17/09/2019

Striking For A Better Future

Pro Bono - Wendy Williams

Around the world millions of students are preparing to put down their pens and walk out of class to demand action on climate change. Daisy Jeffrey is one of those students.
17-year-old Sydney student Daisy Jeffrey is one of the lead organisers of the School Strike For Climate (SS4C) here in Australia.
The School Strike For Climate is an international movement of school students, most of whom have never met in person, but who have been united over a concern for our planet.
Inspired by Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, who staged a protest in August 2018 outside the Swedish Riksdag, the movement has grown to become the biggest ever global climate action.
There are now more than 2,500 strikes planned across 120 countries this Friday – three days before world leaders meet in New York for the United Nations Emergency Climate Summit.
Students across Australia – in every capital city and in dozens of regional towns and centres  – will be joined by workers, First Nations people, parents, unions and more at strikes.
In Australia the grassroots movement is calling for three things:
  1. No new coal, oil and gas projects, including the Adani mine.
  2. 100 per cent renewable energy generation and exports by 2030.
  3. Fund a just transition and job creation for all fossil-fuel workers and communities.
Organisers say everyone is invited. Everyone is needed.
Ahead of this week’s climate strike, Jeffrey talks to Pro Bono News about her decision to strike, why students have been forced into taking action, and how people can get involved.

How did you get involved with the SS4C?
I found out about it maybe a week before it happened and I didn’t realise that you could get involved online. So I brought about half my school. My school has only got 160 kids, but I brought along quite a few kids to the strike. And then I got put in touch by someone who knew the main organiser for Sydney at that stage. So I became involved on the day. And then a week later, I ended up speaking at this massive Stop Adani rally at the town hall. So it’s just been a pretty insane rollercoaster.

What has it been like to go from being a Year 11 student focused on your studies to being thrust to the front of a movement?
Well, for me, and I think you’d get the same response from a lot of kids who are in the strike movement, it felt terrifying before, like I was suffocating, not being able to do anything or not feeling like I had any power over my own future or what the lives of future generations were going to look like.
To have the chance to get involved and actually fight for a better future has been time consuming and difficult, but it just feels like some of that stress has been slightly alleviated.

And how are you finding balancing studying and being involved in the strike?
It’s really difficult! And particularly when it’s such an important cause, you kind of feel like you want to be around all hours of the night to make sure that everything is being handled correctly. But I survive on coffee.

What does your role look like in organising SS4C?
So what we have at this point, at least here in Sydney, and I think Melbourne and Adelaide have similar systems, is a main communication system. We’re about to set up a real national structure. At the moment we have a national network. And basically everyone is on it, but only really lead representatives communicate on there. Then you have your core teams in your cities. And here in Sydney, we have a core team of about 10 people and then a broader Sydney team of about 50. That broader Sydney team was only put together a few weeks ago, and it was because we knew other kids were really interested in being involved and so we wanted to bring them into the movement and to give them that opportunity to actually learn about different forms of activism and leadership and how to handle interviews or generally doing posturing or social media and different ways of going about making a difference, and outreach. So that’s been a really interesting process in the lead up to the strike, putting that together.
And as far as actually putting together a strike, it just involves a whole lot of paperwork. Hours and hours of talking with the police, the council, and particularly with The Domain because it’s privately owned. So that’s probably the least fun part of it.
Largely, the campaign is done through social media, when it comes to actually advertising the strike. And this time round, we’ve had a lot of communication with the unions surrounding our third demand, which is the demand for a just transition policy. So there’s been a lot of that and we’re hoping to get a strong union turnout on the day.
It’s just been a really incredible process. And this time we’re also inviting adults to come out, not only in support of the youth, but in support of First Nations’ climate justice and worker’s rights as we transition to renewable energy.

What is it that you’d like to see?
I just want to see adequate climate action. That’s all we’re asking for.
At the moment, we have a deputy prime minister who has basically said that he doesn’t believe in climate change. We have a prime minister who’s going to be in New York but not going to the climate summit. And, it is so far below inadequate. It’s astounding.
So in Australia, we really have no choice other than to go out on strike, because we just need to see this action as soon as possible. We don’t have time to wait until the next election. And unfortunately, I don’t think Labor would have made much more of a difference, but I think they would have made a difference. And unfortunately, this government just does nothing.

Why do you think it is important for students to be leading this movement?
We’ve taken the charge because it’s our future. To be honest, we’ve enjoyed the rallies and whatnot and we’ve enjoyed getting to know each other, but none of us want to be doing this. It’s something we feel like we’ve been forced into. We’re in a position where we have no alternative because the generations before us, particularly the older generations, have such a refusal to do anything. And our future is in the hands of a small number of massive corporations and governments, and neither are really doing anything to combat climate change.

How can people get involved and support you?
Get involved by finding us on social media. We’re pretty easy to find. And just send us a message, we’ll put you in touch with the relevant people and you can get involved. And if you don’t have the capacity to be at a strike, share it on social media with your friends, maybe do a little bit of posturing or just send an email around.
Or even just lower your carbon footprint. Individual change is not going to solve the climate crisis, but it must come hand-in-hand with system change. And even making those small changes yourself and encouraging your friends and family to lower their carbon footprint is still making a difference.
I feel like this is an overused line, but we don’t need one or two people doing things perfectly. We need billions of people doing things imperfectly. And that’s the only way we’re going to be able to make a difference.

What do you like to do in your free time?
Tough question! I suppose I’m quite into hanging out with people and Netflix. I’m your ordinary teen. This just happens to be taking up 100 per cent of my life at the moment.

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Faster Pace Of Climate Change Is 'Scary', Former Chief Scientist Says

BBC - Roger Harrabin

The increased frequency and intensity of wildfires may be one outcome of climate change. Getty Images
Extreme events linked to climate change, such as the heatwave in Europe this year, are occurring sooner than expected, an ex-chief scientist says.
Prof Sir David King says he's been scared by the number of extreme events, and he called for the UK to advance its climate targets by 10 years.
But the UN's weather chief said using words like “scared” could make young people depressed and anxious.
Campaigners argue that people won't act unless they feel fearful.
Speaking to the BBC, Prof King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, said: “It’s appropriate to be scared. We predicted temperatures would rise, but we didn’t foresee these sorts of extreme events we’re getting so soon.”
Several other scientists contacted by the BBC supported his emotive language.
The physicist Prof Jo Haigh from Imperial College London said: “David King is right to be scared – I’m scared too."
“We do the analysis, we think what’s going to happen, then publish in a very scientific way.
"Then we have a human response to that… and it is scary.”
Petteri Taalas, who is secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said he fully supported UN climate goals, but he criticised radical green campaigners for forecasting the end of the world.
It’s the latest chapter in the long debate over how to communicate climate science to the public.
Greta Thunberg thinks that action comes from people feeling a sense of panic. European Photopress Agency

Will emotive language leave young people depressed?
Dr Taalas agrees polar ice is melting faster than expected, but he’s concerned that public fear could lead to paralysis – and also to mental health problems amongst the young.
“We are fully behind climate science and fully behind the (upcoming) New York climate summit", he said.
“But I want to stick to the facts, which are quite convincing and dramatic enough. We should avoid interpreting them too much.
“When I was young we were afraid of nuclear war. We seriously thought it’s better not to have children.
“I’m feeling the same sentiment among young people at the moment. So we have to be a bit careful with our communication style.”
The polar scientist Andrew Shepherd from Leeds agreed with him that scientists should normally avoid emotional terms.
He said: "I would not use the term (scary) in general, but it is certainly surprising to see record (or near record) losses of ice. The year 2019 has been a bad year for Earth's ice."
However, some scientists appear to believe that their communications in the past have been failing to provoke an emotional response that would convince the public to act.

Do scientists agree climate change is scary?
We tested Prof King's views with the main authors of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), published in 2014.
The consensus among those who replied was that climate models had accurately forecast the rise in global mean temperature.
NASA

But the models hadn’t been sufficiently sophisticated to foresee events like this year’s extreme European heatwave or the slow-moving Hurricane Dorian – described by Nasa as “extraordinary” and “a nightmare scenario”.
Others mentioned severe ice melting at the poles; Tasmania suffering record droughts and floods in consecutive years; record wildfires in the Arctic and an unprecedented two large cyclones in Mozambique in one year.

Changes 'anticipated for decades'
Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, told us he’d been anticipating changes like these for four decades, although he hadn't been certain when they would arrive.
“I have a sense of the numbing inevitability of it all,” he said.
“It's like seeing a locomotive coming at you for 40 years - you could see it coming and were waving the warning flags but were powerless to stop it.”
Few of the scientists we contacted had faith that governments would do what was needed to rescue the climate in time.
They’re alarmed that global warming of just over 1C so far has already created a new normal in which historic temperature records will inevitably be broken more often. This is the predictable side of climate change.
Prof King argues that some changes were not well forecast.

What is the science behind extreme weather events?
The loss of land ice in Antarctica, for instance, is at the upper range of predictions in the IPCC AR5. And there are record ice losses in Greenland
Then there’s this year’s French heatwave.
Extreme and sustained temperatures in France in July led to droughts in some areas. Getty Images

Dr Friederike Otto from Oxford University is an expert in the attribution of extreme events to climate change.
She told us that in a pre-climate change world, a heatwave like this might strike once in 1,000 years.
In a post-warming world, the heatwave was still a one in 100 year phenomenon. In other words, natural variability is amplifying human-induced climate heating.
“With European heatwaves, we have realised that climate change is a total game-changer,” she said. It has increased the likelihood (of events) by orders of magnitude.
“It’s changing the baseline on which to make decisions. How do we deal with summer? It is very hard to predict,” Dr Otto explained.
Researchers had not yet had time to investigate the links between all of the major extreme weather events and climate change, she said.
With some phenomena such as droughts and floods there was no clear evidence yet of any involvement from climate change. And it was impossible to be sure that the slow progress of Dorian was caused by climate change.

'We can’t wait for scientific certainty'
Prof King said the world could not wait for scientific certainty on events like Hurricane Dorian. “Scientists like to be certain,” he said.
“But these events are all about probabilities. What is the likelihood that (Dorian) is a climate change event? I’m going to say ‘very high’.
“I can’t say that with 100% certainty, but what I can say is that the energy from the hurricane comes from the warm ocean and if that ocean gets warmer we must expect more energy in hurricanes.”
He continued: “If you got in a plane with a one in 100 chance of crashing you would be appropriately scared.
“But we are experimenting with the climate in a way that throws up probabilities of very severe consequences of much more than that.”
Hurricane Dorian was packing sustained winds of 295km/h (185mph) when it made landfall. Getty Images

Should the UK bring climate targets earlier?
Prof King said the situation was so grave that the UK should bring forward its date for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to almost zero from 2050 to 2040.
Some of the IPCC scientists we contacted didn’t share his urge to engage with the public on an emotional level.
Others agreed with him.
Prof John Church from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia told us: "Some things appear to be happening faster than projected. This may be partially related to the interaction of climate change and natural variability as well as the uncertainty in our understanding and projections.
“In my own area of sea level change, things are happening near the upper end of the projections.
“What is scary is our lack of appropriate response. Our continued lack of action is committing the world to major and essentially irreversible change.”

Nations 'going backwards' on climate change
Scientists have typically feared being labelled as alarmist or of being accused of campaigning if they express personal views on the issue.
But the recent rash of extremes has drawn some of them out.
Even cautious academics like Dennis Hartmann from the University of Washington in Seattle can’t hide their feelings completely.
He told me: “I do not use the ‘scary’ word.
"I prefer to talk about moving on to an economy in harmony with the natural world, but still providing a better life to humans.
“This is entirely possible. It is disheartening to me personally that we are moving faster in the opposite direction in most of the world.
“Much of what we are doing in increasing atmospheric CO2, extinction of species and destruction of ecosystems is nearly irreversible.
“So maybe it is time to be frightened.”

Links
UK commits to 'net zero' emissions by 2050
Climate change: Where we are in seven charts
What is climate change?
'Dirty secret' gas boosts climate warming
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Why Declaring A National Climate Emergency Would Neither Be Realistic Or Effective

The Conversation - 

The Greens and independent MPs are pushing for Australia to declare a national ‘climate emergency’, in line with several other nations. Darren England/AAP
Predictably, both major political parties are resisting calls this week for a parliamentary conscience vote to declare a climate emergency in Australia.
The resistance is unsurprising because both the Coalition and Labor are still captive to the fossil fuel industry. Both fear alienating voters who believe that a mining job is somehow worth far more than a renewables job, though this is perhaps more true for Labor than the LNP.
A majority of Australians accept that climate change is happening, although, like the minister for natural disasters, David Littleproud, a surprising number don’t necessarily believe it is caused by humans. Moreover, when climate change is made an economic issue, many voters are less likely to support tougher action if they perceive this is going to impact on their cost of living.
Despite the fact he lost his own seat in the recent federal election, former PM Tony Abbott said the Coalition’s overall victory made this point abundantly clear.
Where climate change is a moral issue, we Liberals do it tough. But where climate change is an economic issue […] tonight shows we do very, very well.
Climate change vs the economy
There is no better illustration of Abbott’s zealous observation than in Queensland during the 2019 election.
Former Greens leader Bob Brown, believing he could turn the controversial Adani coal mine into another Franklin River dam, led a convoy of climate activists through Queensland towns. But pushing climate change as a moral issue became an insult to the coal communities there.
Bob Brown’s anti-Adani protests didn’t play well in some Queensland communities. Rohan Thomson/AAP
Labor also talked tough on climate change, with former leader Bill Shorten declaring in the final week of the May campaign:
It is not the Australian way to avoid and duck the hard fights. We will take this [climate change] emergency seriously.
At the same time, Labor vacillated over Adani. The party’s prevarication over climate led to much confusion, and when the votes were counted, it did not win a seat north of metro Brisbane.
Fast-forward to today, and the painful loss of the election has ensured that Labor isn’t taking any chances on coal.
In fact, shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong didn’t hesitate last month when she said,
coal remains an important industry for Australia and it remains part of the global energy mix.
And Labor may now be preparing to walk away from its ambitious climate target of cutting emissions by 45% by 2030, in favour of a focus on a net-zero pollution target for 2050.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale accused Labor of “caving in to the coal, oil and gas lobby” if it abandons its 2030 emissions reduction target, and added,
Labor will have lost whatever remaining credibility it has on the climate crisis.
The politics of a national emergency
In many city councils and certain electorates across Australia, declaring a climate emergency has been a clever strategy both for political consumption and to mobilise behavioural change on a local scale.
But on a national scale, where climate change is so heavily politicised, the declaration of a climate change emergency would be an unmitigated disaster for the major parties, and for the cause of effectively communicating climate change.
This is not to say that climate change isn’t anything short of an emergency. It absolutely is.
The monstrous amounts of energy going into the oceans right now guarantees continued global warming that is fast heading towards the equivalent of the climatic violence of the Eemian period of 118,000 years ago.
And among the countless tipping points we are seeing unfold before us, the shock of a premature fire season in NSW and Queensland, with winter barely over, is just one way in which climate change is having an impact at a local level.
In some ways, there is no better time to raise awareness of climate change than during extreme weather events, as people are looking for explanations as to why they are occurring and how they can be so severe.
But to declare a national climate emergency, pushed so strongly by the Greens and independents, is not only politically difficult in Australia at the moment, it is also a hopeless communications strategy.

Communicating a climate emergency
Here are six reasons why declaring a climate emergency is so deeply problematic.
  1. Without bipartisan support, which is likely to be the case, it will further entrench the politicisation of climate change in Australia. Australians are already divided on anthropogenic climate change, and are increasingly afflicted by issue fatigue. This is precisely because climate change is thrashed about as a political issue (which turns on opinion) rather than a matter of physics (which turns on facts).
  2. If such a conscience vote fails in parliament, it will marginalise any well-intentioned instigators as a partisan minority.
  3. If ever such a conscience vote succeeded, it would merely come to serve as a symbolic cover for inaction in the face of steadily rising emissions.
  4. Without meaningful decarbonisation policies, such a declaration would become a twisted apologia for such inaction, as long as political parties are able to spin national accounting carbon emissions figures.
  5. Recent research by the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub found that the term “climate emergency” didn’t resonate with Australians as much as other phrases, such as climate change, global warming, extreme weather, climate crisis, and complex weather. Only 6.93% of Brisbane respondents and 4.03% of Melbourne respondents preferred “climate emergency” to the other terms.
  6. By far the most overwhelming problem with such a declaration is that politicians are the least trusted sources of information on climate change.
To regain trust on climate change, politicians need to lead with genuinely effective policies and decisions, rather than the foil of a hollow sentiment that has no legal or economic status.
In the meantime, there needs to be better public understanding of the science behind climate change, delivered by trusted sources, that allows people to come to terms with the true urgency of the crisis.

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