Wooohooo ! AIT wins an Oscar !

Thinkprogress.org has the video of the announcement.  Be sure to check out Gore’s “big announcement” in the clip further down on the same page.

 A red-letter day.

Tune in to Four Corners tonight.

The ABC presents a documentary from its sister organisation the CBC on Four Corners tonight.  Entitled “The Denial Machine”, it explores the concerted efforts by a small group of North American scientists and business interests to muddy the waters about the science of global warming. If you miss it, the CBC generously lets us watch it online. Gotta love public broadcasting.   Just click on the tiny red video symbol on this page.

Ex-journo goes head to head with the PM in his electorate

Frm my home electorate of Bennelong in Sydney’s northwest comes news that respected ABC journalist Maxine McKew is to run against John Howard in this year’s federal election.  Could be interesting given Bennelong’s increasingly marginal status.  See 2004 results.  She’s got a pretty tough task ahead.

 Here’s the story from the ABC on Windows Media Video (broadband).

 

Carbon trading must be well overdue !

News this morning that Australia’s power companies are pleading for a carbon trading scheme.  Clearly an idea whose time has come.  So what’s the problem?  Who exactly, apart from a handful of federal government ministers, is against the idea (or at least dragging the chain)? 

Here’s the story from ABC online.

The great aviation debate

The daily transit argues that air travel offers huge benefits to society and that we should tackle automobiles before touching airlines.

The trouble is that air travel contributes disproportionately to global warming.  A trip from Amsterdam to Phuket for two people by air contributes more to atmospheric CO2 than driving a car for AN ENTIRE YEAR.

Air travel unequivocally needs to be brought within the carbon capping and trading mechanisms.  There is no reason for it to be specially privileged.  To do otherwise is to externalise the cost of flying onto the environment.

I cherish my international travel experieces like most others, but it is absurd to imagine that air travel can continue to grow EXPONENTIALLY into the foreseeable future as is currently the case.

Certainly there are social benefits to travel.  I wonder if there are social costs too.  Perhaps the more accessible a place becomes the more it becomes anywheresville.  Generica.  Easy to get to but not worth visiting.  It’s impossible to visit a place without changing it in some way.  Are we losing global cultural diversity as we all strive to be “cosmopolitan”?  Just a few thoughts.  For my two bobs worth – bring back the romance of train trips and sea-faring !!  Air travel is fun, but not if it costs the Earth.

Mr Howard – the protectionist

The Sydney Morning Herald paraphrases John Howard in an article from 11th February.

 “PM:  carbon market will have to protect industry”

What a topsy-turvy way of looking at things.  Surely the PM’s approach should be – a carbon market will have to protect Australian citizens, citizens of other nations and our global environment.

How succesful would we be at limiting global warming if a carbon market had as a key goal the protection of  industry.  We know too that the inference here is heavy industry – coal mining, aluminium extraction, blue chip industries generally.  It certainly seems an odd thing for an economic liberal to talk about protecting certain industries.  He hasn’t worried too much about textiles, manufacturing, agricultural protection in the past, so why suddenly leap to the salvation of industries which, left unrestrained, will bring us all unstuck?

The transcript of the original interview on the Sunday program is here.

Global warming – doubt and uncertainty remain

…..but not over the reality of global warming.  Rather, whether we are underestimating it’s scale.

This letter in the Age tells us why:

 SENATOR Minchin is right ( The Age, 18/2): there is intense scientific debate about climate change. However, the debate is not about the reality of human-induced climate change; the debate is about whether or not predictions from the Inter- governmental Panel on Climate Change (and similar predictions by Al Gore) underestimate the likely extent of climate change.

The debate is about such things as the strength of climate feedbacks. Feedbacks are when climate impacts add to the causes of climate change and consequently magnify the human influences on climate. Barrie Pittock, formerly of CSIRO, includes several emission feedback mechanisms in a recent summary of ways in which consensus science may be underestimating the degree of climate change. Over the 21st century, the amount of extra carbon dioxide added by such feedbacks may equal all human inputs over the 20th century as warming and drying trigger processes that emit more greenhouse gases.

Currently these concerns fall short of the IPCC’s criterion of “well-established science”. The IPCC consensus process is slow and cautious. Developing well-established science for climate feedbacks is where the real scientific debate over climate change is taking place.

Meanwhile, the US journal Science is about to publish a study showing that recent years have followed the high end of projections made by the IPCC in 2001.
Professor Ian Enting, former head of the greenhouse gas modelling team at CSIRO, University of Melbourne

Taking it to the next level

 

I get the feeling we’re in the middle of a momentous time in the history of human civilisation.  Perhaps one day our generation will tell people about how all of these great changes unfolded.  How we went from burning up the planet to learning to live within its capacities.

When the history is written down, one man will stand out as a global leader who came back out from the shadows and worked tirelessly to wake us up and bring about perhaps a quiet revolution.  That man is Al Gore.

 Al Gore and some partners announced today a series of global concerts under the banner “SOS: live earth” – the SOS standing for save our selves.  Styled on the “live8” concerts, they announced the cities and some 25 confirmed artists from the music world who will participate.

Partnerships have been formed with MSN, NBC/Universal, BBC and other media companies around the world.

This could be big.  Very big.                     Take a look at the official site and the MSN site.

It’s War !!

The language ramps up a notch in the global warming discussion.

Environmental advocate and business consultant Murray Hogarth outlines the arguments for military-style framing of what he calls a “fast-emerging crisis for human civilisation.”

I particularly like this extract from towards the end of the article:

Finally, in a war it’s also vital to know your enemy. That’s the trickiest part of all on the climate front. Ultimately the enemy is the face each of us sees in the bathroom mirror every morning, and our own energy-intensive, high-consuming, wasteful lifestyles. Each of us has a voice, a vote and a wallet. We better start deploying them to get politicians and business leaders acting at speed and scale commensurate with the threat.

Elsewhere, Australian of the year Tim Flannery adopts similar rhetoric.  Read the ABC coverage here.

Tim Flannery. (Source: ABC online.)

The destructive power of exponential growth

I draw readers’ attention to a (fairly) new blog by the name Growth is Madness.  Establshed by Dr John Feeney PhD, a psychologist turned writer from the US, it provides a cogent argument for tackling population growth and economic growth as currently defined in developed economies.  Take a look.

On this topic I thought I would provide this extract on the subject of growth from a brilliant book by Australian physicist and author  Geoff Davies –Economia: New economic systems to empower people and support the living world. (Can purchase here)

…a simplified example will illustrate two inescapable lessons.  Suppose there is a small pond in which live 1000 algae (single-celled plant organisms).  Suppose the  pond can sustain 1 trillion algae (a million million): if there are more algae than this the pond’s ecology will be upset and algae will start to die.  Suppose these algae divide once every day while their supply of nutrient’s last.  On the second day there will be 2000 algae, still a trivial number of these tiny organisms.  On the third day there will be 4000 algae.  Question 1: how long will it take before there are 1 trillion algae?  Answer: thirty days.

….Suppose the algae in the pond are clever.  Suppose they realise they cannot keep breeding forever, so they agree they should do something before the pond gets full.  They agree that when the pond is half full, there will still be plenty of pond left but they should start discussing birth control.  Question 2: how much time do they have left when they reach half a trillion?  Answer: one day.  On the twenty-ninth day there will be half a million algae and on the 30th day there will be 1 trillion algae.

Human population has been increasing faster than exponentially during the historical period……The (unknown) person counted as the 6 billionth human alive was born in late 1999.  At that time, the 5 bilionth was not yet a teenager, the 4 billionth was just over thirty and the 2 bllionth was still under seventy.