Lethal Heating: 06/08/16

08/06/2016

Climate Change: Will 'Stormageddon' Make Us Seek Higher Political Ground?

ABC The Drum - Peter Lewis (Opinion)

Following the warmest April on record, ferocious storms lash the east coast of Australia. You would think climate change in action would be an election circuit breaker. But it's not, writes Peter Lewis.

Will storms that hit the east coast of Australia wash away climate change complacency? (Supplied: Jakob ze Zwart)

Half-time in the 2016 election campaign was marked by storms that lashed the east coast of Australia with a force that could only wash away the complacency of those who continue to turn a blind eye to climate change.
After sweltering through the warmest April on record, followed by the strange desert conditions of May, only the most ardent deniers are sticking to the line that it's only a normal fluctuation.
Climate change in action must surely be an election circuit breaker.
Except it's not. According to this week's Essential Report there are still 28 per cent of the population who class themselves in the "business as usual".

Do you believe that there is fairly conclusive evidence that climate change is happening and caused by human activity or do you believe that the evidence is still not in and we may just be witnessing a normal fluctuation in the earth's climate which happens from time to time?

	Total	Vote Labor	Vote Lib/Nat	Vote Greens	Vote other
Climate change is happening and is caused by human activity	59%	69%	45%	91%	57%
We are just witnessing a normal fluctuation in the earth's climate	28%	18%	42%	6%	35%
Don't know	13%	13%	12%	3%	9%

This result is actually trending higher than in recent years with belief in the science as low 45 per cent in the wake of the 2010 Federal election.
What is striking about the week's storms is that it has to date failed to spark the tepid political non-debate around climate change that has been nothing more than a footnote to this election.
To date discussion of climate change has been limited to a proof-point for the Prime Minister's character by critics who see a gap between his pre-coup rhetoric and his performance as national leader.
Meanwhile, Labor doesn't seem to have the stomach for another campaign where they are positioned as the custodians of a "big new tax on everything" and prefer instead to focus on picture opps for renewable investment - which is the safe way to engage with the issue.
And if the responses to this week's Essential Report are a guide, that's not about to change soon.
When asked to rate their top three election issues, just 13 per cent of voters can find space for "addressing climate change".

Which are the three most important issues in deciding how you would vote at a federal election?

Ensuring the quality of Australia's health system	49%
Management of the economy	44%
Australian jobs and protection of local industries	34%
Ensuring a quality education for all children	28%
Ensuring a fair taxation system	26%
Security and the war on terrorism	19%
Housing affordability	18%
Protecting the environment	13%
Addressing climate change	13%
Political leadership	11%
A fair industrial relations system	8%
Controlling interest rates	8%

And when asked which party voters would trust to handle the issue the big winner is neither side - with 40 per cent nominating "don't know" followed by Labor on 35 and the Liberals on 25 per cent.
Why the silence? Here's a clue.
When we asked for SBS News whether voters want to hear more or less on the subject, there is not a huge appetite for more detail, especially compared with other policy issues.

Between now and the election do you want to hear more or less about the parties' policies on any of the following issues?

	Want to hear more	Want to hear less	No opinion
Same sex marriage	30%	38%	32%
Education funding	59%	16%	26%
Housing affordability	57%	15%	27%
Protecting the environment	50%	23%	27%
The NBN	40%	27%	33%
Renewable energy	59%	18%	23%
Taxation	56%	18%	26%
Immigration	41%	32%	28%
Creating employment	62%	14%	24%
Health and Medicare	70%	11%	19%
Climate change	44%	31%	25%
Managing the economy	61%	15%	24%

We want to understand health and education, jobs and the economy; but when it comes to climate change most of us aren't up for any more detail.
So what's going on?
My take is that climate change has become the debate that has been run and re-run until we have given up hope that there is any prospect of government of any stripe doing anything meaningful to shift the compass.
With the major parties are both committed to neutralising the issue, there is no point of engagement and even when climate becomes the news they focus on the giant waves, rather than showing any appetite to make them.
Meanwhile, the Greens are focused on killing the coal industry in a play that it is bold and ambitious - and largely ignored by the voting public.
Which leaves us with the question at the heart of this long and increasingly eerie election campaign: who are we voting for? People who are so committed to giving us what we want, that they're actually not what we want at all.

Peter Lewis is a director of Essential Media Communications (EMC), a public affairs and research company specialising in campaigning for progressive social and political organisations.

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Climate Change: Almost Half Of Australia Is Still Ignorant Or Confused, New Poll Reveals

New Matilda - Thom Mitchell

(IMAGE: Corey Balazowich, Flickr)

Labor and the Greens have sought to make climate change a key election issue this year, but that hasn't changed the fact that a terrifying proportion of the voting public have buried their heads deep in the burning-hot sand.
An Essential Poll* out this afternoon suggests that 28 per cent of the public believe "we are just witnessing a normal fluctuation in the Earth's climate," while a further 13 per cent "don't know" if humans are to blame.
So, that's 41 per cent of Australians who are ignorant and/or confused.
On the upside the poll suggests that since a (much more reliable) CSIRO study on attitudes to climate change was published last year, denialism has trended down.
The Liberal-National Parties attracted the lions share of climate deniers: In all, less than half of the Government's support base – at 45 per cent – believe that "climate change is happening and is caused by human activity".
That leaves 42 per cent of Coalition voters who think "we are just witnessing a normal fluctuation in the Earth's climate," and a further 12 per cent of the LNP support base which "don't know" whether man-made climate change is real.

(A screenshot from today's Essential Poll.)

Labor voters were less conspiratorial. A total of 69 per cent of Labor supporters are convinced "climate change is happening and is caused by human activity". The party still has a climate-denying rump, however, with 18 per cent of Labor voters not convinced humans are to blame, and 13 per cent unsure.
Unfortunately for the Opposition, while its support base is generally aware that humans are demolishing the struts for life on Earth, a key plank of Labor's repair plan is proving unpopular.
Only 15 per cent of Opposition supporters selected an Emissions Trading Scheme as the best response to climate change, despite that being a central and recently unveiled component of the party's climate policy.
The Coalition's solution – its Direct Action reverse auctions, which pay polluters with public money to pollute a little less – was seen as the best response to climate change by only 12 per cent of Government supporters.

(IMAGE: Ulrich Joho, Flickr.)

In keeping with the findings of past polls, incentivising renewable energy was a climate crowd pleaser. It was the preferred action on climate change for 49 per cent of voters, who were split more or less evenly across both major parties.
Overall, 12 per cent of voters preferred "no action" on climate change. That's a bit strange, when you consider that 41 per cent are effectively unsure if humans have a hand in the problem (and it's worth noting there was no option for outright denial).
Labor was more trusted on environmental issues, but with so many Australians ignorant of what's probably the gravest environmental issue, you have to wonder whether we can trust ourselves.

*The Essential Poll surveyed 1011 people, between 2 and 5 June.

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It’s Time For A New Age Of Enlightenment: Why Climate Change Needs 60,000 Artists To Tell Its Story

The Conversation - Elizabeth Boulton

An electric screen showing Shanghai Pudong financial area in a clear day, is seen amid heavy smog in Shanghai. What can art do to make climate change more real? Aly Song

In 2013, one of the world's leading public relations experts, Bob Pickard, cried out to the climate world: "mobilise us!" In a frustrated op-ed, he listed 20 key problems with climate communication. One of them was "story fatigue": bland stories with "highly repetitive and stale" themes.
Climate information is still often confusing, unengaging and absent from the wider public discourse. Linguistic analysis found that the most recent IPCC report was less readable than seminal papers by Einstein. Last year, in America, climate news media coverage rates dropped despite the historical Paris Climate Summit and Pope Francis' climate Encyclical.
One key risk is complacency – a perception that the issue is now resolved. This is despite the risk increasing, as our response lags.
One study found that Australia had the highest percentage of climate sceptics in the world, (17% as compared to 12% in the USA). Analysis of global attitudes in 2015 found that, while across the world, 54% of people considered climate change a "very serious problem," in Australia this figure was only 43%.
Communicating the climate message to inform, but also engage and influence behaviour has proven intensely difficult.
Over a decade of research on this issue has highlighted the need for communication to engage with people's "deep frames" – beliefs formed over a lifetime, which are mostly subconscious.

A girl holds an umbrella over an ice sculpture, made from water taken from the Yellow, Yangtze and Ganges rivers, at an exhibition by Greenpeace. Jason Lee

My research paper, recently published in WIRES Climate Change draws upon cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and philosophy, among other fields, to explore the emerging idea that global warming exceeds modern humans' cognitive and sensory abilities.
To overcome this impasse, climate communication needs to engage people at a philosophical, sensory and feeling level. People need to be able to feel and touch the new climate reality; to explore unfamiliar emotional terrain and be helped to conceive their existence differently.
How is this to be done? The world must turn to its artists: storytellers, film-makers; musicians; painters and multi-media wizards, to name a few.
Under the global Future Earth initiative, a team of around 60,000 scientists and social scientists has been assembled to understand and report on the physical, tangible dimensions of the problem.
I argue we need 60,000 arts and humanities experts to focus upon the intangibles – the communication, engagement and meaning-making aspects of the problem.
Eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has developed a new way of telling the climate story. He recasts global warming as a hyperobject – something which is "massively distributed in time and space relative to humans." Its arrival, he has said, renders humans "weak, lame and vulnerable."
Unlike the Anthropocene conception, which puts humans conspicuously at the center of the problem, the Hyperobject narrative pushes humans to the side.
They are no longer "masters" of Earth, they are now subject to its whims. Human laws, intuitions and other systems of responding to problems are, in the face of this "hyperobject", revealed as trivial.
Artworks Morton discusses which capture this new "hyperobject" include Yukultji Napangati's depictions of an interconnected, "mesh-like" reality, Marina Zurkow's Mesocosm multi-media series which presents "nature" as being dynamic and interconnected with humans and Cornelia Hesse-Honegger's microscopic bugs suffering radiation-induced deformities.

Screen shot of Marina Zurkow's computer-driven animation Mesocosm (Wink, Texas)

Of course many artists are already grappling with climate change.
ARTCOP21, a gigantic global climate art festival, coincided with the Paris Climate talks, while the Reset-Modernity exhibition in Germany "offers a set of disorienting/reorienting procedures…"
Amitav Ghosh's new novel The Great Derangement (2016) considers why modern humans seem disabled in the face of the climate threat.
Olafur Eliasso's installation art, The Weather Project, alludes to the prominent role the sun now has in the consciousness of the climate-aware citizen.
Australian artists are undertaking similar explorations.
John Reid's participatory performance art, Walking the Solar System asks people to hold a frozen walking stance for one minute, during which time they imagine the Earth turning 1,800 kilometres.
This helps them connect to planetary rather than human notions of existence, thereby perhaps starting to bridge the cognitive and sensory disconnect.
A collaboration of poetry, art and sculpture in the On the Verge exhibition revealed the global warming lived experience as a precarious one.
Meanwhile, Gotye's Eyes Wide Open music video contrasted pictures of present day industrialisation with images of the earth as a barren wasteland.
The Australian Environmental Humanities hub and Climarte help to network Australian creative responses to climate change, while the Performance Climates event to be held in Melbourne this July, examines the role of performance art and theatre in responding to it.
In November, Sydney will host the Global Ecologies – Local Impacts Conference, which considers the Environmental Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
But the scale of effort, when compared to the role artists have played in other significant societal shifts, is piecemeal.
Consider the artistic and cultural flourishing that accompanied the rise of Ancient Greece, supported by the agents of change Pericles and Alexander the Great.
Or the Islamic Golden Age of the 8th and 9th centuries, which saw a boom in both art and science.
Or the Enlightenment, which featured arrays of great scientists, philosophers, musicians and artists such as Galileo; Newton; Descartes; Spinoza; Kant; Hobbes; Voltaire; Goya; Bach and Mozart.
If a new human civilisation is to emerge that can live within its ecological limits, artists and communicators must have a prominent place, alongside the great scientific and technological innovators of our times.
Humanity will never be able to defeat a threat it cannot perceive.

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