Why We'll Have To Pay Polluters To Stop Polluting, As Soon As Possible

Fairfax - Peter Martin

We need incentives that will get all our brown coal power stations closed by the early 2020s, and all our black ones by the early 2030s.

What was the weather like in 2015? From rain, hail and soaring temperatures to a tornado - this year's weather had it all.

Get set for a scorcher. None of what you've been noticing is wrong, it really is much hotter than in your childhood. And it's getting hotter. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration says this year will almost certainly be the hottest on record, following on from last year which was the hottest year recorded.
So far, nine out of the world's hottest 10 years on record have begun with the number 2. That means they took place after the year 2000 rather than in the 1900s, when most of us grew up.

That’s what Julie Bishop has signed us up to: zero net emissions, by the second half of the century.

The good news is that the Paris talks showed our leaders are on to it. Ministers including Julie Bishop committed first to holding the increase in the global average temperature to "well below" two degrees (where most of the Arctic melts) and then to "pursuing efforts" to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

The Hazelwood Power Station in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, perhaps the dirtiest power station in the world, is an obvious candidate to be the first station to shut down. Photo: Arsineh Houspian

It's already one degree hotter than it was before industrialisation. The emissions pledges taken to Paris would have kept the increase to only about 2.7 degrees. That's why the ministers pledged to come back every five years with new and tougher targets and to explain how they are going to meet themThe implications are jaw-dropping. The agreement says that to just hold the line at two degrees, emissions will have to peak as soon as possible and then slide so rapidly that by the second half of the century there will be "a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases". That means zero net emissions. That's what Bishop has signed us up to: zero net emissions, by the second half of the century.
It is trite to say that the Turnbull government's $2.5 billion Direct Action program won't achieve it. A legally required update released quietly by Environment Minister Greg Hunt late on Christmas Eve shows emissions actually climbing. But it is probably also true that the Gillard government's $9 billion a year carbon tax wouldn't have achieved it either, not unless the carbon price soared to extremely high levels.
What's needed is to quickly shift most of our cars, trucks, factories and heating away from fossil fuels towards electricity and to make electricity close to emissions-free.
The Australian National University's Frank Jotzo has done the numbers in a report prepared with ClimateWorks, a privately funded think tank. It says that to meet just the two degree target we will have to close all of our brown coal power stations by the early 2020s, and all of our black ones by the early 2030s.
It isn't the sort of task Gillard's carbon tax was set up to achieve, which is why Gillard herself also set up a "Contracts for Closure" scheme under which existing highly polluting plants would be paid to close, after putting in bids. She walked away from it after she realised all of the bids would be too high.
Hazelwood, in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, is the obvious candidate. Perhaps the dirtiest power station in the world, it spews out 60 per cent more pollution a unit of electricity than the NSW black coal stations north of the border. It spews out three times as much as gas-fired power stations.
But why would its owners close it? The coal is relatively cheap because it is next to useless for anything else. Much of it isn't even dried, adding further to emissions. As things stand the NSW black coal stations are far more likely to close than Victoria's more polluting brown coal stations.
And it would cost big money to rehabilitate the site. The inquiry into the 2014 fire at the Hazelwood mine put the cost of decontamination alone at $100 million. Besides, if Hazlewood closed first, the stations that remained would grab its market share. There's a pay-off for not being first.
Paying the stations to close (as Gillard proposed) would result in politically unacceptable and unreasonably high payments to the biggest polluters (as Gillard discovered). Knowing there will be another auction down the track, and then another, they will hold out for very high prices.
So Jotzo has come up with an ingenious solution. It's a Gillard-style auction, where polluting generators put in bids for how much they are prepared to accept to close. But there's a twist. The payment comes not from the government, but from the remaining generators, in proportion to their market share and the amount they pollute. If a big polluter such as Hazelwood loses the auction by asking for too much, it'll be on the hook for big payments to whoever wins.
There would be an incentive to bid low rather than high, and none of the remaining generators would be made too much worse or better off. They would grab market share, but they would pay for it in accordance with the amount they polluted.
The winning bidders would have to use their winnings to rehabilitate their sites and pay government-specified assistance to their displaced workers.
It's by no means a complete solution. Future auctions might operate differently. The point is we are going to have to do everything we can to turn Australia electric and to squeeze most of the remaining emissions out of electricity. The old debate about a carbon price versus direct action is losing its sting. What matters now is finding something that works, and finding it quickly.

As Planet Warms, The World’s Lakes Are Heating Up Even Faster

Washington Post - Joby Warrick

Seals rest on the shoreline of Russia’s Lake Baikal. Scientists say the lake is one of hundreds around the world that are rapidly warming because of climate change. (S. Gabdurakhamano/National Science Foundation)

Lakes around the world are growing rapidly warmer, according to a new scientific study that warns of potential consequences ranging from depleted fisheries to harmful algae blooms that kill fish and contaminate water supplies for cities large and small.
Hotter freshwater lakes are yet another sign of global climate change, and their increasing temperatures are happening at a faster rate compared to the warming seen in the oceans and atmosphere, a team of scientists report in the peer-reviewed journal Geographical Research Letters.
The study is based on decades of measurements from 235 lakes that contain more than half the world’s fresh water supply. On average, temperatures are rising by about six-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit per decade, a rapid increase by geological standards.
The results are a “wake-up call,” especially for regions that rely on lakes for food and drinking water, said Henry Gholz, a program director for environmental biology at the National Science Foundation, which co-funded the research along with NASA.
“Our knowledge of how lakes are responding to global change has been lacking,” Gholz said.
The study, the largest of its kind, involved more than 60 scientists who used temperature records as well as satellite data to gauge changes over time, from Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border to the tropical lakes of central Africa to partially frozen lakes in Scandinavia.
The most dramatic increases were observed at far-northern lakes, which are warming at an average rate of 1.3 degrees F per decade. But tropical lakes also are warming rapidly, the researchers found. Only a small number of warm-water lakes kept a constant temperature or cooled slightly, a departure from the norm that scientists attributed to local land-use changes such as reforestation that increased shade along the shoreline.
Even small variations in temperature can impact fish and other wildlife, the researchers found. Most significant for many areas was the greater potential for harmful algae blooms, an explosive growth in populations of microscopic plants that can strip oxygen from the water and kill fish. Destructive algae blooms—such as the one in Lake Erie in 2014 that contaminated the water supply for Toledo and other Ohio cities—already are occurring more frequently worldwide.
 Such events are important because of the role played by lakes in sustaining human populations in many parts of the world, said study co-author Stephanie Hampton, a professor at Washington State University’s School of the Environment.
“Lakes are important because society depends on surface water for the vast majority of human uses—not just for drinking water, but manufacturing, energy production, irrigation and crops,” Hampton said. “Protein from freshwater fish is especially important in the developing world.”
A separate report earlier this month predicted the number of severe algae blooms would double over the next century because of a combination of warmer temperatures and increased pollution. By 2115, disruptive events like the one in Toledo will be commonplace rather than exceptional, according to a team of U.S. researchers using climate and watershed models to project future trends. The scientists discussed their findings at the American Geological Union meeting in San Francisco.
Even reducing the amount of nutrient pollution that feeds algae growth—including fertilizers and human and animal waste—will not be enough to prevent destructive algae blooms if warming trends continue, said Noel Aloysius, a post-doctorate researcher at Ohio State University’s Aquatic Ecology Laboratory who presented the findings.
“Our assessment of climate reveals less winter snow, more heavy spring rains and hotter summers,” Aloysius said. “Those are perfect growing conditions for algae.”

Links

• Climate change is speeding up the evolution of microscopic ocean creatures
• A Florida algae bloom that literally ‘glows in the dark’
• How Amazon forests will react to climate change

Diabolical

The Monthly - Robert Manne

Why have we failed to address climate change?

© Andrew Halsall / iStock

Unless by some miracle almost every climate scientist is wrong, future generations will look upon ours with puzzlement and anger – as the people who might have prevented the Earth from becoming a habitat unfriendly to humans and other species but nonetheless failed to act. One hundred and twenty years have passed since the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius discovered the basic cause of global warming – the emission of carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels (especially, in his era, coal) – but climate scientists only came to a consensus that the Earth was warming significantly in the late 1980s. Despite our knowledge of the harm we are inflicting, the volume of greenhouse-gas emissions that are warming the Earth has increased each year since that time, recently at an accelerating speed.
Our conscious destruction of a planet friendly to humans and other species is the most significant development in history. In response, in 1988 the international community, under the umbrella of the United Nations, created perhaps the most remarkable co-operative scientific enterprise: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On five occasions – 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2014 – it has provided policymakers and the world’s publics with comprehensive and conservative summaries of the conclusions of the thousands of climate scientists. Each new report has grown more certain than the last about the gravity of the dangers we are facing. Interestingly, however, social scientists other than economists – sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, students of international relations – have not been invited to contribute to the IPCC reports nor have they participated in the global conversation on climate change. This is seriously strange. For no less important than the impact of climate change on the Earth and its creatures is the question of why human beings – international society, governments of nation-states, communities, individuals – have so far failed so comprehensively to rise to its challenge.

The work of the social scientists customarily begins with the recognition that climate change is the most difficult problem human society now faces or has ever faced. Frequently, climate change is described as a “wicked problem”. This does not seem to me greatly helpful. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber invented and defined the idea of the wicked problem in 1973. For them, however, all social planning problems were wicked. As they put it, “[S]ocietal problems … are inherently different from the problems that scientists and perhaps some classes of engineers deal with. Planning problems are inherently wicked.”
Frequently, too, climate change is described as the kind of problem Garrett Hardin had in mind in ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, his seminal article of 1968 that elegantly reveals the conflict between individual and collective interest. Yet as Stephen Gardiner has pointed out in his A Perfect Moral Storm, climate change is a far more difficult issue than Hardin’s individual herdsmen self-interestedly overgrazing on the commons at collective cost. Hardin’s solution rests on state coercion. However, in the case of climate change there is no international authority with that capacity. Moreover, Hardin’s problem is located in the present. With climate change the temporal issue is central. We can transfer most of the damage inflicted on the commons for our benefit to future generations.
There are very many ways to describe the unprecedented difficulty posed by climate change. Let one suffice. In their recently published Climate Shock, Gernot Wagner and the distinguished Harvard economist Martin Weitzman argue that as a policy problem climate change has four dimensions.
The problem is firstly fully global. Because everyone shares the atmosphere equally, mitigation efforts do not discriminate in favour of those who make them. As a consequence, the possibility of altruistic nation-state action is undermined by the problem of the free rider, the nation that benefits from the actions of others without contributions of its own.
The climate-change problem is also unusually long-term. The most catastrophic consequences of current emissions may not become apparent for decades or even centuries. Despite occasional disasters, which are readily assimilated in collective consciousness to old-fashioned weather, we can continue to enjoy the commons while leaving true havoc for future generations. In addition, the principal historical responsibility for the cumulative emissions that have created the climate-change problem rests with the wealthy industrialised countries, but the emissions of the developing world, striving to provide its citizens with an equivalent material life, have become equally important. The difficulty of finding an agreed ethical balance between responsibility for past and present emissions means that the question of climate change cannot be disentangled from the most fundamental questions of international justice.
Moreover, because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for a hundred years or longer, the consequences of today’s emissions are effectively irreversible. Finally, while scientists are now certain that human action is the principal cause of climate change, the limitations of the current climate models mean that the exact time, location and depth of impact of future climate change inevitably remain uncertain. This uncertainty creates opportunities for political mischief, policy inertia and public confusion.
According to Wagner and Weitzman, these four dimensions of the climate-change problem are all, separately, “almost unique”. In combination they are certainly so. Yet they do not even include in their list the most daunting challenge. The industrial revolution, now almost fully globalised, would have been unthinkable without the energy derived from the burning of fossil fuels. All societies are now required to make a swift transition to nuclear energy or energy derived from renewable sources or to both – a kind of consciously planned, economy-wide, self-denying transformation never before achieved or indeed required.

As political scientists and historians of science have shown, climate change only became a public issue in the late 1980s, with the Toronto climate conference, the creation of the IPCC, and the widely reported Congressional testimony of James Hansen, the chief climate scientist at NASA, during the ferocious American summer of 1988. The vested interests instantly rallied. Most important was corporate America’s Global Climate Coalition. This group of businesses and trade associations supported the conservative or libertarian think tanks that had mushroomed during the Reagan years. In the area of climate-science denial, the most important of these think tanks was at first the George C Marshall Institute, which was led by genuinely distinguished physicists. As Myanna Lahsen and others have argued, as committed Cold Warriors their war against climate science was an extension of the ideological battles they had fought against the left-leaning Union of Concerned Scientists; as economic libertarians, it was an extension of the earlier battles they had fought over state action regarding tobacco, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer; and as distinguished physicists, it was an expression of the contempt they felt for the intellectual quality of the new generation of environmental scientists. To deploy Allan Schnaiberg’s valuable distinction, they were representatives of “production science”, those disciplines oriented towards industrial progress, and enemies of “impact science”, which asked awkward questions about resource depletion and the damage wrought by the cornucopian myths of endless growth and material progress under contemporary capitalism.
The 1990s saw the growing international influence of environmentalism in general and a preoccupation with global warming in particular. In response, climate-science denial blossomed in the United States into the pivotal project of what has been called the anti-environmental counter-movement. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a great deal of the political energy of anti-communism was transferred to anti-environmentalism. Economic libertarianism, or market fundamentalism, facilitated the swift transition from the Red Scare to the Green. The overwhelmingly most important institutions for the dissemination of climate-science denial in the 1990s were the dozen or so most prominent market-fundamentalist think tanks. In the following decade, their influence exploded with the emergence of often vicious denialist blogs, which provided the think tanks’ anti-climate science propaganda with a highly effective echo chamber.
The key political strategy of the climate-science denialist counter-movement was the manufacture of doubt, a strategy borrowed from the tobacco industry’s success in delaying by decades the passage of anti-smoking regulation and legislation. It was not necessary to demonstrate that smoking was safe. All that was needed was to suggest that the evidence of harm was unclear.
Science has a commanding cultural authority in contemporary Western societies, including that of the US. As a consequence, the denialist counter-movement had to create the illusion of an oppositional climate-science community, what Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in Merchants of Doubt call a “scientific Potemkin village”. This was achieved in part with mass petitions, supposedly signed by climate scientists, and in part by financing the publication of scores of denialist books. Most importantly, it was achieved by energetically promoting and generously funding the handful of contrarian or denialist climate scientists. Research has shown that by the end of the 1990s such scientists were quoted as frequently in the quality US press as the leaders of the field.
Even more, it was the denialist cadre of scientists whose testimony was almost exclusively presented to the relevant Congressional committees. As the influence of the denialist counter-movement deepened during the 2000s, it was more common for genuine climate scientists who appeared before Congress to answer charges of academic fraud than to provide evidence of the dangers the world was facing.
By this time the quality US press facilitated what has been called the false “duelling scientists scenario” by looking for “both sides of the story”, an unthinking habit that the authors of a particularly influential article christened “balance as bias”.
The duelling scientists scenario prevailed, especially due to the influence of denialist blogs and right-wing media like Fox News and populist radio. While four separate studies have shown that roughly 97% of climate scientists regard the recent pattern of global warming as human-caused, even today half of the American public think climate change is a matter of fierce scientific dispute. In the process of building the climate-science Potemkin village, in what has been called “the social construction of non-problematicity” through “consciousness lowering” activities, the climate-denialist counter-movement has achieved, by any reckoning, outstanding success.
What was the relationship between the fossil-fuel and allied manufacturing corporations and the ideologically driven conservative or libertarian foundations in the funding of the denialist counter-movement? On balance, the research shows that while during the 1990s both the corporations and the foundations funded denialism directly, around 2000, following the defection of most corporations from the Global Climate Coalition, only ExxonMobil continued to fund the counter-movement directly and even then only until 2009. Robert Brulle is responsible for painstaking research on the funding of climate-science denialism. He found that between 2003 and 2010 the dozens of conservative or libertarian foundations were the overwhelming source of the more than $7 billion received by the denialist think tanks. There is, however, one important caveat to this picture. The numerous foundations connected to Charles and David Koch’s vast corporate empire were by far the largest financial supporters of climate-science denialism. As the Koch brothers’ most important enterprises are in oil and gas, and as they are zealous market fundamentalists, in their case it is impossible to separate the corporate financial interest from the ideological motivation.

The denialist counter-movement transformed environmental and climate-change politics in the US. In the early 1990s there was scarcely any difference in attitude to these issues between Democrat and Republican voters or between self-identified liberals and conservatives. By 2010, on every question concerning global warming there was a 30 to 40 percentage point party-political and ideological gap. The polarisation of opinion among voters was paralleled by hardening ideological division among the politicians. As late as 2008 it was still possible to be a Republican leader and to express concern about global warming, as demonstrated by both the leader of the House, Newt Gingrich, and the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain. By 2010 that was no longer so. Two events had altered the political landscape.
First, on the eve of the Copenhagen climate-change conference in December 2009, the denialist movement had conjured a global scandal by hacking into a University of East Anglia server and then publishing innocent but apparently incriminating sentences selected from a thousand email exchanges between several of the world’s leading climate scientists. Second, by the time the vital Copenhagen conference concluded it was clear to almost everyone that international climate-change diplomacy had reached a state of gridlock.
In response to these events, and as part of its rightward Tea Party drift, the Republicans had metamorphosed into the world’s first major and unambiguous climate-change denialist political party. A study conducted for Think Progress discovered that all but one of the 50 or so Republican contenders for the 2010 Senate elections were opposed to climate action. Climate-change denial had by now become as clear a litmus test of loyalty to the Republican Party as abortion, Obama-care or gun control. This is still the case, as the present grotesque contest for the Republican presidential nomination all too plainly reveals.
Without the climate-denialist counter-movement’s brilliant success in polarising American public opinion, this kind of Republican Party political transformation would not have been possible. Dan Kahan’s theory of “cultural cognition” offers the most persuasive and sophisticated explanation for it. How, Kahan asks, can we explain the uniformity of the opinions of Americans on a variety of logically altogether unconnected issues? Why is it so easy to predict that those who believe in the right of gun ownership will also oppose abortion and deny human-caused climate change? Drawing on the work of Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Kahan argues that Americans adhere to one or another “world view” – either hierarchical-individualism or communitarian-egalitarianism. He claims that this binary division is more universal, more instinctive, more deeply rooted than either political ideology (conservative–liberal) or party affiliation (Republican–Democrat), and a more accurate predictor of opinion than gender, age, class or education. In the US, when there is no cultural battle over scientific questions, the authority of science is accepted. When, however, there is contention, and, in particular, alternative evaluations of risk, citizens understand that they are in no position to arrive at their own assessments independently. What individualists and communitarians do is turn to the experts or the political leaders or the commentators who, according to their world views, they have come to trust.
The theory of cultural cognition shows how crucial it has been for the denialist movement to concoct the duelling scientists narrative and to build the climate-science Potemkin village. Among other things, hierarchical-individualists do not criticise the ideas of capitalist enterprise and material progress. The denialist movement provides them with the culturally compatible scientific experts, politicians and commentators to help keep their world view intact. Kahan does not even regard the process of cultural cognition as straightforwardly irrational. Given that individuals understand that they cannot influence the outcomes of issues as large as climate change, it is rational for them to choose a more comfortable life by conforming to the opinions of their peers, for an oil refinery worker from Oklahoma to be a climate-change sceptic and an English professor from New York a climate-change true believer. Unfortunately for society’s wellbeing, climate-change denialism, maintained by the process of cultural cognition, by paralysing necessary action, is entirely irrational for the collectivity as a whole.
Echoing Garrett Hardin, Kahan calls this particular study ‘The Tragedy of the Risk-perception Commons’. President Barack Obama has achieved about as much through regulation and the US Environmental Protection Agency as is possible in the face of a hostile Congress. However, while one of the parties in the US remains in denial, the “indispensable nation” cannot provide the reliable long-term leadership that is required for comprehensive international climate-change action. Accordingly, Kahan’s tragedy is the world’s.

There are now several outstanding books exploring the relationship between individual psychology and climate change. The most brilliant and penetrating is Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species, published in 2010. In addition, there are scores of sophisticated and ingenious empirical experiments. Although most have been conducted in the US, several surveys of international opinion suggest that the levels of concern about global warming do not vary greatly across the developed world. For this reason, the American psychological studies almost certainly reveal more general patterns of individual resistance to climate change in wealthy nations.
In these studies, climate change is invariably a minor concern, not only compared to the economy or health care but also compared to other environmental problems like water or air pollution. When 20 issues of concern are presented to Americans, climate change almost always ranks at the bottom.
Many studies that seek to understand society’s indifference or inertia have shown the falsity of what remains the most common explanation, the “information deficit model”. Statistically speaking, both self-reported and genuine understanding of the climate-change problem correlate negatively with the degree of personal concern individuals express.
In one study, conservative white males who claimed scientific understanding were more than three times less likely to believe in the dangers of climate change than other people. Given that they are the beneficiaries of the status quo, their greater hostility to climate science than all other social groups was founded on the psychological tendency known as “system justification”.
Another study discovered that it is a myth that conservatives are generally hostile to science. Conservatives were only hostile to Allan Schnaiberg’s “impact science”, those disciplines concerning the environment and health. They were, on balance, more trusting than liberals of his other category, “production science”, those disciplines linked to capitalist enterprise and material progress.
This is not to say that studies find impressive levels of understanding. Frequently, climate change was confused with the hole in the ozone layer. One study revealed that fewer than 10% of people realise that more than 90% of relevantly qualified scientists believe in human-caused global warming.
Several studies reveal that the choice of language helps determine the level of concern. Conservatives are significantly less resistant to acknowledging there is a problem when the talk is of “climate change” rather than “global warming”. Because many studies have found the level of “visceral” response to the problem to be low, communicative calmness is implicitly or explicitly recommended. One concluded that people are repelled by climate-change messages that seem to them “apocalyptic”. Presenting the issue in this way interfered with their desire to live in “a world that is just, orderly and stable”. Another discovered that people were increasingly irritated by claims they regarded as “alarmist”. Such findings suggest a serious political problem. How can governments hope to convince citizens of the need for revolutionary economic transformation in a voice of studied or confected moderation?
Many studies also emphasise the importance of framing. One suggested a problem with using the frame of “care”, as this was the kind of narrative conservatives rejected. Another found that climate-change warnings were more effective if framed as public health concerns rather than as national security ones. Liberals, the authors speculated, were repelled by what they thought of as a conservative cause; conservatives were repelled by the intrusion of a left-wing issue onto the cause they held most dear.
These psychological studies use statistical methods with individual, mainly American, subjects. Meanwhile, Kari Marie Norgaard’s Living in Denial, an investigation of the psychological sources of resistance to confronting the question of climate change, is based on one year’s close observation of a single Norwegian town at a time of baffling weather patterns. Hers is a study not of individuals but of the interface of individual and society, or what she calls “the social organisation of denial”. Norgaard found that while the townspeople denied neither the reality nor the gravity of climate change, it played little role in their daily life. Climate change was rarely discussed. When it was, it proved to be a conversation stopper. The townspeople thought it an inappropriate topic for the education of their children. They felt the need to protect themselves from its reality, for, if confronted, it filled them with a sense of helplessness, dread and personal guilt. They shielded behind their image of Norway as a small country incapable of making much difference one way or another, their pride in Norway as an environmentally responsible nation, and their oft-expressed anger at the climate-change recklessness of George W Bush’s “Amerika”.
Norgaard’s study is interesting in part because it suggests that psychological denial offers a more general clue to the puzzle of humankind’s incapacity to rise to the challenge of climate change than the kind of political denialism found more or less exclusively in the US, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Even more, it is interesting because of her observation that climate change undermined the townspeople’s sense of “ontological security”, their vital need for confidence in the continuity of their community’s life. George Marshall is, like Norgaard, a climate-change participant-observer. In his Don’t Even Think About It, he also notes how often the topic rapidly changes if climate change is raised in polite conversation. But he goes further than Norgaard. Marshall tells us that if he was able to engage people in conversation about climate change, rather frequently it led to discussions about death, an even more taboo topic. In his great encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis recently expressed most succinctly the kind of ontological insecurity aroused by recognition of the climate-change crisis: humankind’s fearfulness about the continuity of our life on Earth. “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain.”

Climate change is a fully global problem. If the challenge is to be met, principal responsibility inevitably rests not with individuals or communities or even nation-states but with the practices and institutions of international society. So far, to judge by results, there has been almost total failure. When climate change became a central question of international diplomacy in the late 1980s, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was approximately 350 parts per million. Today it is more than 400. How have international-relations scholars explained this failure?
The most cogent critique comes from the “realists”: Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, in a paper they published in 2007 called ‘The Wrong Trousers’, and David Victor, in his 2011 book Global Warming Gridlock. Their analysis goes like this. A few years before climate change was recognised as a critical problem, scientists had identified a hole in the ozone layer produced by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs): industrial chemicals found in refrigerators, air-conditioners and other common products. Environmental diplomacy, which culminated in the Montreal Protocol of 1987, proved remarkably successful in removing CFCs from manufacturing industry. The process that largely succeeded in the case of the ban on CFCs was almost mechanically adopted when international diplomats turned their minds to the problem of global warming a few months later in Toronto. As with tackling the problem of the hole in the ozone layer, international negotiations took place under the authority of the United Nations with the conference decisions requiring the agreement of all nations. As with ozone diplomacy, these often painfully difficult negotiations succeeded in producing an international scientific body, the IPCC, and a framework convention. As with ozone diplomacy, the negotiations led to the adoption of a so-called protocol. As with the Montreal Protocol, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 distinguished between the responsibilities of developed and developing countries. As with the Montreal Protocol, Kyoto established targets and timetables – in this case, for the reduction of carbon emissions in the industrialised countries. As with the Montreal Protocol, Kyoto was a legally binding but non-enforceable treaty that would come into force after ratification by most industrialised countries. As with the Montreal Protocol, it provided a means – in this case, the Clean Development Mechanism – by which funds could be transferred to the developing countries to help them reduce their carbon emissions.
Prins & Rayner and Victor argue that using the Montreal Protocol as the model for tackling carbon emissions, a more difficult problem by several orders of magnitude, was a tragic mistake. The Montreal Protocol dealt with a relatively modest problem with a relatively simple solution, involving a manufacturing process conducted in a small number of countries by a small number of corporations, regarding chemicals for which economically almost painless alternatives were soon discovered. The Kyoto Protocol dealt with a problem of baffling complexity, involving every nation and corporation on Earth, regarding the source of energy for almost all economic activity, without which one of the greatest transformations in human history – the global industrial revolution – would have been unthinkable.
In a world of fierce economic competition, where nations were driven by self-interest and where the problem of the free rider was inevitable, targets and timetables were unrealistic, guaranteeing at best hopelessly inadequate cuts in emissions. A process that effectively required international unanimity was certain to produce lowest-common-denominator results, giving fossil fuel—producing nations like Saudi Arabia and Russia ample scope to block progress and make mischief. The creation of a legally binding treaty precluded the flexibility that national economies needed. However, by creating a legally binding treaty without enforcement provisions, agreements could be dishonoured almost without cost. Without a far more effective regulatory regime, the most popular Kyoto instrument, the Clean Development Mechanism, could be easily corrupted. As it turned out, it was. China and India, the countries where emissions were growing fastest, were excused from any sacrifice. In turn, this ensured the non-involvement of the US, the greatest world emitter at that time. Kyoto did not reduce emissions. Its successor, the Copenhagen climate-change conference of 2009, produced nothing but unfulfillable commitments, like limiting the post-industrial temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, and improbable promises, like the offer of US$100 billion in annual grants to the developing world by 2020.
What is the alternative to Kyoto? David Victor points out that only a small number of nations are vital to the research and development that will create the renewable energy technologies, and that there are only a relatively small number of nations responsible for the overwhelming proportion of greenhouse gas emissions. He argues that what should be created, instead of a legally binding but non-enforceable United Nations treaty, is a “club” of significant climate-change nations, providing benefits to members and imposing trade-based penalties on those nations free-riding on the emissions reductions of others.
There are strengths but also obvious difficulties with his proposal. Victor’s models for the club are the World Trade Organization and the European Union. While Victor argues that nation-states established both these “clubs” through self-interest not altruism, in the case of global warming it is hard to see what kinds of short-term or narrow self-interest would be served by the establishment of the climate club. Moreover, while the spirit of Victor’s thought is realist, his solution is utopian, requiring the conversion of the international community to an entirely new way of thinking. In addition, as he admits, it is based on slow institution-building and incremental change. However, if the physics and the chemistry of climate change have made anything clear, it is that time is the one luxury we do not have. In the name of realism, Victor advocates incremental reform. If the hope is to protect a human- and species-friendly planet, incremental reform is entirely unrealistic.
In recent years, there have been various suggestions for an alternative international climate-change architecture. Todd Stern of the Center for American Progress (now special envoy for climate change at the US Department of State) and William Antholis of the Brookings Institution advocated the establishment of a climate association called the E8, which would include a small group of key developing and developed countries. Moisés Naím, then the editor of Foreign Policy, argued for minilateralism in the form of a new 20-nation climate-change institution. William Nordhaus, president of the American Economic Association, recently supported Victor’s idea of the climate club. None of these ideas has any significant following at present or any obvious prospect of success. What the international community has in fact now settled for is a system of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). These voluntary emissions-reduction timetables and targets are neither legally binding nor enforceable, and are subject to periodic review. INDCs are in essence the system of “pledge and review” proposed by Japan before the creation of the Kyoto Protocol. At the time of the Paris climate-change conference, humanity’s hopes now rest on an international treaty idea, more realistic but less ambitious than Kyoto, first floated a quarter century ago.

Several political economists have offered a different explanation for our collective failure to rise to the challenge of climate change. This argument, which Naomi Klein has christened “bad timing”, divides the history of the advanced capitalist economies into two distinct postwar periods. The first, from 1945 to the mid 1970s, dominated by the thought of John Maynard Keynes, was characterised by acceptance of the mixed economy of public and private ownership, a recognition of the need for government economic intervention and regulation, state investment in designated industries, relatively high levels of taxation, and scepticism about the consequence of untrammelled market forces. The second, since the late 1970s, dominated by the thought of Friedrich Hayek and the Chicago school, is characterised by a belief in the superior efficiency of privately owned enterprise, disbelief in government intervention and regulation, scorn for state industry policy or attempts to pick winners, hostility to taxation, an aspiration to small government, and a fundamentalist faith in untrammelled market forces. “Neoliberal” is the usual descriptor used to characterise this second period.
As it happens, so the argument proceeds, the emergence of neoliberal hegemony coincided almost exactly with the time when concerns about climate change moved from being a topic of discussion among a small group of scientists to a matter of general social concern and alarm. At the very moment when the neoliberals came to dominate the political economy of advanced capitalism, a rational response to climate change required powerful government regulation and intervention, state action to rein in the activities of the fossil-fuel corporations, state industry policies investing heavily in renewable energy, high tax on carbon pollution, recognition of the catastrophic potential of market failure. These were precisely the policies and attitudes that neoliberals had cast into the rubbish bin of history and that they most abhorred.
The continuing hegemony of neoliberalism means that the actions needed cannot be taken without the renunciation of the dominant political faith of contemporary times: market fundamentalism. Even a natural neoliberal like David Victor recognises that climate policy requires major state intervention and massive government investment. Similarly, Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson argue that if there is now hope it lies in the emergence of something they call “climate Keynesianism”. If neoliberalism persists, as they believe it most likely will, the only prospect is “stagnation” or something far worse. Newell and Paterson called their book Climate Capitalism. The common-sense premise of their argument, which I accept, is that whatever path is chosen, “capitalism of one form or another will provide the context in which near-term solutions to climate change have to be found”.
During the Soviet era the communist regimes were described as “really existing socialism”, a phrase that sought to distinguish communism in practice from communism in theory. The examination of the climate-change behaviour of “really existing capitalism” might free us from impossibly contentious, highly theoretical and presently unhelpful ideological debates, and allow us, more modestly, to identify some readily observable characteristics of capitalism, the now-unrivalled global economic system, that are implicated in the climate paralysis we now face.
Several of the most powerful corporations on Earth are involved in the fossil-fuel business. Scholarship has revealed disturbing aspects of their recent behaviour. As soon as the problem of global warming was recognised, the American fossil-fuel corporations and allied manufacturing interests became actively involved in fierce struggles to prevent action against climate change. As noted, in 1990 the Global Climate Coalition, representing a very large number of the major US corporations, began funding climate-change denialism in the US. At the same time, in Europe an automobile manufacturers’ campaign killed off an EU proposal for a carbon tax. As Eric Pooley shows in The Climate War, fossil-fuel corporations fought ruthlessly and spent lavishly to dilute and destroy the two “cap and trade” bills when they were introduced to the US Congress. Despite their billions of dollars of annual profits and their occasional promises, no fossil-fuel corporation has invested seriously in renewable energy. During the brief period when BP rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum, as much was spent on advertising its supposedly noble climate credentials as on renewable energy investment.
The corporations’ entirely characteristic behaviour is even more damaging than this. Climate scientists like James Hansen have argued that burning all fossil fuels will inevitably lead in the long-term to an ice-free Earth. Environmental activists like Jeremy Leggett of the Carbon Tracker Initiative have pointed out that if a temperature increase is to be kept to the consensual, post-industrial 2 ºC limit, 80% of the fossil fuels currently on the books of the corporations will have to remain in the ground. Nonetheless, the corporations have shown no inclination to moderate their quest for the tar sands of Alberta, the coal of Queensland’s Galilee Basin, and the oil and gas now potentially available because of the melting of the Arctic Circle. Nor has any country, not even climate-conscious Norway, shown any desire to prohibit or even restrain the activities of the fossil-fuel corporations. In his Don’t Even Think About It, George Marshall tells us that he had asked both Leggett and the founding chair of the IPCC, Sir John Houghton, whether they could recall even one instance where a proposal to limit the activities of the fossil-fuel corporations had been discussed in government circles. Neither could. In the age of neoliberal capitalism, everyone in authority who is concerned about global warming seems to agree that the solution to the problem is to put a price on the emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels but not to restrain the global corporations from expanding their search for ever more coal, oil and gas. An intelligent and observant Martian visiting the Earth and learning of our climate problem would be entitled to believe the human race insane.
The debate about capitalism lost credibility and respectability in part because of the historic mistake made by the dominant stream of the left, which for far too long thought of the viciously authoritarian, economically irrational and environmentally destructive communist regimes as attractive alternatives to capitalism. It was pushed even further to the margins because of the unprecedented material prosperity postwar capitalism has brought from North America and Europe to significant parts of Asia. However, because of the climate crisis, questions about the viability of capitalism, not in theory but in practice, have insinuated themselves into mainstream intellectual debate for the first time since the Great Depression.
It is not only Marxist scholars like John Bellamy Foster or longstanding anti-capitalist activists like Naomi Klein who have raised fundamental questions about the contradiction between capitalism and the climate, and the disaster that unresisted “really existing capitalism” is presently visiting upon the Earth. So has the scrupulously mainstream environmentalist Gus Speth, in his The Bridge at the End of the World, and the eminent political sociologist Michael Mann, in his four-volume study The Sources of Social Power. In his gloomy concluding chapter, Mann argues that the climate catastrophe awaiting the planet is a consequence of three interconnected forces dominating the social landscape: the nation-state, the consumer-citizen and the transnational capitalist corporation. Recently, two Australian scholars, Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg, published their important book Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations, an analysis of the impact that the business-as-usual, supposedly environmentally sensitive contemporary corporation has had on climate. Echoing the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s description of capitalism, its subtitle refers to “creative self-destruction”. The term’s meaning has been most succinctly expressed by Elizabeth Kolbert in her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

It is not only among the climate scientists that the level of panic is rising. A telling example of the fear that now is gripping many of the social scientists who have given their lives to the study of the impending climate crisis can be seen in the most recent book by the eminently respectable, highly intelligent and extraordinarily well-connected former World Bank chief economist Lord Nicholas Stern.
In his famous 2006 intervention commissioned by the then UK chancellor Gordon Brown for the Blair government, Lord Stern advocated a greenhouse gas atmospheric ambition of 550 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent (ppm CO₂e). He knew that 550 ppm CO₂e would run the very real risk of disastrous, irreversible environmental damage. But he regarded any action that exceeded a 1% annual cut in global greenhouse-gas emissions as politically impossible and economically irresponsible, as likely to trigger a worldwide recession. Implicitly, as left-wing critics like Clive Hamilton and John Bellamy Foster cogently pointed out, in the Stern Review environmental wellbeing had been sacrificed on the altar of the unquestioned idea of economic growth and supposed political realism.
In recent months Lord Stern has published a new analysis of the climate-change crisis, Why Are We Waiting? The tone is now much more urgent. Stern points out that, at a time when global emissions are accelerating, if humankind opts for business as usual by 2100 we will have a 750 ppm CO₂e world with a likely 4 ºC or more post-industrial temperature rise, a temperature not experienced on the Earth for ten million years. Even if we now stabilised the volume of emissions at the current 50 billion tonnes per annum, we would bequeath our children and grandchildren a 650 ppm CO₂e world with only a 50–50 chance of holding temperature to a ruinous 3.5 ºC increase above pre-industrial levels. If somewhat more radically we were to opt for a 550 ppm CO₂e world – Stern’s own former target – we will still have a less than 50–50 chance of remaining below a disastrous temperature increase of 3 ºC. Stern accepts that the world must aim for the now internationally agreed limit of no more than a 2 ºC temperature increase on pre-industrial temperature. According to his calculations, for there to be any hope of only a 2 ºC increase in the next 15 years, in the developing world – where both greenhouse-gas emissions and population levels are currently accelerating very rapidly – emissions will have to be reduced. In the developed world – where emissions have become more or less stable – they will have to be cut in half. All politically realistic and economically prudent talk about restricting emissions reduction to 1% per annum has by now been abandoned. What Nicholas Stern now calls for is nothing less than an immediate, global-wide “energy revolution”.
The climate scientists have shown us why this revolution is needed. What the social sciences have analysed are some of the roadblocks to action in the face of what is, admittedly, the most daunting problem humankind has ever faced. A comprehensive long-term international solution to the climate-change crisis is not feasible without the US. Political scientists have shown how the force of climate-change science denial, conjured by the alliance of vested interests and conservative or libertarian ideologues, has corrupted that country’s political culture and captured one of its major parties. Empirical psychologists have shown that there is an even deeper and broader form of denialism than the political version held by conservatives in the Anglosphere. Citizen-consumers in both the developed and the developing worlds are the beneficiaries of the kind of unprecedented material prosperity that our fossil-fuel driven industrial civilisation has delivered. There is little hope that they will turn spontaneously against the source of present comfort in the interests of the poorer nations and future generations, particularly in the absence of moral leadership from political and economic elites across the nations, without what Paul Gilding has called “the Great Awakening”.
Left-leaning political economists have shown that this awakening has been inhibited by one of the unhappiest accidents of history: the fact that consensus developed among climate scientists at the precise historical moment that neoliberal capitalism in the industrially developed world usurped its earlier postwar Keynesian form. According to these economists, it is now inconceivable that the climate crisis can be overcome within the neoliberal frame, that is, without massive interventionist state activity – punitive carbon taxes or steep cap-and-trade emissions ceilings, demanding building and transport regulations, massive subsidies for renewable energy industries. Even such policies, however, will most likely not be enough. We know that something like 80% of known fossil-fuel reserves have to be left in the ground if a human- and species-friendly planet is to survive. Before too long, the licence granted to the fossil-fuel corporations, which allows them to continue their obscene search for ever more of the coal, oil and gas that we know is destroying our planet, will have to be withdrawn.
There is, too, as international-relations scholars are beginning to understand, the need for a new international climate architecture. After a lost 25 years, the world has accepted that the Kyoto Protocol has failed. It is highly unlikely that its replacement – the pledge-and-review system of voluntary, unenforceable targets and timetables that will be embraced in Paris – will be able to deliver the kind of immediate and radical emissions reductions that are now needed. Although time is against it, the most plausible suggestion is for something like a climate club, proposed by David Victor and William Nordhaus, which would facilitate international fossil-free energy collaboration, and allow irresponsible nations, free-riding on the emissions reductions of others, to be penalised by trade or other sanctions. As most social scientists now realise, the overwhelming question of international justice can no longer be evaded or even postponed. Before too long, emissions from the developing world will constitute two thirds of the global total. Without massive transfers of money and technology from the developed to the developing world, the kind of fossil-free energy revolution we need is simply inconceivable.
Yet, as many people now realise, something much more profound than all this is required: a re-imagining of the relations between humans and the Earth, a re-imagining that will be centred on a recognition of the dreadful and perhaps now irreversible damage that has been wrought to our common home by the hubristic idea at the very centre of the modern world – man’s assertion of his mastery over nature.
Such a recognition signals a coming moral shift no less deep than those that have already transformed humankind with regard to the ancient inequalities of race and gender. It is a recognition of the need to overcome the philosophy of what Naomi Klein calls extractivism, a recognition that drives the young people who are on the frontline of the struggle against the depredations of the fossil-fuel corporations, in the virtual space Klein calls “Blockadia”. It is this recognition that will have to penetrate the minds and the hearts of the political and economic elites if there is to be Gilding’s Great Awakening, but that is already making Bill McKibben’s international movement for divestment from fossil fuels one of the fastest growing, most effective and most morally charged international protest movements since the anti-apartheid struggles. And it is this recognition that forms the core of Pope Francis’s recent summons for a worldwide cultural revolution. ‘‘No system,” he writes, “can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful … An authentic humanity … seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door.’’

It is on our instinct for what is good, true and beautiful, and on the arousal of that authentic humanity from its present slumber, that hopes for the human future and the future of the species with whom we share the Earth now rest.

A Still-Growing El Niño Set To Bear Down On U.S.

NASA - Alan Buis

The latest satellite image of Pacific sea surface heights from Jason-2 (left) differs slightly from one 18 years ago from Topex/Poseidon (right). In Dec. 1997, sea surface height was more intense and peaked in November. This year the area of high sea levels is less intense but considerably broader. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The current strong El Niño brewing in the Pacific Ocean shows no signs of waning, as seen in the latest satellite image from the U.S./European Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 mission.
El Niño 2015 has already created weather chaos around the world. Over the next few months, forecasters expect the United States to feel its impacts as well.
The latest Jason-2 image bears a striking resemblance to one from December 1997, by Jason-2's predecessor, the NASA/Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) Topex/Poseidon mission, during the last large El Niño event. Both reflect the classic pattern of a fully developed El Niño.
The images show nearly identical, unusually high sea surface heights along the equator in the central and eastern Pacific: the signature of a big and powerful El Niño. Higher-than-normal sea surface heights are an indication that a thick layer of warm water is present.
El Niños are triggered when the steady, westward-blowing trade winds in the Pacific weaken or even reverse direction, triggering a dramatic warming of the upper ocean in the central and eastern tropical Pacific. Clouds and storms follow the warm water, pumping heat and moisture high into the overlying atmosphere. These changes alter jet stream paths and affect storm tracks all over the world.
This year's El Niño has caused the warm water layer that is normally piled up around Australia and Indonesia to thin dramatically, while in the eastern tropical Pacific, the normally cool surface waters are blanketed with a thick layer of warm water. This massive redistribution of heat causes ocean temperatures to rise from the central Pacific to the Americas. It has sapped Southeast Asia's rain in the process, reducing rainfall over Indonesia and contributing to the growth of massive wildfires that have blanketed the region in choking smoke.
El Niño is also implicated in Indian heat waves caused by delayed monsoon rains, as well as Pacific island sea level drops, widespread coral bleaching that is damaging coral reefs, droughts in South Africa, flooding in South America and a record-breaking hurricane season in the eastern tropical Pacific. Around the world, production of rice, wheat, coffee and other crops has been hit hard by droughts and floods, leading to higher prices.
In the United States, many of El Niño's biggest impacts are expected in early 2016. Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration favor an El Niño-induced shift in weather patterns to begin in the near future, ushering in several months of relatively cool and wet conditions across the southern United States, and relatively warm and dry conditions over the northern United States.
While scientists still do not know precisely how the current El Niño will affect the United States, the last large El Niño in 1997-98 was a wild ride for most of the nation. The "Great Ice Storm" of January 1998 crippled northern New England and southeastern Canada, but overall, the northern tier of the United States experienced long periods of mild weather and meager snowfall. Meanwhile, across the southern United States, a steady convoy of storms slammed most of California, moved east into the Southwest, drenched Texas and — pumped up by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico — wreaked havoc along the Gulf Coast, particularly in Florida.
"In 2014, the current El Niño teased us — wavering off and on," said Josh Willis, project scientist for the Jason missions at JPL. "But in early 2015, atmospheric conditions changed, and El Niño steadily expanded in the central and eastern Pacific.  Although the sea surface height signal in 1997 was more intense and peaked in November of that year, in 2015, the area of high sea levels is larger. This could mean we have not yet seen the peak of this El Niño."
During normal, non-El Niño conditions, the amount of warm water in the western equatorial Pacific is so large that sea levels are about 20 inches (50 centimeters) higher in the western Pacific than in the eastern Pacific. "You can see it in the latest Jason-2 image of the Pacific," said Willis. "The 8-inch [20-centimeter] drop in the west, coupled with the 10-inch [25-centimeter] rise in the east, has completely wiped out the tilt in sea level we usually have along the equator."
The new Jason-2 image shows that the amount of extra-warm surface water from the current El Niño (depicted in red and white shades) has continuously increased, especially in the eastern Pacific within 10 degrees latitude north and south of the equator. In the western Pacific, the area of low sea level (blue and purple) has decreased somewhat from late October. The white and red areas indicate unusual patterns of heat storage. In the white areas, the sea surface is between 6 and 10 inches (15 to 25 centimeters) above normal, while in the red areas, it is about 4 inches (10 centimeters) above normal. The green areas indicate normal conditions. The height of the ocean water relates, in part, to its temperature, and is an indicator of the amount of heat stored in the ocean below.
Within this area, surface temperatures are greater than 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in the central equatorial Pacific and near 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) off the coast of the Americas. This El Niño signal encompasses a surface area of 6 million square miles (16 million square kilometers) — more than twice as big as the continental United States.
While no one can predict the exact timing or intensity of U.S. El Niño impacts, for drought-stricken California and the U.S. West, it's expected to bring some relief.
"The water story for much of the American West over most of the past decade has been dominated by punishing drought," said JPL climatologist Bill Patzert. "Reservoir levels have fallen to record or near-record lows, while groundwater tables have dropped dangerously in many areas. Now we're preparing to see the flip side of nature's water cycle — the arrival of steady, heavy rains and snowfall."
In 1982-83 and 1997-98, large El Niños delivered about twice the average amount of rainfall to Southern California, along with mudslides, floods, high winds, lightning strikes and high surf. But Patzert cautioned that El Niño events are not drought busters. "Over the long haul, big El Niños are infrequent and supply only seven percent of California's water," he said.
"Looking ahead to summer, we might not be celebrating the demise of this El Niño," cautioned Patzert. "It could be followed by a La Niña, which could bring roughly opposite effects to the world's weather."
La Niñas are essentially the opposite of El Niño conditions. During a La Niña episode, trade winds are stronger than normal, and the cold water that normally exists along the coast of South America extends to the central equatorial Pacific. La Niña episodes change global weather patterns and are associated with less moisture in the air over cooler ocean waters. This results in less rain along the coasts of North and South America and along the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, and more rain in the far Western Pacific.
El Niño events are part of the long-term, evolving state of global climate, for which measurements of sea surface height are a key indicator.

Links

• El Niño images
• Latest El Niño forecast
• Animation of the evolution of the 2015 and 1997 El Niños
• How NASA studies El Niño
• NASA's satellite altimetry programs
• NASA's Earth science activities

Switzerland Has Warmest December Ever As Average Temperatures Rise 3.4c

The Guardian

The country that founded winter tourism has seen the mildest end to the year since records began 150 years ago with ski resort owners set to suffer

Tourists ski on a thin layer of snow in Leysin, Switzerland during the country's warmest December on record. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

Switzerland has experienced its warmest December since the country that founded winter tourism began keeping records 150 years ago.
Clear skies and dry ground have seen the Alpine nation end the year 3.4C above the long-term historical average for December, a climatologist for the federal office of meteorology and climatology (MeteoSwiss) said on Monday.
"There's no doubt about it," Stephan Bader said. "It's the warmest December in our recorded measurements dating back to 1864 – clearly. And it's especially pronounced at higher altitudes."
The dry warmth and slopes bereft of snow have hurt resort owners and ski lift operators, who are already contending with Switzerland's strong currency discouraging foreign visitors.
MeteoSwiss earlier this month said it expected 2015 to break the annual record for the third time in just a handful of years.
Globally, this year will be the warmest on record and 2016 could be even warmer due to the El Niño weather pattern, the World Meteorological Organization said last month. It warned that inaction on climate change could see global average temperatures rise by 6C or more.
It came as climate scientists in France said that this year's El Niño was the strongest ever measured, surpassing the one in 1997-98, both in terms of ocean surface temperature – up by more than 3C (5.4F) - and the surface area affected.
"It is probably the most powerful in the last 100 years," said Jerome Lecou, a climate expert at the French weather service Meteo France, noting that accurate measurements have only existed since the mid-20th century.
As was true in 1998, this year's super El Nino will have contributed to making 2015 the warmest on record, worldwide.
But the reverse may also be true, with climate change boosting the power of cyclical El Nino events.
"If you add the background global warming to natural weather phenomena, there's a tendency to break records left and right," Le Treut told AFP.

Links

• Analysis UK floods and extreme global weather linked to El Niño and climate change
• From Paraguay to the US, Australia to Spain, El Niño brings Christmas chaos
• Daffodils in bloom, the warmest ever December: how worrying is the world's strange weather?
• 2016 set to be hottest year on record globally
• Record US temperatures are work of El Niño and polar vortex, experts say
• Climate change makes past five-year period the warmest on record: WMO
• Record El Niño set to cause hunger for 10 million poorest, Oxfam warns

More Americans Were Killed In Christmas Weekend Storms This Year Than In Islamic Extremist Attacks Since 9/11

Salon - Ben Norton

Extreme and deadly weather over Christmas weekend shows Sanders is right: Climate change is the gravest threat

Lightning illuminates a house after a tornado touched down in Jefferson County, Ala., Friday, Dec. 25, 2015. (Credit: AP/Butch Dill)

When asked in the first Democratic presidential debate what he considers to be the greatest threat to national security, Sen. Bernie Sanders insisted it is climate change.

“The scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable,” Sanders said in the October debate.
In the second debate, in November, Sanders stood by his statements. A month later, the dangers about which Sanders warned would come into fruition.
Over the Christmas holiday weekend, at least 43 Americans were killed in a series of extreme storms and floods.
More than 20 states from Texas to Maine had severe weather warnings. Tornadoes were spotted in 10 states. Michigan saw a tornado for the first time in the month of December.
Up to 1,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in the storms, causing millions of dollars worth of damage. In Texas alone, 600 buildings were damaged or destroyed.
Millions of people were stranded, on the busiest weekend of the year. Thousands of flights were canceled and delayed. Major highways were covered with floodwater and snow.
While this extreme weather was raging throughout the southern and midwestern U.S., states across the East Coast broke heat records. On Christmas Day, at the same moment that Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico were hit with blizzards, it was over 70 degrees in New York City.
The U.S. was not alone. As these storms were hitting the U.S., South America and the U.K. were seeing huge flooding. As many as 160,000 people were evacuated because of storms in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
Overall, 2015 has been the hottest year ever on record. With extremely warm temperatures come extremely cold ones — and extreme weather.
Mountains of scientific studies show that extreme weather is directly linked to anthropogenic (aka, human-caused) climate change.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) notes that the “years 2011-2015 have been the warmest five-year period on record, with many extreme weather events — especially heatwaves — influenced by climate change.”
“The state of the global climate in 2015 will make history as for a number of reasons,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a November statement. “Levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached new highs… This is all bad news for the planet.”
In other words, all the facts show that Sanders is correct: Climate change is, by far, the largest threat to Americans’ security — and to the security of all other living things on this planet.
Sanders was pilloried by the American political and media establishments, nevertheless, for asserting that something seemingly abstract like climate change poses the greatest threat to the national security of not just the U.S., but also of the world as a whole.
Politicians and news outlets have constantly instead claimed that Islamic extremism poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security. Yet only a handful of Americans have been killed by self-proclaimed jihadists in the past 14 years, while climate change continues to get worse and worse.
To put things into perspective, more Americans were killed in the 2015 Christmas weekend storms than have been killed by Islamist extremists since 9/11.
Since the 9/11 attacks, 40 Americans have been killed by Islamist extremists. From 9/11 to mid-2015, just 26 Americans were killed by self-proclaimed jihadists. Fourteen more were killed in the San Bernardino massacre in December.
In the 2015 Christmas weekend storms, on the other hand, at least 43 Americans were killed.
If politicians and the media did their job — logically and sensibly governing and informing the public, not fear-mongering — this would not be a surprise. A comprehensive U.N. report released in November corroborated Sanders’ warnings. The study found that 90 percent of major disasters in the last 20 years have been weather-related. It also found that the U.S. had been hit with more weather-related disasters than any other nation, including enormous countries like China and India.
In the past 20 years, according to the U.N. report, there were at least 6,457 recorded floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts, and other disasters. 606,000 people were killed in this extreme weather. 4.1 billion more people were injured, made homeless, or left in need of emergency assistance.
The U.N. report estimated that the costs of these thousands of weather-related disasters were between $5 trillion and $6 trillion — or between  $250 billion and $300 billion every single year.
“Weather and climate are major drivers of disaster risk and this report demonstrates that the world is paying a high price in lives lost,” cautioned Margareta Wahlström, the U.N. official who oversaw the study.
The extreme weather that ravaged the U.S. over Christmas weekend is just one of these myriad disasters, yet many American politicians refuse to even acknowledge that it exists, or at least that it is caused by humans.
Nonetheless, as Sanders also stresses, this threat is not unavoidable; tangible actions can, and must, be taken here and now to mitigate it.
“Greenhouse gas emissions, which are causing climate change, can be controlled,” stressed WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud in November. “We have the knowledge and the tools to act. We have a choice. Future generations will not.”
Yet substantive action is being prevented by an obstinate reactionary political class and corporate media regime. As journalist Naomi Klein warns in her book and film “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” the capitalist system, which puts profit over people, guarantees that large corporations like fossil fuel giants, not scientists, lobby for and even write environmental policies and laws based upon their bottom line, not based on what is good for the world as a whole, and for the people in it.
Much of the media fuels this problem, by giving a platform to climate science-deniers and treating people like Sanders as freakish pariahs when they point out that climate change is a much larger threat that Islamic extremism will ever be.
The U.S. political and media establishments are exponentially more interested in Islamic extremism than they are in anthropogenic climate change-induced extreme weather, but the facts indisputably show that climate change is exponentially more dangerous. Until they begin to treat it as such, there will be more and more tragedies like those millions of Americans endured over Christmas weekend.

The Comedy Of Climate Change

ABC Science Show - Robyn Williams Presenter

Where are the laughs in global warming? Is there a comedy of climate? Three renowned experts in the field offer their considered opinions: Rod Quantock, Hannah Gadsby and Andrew Denton. Recorded at Womadelaide’s 2015 Planet Talks, our guests provide advice on boiling billionaires for dinner, and how to change the minds of sceptics.

Audio

Transcript

Robyn Williams: And so to WOMADelaide and the comedy of climate change.
My name is Robyn Williams, and in 1971 I did my last Monty Python, and it was a raid on the Tate Gallery to put bras and knickers on all the rude statues. And one of the most delightful things was Graham Chapman dressed as the Queen's mother standing with his moustache and a pipe, and people were wandering past in the street, almost collapsing with amazement at this incredible sight. He took absolutely no notice of that.
Now, I interviewed him for The Science Show a few years later and he was slightly unwell, so I was making him a cup of tea and I said, 'Do you take sugar?' And he said, 'No, I'm gay.' [laughter] That's exactly what my kids did, they laughed as well. It's got no logic to it. And the most amazing thing is, that that juxtaposition of what makes funny, because we are about to talk about climate and comedy, the funny thing about comedy is you can't predict it necessarily.
I have some colleagues here. Rod Quantock used to be in travel, I think he used to take a dead chicken on a stick and go to various other people's posh receptions and lovely dinners. Would you please welcome Rod Quantock?
[Applause]
Hannah Gadsby is a boxer, obviously. Really, she is, and a very enthusiastic one. Would you please welcome Hannah Gadsby?
[Applause]
Andrew Denton has lots of rope but never enough, and we miss you on telly.
[Applause]
So we have a number of juxtapositions in climate where an awful lot of scientists are in this world conspiracy, and some of it is funny, some of it is terribly sad. Rod Quantock, you've done a number of presentations over the years about climate change. I want to ask you, how can comedy illuminate a subject as serious and complex as that?

Rod Quantock: Easily. Okay, next question. Just to give you a bit of my background, I probably am the only comedian in Australia and I think I'm quite rare in the world who actually devotes all of his comedy shows to issues around climate change, but particularly things like peak oil. But to get to that point takes an awful lot of work. And I spent a lot of time being a political comic, and I have the advantage that most of you don't have; I've got nothing to do during the day. I work for an hour or two hours at night, and the rest of the time is my own. And I spend that time reading what you don't have time to read. And I've had people come to me at the end of a show about politics and people say to me, 'I love coming to your shows every year because it means I don't have to read the newspapers for a year.'
So when I got involved in climate change I applied for what used to be called a Keating Fellowship and Howard changed that very quickly to an Australia Council Fellowship. And I applied for it because I was broke, a condition which is with me constantly. And I thought, well, I've been around a while, I deserve some money. So I was about to turn 60 and I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll apply to them to do a project about the world from the day I was born. I was born in [mumbles], and I just look at the world, where it came from and how it got to where it was, contemporaneous with this application.
So I did that, and I began in 1948, the declaration of human rights, the division of Israel and Palestine, North and South Korea, Velcro was invented in 1948, the first Holden rolled off…you know, the roots of our contemporary world are there and a lot of it is still festering today. I'm not what you'd call a bright person but I'm methodical, and I did it chronologically. And as I went through I started to see things like the impact of chemicals in our environment. I'd been aware of that, but as you march back through time and then push your way forward, these become more and more apparent.
And then I hit the 1973 oil shock when the world economy collapsed through lack of oil. So I got interested in peak oil. But as I got closer and closer to the day, I saw climate change looming and looming and looming larger in discussions. So I took that and I really knuckled down and I read everything there is to read about it, and I came to the conclusion that we are all going to die. That's it.
Now, I have a preconditioned attitude to apocalypse. By the time I was 10, I'd seen black-and-white footage of the Hiroshima bomb, I'd seen black-and-white footage of the Holocaust, I'd seen black-and-white footage of Japanese prisoners of war, I've seen the worst that humanity could do to one another. And so it was very clear to me that climate change is something we weren't going to stop because it's not in our nature to be intelligent and clever about these things.
And then you throw in peak oil and you suddenly realise that the brick wall is approaching very, very quickly. So I thought, what do you do? And I thought, well, you tell people about it, that's what you do. So I did a show called Bugger the Polar Bears, This Is Serious, because people were always thinking it's about polar bears. And I did shows called The People We Should Eat First. I actually have a list of people we should eat first. And when climate change really hits, I want you to remember that the person sitting in front of you is made of protein. Just keep that in mind. And as a general warning to you all, try not to look delicious. I actually used to be 18 stone but I'm trying to get less and less a source of food.
But it's a lot of work to understand it. The basics are simple. CO₂ is a greenhouse gas and there's lots of it, more in the atmosphere, so we are heating up. But the consequences, the flow-ons, the shift changes in the state of our environment that can happen very, very suddenly, those sorts of things you've really got to study. And I got to a point where I thought it's all over. And I thought, well, you're a comedian, what would you know? So I rang a professor at Melbourne University, one who shared in the Nobel Prize for the IPCC report and said, 'Can I come and have a coffee with you?' And I said, 'We are all going to die, aren't we?' And he said, 'Yeah, we are.' And I spoke to a few more.
And in the end I rang Robyn Williams because I was going to be in Sydney, and I thought he's the man who speaks to all the scientists, I'll save myself a lot of coffees that I can't afford and go and talk to him. So I went to him and I said, 'Look, are we all going to die?' And he said, 'Yes.' So that's where I got to.
And then turning that into comedy was very difficult. It took me approximately two years to be able to go on and do a two-hour show about climate change. But as I go on and I see that my rather naive hopes I suppose of telling people here's the problem and people will respond clearly hasn't worked. So I'm now in a position where I'll keep doing the comedy but I don't have terribly much confidence at all to make a difference.
Robyn Williams: What I want to know, Rod, give me two names of who you would eat first.
Rod Quantock: Well, Tony Abbott…
Robyn Williams: He is too chewy!
Rod Quantock: I know, he's too thin, and I mentioned this to an audience, and a woman put her hand up and said, 'Stock. Boil him down for stock.' That's right, isn't it, that's what you do. You know, Gina Rinehart…
Robyn Williams: No, please!
Rod Quantock: I put out a recipe book called How to Feed a Family of Four to a Family of Eight. But anyway…so…anything else?
Robyn Williams: All right. Hannah, same question.
Hannah Gadsby: Assuming I'm not here because I'm an expert on climate change, as is Rod, I do have all day to myself, but I don't put it to use. A lot of naps, which I think is an energy saving technique. I think I'm doing my bit. I'm here because I've used comedy to make unpopular ideas palatable. In the early days, one of those was making homosexuality palatable in Tasmania.
Robyn Williams: It worked!
Hannah Gadsby: It worked, yes, I take all the credit. When I first started doing comedy I realised comedians are the underdogs, and then I saw that most of the comedians and especially the successful ones are white, middle class, heterosexual men who went to private school. I love it when they get angry. They are like the canaries; you know the world is screwed if they're angry.
What I came to learn very quickly is that I was not only up against it in life, I was up against it in comedy. I'm not everyone's picture of what a comedian should be. I don't hold true to most of the clichés of what I am, as a Tasmanian lesbian with mental health issues. That's an uphill struggle in life, and great for comedy, but I don't hold true to any of the clichés; Tasmanians are simple, lesbians are angry and don't have a sense of humour, women are moody and irrational and emotional and can multitask. None of these things apply to me.
And of course mental health being something that has come into the public consciousness, but certainly when I was first talking about it, it was still a shock that comedians were sad. The cat's out of the bag now, I've lost the element of surprise, that a lot of my work isn't done at these lovely festivals where you're instantly on my side. I do clubs and pubs, I do regional tours, and I will follow comedians who make homophobic, sexist, racist remarks. And I cannot be angry to an audience who have just laughed at that, because they are not going to listen to me, they are not going to like me and they are not going to laugh at me. And if someone is not laughing, they're not listening.
So part of what I think I'm really good at is making people listen to things they normally find uncomfortable. And one of my favourite things that has happened to me in my career is I was in Tasmania once and this bloke came up to me, and he's not my demographic. He'd look at a lot of you and beat a lot of you up, that kind of guy. He came up to me, and I felt threatened, I felt physically threatened, I'm like, oh no. And he just came up to me, 'You're that piss-funny lesbian.' I'm like, 'I hope, because I don't want to disappoint you.'
And then he said, 'That stuff you do about depression, spot on, good onya mate.' And I'm like, 'I don't know what I've done.' It was just a really lovely moment, to think that someone like that has looked at someone like me and listened, and I think that's what comedy can do in a situation like this, take an unpopular and a very miserable topic and make a conversation that is a little bit enjoyable other than just, 'We are all going to die.' It's, 'We're all going to die, ha ha ha.'
Robyn Williams: Yes, it is funny. Thank you. It's actually incredible how serious this bunch were when we were briefing for an hour and a half. How do you do this in front of an audience, an unforgiving audience like us? In the middle of that, Paul Willis turned up with his son Chester, and they had just been to Argentina, to a cathedral, and they walked in and there was this wonderful statue of the Madonna and Jesus, and Chester, who's eight said, 'Look Dad, there's Brian.' It was too. Andrew, same question.
Andrew Denton: Well, my favourite definition of comedy is Mel Brooks who said that tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. I think it's important to frame this conversation with that.
I have for some years now been attempting to form a group of what I refer to as fundamentalist moderates, and our aim is to travel the world and slaughter anyone that won't see both sides of the argument. Because it's hard not to see people of good intent and great intellect and hard work such as scientists who are working on this traduced in the way they are, to hear them referred to as millionaires (although I prefer Jon Stewart's description of them as thousandaires), and to see the scientific method being so thoroughly rubbished and disrespected.
And it's hard not to respond to that with some degree of anger or some degree of sarcastic humour. Part of me tends to think that those who believe that the scientific method that has led us to understand global warming is ridiculous, should have their electricity and planes and cars taken away because clearly they don't work either.
I sometimes think that Andrew Bolt should be given a holiday home on the shores of Vanuatu for a year from which to write his articles, just to get him a little closer to the subject. But then I've realised that the getting angry is kind of a waste of energy, it's not useful energy, and energy is the source of what we are talking about here, and that the energy we should be expending is on that vast group of people in the middle who are uncertain and who are looking for cues about what to think and how to act. And it's a difficult subject to get your head around because it's distant and it's abstract and it's existential, and it's inviting people, as Rod and Hannah have reminded us, to attend their own funeral procession.
So where does comedy sit in this mix? I think we tend to overstate the effectiveness of satire quite often. I thought the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks where some people posited that the terrorists only killed these people because they were so terrified of them was ridiculously and patently nonsense. These terrorists acted with such brazen impunity, terrified was what they were not.
And I'm often reminded of Peter Cook's response when he set up the Establishment Club in London, which was a satirical club, and Peter Cook was one of the finest comic minds we've ever produced. And he was asked, 'What difference do you think this is going to make to British politics?' And he said, 'Well, I think it will affect British politics in the same way as German cabaret unseated Hitler.' And I think we can overstate the value of satire and its impact greatly.
However, I do think comedy, when done in a certain way, has its place. And as evidence of this, those of you that saw John Oliver do that piece where he got 97 climate scientists to debate three climate deniers to visually represent the actual statistics of the debate was a very effective piece of comedy, because even if you're on the other side of the argument, you could sure as hell understand what he was going to say.
Comedy when it's done well shows people ways of thinking, ways of organising their arguments, ways of critically analysing the world. It's why people like Bill Hicks and George Carlin and Lenny Bruce are still remembered and quoted and watched and listened to and read today because they didn't just tell jokes, they put together an argument and they used comedy to make it stick. As Hannah said, if people are laughing at you, they are listening. And people on both sides of the divide, left and right, have a universal desire to laugh and to be made laugh.
However, I think the issue is if comedy is just preaching to the choir, as we are today, hallelujah, then I think it is limited. And the question to me is how does comedy become useful, how does it speak across the gap, how does it speak to the elephant in the room? I keep hearing climate change referred to as the elephant in the room. Well, actually it's not the elephant in the room, it is the room, it is the room we're in, there is no other room. So how do we speak across the gap, and how do we reach that vast group of people in the middle who are looking at ways to act? So my belief is that the way to do that is to put humour together with humanity.
Robyn Williams: Hannah, were you about to use your microphone?
Hannah Gadsby: No…it's not a shape I'm used to…
Andrew Denton: We all want to live in a world, as George W Bush said, where man and fish can live together peacefully. And the question to me is what is it…let's reach beyond the things that we dislike about our opponents and that they hate about us, and what is it that we have in common? One of the greatest primal drivers of civilisation has been the desire to protect the next generation. Even those who you most despise on the other side would not argue the thought of a clean planet would be nice, food security would be good, wars not based on immigration would be excellent, and a decent planet for our children would be great. So if we can agree on those things, and it's surely possible to do that, then how do we move from there? And this is the ultimate human problem, this is human made, and I believe our response to it needs to be based in humanity, emotion, as Hannah said, because when people respond with their hearts…a lot of the climate change argument is about intellect, it's about graphs and information and statistics, and they are shocking and sobering. But if you want people to act, you've got to speak to their heart.
So, for example, the demonization of scientists. I think it would be a very worthwhile thing as a response to what's being talked about, as the entire scientific method has been trashed and their motives have been questioned, to actually go and talk to these people as human beings, and talk to them not just about the work they've done and why they do it and the passion they feel about it, but what about what their doubts are as well. And I think it would be worthwhile and useful to accept the fact that the people who are most passionately committed on both sides of this argument, the activists and the denialists and those who would lie about it, perhaps their motives and passions come from a similar place which is the incredible fear and the almost incomprehensible task of trying to face up to an existential threat.
And in George Marshall's book, one of the interesting things he does is he goes to speak to Christian fundamentalists, and he does this because he wants to know how religions who have been the most effective communicators and instigators of mass communal action, how they've done it. And a man he goes to speak to is Joel Hunter at the Northland Church who says one of the most important things we do is we have a process whereby we accept that there is doubt and uncertainty and there is backsliding in this process, and we encourage people to express it and we acknowledge it.
And I think it would be worthwhile for us in this conversation, rather than simply demonising…and the tactics are deplorable and mendacity needs to be called out where it is, but I think it would be a more worthwhile exercise rather than just launching into that pitched battle, to actually try and get a broader understanding as to why these people think the way they do. Because it's not simply about 'they hate us', and I suspect that their fears and their desires for the planet are not that dissimilar to ours, but when somebody is connected emotionally they can transcend ideology, and that's the broader point I'm trying to make today, which is when we get locked into ideology we don't move forward.
Robyn Williams: Andrew Denton, with Hannah Gadsby and Rod Quantock, at WOMADelaide.