Archive for January, 2010
In a media statement released today, the WA State Government announced that the Forest Products Commission (FPC) will close down its carbon division.
The decision, announced by the Forestry Minister, Terry Redman, will doubtless be well received by the other main players in Australia’s developing forest carbon sector. Companies like Carbon Conscious , CO2 Australia and Rewards Group have been arguing for a while now, and with some justification, that a State Goverment owned entity should not be competing against the private sector in the carbon space.
FPC had previously completed deals with Synergy (5000 hectares) and BP but uncertainty over a start date for emissions trading had already forced an organisation restructure late last year.
The immediate future of existing contracts is not made clear in the statement, however FPC “will be exploring ways it can transfer this work to the private sector” according to Minister Redman.
Earlier this month, Pete and I took a team to Southbound as part of Greensense’s ongoing partnership with Sunset Events as their sustainability auditor. For any who don’t know, Southbound is one of Western Australia’s largest and most iconic music festivals. Held in Busselton, three hours south from Perth, it attracts over 20, 000 people over the weekend.
Our role at an event like Southbound is to work with the team at Sunset Events, as well as the large number of suppliers to the festival, to understand exactly what goes into putting on an event of this type and size, and importantly, the associated impacts of these activities in terms of energy and water consumption, waste management and carbon emissions.
During the festival itself, we were out and about surveying festival goers to understand how they travelled to Southbound as well as checking out Southbound’s other green initiatives. This helps us understand how well (or not) these ideas actually work in reality and means we can make recommendations on how to reduce the impact of future events.
One of the most positive things for us was to see FestivalBudi in action for the first time in Australia: Acting on a recommendation from a previous Greensense sustainability audit, Southbound promoted the use of FestivalBudi (part of Liftshare) as a means of putting travellers in touch with each other to encourage carpooling to festival. While we were surveying, we came across a few people who had used it and everyone thought it was a great idea to save money, meet new people and do their bit for the environment.
To top it all off, when we weren’t surveying festival goers, counting cars in the carpark or chatting with the stall holders, we still managed to see some great bands and have a dance in the silent disco — what a great start to the year!
With the end of 2009, many research bodies have released their climate findings for the year and the decade (See Annual Australia Climate Statement or this review of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis). The research shows that 2009 was the second hottest year on record in Australia (after 2005) and the decade itself was the hottest we’ve seen.
It seems fitting that I write this blog after we’ve just experienced three consecutive days in Perth over 40 degrees. When considered with alongside the record breaking heatwaves experienced in Adelaide in November last year, and other extremes experienced by Victoria, New South Wales and even Tasmania, the trend of increasing temperatures can not be denied.
A look to Australia’s climate change predictions is a sobering exercise. For example, in Perth, we currently experience around 28 days per year over 35 degrees. This is expected to climb to between 33 and 38 by 2030 and to between 36 and 67 by 2070, with the variation allowing for different climate change scenarios. The reality is, we are currently seeing increasing temperatures in many regions due to climate change, and we will continue to do so.
This leads us to the case for adaptation. But that is another topic worthy of it’s own blog — For those interested, I’ll blog again next week on what adaptation entails.
One of the more positive outcomes from the Copenhagen Accord - and let’s face it, we weren’t inundated — was the acknowledgement by both developed and developing nations that increases in global temperature need to limited to no more than 2 degrees by 2100 if we’re to avoid the worse effects of global warming. See paragraphs 1 and 2 of the Accord for the details.
For those of you not familar with the IPCC complied science, that translates to atmospheric greenhouse gas levels of no more than 450 ppm, which in turn will require a global reduction of around 13Gt of CO2-e per year by 2020. So if 2 degrees represents the target, how far does the current global response go to achieving it?
The guys at Climate Action Tracker have been busy translating the range of commitments made by the world’s largest carbon polluters into likely scenarios in terms of global CO2 concentrations and associated warming. The news is not great. The two images below, borrowed from the CAT website, demonstrate in simple terms that, based on the most likely current commitments from major industralised and developing nations, we’re on course for warming in the region of 3.5 degrees by 2100.
Delving a little deeper, the graph shows annual global GHG emissions out to 2050, with the gray line representing business as usual and the solid black line representing a 450ppm / 2 degree warming scenario. Finally, the red line shows forecast GHG emissions based on the most likely range of commitments and pledges made by major carbon polluters, including Australia.
The thermometer to the right represents what these commitments translate to in terms of likely global temperature increase by 2100. The higher number relates to the least ambitious of the range of comittments made and conversely the lowest number to the most ambitious. Even under the most abitious reduction scenario currently on the table warming is likely to be in the range of 2.8 degrees.
This all paints a rather bleak picture, particularly when you take things a step further and look at projected sea level rise associated with 3.5 degrees of warming. A recent report, published in the scientific journal Nature and discussed in some detail on the Guardian website, suggests a warming of this magnitude could lead to sea level rise of around 1.5m by 2100 and up to 8m 0r 9m beyond that.
With developed nations due to confirm their final emissions reduction commitments by the end of this month, we’ll have a better idea of just how far off the mark we’re likely to be. One thing is clear though, global climate change politics is no nearer finding a solution that the science demands.
The letters page in our local paper seems to be full of correspondence from climate skeptics. After muttering to my wife about this over coffee in the morning one too many times, she sent me off to write my own letter to try and balance the score. I’ll let you know if it gets published.
Here is what I wrote (with a couple of hyperlinks inserted, since this is the web and not a dead tree):
Dear Letters Editor,
There seems to be an endless stream of letters from climate “skeptics” published in The West. A real skeptic should be a critical inquirer but these correspondents all seem to copy and paste from the same tired climate change denialist web sites: “we’re not warming, we’re cooling”; “well okay, we are warming but its the sun that’s doing it”; “actually its CO2 from volcanoes”; “well even if it is from burning fossil fuels, an ETS well send us all bankrupt!”; “it’s a global conspiracy, don’t you know!”.
Matthew Lague (I don’t warm to this policy, 2/1) seems to be no exception. He suggests that global warming isn’t happening because since 2001 satellites “have detected a discernible downward trend in temperature”. Picking a particular satellite temperature record starting in 2001 smacks of cherry picking, picking data to suit your argument. If you look at the global temperature trends from NASA GISS, the long-term warming trend is very clear. NASA’s analysis was recently updated with 2008 data. It was the coolest year since 2000 because of a strong La Niña event in the Pacific, but was still the ninth warmest year since instrumental measurements began in 1880.
He also says that climate models, the reason we think warming is going to continue, aren’t trustworthy because “they do not reproduce past warming”. This is just wrong too. They can and do reproduce past warming. One of the first real climate models from NASA in 1988 successfully forecast the warming of about 0.2 degrees a decade we have experienced in the last 20 years.
Lastly, he suggests that the sun is responsible for global warming because Mars has been warming too. There is actually very little evidence that Mars is warming. What’s more, if skeptics don’t think scientists understand understand the climate on Earth, why would they think they know what’s happening on Mars? As an aside, the sun is definitely not causing the current warming on Earth. There has been no increase in solar irradiance on earth since 1940, according to the Max Planck Institute.
In the same edition Peter Bowley (Join the real world, 2/1) asks for the government to detail both sides of the “global warming issue”, “for and against”. This request demonstrates a real problem, the perception that there is a debate underway on climate change between two opposing viewpoints with equally valid arguments. This is just not the case. The evidence for human induced global warming is overwhelming and the arguments against are for the most part pseudo-science and empty rhetoric. The media should take most of the blame for this perception with relentless ‘false-balance’ reporting and contrarian and sensationalist “op-ed” letters and articles.
I do agree, however, with Peter Bowley’s call for the Government to explain the ETS in plain english. They should, because it really is quite simple. The government will set a limit on our greenhouse gas emissions. Each year they will issue permits to pollute up to the level of this cap. About a thousand businesses will then need permits for their emissions. These permits will be tradable. And no, it won’t send us bankrupt, Treasury checked. It will just ensure we meet our national reduction target, even if it is only 5% and even if the skeptics don’t like it.
Yours Sincerely,
Fabian Le Gay Brereton
