Does piracy cause global warming ...

Excerpt from Sydney Morning Herald:

Cool heads missing in the pressure cooker

by Peter Hartcher

6 April 2007

The first thing that strikes you on reading the latest consensus report from the world's climate scientists about the effect of global warming is that it is like the plot of an Armageddon movie.

"The climate of the 21st century is virtually certain to be warmer with changes in extreme events," says the chapter on the effects on Australia and New Zealand, due to be published tonight in Brussels.

"Heatwaves and fires are virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency (high confidence)", with the parenthetic notation meaning that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attach a likelihood of greater than 90 per cent to this forecast.

"Floods, landslides, droughts and storm surges are very likely to become more frequent and intense, and snow and frost are likely to become less frequent (high confidence)," says the final draft of the document that the panel provided to the institutions that set it up, the world's governments.

"Ongoing water security problems are very likely to increase by 2030 in southern and eastern Australia and parts of NZ that are distant from major rivers (high confidence).

"Ongoing coastal development is very likely to exacerbate risk to lives and property from sea-level rise and storms. Sea level is virtually certain to rise (high confidence)."

So, for example, by 2050 a rise of 20 centimetres in the sea level along the Sydney coast combined with a big, once-in-50-year storm would bring the sea 110 metres further inland at Collaroy and Narrabeen beaches, a permanent loss of coast, the scientists project.

Then there is the damage to major infrastructure from extreme weather by 2030: "Risks include failure of flood plain protection and urban drainage-sewage, increased storm and fire damage, and more heatwaves causing more deaths and more blackouts (high confidence)."

Plus there is the expected damage to forestry and farming, the extinction of hundreds of species, and the destruction of unique environmental assets such as the Kakadu wetlands and the Great Barrier Reef.

And all this from a projected rise in average temperature of between 0.3 degrees and 3.4 degrees in the zone from Australia's coast to 800 kilometres inland, a warming that the scientists predict will happen by 2050 on present trends.

The warming in Australia so far, since 1910, has been between 0.6 and 1.2 degrees, with most of the rise since 1950. The reported rise in the sea level is seven centimetres.

The report, five years in the making, is the state of knowledge of the world's climate scientists. The chapter on Australia and New Zealand bears the names of 22 authors. The panel operates in three working groups.

The report of the first, on the physical science, went public in February. Tonight's is the work of the second, on impacts. The third, to be published next month, is on how to mitigate its effects.

The next thing that strikes you about the report is the high degree of uncertainty to which the authors readily confess. Climate change, the scientists write, "is taken to be due to both natural variability and human activities. The relative proportions are unknown unless otherwise stated".

In Australia's case, "it is very likely that increases in greenhouse gases have significantly contributed to the warming since 1950".

This wording - "very likely" and "significantly contributed" - is a useful reminder that we are still in the realm of hypothesis in trying to assess whether it is human activity that is responsible for global warming.

Scepticism in science, indeed in every realm of human affairs, is a healthy attitude.

The very highest accolade, the Nobel prize, has been awarded for acclaimed breakthroughs that are later discredited, like the 1949 decision to give the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz the prize for inventing the lobotomy as a cure for schizophrenia.

A leading Australian sceptic of man-made climate change is Ian Plimer, a professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide.

The fact that the Earth's atmospheric temperature is rising at the same time as humans emit more greenhouse gases is a correlation, and not a causation, he points out: "The Earth's temperature rose by 0.7 per cent in the 20th century, but there was also an increase in piracy. Does that mean piracy causes global warming?"

If Al Gore calls climate change an inconvenient truth, Plimer asks unfashionable questions.

"There is new work emerging even in the last few weeks that shows we can have a very close correlation between the temperatures of the Earth and supernova and solar radiation. What if global warming has nothing to do with human activity?

"What happens if the astronomers are right, and the world is actually entering a cooling period?"

Plimer thinks the climate scientists are in the grip of groupthink and that other branches of science can lend perspective: "We geologists have seen climate change for 4500 million years. Tell us something new."

He dismissed the recent visit to Australia by Sir Nicholas Stern, an adviser to the British Treasury and author of the Stern report on climate change. Stern proposed that Australia cut its carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, and by 60 per cent by 2050, to avert catastrophic global warming.

Plimer's response: "Stern bases his argument on science, but he hasn't validated it. So from day one, I don't even let him out of the barrier."

What if the hypothesis is wrong? What if, like the Y2K hypothesis, all the experts turn out to be embarrassingly off the mark? What if Stern is wrong? He has proposed that the world spend 1 per cent of annual economic output for the next few decades to move from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. What if this money, about $US400 billion a year, is spent on the basis of a flawed theory?

It was a question Stern was quite happy to answer during his visit to Sydney. "What if I'm wrong?" he posited in an interview with the Herald. "Well, suppose this science is a big hoax, and we believe it and we invest 1 per cent of GDP per annum. What are we going to get?

"We'll get a bunch of new technologies, some of which will turn out to be really super - say the price of solar energy really drops - this is the kind of thing we might get out of it.

"We'd get much less air pollution. You'll get cleaner fuels for developing countries, which will make cooking much safer. Air pollution in huts is the second most important cause of death in developing countries, after water shortages from lack of infrastructure.

"So you get a lot of collateral benefit. And you've spent 1 per cent of GDP for a while till you find out."

Then he turned the proposition around: "What if you take the much, much more likely hypothesis that the vast majority of the world's scientists are right. And you bet the other way.

You say: 'I don't believe all this stuff, I'm going to wait and see.'

"What if that bet's wrong? You end up in a position that's extremely hard to extricate yourself.

The flow of carbon emissions building up into the stock is like a ratcheting effect. You can't turn the clock back. The basic economics of risk point very strongly to action."

The annual sales of the global insurance industry, excluding life insurance, amount to 3.5 per cent of global GDP, according to McKinsey's management consultants.

If the world is prepared to pay the equivalent of 3.5 per cent of its total annual output to guard against the possibility of all sorts of risks that, in any one year for any one client, are quite remote, such as fire and theft, then the prospect of paying a 1 per cent premium to protect against a catastrophic global event seems entirely reasonable.

Australia's political leaders have abandoned scepticism on climate change. Both the Coalition and Labor are now pledged to overcoming climate change.

They are going about it in very different ways.

Kevin Rudd has embraced the targets for big cuts to Australia's carbon emissions, but refuses to say how these targets would operate. Will they be compulsory? How would they be enforced? He won't say. So Labor's policy is feelgood but, without a great deal more detail, it is phoney.

John Howard rejects any targets, any targets whatsoever, for cutting emissions. He offers a few specific initiatives but they are ad hoc, without any overall pattern or plan.

Howard's biggest single environmental initiative to date is his $10 billion plan to revive the Murray-Darling River system, and it is a very good plan. But it seeks to fix a problem of water flow without addressing the climate that produces the water. It addresses a symptom, not a cause.

Rudd accuses Howard of "not getting it". Howard accuses Rudd of seeking to destroy the jobs of Australian coalminers in a rush of green fundamentalism.

The good news is that it is an election year and problems, such as this one, that have been long ignored in Australia are getting a lot of attention. The bad news is that it's an election year, a feverish time when, as the Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, told his department recently: "There is a greater than usual risk of the development of policy proposals that are, frankly, bad."

The overheating of the political climate in this election year is one form of climate change for which there is 100 per cent certainty.

See - Piracy and global warming.