.

Mark Bahnisch and Pandora Karavan are on the road in rural Queensland this week interviewing locals, politicians and industry figures to get both the technical and human side of this important issue.

The project has also been crowd-funded. We are not taking donations from any groups with a partisan view on CSG but are seeking funds from those who are interested in accountable journalism. Our fundraising campaign page is here.

If you are interested in contributing, please contact us via email.

Please also follow us on Twitter and facebook, and share the news about CSG: Behind the Seams with your friends and contacts. You can sign up for an email newsletter by using the form on the right hand sidebar of the FAQ Research front page.

They tried to revivify a number of zombies.

• Objecting to the statement that  ”The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring” from the American Physical Society’s climate policy statement.  Apparently, nothing in science is incontrovertible, not even data trending in one direction. The APS added a commentary “However, the word “incontrovertible” in the first sentence of the second paragraph of the 2007 APS statement is rarely used in science because by its very nature science questions prevailing ideas. The observational data indicate a global surface warming of 0.74 °C (+/- 0.18 °C) since the late 19th century.” Incontrovertible means there is no evidence to the contrary.
• The lack of warming over the past decade zombie.
• The CO2 is not a pollutant zombie.
• The de Freitas / Climate Research affair zombie, where a paper by Soon and Baliunas that de Freitas edited  claimed that the recent warming was not unusual in the context of the past 1,000 years which they called a politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion. Unfortunately the paper was not factually correct and should not have been published. The Editor in Chief and three associate editors resigned, leading the publishers to revamp the journal, de Freitas losing his editorial position in the process.
• The climate change – Lysenkoism zombie.
• Climate science is at the trough zombie (follow the money).

They also claimed:

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls.

Andrew Revkin of New York Times blog Dot Earth posted a response by Nordhaus:

The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.

There were many online reactions including Dot Earth, Skeptical Science and Think Progress. The Australian, not to be outdone, published a news item on the WSJ letter on Monday.

SCIENTISTS from around the world, including the former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre, are calling for calm on global warming, saying alarmist rhetoric is not backed by evidence and is being used to increase taxes.

A rebuttal on the science was published yesterday by the WSJ, signed by 39 scientists from around the world, including moi. This has been republished in a number of other papers who reproduced the original op-ed. The Australian has just published the letter also.

The original letter led Andrew Revkin to wonder whether there weren’t some legitimate points obscured by the misleading assertions it made over Nordhaus’ work and sought comment from a number of economists including Martin Weitzman, Robert Mendelson and Gary Yohe. That post is worth a read.

Gary Yohe’s main point on hedging:

Many of the temperature targets that negotiators contemplate would be impossible if no action were taken to limit emissions of heat trapping gasses before 2035. Not just economically impossible, but technologically impossible given resource constraints that have only become more binding over the past few years.

In short, doing nothing closes policy options that could turn out to have been the right choice – in a time when our grandchildren will wonder what it was that we were thinking about.

Many Australians did not receive fair, accurate and impartial reporting in the public interest in relation to the carbon policy in 2011.

An estimated 25% of Australians read one of the ten capital city newspapers (omitting the Canberra Times). Between February and July last year, these ten papers printed almost 4,000 articles on climate change policy, a whopping 28% in The Australian alone. Most were on the Gillard Government’s carbon price policy. Of the total, 43% were negative, 41% neutral and 15% positive. News Limited  publications comprised 65% of the total. For the News reader, the respective numbers were 50%, 41% and 10%. That’s right, less than 10% of the 2,770 articles on climate policy in the major News Limited papers during this period were positive towards climate policy.

Total articles on climate change policy Feb-Jul 2011

Ratio of negative to positive articles in 10 major Australian newspapers Feb-Jul 2011

In December, the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ) released its report A Sceptical Climate: Media coverage of climate change in Australia, Part 1- Climate Change Policy. The study provided a snapshot of how climate change policy was covered over a six-month period from February to July 2011. The dominant issue during this period was the introduction of the Gillard Labor government carbon emissions pricing scheme.

The articles were divided into news, editorials, features and comment. Most comment was in-house and dominated by a few commentators. The top ten commentators were negative or neutral commentators, although the Fairfax media featured a number of consistently positive commentators outside the top ten. The report noted that being positive or negative did not preclude investigative reporting. However, Terry McCrann, Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Miranda Devine, Piers Akerman and Christopher Pearson accounted for 21% of the commentary. They are not noted for their investigative reporting skills. All present disproven “scientific” allegations as fact and are overwhelmingly negative to almost all forms of carbon policy.

Four percent of the articles were editorials. They were slightly more positive than the sample average but displayed the same tendencies as total articles. The total was roughly one half negative, one third neutral and one quarter positive. The News Limited editorials were two-thirds negative, one-third neutral with a few positive; the Fairfax broadsheets were the other way around. The weight of ownership skewed the total sample towards the negative.

Framing and sources were also both investigated. The carbon price policy was framed mainly as a business issue. Economy, jobs and investment were 43%, prices 30% and No integrity (Gillard)/No point frames totalled 25%. The climate policy benefits and risk management aspects were not named in the framing section at all.  11% of all stories had no sources and 30% one. When the first three sources in all stories were added up: 28% were Labor, 18% Liberal and  23% business. Total civil society sources were 17%, emphasising the strong political, rather than policy, framing of the content. According to the report, when covering international climate policy, the only societies that had a lower level of civil society sources in such articles than Australia were Pakistan and Israel.

Business sources were also used highly selectively. Fossil fuel sources comprised 28% of all business sources, 8% of the total, although one might expect that given their exposure to the issue. Of the 826 business sources used, 79% were negative 4% neutral and 17% positive.  The Fairfax/News split here was less pronounced. Some business sources were heavily utilised—Bluescope Steel 71 times—while other business interests favouring the policy complained that they were being sidelined. The Businesses for a Clean Economy are hardly the driving power for the economy, but a look at their website demonstrates they could show the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance a thing or two about transparency.

This is Part 1 of a two-part report where the second part will look at the representation of climate science in the media. I await it with interest:

Yes, this report has established that the reporting of climate change in sections of the Australian media has been far from impartial, fair or balanced. Is it in the public interest for a media organisation that dominates the market to ‘campaign’ as The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun have done, on an issue which a huge majority of the world’s scientists have found threatens the lives of millions? In what circumstances does a lack of diversity and balance, represent a threat to democracy?

Our research has also found evidence of strong reporting, both in these ten publications, the ABC and the fledgling independent media. At the same time however, News Ltd amplifies the power of some of its most biased reporting through blogs, video, links with talk back radio and broadcast media.

Our second report which deals with the reporting of climate science will provide more evidence that while the carbon policy was the focus of intense attention, climate science reporting slipped right down the news agenda. Meanwhile Australian readers received their usual dose of climate scepticism.

Evidence in this report suggests that many Australians did not receive fair, accurate and impartial reporting in the public interest in relation to the carbon policy in 2011. This suggests that rather an open and competitive market that can be trusted to deliver quality media, we may have a case of market failure.

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system.

In a 10,000 word essay, she covers the last Heartlands conference, recent American polling on climate change, the rejection of climate science by the mainstream Republican Party and its supporters, the Republican presidential primaries, the lack of a solid narrative in progressive politics to articulate a vision to transform to an equitable, low carbon economy, the rush to invest in oil shale, coal seam gas and coal developments, and the recent emergence of occupy X as a broad-based source of discontent with the status quo.

The science at the Heartlands Conference, although being announced as the headline act, was really the sideshow. According to Klein, the main theme was the threat to markets, freedom and the economy that belief in climate change poses. Of the “science” itself

…the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next.

And this is the pattern set by the denial movement everywhere it operates. These arguments are repeated  the media outlets that are denialism’s apparatus. At no point has a credible alternative theory been provided. But none is needed, because the science isn’t the point.

Often the view coming from America is that USA=World. Klein’s point that a small demographic dominated by older, white males has placed climate change front and centre of the culture wars is also relevant to Australia:

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion.

With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal and dysfunctional economic status quo. One of the most interesting findings of the studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes.

A much-discussed paper on this topic by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes” (pdf link)) found that confident conservative white men, as a group, were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” than the rest of the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this discrepancy: “Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.”

Much of the rhetoric is about freedom, democracy – which is interpreted as the right to exercise personal choice free of state control (i.e., freedom) – and the superior efficiency of free markets over governments. This ideology places the individual at the pinnacle of civilization and rejects any form of governance that mediates relationships between individuals beyond those prescribed by the free market.

There are now 7 billion people on the planet and several billion more due to be born in the next few decades. How many of those alive now,  representing themselves and their children, would see eye to eye  with the free-market fighters? Is their democracy and freedom being represented?  Given that the ideologically-driven free-marketeers are disproportionately in the English speaking west and a few European countries, the thought that this is in any way a globally representative view, beggars belief:

As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and busy themselves getting unpoor. When I asked (Patrick) Michaels (of the Cato Institute) whether rich countries have a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed that there is no reason to give money to countries “because, for some reason, their political system is incapable of adapting.” The real solution, he claimed, was more free trade.

This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mindset is a matter of great urgency, because climate change will test our moral character like little before.

And that too, uncovers a key point. At its core, climate change is not a scientific issue, but a moral one. It is a market failure large enough to transform Earth and define its geological future. The change may not be as large as the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary that finished off the dinosaurs, or the Permian extinctions that were even larger but business as usual is certainly on a scale of the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum 56 million years ago. Humanity places itself at risk and ushers in a new geological era while it’s at it.

So, is it possible for the climate change denialists  sit comfortably in their gated communities listening to the sound of 6+ billion people adapting to more than 4°C? Or will they need the armies they are so busy creating deficits to maintain, while campaigning to cut taxes and government services to keep order?

Klein lists six reforms she thinks are needed:

1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere
2. Remembering How to Plan
3. Reining in Corporations
4. Relocalizing Production
5. Ending the Cult of Shopping
6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy

While others’ shopping lists may be somewhat different, civil society is re-examining these issues. On the one hand there is Occupy X who are slowly defining their agenda. On the other hand, first the World Bank and now the International Monetary Fund have turned away from their ruinous policies of austerity measures for debt-ridden developing countries and are looking at the sustainable investment of returns for developing natural assets. Norway’s resource rent and investment plan is seen as a model – one that Australia tried to emulate with the mining tax only to stir up a political hornets nest. The mining industry has been successful in defending the status quo by linking continued growth in resource extraction with economic growth, job and the creature comforts of modern society. As Dr Nikki Wlliams recently appointed to the National Minerals Council put it in a presentation for the NSW Coal Industry “Balancing growth with social responsibility”:

that was little better than a call for the status quo. According to the presentation, sound public policy is the victim of desperate politics. In a presentation that refers to bling but not climate, I can’t see the commitment to social responsibility, only the claim.

According to the report “Cool Dudes”, about 10% of Americans can be considered intractable climate deniers. In Australia, the number is 5.8% (Reser et al.). The remainder of those unconvinced on the science are not rusted on but have likely been persuaded by their world view and the strength of the political narrative that has been offered. And is dominant in Australia’s media at least.

This suggests that there is space for a more inclusive narrative that covers a broader political spectrum. Klein again:

The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, before everything was broken into single “issues” to be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded NGOs. Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.” By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, breathing new life and urgency into longstanding fights against everything from free trade to financial speculation to industrial agriculture to third-world debt, while elegantly weaving all these struggles into a coherent narrative about how to protect life on earth.

But that isn’t happening, at least not so far. It is a painful irony that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a left-wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” (and, of course, those mills were the beginning of climate change). When demonstrators are cursing out the corruption of their governments and corporate elites in Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Madison and New York, climate change is often little more than a footnote, when it should be the coup de grâce.

Half of the problem is that progressives—their hands full with soaring unemployment and multiple wars—tend to assume that the big green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of those big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for the destruction of the rest of the economy). The result is that those taking on the failures of capitalism and those fighting for climate action remain two solitudes, with the small but valiant climate justice movement—drawing the connections between racism, inequality and environmental vulnerability—stringing up a few swaying bridges between them.

The right, meanwhile, has had a free hand to exploit the global economic crisis to cast climate action as a recipe for economic Armageddon, a surefire way to spike household costs and to block new, much-needed jobs drilling for oil and laying new pipelines. With virtually no loud voices offering a competing vision of how a new economic paradigm could provide a way out of both the economic and ecological crises, this fearmongering has had a ready audience.

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, like Yale’s Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract global warming), as well as playing up concerns about national security.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t work. For years, big green groups have framed climate action as a way to assert “energy security,” while “free-market solutions” are virtually the only ones on the table in the United States. Meanwhile, denialism has soared. The more troubling problem with this approach, however, is that rather than challenging the warped values motivating denialism, it reinforces them. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of short-term hubristic thinking that got us into this mess.

I’ve reproduced large chunks of Klein’s essay, so as not to distort her message in order to make my own points. It is clearly focussed on seeing the revival coming from the green left. But when I look at who is not incorporated in the vision of the far right, in its rejection of the scientific body of knowledge, and its anti-social expression of individualism, who is left (pun intended)? Pretty much everyone who considers the science describes serious risks and sees acting on climate change as a moral issue. In Australia this includes all progressives, a significant part of the Labor Party and labour movement, the compassionate religious and traditional liberals who value knowledge.

She is spot on about the narrative of appeasement but that is more a point on discourse than substance. The political discourse of appeasement just gets attacked and wedged by the media that parrots the far right agenda. It doesn’t stand for anything in itself, as Guy Rundle recently said about the Labor Party in Australia. In trying to balance the concerns of the working class on price and jobs and the social progressives on social and environmental sustainability the core message is absent. In the US, Obama is being wedged by the same issues, a hostile house and a hostile media. In Canada, the Harper government is promoting the small government agenda, gutting Environment Canada and handing their core concerns to the provinces, whose interests are, well, provincial. The Kiwis are diluting their policies also, though they do have a trading scheme.

Stripped of its political rhetoric, many of the claims made against taking strong action on climate completely lack logic. If humanity can readily adapt to a 3°C, 4°C or more temperature increase as claimed, why then are some industries completely unable to adapt to a low carbon economy? Analysis suggests the latter agenda is cheaper and more equitable. There are a whole range of objections to the unregulated free trade agenda that come out of conventional economics.  Most forms of economic development actually require good governance. In his book The Plundered Planet, Paul Collier shows us that while in some sectors cowboys thrive (and those are by far the largest backers of the Heartland Agenda), most other sectors—those providing the bulk of goods and services—require good governance. They require a civil society with a respect for knowledge. So doers technology transfer and the utilization of international funds such as the Adaptation Fund being set up under the UN climate change convention. This directly links the needs of adaptation in the developing world with sustainable development.

Climate change and the future of global “development” is a wicked problem—the key to wicked problems is not to work on the problem but to work on the solution. Solution solving, if you will. I’m not too keen on the narrowing of the agenda that Klein produces above—by focussing on “the problem” it limits the options for management. It may be the powerful that dominate this agenda, but they are also few. I’m involved in work that critiques the legally binding pathway and target “one-shot” approach to climate policy most preferred by the green left in favour of a more flexible learning by doing approach. Markets can work when properly regulated, though how to do so is not always clear. There are good arguments for managing some externalities through markets and others through regulation involving taxes and levies. The key is not to make solutions more palatable to conservative values (and some values within the conservation movement are themselves very conservative)  but is to concentrate on the values that civil society requires in order to function and use that to inform possible solutions. Scenarios that explore those possibilities are a great way to do that.

And on civil society, Klein has the last word:

In other words, culture is rapidly shifting. And this is what truly sets the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) moment apart. The Occupiers—holding signs that said Greed Is Gross and I Care About You—decided early on not to confine their protests to narrow policy demands. Instead, they took aim at the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis, while embodying—in highly visible ways—radically different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.

This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not a distraction from the “real” struggles. In the rocky future we have already made inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people, and a capacity for deep compassion, will be the only things standing between humanity and barbarism. Climate change, by putting us on a firm deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound social and ecological transformation.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time. The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

One of the most vocal critics of the domestic policy was Guy Pearse, author of Quarry Vision and High and Dry, an essay and book about the relationship between Australia’s mining industry, politics, and climate policy. I was interested in how much CO2 Australia was likely to export, but had come up high and dry. So I asked Guy what the numbers were. Coincidently he was putting together estimates for current and future projects for a talk at the Woodford Folk Festival, so I offered to have a look at the temperature and CO2 budget effects. Guy’s estimate is that Australia will export about 75 Gigatonnes CO2 conservatively between now and 2050.  That’s 10% of the total budget estimated by the German agency WBGU (pdf) that can be emitted from 2008 to give a 2 in 3 chance of avoiding 2°C.

Guy says:

I estimate that Australian coal exports will generate around 75Gt CO2 between now and 2050 – perhaps another 5Gt will come from domestic coal use, and 8-10 Gt from LNG if the expansion of coal seam gas proceeds. In rough terms, between now and 2050, Australian fossil fuel could account for about 1/8th of the remaining carbon budget for 2 degrees C. This highlights the global significance of the coal boom now unfolding in Australia. I have also tried to break the Australian coal rush down to explain the CO2 emissions company by company in terms more readily understandable for the general public. So, for example:

• The proposed GVK/Hancock mines in the Galilee Basin are equivalent to a 6% increase in the global car fleet (another 63 million cars);
• the Waratah mines (excluding Carmichael East — yet to be quantified) are like increasing international aviation by 1/3rd;
• the new Xstrata mines are like doubling Australia’s coal fired power stations;
• the Adani mine (just one project) is like doubling Queensland’s emissions;
• the proposed Mejin mine is like doubling the emissions of 60 small countries;
• the new Peabody mines in Australia almost equate to adding the CO2 emissions of Pakistan,
• the Bandanna mines are like doubling Australia’s agricultural emissions.

Even the emissions from smaller players have a staggering impact – e.g.,

• the annual emissions from Aston/Whitehaven’s new mines, or of QCoal’s mines will each be greater than all the CO2 saved by all the hybrid cars ever sold world-wide;
• The new mines of the relatively small Jellinbah Coal add nearly 100 times as much CO2 as is saved by all he household solar panel installations in Australia.

Tallied up, the new/expanded coal mines in Australia add about 1.75Gt of CO2 annually – about 11 times what the Australian government estimates will be saved by the carbon tax legislation that recently passed Parliament. By 2020 or soon thereafter, Australia is exporting nearly twice as much CO2 as is Saudi Arabia today. If these numbers are not already an underestimate, as I believe they probably are, they will soon be. New mines are being announced ever month or two—quickly rendering CO2 calculations redundant. Nonetheless, I thought you might find this information useful. Needless to say, it’s hard to see how this sort of expansion in coal production is consistent with any effective global climate change response.

Go see his whole presentation here. I had a look at how it affected the chances of reaching the 2°C climate policy target, estimating it changed the chances of avoiding (or exceeding it) by a net 4%. I also had a look at the contribution to global temperatures. Using an emission scenario designed to avoid 2°C peak temperature during 2100, it increased the peak by 0.02°C and delayed it by 5 years, and increased temperature in 2100 by about 0.03°C. That doesn’t sound like much but given that temperature has already risen by about 0.8°C, it adds up.

The 75 Gt CO2 is more than double my estimate to 2050 of 32.4 Gt CO2 based on the Treasury-MMRF baseline estimate to 2030.  If we followed current policy of -5% to 2020 and -80% by 2050 total Australian emissions would be 15.1 Gt CO2, so by 2050 all going well, we would export 5 times more CO2 than we would save at home.

This clearly demonstrates that if Australia wants to avoid exceeding 2°C, and enjoy the benefits of avoided damages, like having at least part of the Great Barrier Reef in a halfway decent state, both domestic and international policies are needed. Which is why the government’s stance at the recent Durbin UNFCCC CoP meeting, not pushing for an international agreement, made very little sense. Any coal Australia exports needs to be within an international policy context that is consistent with domestic policy.

Furthermore, the non-resource sectors of the Australian economy are quite weak. Returns from mining are also weak and will continue to be for some years as the investment in new mines is depreciated. Mining also does not contribute to employment in any significant way. When the resource boom passes, and there is some evidence it has peaked (but not coal perhaps), it will be more on a par with the rest of the economy. It makes more sense to invest in the transformation to a low carbon economy as soon as possible, rather than balancing the domestic budget deficit – one of the lowest in the world. Such investment will have a long-term upside. There may be some coal export within that mix, but the current open slather makes no sense, economically or environmentally. The coal industry is not as economically important to the national economy as it thinks it is. Unless it pays its way through a resource rent tax which is re-invested in sustainable development, following the Norwegian model. We don’t need an industry that makes a few people rich but in the long run harms everyone else .

Updated Jan 7, 13:22

Background

Attributing extreme climate events to climate change is controversial. Scientists tend to be cautious about doing so to avoid the mistake of attributing cause to an event that may be random. The main tool used to attribute change is a signal-to-noise model of climate indices. Anthropogenic change is assumed as an emerging trend of gradual change. Statistical  significance will only register when that trend emerges from the noise of natural climate variability.

Getting a climate baseline free of external forcing in observed climate is also difficult. This is one reason why climate model baselines run at pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases are commonly used, although this assumes the models adequately reproduce the statistics of climate variability. In general, while doing a pretty good job, models tend to under-represent some aspects of natural climate variability (usually those on longer timescales). However, they also tend to be less sensitive to forced changes than is currently being observed. Despite that, their skill in both aspects is continually being improved.

The real world is influenced by internal variability; a small number of natural forcing mechanisms including changes in solar irradiance and volcanoes, and a number of human-induced forcings that combine with natural processes and include greenhouse gas emissions, ozone, sulphate aerosols, land cover and land use change, ice and snow cover, CFC effects on the stratospheric ozone layer and  chemical processes influencing atmospheric composition.

When that list is written out people tend to point and shout “Look!! The uncertainty monster – a big hairy thing. And climate has always changed anyway. So there.” Except this is one area where earth system science has done an excellent job over the past 50 years. Most models now include most of those forcings and for mean  climate change in a range of variables, a clear signal has emerged.

Climate extremes are tougher to assess than the mean. The least noisy and more frequent extremes are easier to assess. These include cold nights and warm days, sea surface temperatures, sea level extremes and some rainfall indices, like rainfall over a 1% threshold (the wettest 1% of days). The noiser and less frequent extremes like tropical cyclones, severe storms, hail and tornadoes are tougher. So too, are big systems that have a wide range of influences ranging from seasonal to decadal such as monsoonal systems.

These influences are reflected in confidence statements on observed changes from the recently released IPCC SREX report on extreme events and disasters. For example, hot days and cold nights are very likely to have increased and decreased respectively on a global basis since 1950. On continents with good data coverage, these changes are held to be likely. In Asia, changes are given medium confidence and in Africa and South America low to medium confidence given data coverage. When it comes to global trends in tropical cyclones, however, there is low confidence in assessing any change, as is the case for hail and tornadoes.

The projection of future changes also uses the signal-to-noise model. Many different climate models run with several  emission scenarios that include multiple runs with the same scenario (ensembles) will exhibit large variation between model results. The task of projecting extremes becomes very difficult because the signal has to be extracted not just from the noise within one simulation, but also across different simulations. This is the main reason for statements such as:

Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain. For projected changes by the end of the 21st century, either model uncertainty or uncertainties associated with emissions scenarios used becomes dominant, depending on the extreme.

Two methods can improve the situation. One develops an understanding of the physical mechanism causing a change and attributes that mechanism to a change process. The other covers fingerprinting methods that extract signals from complex data, picking out broad patterns of change. Often these can distinguish between patterns of natural variability, such as ENSO and the North Atlantic Oscillation, and patterns of change associated with greenhouse warming. However, the latter method, despite being sophisticated, linearise the results.

If the human-induced component of climate is not linear as I’ve been maintaining, but changes  in a step-wise fashion, extremes may also change rapidly. So what does happen?

Results

Temperature in SE Australia shifted upward in a step-wise fashion in 1997, as did temperature in most regions of the world. Maximum temperature rose by 0.8°C 1997-2010 compared to 1910-1996. Taking daily max temperatures from Laverton RAAF, which is the closest high quality designated rural station near Melbourne, I tallied days above 35°C and above 40°C since 1943, when the station opened. Climate is stationary until at least 1968, there was an underlying anthropogenic warming in max temp since at least 1973, suppressed somewhat by above average rainfall in many years. Higher max temp since 1997 has been partly enhanced by below average rainfall.

When the resulting time series for days >35°C for Laverton are subject to statistical tests for shifts, the change in 1997 is significant using the bivariate test  to the 1% level, and to the 5% level using the Rodionov STARS regime shift test and the z test. The average goes from 8 days before the shift to 12 days after, a 50% increase. The shift in days >40°C goes from 0.8 to 2.6 per year. Roughly one-third of that change is the effect of rainfall reduction (which may be anthropogenic) the other two-thirds is due to direct anthropogenic warming.

Step and trend analysis for Tmax for south-eastern Australia 1910–2010

Days above 35°C and above 40°C for Laverton Victoria 1943-2011

This station was used to produce the linear projections of changes in extremes presented in the recently released The Critical Decade: Climate Change and Health report (and featured in the original Garnaut report). The baseline period was 1974-2003 and average days >35°C averaged 9 per year. The projected increase for 2030 was 12 days per year, exactly what we have experienced in the period 1997-2011.  The effect of the oceans on atmospheric warming first suppresses warming because basically most of the energy is going into the ocean, then brings it all on at once in a series of step changes occurring every few decades. This produces significant effects on extreme temperatures.

In recent years these extreme temperatures have led to health effects due to heat stress, damaged crops in warmer areas, disrupted transport (especially trains), increased peak power demand, led to rolling blackouts and contributed to a significantly higher fire risk. The current regional average is likely to persist for a while before another shift any time between now and 2030. If we get a better idea of the exact mechanism that makes the ocean “work”, so that the atmosphere warms rapidly relative to the ocean, these events may become predictable or at least identifiable shortly after the event. Otherwise about 15 years of statistics is needed to positively identify any shift in conditions.

This can be contrasted with Rahmstorf’s recent summary at RealClimate on changing extremes that describes the non-linear effects on variability plus climate change. This can be seen in temperature records from Texas as well as Moscow, where cool conditions existed from 1956-1977, probably due to the North Atlantic Oscillation. Texas warms from 1990 in a step change reminiscent of the one that affected southern Australia in the late 1960s. I’m still working on that data and hope to do a post that looks at last summer’s heat wave. I’ve also had a quick look at the Russian data for 2010, but it’s not in great shape.

Tmax anomaly for 49 climate stations in Texas, not spatially weighted

Tmin anomaly for 49 climate stations in Texas, not spatially weighted

How the climate changes is important information for adaptation. If we are confident that abrupt shifts in extremes are not going to be temporary, then investment in comprehensive adaptation measures is likely to be cost effective. Anticipating a timely response to further abrupt changes in advance also makes sense.

The signal to noise model, which extracts a linearised signal from climate model ensembles is not so useful in this context. More useful questions are “Are shifts more frequent and larger under high emissions scenarios?”  and “If models show step changes in extremes (they do), what are diagnosable signs that we can look for in observations?”

If climate moves through a series of shifts, or jerks, it requires re-think how we analyse and use climate information from both the observations and climate models. On the other hand, if we better understand how the signal changes, the decades of delay in recognising a linear response may no longer apply – at least for some of the more frequent extremes.

And it was a complicated poster, let me say, though there were simple bits in it. When you want to overturn a paradigm, a simple “it ain’t so because it ain’t” doesn’t cut it. The main thesis is that the signal-to-noise model, which assumes a smooth anthropogenic change signal within a background of noisy natural variability, is wrong. Instead the climate follows a deterministic non-periodic pathway, to coin Ed Lorenz of butterfly complexity, where the forcing produced by increasing greenhouse gases does not gradually change climate, but comes in steps. The bulk of the energy is stored in the ocean, with climate showing little warming, only to be released in periodic bursts influenced by the processes associated with climate variability.

This is important, because it suggests that all the work going into calculating probabilities of mean change using climate model ensembles, has limited utility. If the climate shifts in a series of step changes, then this is more important than calculating a probability density for a series of curves for a given date.

So I was standing next to the poster waiting to ambush the unwary, met Jess of LP commenting fame, when along hopped Eli the Bunny. After checking overhead to see that Ethon wouldn’t eat my liver if I ambushed the bunny, I blew his cover. Happily, Eli was intrigued enough by my bravado in challenging the accepted wisdom of how climate is changing, he agreed to do a post when the paper setting the groundwork became available. Which it did, the week before Christmas (another job I got done while at the conference).

He’s called the steps jerks. Which is an eye-catching headline and gets people looking for insults. The jerks are happening because the system is buffered as long as the upper ocean absorbs the energy from climate forcing. Until it has to do some work and the energy can go in two directions: into the atmosphere or into the deep ocean. I don’t have the exact mechanism figured out yet, but am working on it.

You can join the discussion at Rabett Run, comment here, have a look at the poster and the paper, which covers the basic methodology and how it has affected the climate in south-eastern Australia. I’ll add some of the more straightforward stuff from the poster in the next few days.

This blog serves a couple of purposes. One is to get some of my thoughts into written form, another is to practise communicating complex issues simply (Ha – don’t always often succeed on that one!). Yet another is to use the research behind posts to expand my knowledge of particular issues. Many of last year’s posts are too complicated and detailed – often because I’m exploring the edges of what’s known – but in future I’ll try to balance these out with simpler summaries. There will continue to be gaps where I get too busy to post, but hopefully the regularity of posts will increase. I’m interested to hear of issues that readers and lurkers have which they would like expanded upon.

Is 2012 the last year? One of the running topics in the media this year is that it is the year of a b’ak’tun, the end of a Long Count Mayan Calendar. Some writers have linked the b’ak’tun with the apocalypse; the Mayans say that has no basis. But we love a good disaster, don’t we? Wikipedia has along post on the eschatology of 2012, showing that links to end of the world come from a variety of (mainly New Age) sources. Go read – it’s interesting and entertaining. The end is nigh!

In addition to the end of the world, other themes I follow will seek the transformation of the existing world and the path it is on into an imagined future. One that our descendants can look back from and say “They did good”. What might that world look like, how will our current values translate into the future, and how do we get there?

Topics include:

• How the climate changes – hopefully putting the signal-to-noise model of climate change in it’s place. The world ain’t linear.
• Some insights from research behind the IPCC chapter Foundations of Decision-making that I am currently working on (without divulging its contents). It’s a fascinating pot-pourri of different disciplines seeking a solid narrative.
• Bulletins from the climate science-policy interface.
• Exposing misinformation, misdirection and agnotogeny (the generation of ignorance) designed to divert our attention from risks in social-ecological systems.
• Using scenarios to imagine the future. Turning the problem-based scientific scenario into a solution-based creative scenario. Wicked problems – with even wickeder solutions!

I kind of like the symbolism behind the b’ak’tun. The end of a long count, a celebration, the start of a new one. Let’s make this year a good one.