Lethal Heating: 07/02/20

02/07/2020

(AU) Today, The Kyoto Climate Deal Ends And Australia’s Paris Cop-Out Begins. That’s Nothing To Be Proud Of, Mr Taylor

The Conversation - Penny van Oosterzee

Mick Tsikas/AAP

Penny van Oosterzee is Adjunct Associate Professor James Cook University and University Fellow Charles Darwin University, James Cook University.

Today marks the end of the Kyoto climate deal and the start of its successor, the Paris Agreement.

Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor on Wednesday was quick to hail Australia’s success in smashing the Kyoto emissions targets.

But let’s be clear: our record is nothing to boast about.

Taylor says Australia has beaten Kyoto by up to 430 million tonnes — or 80% of one year of national emissions. On that record, he said, “Australians can be confident that we’ll meet and beat our 2030 Paris target”.

The fact that Australia exceeded its Kyoto targets means it’s accrued so-called “carryover” carbon credits. It plans to use these to cover about half the emission reduction required under the Paris commitment by 2030.

But there’s been little scrutiny of why Australia met the Kyoto targets so easily. The reason dates back more than 20 years, when Australia demanded the Kyoto rules be skewed in its favour. Using those old credits to claim climate action today is cheating the system. Let’s look at why.

The Paris climate deal officially starts today. Daniel Munoz/Reuters

Australian scorns the spirit of Paris

The Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty negotiated in 1997. Industrialised nations collectively pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2% below 1990 levels. The reductions were to be made between 2008 and 2012.

Any surplus emissions reduction in the first Kyoto period could be carried over to the second period, from 2013 to 2020. In the name of climate action, five developed countries – Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK – voluntarily cancelled their surplus credits.

However, Australia held onto its credits. Now it wants to use them to meet its Paris target – reducing emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030.

This is clearly not in the spirit of the Paris agreement. And importantly, the history of Kyoto shows Australia did not deserve to earn the credits in the first place.

Sneaky negotiations

Under Kyoto, each nation was assigned a target – measured against the nation’s specific baseline of emissions produced in 1990. During negotiations, Australia insisted on rules that worked in its favour.

Instead of reducing its emissions by 5.2%, it successfully demanded a lenient target that meant emissions in 2012 could be 8% more than they were in 1990.

Our negotiators argued we had special economic circumstances - that our dependence on fossil fuels and energy-intensive exports meant cutting emissions would be difficult. Australia threatened to walk away from the negotiations if its demand was not met.

Australia negotiated an advantageous deal under the UN Kyoto protocol. Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock

Australia then waited until the final moments of negotiations – when many delegates were exhausted and translators had gone home – to make another surprising demand. It would only sign up to Kyoto if its 1990 emissions baseline (the year future reductions would be measured against) included emissions produced from clearing forests.

Here’s the catch. Australia’s emissions from forest clearing in 1990 were substantial, totalling about a quarter of total emissions, or 131.5 million tonnes of carbon.

Forest clearing in Australia plummeted after 1990, when Queensland enacted tough new land clearing laws. So including deforestation emissions in Australia’s baseline meant we would never really struggle to meet – or as it turned out, beat – our targets. In fact, the rule effectively rewarded Australia for its mass deforestation in 1990.

This concession was granted, and became known as the Australia clause. It triggered international condemnation, including from the European environment spokesman who reportedly called it “wrong and immoral”.

Then prime minister John Howard declared the deal to be “splendid”.

John Howard was thrilled with Australia’s concessions under Kyoto. LYNDON MECHIELSEN/AAP

A new round of Kyoto negotiations took place in 2010, for the second commitment period. Under the Gillard Labor government, Australia agreed to an underwhelming 5% decrease in emissions between 2013 and 2020.

Australia insisted on using the deforestation clause again, despite international pressure to drop it. It meant Australia’s carbon budget in the second period was about 26% higher than it would have been without the concession.

Had forest clearing not been included in the 1990 baseline, Australia’s emissions in 2017 were 31.8% above 1990 levels.

Forest clearing in 1990 made it easy for Australia to beat Kyoto targets. Harley Kingston/Flickr

History repeats

At the Madrid climate talks last year, Australia reiterated its plans to use its surplus Kyoto credits under Paris. Without the accounting trick, Australia is not on track to meet its Paris targets.

Laurence Tubiana, a high-ranking architect of the Paris accord, expressed her disdain at the plan:

If you want this carryover, it is just cheating. Australia was willing in a way to destroy the whole system, because that is the way to destroy the whole Paris agreement.

Whether Australia will be allowed to use the surplus credits is another question, as the Paris rulebook is still being finalised.

Analysts say there is no legal basis for using the surplus credits, because Kyoto and Paris are separate treaties.

Australia appears the only country shameless enough to try the tactic. At Senate estimates last year, officials said they knew of no other nation planning to use carryover credits.

Protesters in Spain in January 2020, calling for global climate action. JJ Guillen Credit/EPA

Nothing to be proud of

Some hoped Australia’s recent bushfire disaster might be a positive turning point for climate policy. But the signs are not good. The Morrison government is talking up the role of gas in Australia’s energy transition, and has so far failed to seize the opportunity to recharge the economy through renewables investment.

Crowing on Wednesday about Australia’s over-achievement on Kyoto, Taylor said the result was “something all Australians can be proud of”.

But Australia abandoned its moral obligations under Kyoto. And by carrying our surplus credits into the Paris deal, we risk cementing our status as a global climate pariah.

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Facebook Creates Fact-Checking Exemption For Climate Deniers

Heated - Emily Atkin

A group with ties to the fossil fuel industry plans to use Facebook's op-ed loophole to spread climate misinformation.

LEONELLO CALVETTI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images

Facebook is "aiding and abetting the spread of climate misinformation,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University. “They have become the vehicle for climate misinformation, and thus should be held partially responsible for a lack of action on climate change.”

Brulle was reacting to Facebook's recent decision, made at the request of climate science deniers, to create a giant loophole in its fact-checking program. Last year, Facebook partnered with an organization, Science Feedback, that would bring in teams of Ph.D. climate scientists to evaluate the accuracy of viral content. It was an important expansion of the company's third-party fact-checking program.

But now Facebook has reportedly decided to allow its staffers to overrule the climate scientists and make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it "opinion."

The organization that requested the change, the CO2 Coalition, is celebrating, E&E news reported on Monday. The group, which has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, says its views on climate change are increasingly ignored by the mainstream media. Now it plans to use Facebook to aggressively push climate misinformation on the public—without having to worry about fact checks from climate scientists.

How it all started

A column published in the Washington Examiner in August 2019 claimed that "climate models" were a "failure" that predicted exponentially more warming of the earth than has occurred. The piece, co-authored by notorious climate science denier Pat Michaels, was quickly shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook.

There was just one issue: It wasn't true.

This is exactly the kind of mess that Facebook's network of independent fact-checkers is supposed to solve. In May 2019, Facebook partnered with Science Feedback, a site dedicated to explaining "why information is or is not consistent with the science." Science Feedback's process is extremely rigorous. Each piece has multiple reviewers, and each reviewer "holds a Ph.D. and has recently published articles in top-tier peer-reviewed science journals."

Five scientists reviewed the Washington Examiner article for Science Feedback. The scientists identified a number of problems with the piece: "false factual assertions, cherry-picking datasets that support their point, failing to account for uncertainties in those datasets, and failing to assess the performance of climate models in an objective and rigorous manner." The article was rated "false" by Science Feedback and logged in Facebook's system.

That should have been the end of the story. The Washington Examiner article should have had a warning overlaid each time it was shared on Facebook, and its distribution on Facebook should have been dramatically reduced.

But that's not what happened.

Instead, an organization affiliated with Michaels, the CO2 Coalition, wrote Zuckerberg and complained about Science Feedback's rating. Among other things, the coalition claims that Science Feedback's analysis amounted to "simple differences of opinion." The coalition asked Zuckerberg to "remove Facebook’s censorship, labeling, and restrictions on this article."

Amazingly, it worked. In September, Facebook removed the false rating, overruling the judgment of Science Feedback. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook found that the misinformation about climate models was an "opinion" and, therefore, not eligible for fact-checking.

Now, the CO2 Coalition has announced its intention to exploit this loophole to spread climate misinformation on Facebook.

How Facebook's fact-checking program is supposed to work

The rules for Facebook's fact-checking program are clear. Facebook does not conduct the fact-checks itself. Instead, it has outsourced the process to third parties that are certified by Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network.

If a publisher has a dispute about a rating it receives on Facebook, it should "reach out directly to the third-party fact-checking organizations." The rating can only be removed by the organization that issued the fact check — either because the fact checker is convinced by the publisher's dispute or the publisher corrected the false information. There is no mechanism to appeal a fact-check directly to Facebook.

According to Facebook's rules, all "public, newsworthy Facebook and Instagram posts, including ads, with articles, photos, or videos," are eligible for fact-checking. The only type of content that is listed as exempt is original content posted by politicians or political candidates.

The Wall Street Journal reported that, after receiving the complaint from the CO2 coalition, Facebook planned to create a new rule exempting "opinion pieces" from fact-checking. But Facebook did not "respond to requests for comment" on the new rule. No such rule has been publicly acknowledged by Facebook in the months that followed.

In response to a request for comment, Facebook did little to clarify the situation, reiterating the company’s official fact-checking policies but not addressing its decision to overrule Science Feedback. “The focus of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program is combating viral misinformation,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said. “There’s an appeals process in place for publishers to appeal directly to fact-checkers to dispute ratings.”

How climate science deniers plan to exploit Facebook's loophole

Creating an unwritten exemption for "opinion" content, which is enforced by Facebook and not its fact-checking partners, creates a giant loophole for misinformation. The CO2 coalition told E&E News that they plan to exploit it.

After the quiet decision by Facebook, the coalition says it and other groups that attack consensus climate science can share content that climate scientists have labeled as misleading because Facebook will consider it "opinion" and therefore immune to fact-checking.
The CO2 Coalition is increasingly focused on using Facebook to reach more people with its message that climate change fears are overblown and that burning more fossil fuels would help humanity, Executive Director Caleb Rossiter told E&E News this week. He sees the battle over its climate-related posts as part of a larger proxy war over how to reach an audience outside of conservative media.

Rossiter said Facebook was increasingly important because "the mainstream media" is no longer willing to amplify the group's opinions. But the reason the “mainstream media” is not willing to amplify the group’s opinions is because they’re not opinions at all. They’re falsehoods.

Climate facts are not climate opinions

Andrew Dessler is one of the five climate scientists who originally fact-checked the CO2 Coalition’s op-ed by Pat Michaels. It was “complete bullshit,” he said. “We gave it a bad review, which it 100 percent deserved.”

The article claimed computer models used by climate scientists to predict warming have proved overblown, and thus shouldn’t be trusted. To prove it, Michaels compared “actual temperatures since 1979 with what the 32 families of climate models used in the latest U.N. report on climate science predicted they would be.”

The comparison was flawed. Michaels compared the earth’s present temperature with past climate models that predicted more carbon pollution than actually occurred. If we had polluted as much as the models predicted, the world would have warmed as much as the models predicted.

We know this because actual climate scientists have published research assessing the accuracy of climate models. That research, which went through the rigorous peer-review process, says computer climate models have been largely accurate for the last 40 years. Michaels’ analysis, on the other hand, didn’t go through any peer-review process, nor is Michaels climate scientist himself. What Michaels did was amateur Google sleuthing. What the scientists did was science.

Dessler thinks Michaels should be able to state his opinions about climate change without getting fact-checked. “Things like, ‘we should [implement] a carbon tax,’ or ‘subsidize nuclear energy, or even ‘we shouldn’t do anything about climate change,’” he said. “Those aren’t facts; they’re policy choices.”

But statements about the physical condition of the planet; the effect of carbon on the atmosphere; the historical accuracy of climate models—those are scientific in nature. “Those are not opinions,” Dessler said. “They’re either true or false.”

“The earth is warming. Climate models have done a good job,” he added. “That should be covered by fact-checking.”

The dire consequences of not fact-checking climate denial

The CO2 Coalition told E&E News that it is getting assistance from a "'conservative' Facebook employee." Facebook says that claim is not true, but did not specify who at Facebook reversed Science Feedback’s ruling.

American political conservatives have a long, well-documented history of perpetuating climate disinformation in order to delay climate action. Disinformation—that is, the intentional spread of misinformation—has been a key strategy of the fossil fuel industry and its political allies for decades. The less people understand about climate science, the strategy goes, the less likely they will be to support aggressive climate policies, which threaten the fossil fuel industry’s immense profitability.

The CO2 Coalition’s use of Facebook’s op-ed loophole “fits right back into that strategy of trying to promulgate misinformation to the public in order to keep alive the lack of public concern over climate change, to stop meaningful action to address it,” Brulle said. And by having the loophole, Brulle said, “Facebook is becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution, to climate change. ”

Naomi Oreskes, an acclaimed Harvard University professor who co-wrote “Merchants of Doubt,” agreed that Facebook’s op-ed loophole is “potentially very damaging.”

“We know that many people, particularly young people, are getting their information heavily, or even primarily, from social media,” she said. “For social media to propagate disinformation, without any attempt at screening, is for them to become, in effect, part of the disinformation machine.”

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Coronavirus And Climate Change: Collective Action Is The Only Way Forward

Deutsche Welle - Neil King | Gabriel Borrud

When faced with a crisis, coming together is the one vehicle of change humans have when it comes to fighting for their future, says social psychologist Stephen Reicher.

Rebellion protesters hold a banner saying 'United for Climate'

Human beings all over the world agreed to strict limitations to their rights when governments made the decision to enter lockdown during the COVID-19 crisis. Many have done it willingly on behalf of the collective. So why can't this same attitude be seen when tackling climate change?

Stephen Reicher is a social psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he researches collective behavior and social identity. DW spoke to him for the second season of the environmental podcast On The Green Fence.

DW: We've watched the collective move very fast in response to this crisis. Were you amazed by that?

Stephen Reicher: At one level, I wasn't. If you look at the literature on what happens in emergencies, the traditional literature plays into this notion of the public as a problem — the idea that human beings are always psychologically frail and they always have difficulty in dealing with complex information. And under a crisis, they crack, they panic. You would never have a Hollywood disaster film without people running, screaming, waving their hands in the air and blocking the exits.

But actually, that isn't what happens in disasters. When people come together, when they have a sense that others will support them, especially in situations of difficulty, then it makes them better able to cope and more psychologically resilient. Collectivity is the resource that allows us to cope practically, but also psychologically, to get through these times.

Why was the response to the coronavirus seemingly so easy, particularly when compared to the far more existential threat of climate change? What is the difference between these two?

Stephen Reicher: The temporality of the issue, the fact that it is immediate, the ways in which it is tangible and the way in which it is unarguable.

If you are talking about the events that are happening now due to climate change and that are killing people, it is probabilistic that climate change was critical to them. The probabilities are very, very high. But it is not immediately self-evident in the same way that it's evident that somebody is dying from coronavirus. These things become arguable.

And that's where the second factor comes in, which is the political factor. In some places it has been consensual, and it has been pretty positive. And that's because politicians have not tried to argue or mobilize against compliance with medically-necessary measures. In other places, that's not true — in the United States, for instance, where Trump has been supporting those in various states who have been calling it a "lockdown tyranny." And in Brazil, and in India.

The other absolutely obvious point differentiating coronavirus from climate change are the political differences and the differences in terms of political leadership — in terms of a) how we understand what's going on, and b) how we should respond to what's going on.

Although climate disasters like the Australian bushfires are strongly linked to climate change, the link isn't as immediate as deaths from coronavirus, says Reicher

One example of collective action can be seen in a makeshift donation fence locals in Dresden made to provide immediate help to the homeless during the lockdown

If I understood you correctly, if there were general consensus and a general realization that we are facing an existential threat and everybody really believed the science, the collective would be moved to action. Is it really that simple or is something else holding us back?

Stephen Reicher: At the moment we are acting collectively towards members of our community who are currently alive, and we can see whether they will live or die. It is much more abstract in the sense of climate change because we are acting for many of those who are not yet born — they might be our children or grandchildren.

It's the articulation of the psychological and lived experience with the ideological way in which we make sense of it and explain it and are told how to behave. The reason why the political, in many ways, is more powerful in undermining action on climate change is because it is much more abstract. It is a much less direct experience.

Do we need role models to catalyze change? And if so, what kind of role models? If Greta Thunberg, for instance, can’t pull it off, then who could?

Stephen Reicher: We need leadership. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that some of the countries where coronavirus is raging most dangerously are those with toxic leadership, as in the United States, as in Brazil. Whereas in some of those countries which are doing well — like New Zealand — the leadership takes a very different form indeed.

Jacinda Ardern has been credited with keeping COVID-19 numbers low in New Zealand. To date, the country has seen roughly 1,500 cases and 22 deaths

The number of cases in the US has surpassed 2.5 million. Critics say President Trump's delayed response is partially to blame

Leadership can take many forms. It doesn't have to be traditional. It doesn't have to be hierarchical. It doesn't have to be a single individual. It can be distributed. But you need voices which, firstly, serve to create a sense of community and communal responsibility. Secondly, they need to form a relationship with the public. A leader needs to be seen in many ways as one of us, as acting for us, and as achieving for us, in order to be effective.

Leadership is effective to the extent that we believe that a leader is representative of us, understands who we are and what we value. More than ever, we do need good, inclusive leadership that engages with the public rather than imposes on the public.

On a personal level, Steve, if you as a social psychologist could mold the change that we'd need to achieve for a sustainable world, how would you go about putting the collective on the right track?

Stephen Reicher: The group is always going to be part of the solution. Groups can do awful things and groups can do magnificent things. The problem doesn't lie in group psychology, per se. It depends on the specific ideologies and cultures that define the groups we belong to. How inclusive or exclusive are they? What are the norms and values that define the nature of our community? Are they values of compassion or are they values of strength and domination? Not all groups are good, but that depends upon the group culture.

The thing that is absolutely clear, however, is that if you get rid of groups, then you get rid of the one vehicle of change that we've actually got. If you get rid of groups, you freeze the status quo. The power of the powerless lies in their combination. I think we can wield that power for good rather than for ill.

The genocidal Nazi dicatorship is the prime historic example of how dangerous the collective can be

History also teaches us that the collective is the only vehicle for change we have, says Reicher

Do you think we're going to pull this off? If the science is right, we are running out of time. When it comes to the changes that have to be made, are we going to be magnificent? Are we going to be horrible?

Stephen Reicher: There is a problem with the debate that's going on at the moment. Some people are telling us that coronavirus is going to change the world for the good — we're going to realize that collectivity is terrible, we're going to realize that precarity is destructive and that inequalities kill. And other people are saying, no, no, no, it's going to be completely awful — we're all going to be divided, we're going have a recession which will pit us against each other.

The danger of making predictions in those forms is that it gives rise to fatalism. Either you believe it's going be awful so there is nothing you can do about it, or you believe it's going to happen anyway and therefore you don't need to do anything about it. Those were the critiques, for instance, of mechanical forms of Marxism.

I don't think there is any inevitable outcome. I'm not a prophet. If we want to move forward progressively, we've got to harness the power of the collective. We've got to understand how it's within the collective that we become agents who can actually make and change our own world.

To predict is to be counterproductive. It pacifies people. It says "the future will be like this," rather than to say "we need to fight for the future."

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