Once if you were a climate scientist the chief enemy was denial. Now, says Michael E. Mann, it’s more likely to be “doomism”: the idea that taking action to reduce the threat of runaway climate change is pointless because it’s already too late.
Doomism, argues the internationally renowned climate scientist, is part of the latest frontier in the climate wars - a new tool being exploited by those resisting change in the way the world does business.
It sits alongside what he calls “soft denialism” (climate change is happening but it's OK, we can adapt) and “deflection” (sowing division by making it all about individual lifestyle choices). Such tactics, he says, are in some ways “even more pernicious” than the old arguments flatly rejecting human-induced climate change.
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| An Extinction Rebellion protest calling for stronger action to reduce climate change. Credit: AAP |
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| "Dangerous impacts from climate change are with us in real time": Climate scientist Michael E. Mann. Credit: Getty Image |
Mann, who is professor of atmospheric sciences at Pennsylvania State University, believes the world has 10 years in which to make the profound systemic changes and cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that might limit warming to around 1.5 degrees centigrade.
Left to business as usual the world will warm 4 to 5 degrees, leaving the generations who follow with a “fundamentally different planet” - one where sea-level rise will wreak havoc on coastal cities and communities, while climate extremes devastate terrestrial and marine environments. The impacts, he says, would be irreversible, even if a way could be found to “magically” cool the planet again.
Mann found himself thrust into the midst of the climate wars after publication of his now-famous “hockey stick” graph of 1999, which depicted a sharp rise in global temperature as CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increased. The graph featured heavily in an early report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), making Mann a prime target for attack by climate change deniers.
“Politics came to us – we didn’t come to politics,” he says of the scientific struggle of the past two decades. While in many ways he’d love a return to his old life of research and number-crunching, necessity has forced him to embrace the role of what he calls “scientist advocate”.
That’s the mission that brought him to a roomful of hard-headed finance types in Sydney this week, at a conference organised by the Investor Group on Climate Change.
That Mann should be invited to address such a meeting makes perfect sense to the IGCC’s chief executive, Emma Herd.
Financiers and investors are now becoming ever more alert to the risks posed by climate change, she says. The dollars are starting to follow, even without the policy leadership which business has looked for in vain from the federal government. Collectively the group’s 74 members, based in Australia and New Zealand, have more than two trillion dollars’ worth of assets under management and they want assurances from companies that those investments have a long-term future.
“What I’m increasingly seeing - and investors are a big part of the reason for this - is that the private sector in Australia recognises that climate change is going to cause major economic shifts and are trying to manage it,” she says.
“Government is still fighting the political fight. The private sector is getting on with it and doing the best they can. That doesn’t mean you are not going to get different views from different sectors … but what you are not seeing is fighting the need to do anything about it at all.”
She says the “energy and momentum” at this week’s meeting was “palpable … It really feels like in the last 12 to 18 months investors are stepping up their engagement with companies and pushing companies to have a much better response”.
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| Icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland. Scientists are trying to understand the alarmingly rapid melting of the ice. Credit: AP |
“What is underway is a transition to a low-carbon future. That direction is irreversible and the smart money has worked that out and can see globally the trillions of dollars of infrastructure required to transition the world over the decades to come.”
The shift in the energy system is already playing out much faster than many predicted, Summerhayes adds. “The world went from no smart phones to saturation in 10 years. The economics will drive the shift to renewables in a similar way.”
As I heard someone say recently, you can’t do business on a dead planet.London-based Georg Kell, chair of influential Anglo-German asset management firm Arabesque Partners, was another panellist at the conference who, like Summerhayes, flags technological change as a key driver of change.
Geoffrey Summerhayes, chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum
But he also takes heart from the growing impact of the case for intergenerational fairness, now being made more powerfully than ever by young activists like Sweden’s Greta Thunberg. (Mann joked this week that OPEC had zeroed in on her like the malevolent “Eye of Sauron” in fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings).
“We have to ask ourselves, honestly, when we pass away, are our children in a position to enjoy the world as we have done?” Kell says. “Will they be able to go camping, scuba diving, will they have the same beauties, or will they live in a different world that will be far more confronting?”
Climate change, he says, is not about “red, or blue, or green” politics. “In Europe, new alliances are coming into being … CEOs of leading companies are now teaming up with green parties, unheard of years ago, teaming up to win over mainstream parties and help re-shape the political landscape.”
Any business leader that played the denial card was guilty of “stupidity at best, and gross negligence, I would argue, almost criminal behaviour, at worst,” he says. “The evidence has been compelling for years already.”
A striking theme at the investor conference was frustration over the inability of Australia’s political parties to resolve the climate wars after a decade of bickering and stalemate. Government actions were seen as piecemeal and sometimes a direct obstacle to private sector investment. “If electric vehicles had been cast as a cost-of-living issue we would have them by now … instead it was cast as a climate-change initiative so it became a political football,” one speaker pointed out.
The Australian Industry Group’s Innes Willox complained that the energy wars had become “Australia’s Brexit”.
“Industry finds it increasingly difficult to make reasoned, calculated investment in the energy space … so it is going its own way,” he told the conference. Others worried that various state governments – including NSW and Victoria – have declared goals of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but with no clarity for business about how to get there.
(The Morrison government’s insistence that it is on track to meet its modest Kyoto and Paris carbon emission reduction targets were dealt a blow by the International Monetary Fund earlier this month, which said Australia on current trajectories would fail to meet those targets even with a steep carbon tax).
Tony Maher of the CFMEU, representing mine workers, appealed to investors to prioritise the social and political dimensions of tackling climate change as well as the financial risks. “So far Germany is the only country that can say there has been a just transition [out of coal],” he told the conference. “Workers always get screwed, communities get broken … we have to prove to them that [that won’t happen].”
Mann warned his business audience this week that there are uncertainties in the climate modelling but that was not a reason for inaction. “If anything, it's the opposite ... things are happening faster and with greater magnitude than we predicted a decade or so ago. There are things missing from the models that are causing them in some sense to be overly conservative.”
One example is the massive undulations in the northern hemisphere jet stream that locked in both extreme low- and extreme high-pressure weather systems in different parts of the US this year. That, he said, was “not captured in the modelling”.
Mann, who will take up a visiting professorship at the University of New South Wales in 2020, insists the world doesn’t need “a miracle” to avert the most devastating climate change scenarios. “We have the solution in our hands. We simply need to find the political will to provide the incentives necessary to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”
Not all sections of the business community are alive to the need for urgent action, but building alliances with those that are is, he says, “a huge opportunity”.
“It’s one thing when environmental groups are leading the communication effort. But when you have the business community, the finance community, the insurance and reinsurance communities talking about climate change as an existential threat, it potentially … really broadens the constituency for climate action.”
Links
- ‘The most villainous act in the history of human civilisation.’ Michael E Mann speaks out
- Climate expert Michael Mann slams climate deniers as ‘villainous’ and ‘immoral’
- Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions
- Lifestyle Changes Aren’t Enough to Save the Planet. Here’s What Could
- What's happening in the Amazon?
- Summer likely to bring increased risk of heatwaves and droughts: bureau
- Prince William and Kate Middleton visit melting glacier
- Greenland has massive ice melt after European heatwave
- 'This is all wrong': A transcript of Greta Thunberg's Climate Summit speech
- Lifestyle Changes Aren’t Enough to Save the Planet. Here’s What Could
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