'A passionate and informative demostration of how mitigating climate change can be compatible with economic growth' Professor Ross Garnaut, the Garnaut Climate Change Review
'Humanity's greatest challenge is to minimise the consequences of climate change. With challenge comes opportunity. This book is about opportunity' Professor Peter Doherty, Nobel Prize winner
'A fascinating and provocative insight into how business can make the most of the environmental challenge' Geoffrey Cousins, business leader and author
Thanks to all my supporters, friends and family for all their efforts. In particular my literary agent Benython Oldfield, has been magnificent and Sputnik Agency who developed this website and hosted the Melbourne book launch - I can't thank enough all those at Sputnik for donating, developing and supporting me!
The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in question time yesterday noted the major outcomes from our report ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis‘. You can read it in Hansard here. If you read the Hansard, while the Prime Minister was reading out some of our findings, there were interjections from Dennis Jensen MP who scaringly has a science background! Anyway, Jensen shouts out twice ‘there is cooling.. the trend is cooling’ to the Prime Minister. I responded to similar ideological claims from Andrew Bolt earlier in the year - click here to have a read over at Graham Readfearns blog at the Courier Mail. Aside from answering these claims, there is a very important question Jensen shoudl clarify : If you believe your expert claim that the world is cooling, then why are the glaciers, Arctic sea-ice, Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets all melting rapidly? Doesn’t sound scientifically possible does it? It’s because this notion of cooling is completely false. I’ll let you be the judge.
This is taken from our report about the ‘global cooling’ claims - I have edited the full version for brevity you can see full response in report.
Has global warming recently slowed down or paused?
No. There is no indication in the data of a slowdown or pause in the human-caused climatic warming trend. Since 1985 the world has warmed on average about 0.5°C (see Figure above). This is entirely consistent with the climatic warming trend of ~0.2 °C per decade predicted by IPCC, plus superimposed short-term variability (see Figure above). The latter has always been – and will always be – present in the climate system. Most of these short-term variations are due to internal oscillations like El Niño – Southern Oscillation, solar variability (predominantly the 11-year Schwabe cycle) and volcanic eruptions (which, like Pinatubo in 1991, can cause a cooling lasting a few years).
Global cooling has not occurred even over the past ten years, contrary to claims promoted by lobby groups and picked up in some media. In the NASA global temperature data, the past ten 10-year trends (i.e. 1990-1999, 1991-2000 and so on) have all been between 0.17 and 0.34 °C warming per decade, close to or above the expected anthropogenic trend, with the most recent one (1999-2008) equal to 0.19 °C per decade.
It is perhaps noteworthy that despite the extremely low brightness of the sun over the past three years (see Figure 5 in report); temperature records have been broken during this time. For example, March 2008 saw the warmest global land temperature of any March ever measured in the instrumental record. June and August 2009 saw the warmest land and ocean temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere ever recorded for those months. The global ocean surface temperatures in 2009 broke all previous records for three consecutive months: June, July and August. Every single year of this century (2001-2008) has been among the top ten warmest years since instrumental records began.
Over a year in the making, I have helped co-lead a group of 26 prominent international climate scientists research and write a report called ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis’: a worldwide update on the latest indicators and observations relating to climate change. It has been a large effort on behalf of everyone involved and while being challenging it has been immensely rewarding at the same time.
Download the summary of the report in 11 different languages here and download the full report and figures here.
The goal of ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis’ was to provide a robust and objective update of the latest climate science for policy-makers worldwide, particularly emphasising on the major developments from the observations over the past three years since the scientific input into the IPCC 2007 report. This synthesis is unfiltered from government, industry or NGO’s and is directly from climate scientists in the field.
The report is not opinion, but based on published peer-reviewed scientific research and different to the IPCC 2007 report in style, with a focus on writing it in plain a language as possible. Also, there are several ‘misconception’ boxes which have simple explanations of questions like ‘Has global warming slowed down or paused?’ and ‘Isn’t climate always changing?’
Main conclusion: We find some calming news on some fronts (tipping points and lower land clearing) but mostly unexpectedly bad news, particularly with respect to ice melt around the world from the warming (Antarctic, Greenland, Arctic and Glaciers). More about these details later.
I will be blogging about various aspects of the outcomes and process over the coming weeks, but in science there is the diagnosis and the cure. The main outcome from the climate diagnosis is that the world needs to heavily move towards resourcing the cure - enabling and committing to the rapid upscale in low carbon technologies and a new Clean Industrial Revolution. I urge you all to at least read our summary of the main points.
Another point: None of the authors were paid or profited to undertake this work - it was a public service they felt necessary.
By popular demand I’ve uploaded the Plimer debate from Kerri-Anne’s show yesterday (Scroll down here). Amazing to hear a non-climate scientist who’s never presented or published research in climate science or conferences talk about ‘fraud’ and ’scam’ - it simply takes my breath away. I also forgot to mention the apparent links of Plimer to mining companies , but nothing will stop Plimer getting air-time given the special interests in this debate. Go here to see climate scientists Barry Brook and Ian Enting spending their valuable time eradicating much of the garbage in Plimer’s book. My thoughts on denialists in general and their anti-science mentality have been issued before here.
Also, just in terms of claims that I’m pushing this climate scam for my own interest, well its quite the contrary if you actually follow through Plimers logic. I should be PROMOTING Plimers views since more government money will be spent on researching the apparent uncertainties in climate science rather than going towards researching and developing the solutions! Quite the opposite to my self-interest, I am pushing for resources to move beyond the climate science (ie me) and to low carbon technologies and solutions around the world. This warped self-interested view from the deniers comes from a very dark side of the human race. If interested I published an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald a couple of years ago on this here.
I just got back from a ‘debate’ on climate change with Ian Plimer on the Kerri-ann show. Although they are never helpful to the way we should move forward in Australia, I had some useful reflections on where we are at.
On Plimer: My mother always used to tell me never trust a person who can’t look you in the eye. When meeting Plimer pre-interview, or throughout the 30 minute discussion on or off air, he never ever looked me in the eye. Maybe I had something offensive on my face, but I was deeply skeptical of the denialist even before I heard his dangerously backward views. I guess if you trying to claim that thousands of climate scientists (in a totally different scientific area than Plimers) are engaging in global ‘fraud’, you’d never want to look at one of those people in the eye right?
On Hope: If you watch the interview I got the distinct feeling Kerri-Anne was on the side of Plimers which is totally her right in a liberal democracy. I couldn’t help but realise however, this debate is really a generational one, just like civil liberties, smoking or womens rights in the 60’s and 70’s. I do talk about this in the book, but every time I do an interview or speak to the public, this generational dichotomy is confirmed. After the interview today a 30ish crew-member of Kerri-Ann came up to me and said along the lines of ‘Keep going, there is a new generation that simply gets it!’ The new generation in the 1970s (like Kerri-Anne) understood the importance of womens rights and civil liberties to which we now live today : the new generation understand the move to low carbon future and how it’s a far better way of growing an economy than the old polluting way. Thanks to the comments that have come in and to that crew-member at Nine:: thats where my hope comes from.
After reports coming from APEC, it sounds like Obama and other world leaders are gearing up for a political talk-fest at Copenhagen as opposed to meaningful action. Without the US, the other economies will go nowhere on negotiations and it’s well known that in the US the culprit are Republican fear-mongers are completely stalling Obama’s plans.
This begs the question: Why is it that US conservatives can take the world to a war on completely erroneous grounds and spend $trillions, while completely avoiding one of the biggest risks to humanity this century that is grounded in fundamental science? It’s an utter disgrace!
