Tipping Points

30 August 2007

By Kellie Tranter

I am an occasional optimist, but I suspect that's only because hope is the last thing to die. So perhaps when our fearless leaders finish sloshing down their taxpayer funded canapes and Camembert with fine French champagne at next week's APEC meeting they could let me know whether their gourmet global warming gabfest (oops, I mean discussions) has concluded that we should be concerned about our planet reaching the point of no return.

In Revenge of the Gaia, Professor Lovelock said "Deadly it may be, but when we pass the threshold of climate change there may be nothing perceptible to mark this crucial step, nothing to warn that there is no returning. It is somewhat like the descriptions some physicists give of the imagined experience of an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a massive blackhole." To what extent might feedback loops be our guide? The concept is that climate deviations are amplified rather than suppressed, so that increased heat leads to even greater heat. Lovelock gives some examples of known feedbacks:

As the oceans warm, so the area covered by nutrient-poor water increases, making the ocean less friendly for algae. This reduces the rate of pump down of carbon dioxide and the generation of white reflecting marine status clouds. This is happening now. More Info >
The Boreal forests in Siberia and Canada are dark and heat absorbing. As the world grows warmer they extend their range and so absorb more heat. This is happening now. More Info >
More Info >
As forest and algal ecosystems die their decomposition releases carbon dioxide and methane into the air. In a warming world this is a positive feedback. This is happening now. More Info >
The ice albedo feedback. Is this happening now? More Info >
Large deposits of methane are held in ice crystals within molecular-sized voids, called clathrates. These are stable only in the cold or under high pressure. As the Earth warms there is an increasing risk of these clathrates melting, with the escape of large volumes of methane. Methane is twenty-four times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. When will this start?

And just when we thought that it couldn't get any worse, we find out that we may have grossly underestimated the speed at which our climate is changing due to Global Dimming. More Info >

Then there is our sunburnt country, a land of droughts (albeit a bit more severe than expected) More Info > and flooding plains (...and nowadays, of course, tablelands and coasts and cities...). So far this year we have seen flooding in New South Wales More Info >, South Australia More Info >, Victoria More Info >, Queensland More Info >, Northern Territory More Info > and Western Australia More Info >.

But in modern times the description of a land of droughts and floods is far from unique to Australia: consider China More Info > , or the UK More Info >, or America More Info >, or Vietnam More Info > , or India More Info >, or Africa and More Info >, or GreeceMore Info >

Frankly, it sounds to me as though we've passed the tipping point, the point of no return.

But this doesn't seem to worry our leaders: apparently climate change has gone from the major APEC agenda item John Howard was talking about a few months ago, down to little more than the subject of a casual chat. No agenda, no agreements, no targets, no timetables, no promises, nothing definite, just a chat.

In fact, there is a credible suggestion (the leaked draft APEC leaders' declaration) that Howard and Bush will try to use APEC to reduce the heat on them in their upcoming elections and at the same time undermine international action to address climate change while protecting the Australian export coal industry and American fossil fuel interests. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/31/2020167.htm

(And they're effectively closing down the country's largest city for that? Oh, and for the fireworks that we have to pay for but aren't allowed to see, and lunch for the ladies at Bondi...)

But it seems I'm not the only one who feels that things are "slip, slidin' away"...More Info >

And a question for our elected representatives, paid to represent our best interests: are we even being told the truth? More Info >

As Professor Lovelock has said, to undo the harm we have already done requires a programme whose scale dwarfs the space and military programmes in cost and size. Is it therefore appropriate for our State Government to set only a target of a 60% cut in greenhouse emissions by 2050 and a return to year 2000 greenhouse gas emission levels by 2025 More Info > ? In the lead up to the Federal election what proposals will be put forward by Howard or Rudd about adaptation More Info > to reduce the impact that climate change is set to have on Australia? And what about peak oil More Info > and national security More Info > and refugees More Info > (I do hope they enjoy the fireworks....)

Isn't the Government simply maintaining a veneer of global warming proactivity when it shirks the Kyoto Protocol, instead relying on the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (which doesn't involve binding requirements to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by any fixed amounts, but "urges" signing nations to voluntarily develop "clean technologies"? How would you characterise that sort of behaviour if the window of opportunity for the world to try to stop the juggernaut, let alone turn things around, is 10 years?

There is no doubt about what we are facing. Professor Lovelock also said that if global temperatures increase by more than 2.7 degrees the Greenland Glacier will no longer be stable and will continue melting until most of it is gone; if it increases by 4 degrees this will destabilise tropical rain forests and cause them to disappear and be replaced by scrub or desert; the threshold for failure of algae in the ocean is 500 parts per million which at present rates will be reached in 40 years....and so on. A temperature increase of that magnitude seems inevitable. According to an April 2007 UN study http://www.stwr.net/content/view/1829/36/, even though we have the know how to reduce global greenhouse emissions by as much as 26bn tonnes by 2030, doing so will do no more than limit the expected temperature rise across the planet to 2-3 degrees; cheaper solutions, which could bring emissions down to 1990 levels, would see average temperatures rise by as much as 4 degrees this century. So even taking an optimistic approach to likely greenhouse gas reductions we are well within or beyond Professor Lovelock's danger zone.

To what extent does any of this really concern our elected representatives? How accurate today is H L Mencken's comment in 1926, "It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground."

Are we even being told the truth?

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19325903.800-climate-change-what-the-ipcc-didnt-tell-us.html

What we want is the truth for once, instead of opportunistic mendacity. The real facts and figures about what is happening. The uncensored truth about what the experts are predicting. The unsanitised truth about what our elected representatives really think and about where our government's priorities lie. And instead of the sewers of "spin" (which will inevitably overflow in the lead up to the Federal election), can someone tell us the truth about what --if anything--our government ever really intends to do.

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