KOLONTAR, HUNGARY - Shortly after a red river from hell tore through this village on 4 October, destroying lives and homes, Hungary's junior minister for environmental affairs, Zoltan Illes, said aloud what many feared: Nobody really knew what was in the caustic sludge - a by-product of the aluminum industry whose pH can reach a dizzying 13 - that had broken through a nearby reservoir.
But scientists at the Institute of Materials and Environmental Chemistry in Budapest begged to differ. The institute, part of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has done research on the toxic residue - which chemists call "red mud" - for decades. "We know red mud better than we know our wives," says Easzlo Kotai, a chemical engineer at the institute.
Kotai is part of a nine-member scientific task force, called together by the Hungarian government, which has found itself battling not just mud but also a rising tide of rumors and misinformation. Illes, for instance, said that the sludge was radioactive and could cause cancer, and the environmental group Greenpeace announced that it contained dangerous levels of heavy metals. Those claims led to fears of a widespread ecological catastrophe - including a poisoning of the Danube, one of Eastern Europe's major rivers. But Illes has dropped his claim about radioactivity, and scientists say Greenpeace's report was alarmist and unscientific.
Two weeks after the disaster, Kotai and other scientists say its environmental impact may be less severe than widely broadcast images suggested at first. They don't want to diminish the human tragedy: Nine people have died and more than 100 have been injured; many suffered burn-like wounds from the sludge's alkalinity. But much of the sludge can be removed physically and taken back to one of the company's intact reservoirs; the remainder can be neutralized with mild acids, says Janos Szepvolgyi, an environmental chemist who heads the task force. Task force members predict only minimal effects on the ecology of the Danube and don't think drinking water is at risk. "It's not as dramatic as it seems," says Tamas Nemeth, the academy's general secretary and a soil scientist himself. "We can handle this."
About a million tonnes of red mud poured out when the dam on reservoir 10 of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar alumina factory near Kolontar broke just after noon on 4 October. The sludge is formed during the so-called Bayer process, when bauxite ore is pressure-cooked with sodium hydroxide in giant reactors to extract aluminium hydroxide. The residue was stored in giant reservoirs right next to the factory, as it is at similar facilities around the world.
What caused the break is still under investigation. Some environmental groups had suggested that Hungary's red mud reservoirs, a legacy of the communist era, were poorly monitored and prone to breaks. The Hungarian task force, which also includes biologists and ecologists, has set out to map the impact of the release and provide the government with advice on how to limit the harm. Aside from the sheer physical impact of the initial wave - some Kolontar residents likened it to a red tsunami - the sludge's main problem is its deadly alkalinity, says Szepvolgyi. The Torma, a small stream near the village that ultimately flows into the Danube, turned red and is now almost completely lifeless. But the environmental damage downstream was reduced, says Szepvolgyi, partly by dilution and possibly because government workers dropped large amounts of fertilizers and calcium sulfate into the rivers to bring down the pH. Elevated pH values of between 8 and 9 were measured locally in the Danube for a few days, but they have come down, says Szepvolgyi. No major fish die-offs in the Danube have been reported.
Nor do task force members believe heavy metals will be a major problem. During a press conference on 8 October, Greenpeace announced that red mud from Kolontar contained high levels of arsenic, chromium, and mercury, suggesting that illegal dumping had occurred in the sludge pond before it broke. For arsenic, the level was 25 times higher than the limit for drinking water, the group said.
But that's a nonsensical comparison because nobody is planning on drinking the sludge, says Szepvolgyi. A better reference is the arsenic level allowed in organic sludges that Hungarian farmers are permitted to spread on their lands; the level measured by Green-peace was just slightly above that. Szepvolgyi also criticizes the group for basing its findings on a single sample. The sludge wasn't homogenous, he says, and the task force's own measurements have found varying levels of heavy metals at different locations—but none dangerously high, Szepvolgyi asserts.
Greenpeace spokesperson Szabina Moses says the group stands by its findings and that the academy scientists are downplaying the risks. "We're talking about arsenic. I don't have to be a scientist to feel that that is dangerous," Moses says.
Initial news stories suggested that Kolontar and Devecser, a bigger town farther down¬stream, might have to be abandoned altogether. That was an exaggeration, task force members say. When Kotai gave Science a tour of the area last week - expertly talking his way past police roadblocks - cleanup activities in Kolontar were in full swing. Trucks were hauling away tonnes of red mud; a few homes were clean again, and a handful of residents, looking somber, were returning. Many yards and sidewalks were covered with calcium sulfate. The compound - which makes streets look as if they're covered with dirty snow—not only helps neutralize the mud but also prevents it from becoming an easily dispersible powder once it dries. Instead, the mix forms a cake that can be removed with shovels.
What will happen to the surrounding farm¬land? The layers of red mud there vary from 1 or 2 centimeters to more than 10 cm thick. Some will need to be removed, but small quantities can probably be mixed in with the soil, says Nemeth. The alkalinity can be neutralized with mild acids, such as acetic acid or humic acid, a complex organic mixture that occurs naturally in the soil. Studies will have to show whether crops can be grown safely in these areas, Nemeth adds, but it might be wise to stick with biofuel crops or trees for the foresee¬able future. "I don't think anybody will want carrots and potatoes from this area anyway."
As Science went to press, another breach from the same reservoir threatened. But a new dam would divert most of the sludge, even if that happened, says Nemeth. What's more, the reservoir contains far less fluid, so any escap¬ing mud would travel slowly and only a couple of hundred meters, models show.
Amid the media frenzy, scientists say they are trying to be the voice of reason. When Kotai encountered one roadblock in Devecser, two police agents wearing rubber boots and facemasks asked if they were at risk as they guarded a street full of deserted homes. Kotai tried to reassure them. "They are scared," he said after he got back into his mud-covered Volvo. "They have heard so many stories."
MARTIN ENSERINK
Science
22 October 2010
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
BEWARE THE GREEN SPIN BEING PEDDLED ON THE FUTURE OF OUR FORESTS
The following article was prepared by myself with the help of two persons who, for professional reasons, must remain anonymous. One works regularly with the green movement providing advice on forest management. He has asked not to be named so that he can continue his current good relations with the greenies. The second person is concerned that he may be subject to personal abuse and professional retribution as he is still actively working in the forestry industry.
The recent “agreement” reached in Tasmania between environment groups, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFEMU) and logging contractors caught in the cross fire has recommended closing the native forest products industry in that state. Negotiated behind closed doors, the agreement appears likely to be accepted by the Tasmanian Labor/Green coalition government.
The closed discussions in Tasmania were extraordinary because they consisted entirely of self appointed arbiters with limited understanding of or qualifications in forest management. That these types of people should decide the future of Tasmanian forests and the native forest products industries is anti-democratic and unscientific. The forestry profession has been involved with forest management in Tasmania for almost a century. Its members possess a wealth of knowledge and practical experience on the complexities of forest management but they were not invited to offer an opinion on the future of forestry in that state. It is the equivalent of holding a meeting to decide how the Royal Hobart Hospital will be managed from now on but without inviting medical professionals such as doctors and nurses and specialists. Instead, shop stewards, delivery drivers and visitors make the decisions about hospital management.
Environmental activists in WA have long objected to the use of native forests for timber production, their arguments being long on emotion but short on credible science. To support their position, they have recently dusted off past campaign rhetoric and rebadged it in a move to achieve the same result in WA that now seems likely in Tasmania. The first shot in the renewed anti-logging campaign in WA was in a plethora of articles and letters to the South Western Times in November. The letters brought nothing new to the debate: the script is the same one that forest activists have been preaching for the last 20 years.
There are good reasons why a native forest industry should continue in WA. The negatives listed by environmental activists are mostly unscientific opinions, unsupported by evidence-based research. Even so, their alarmist claims pale into insignificance compared to current threats to the long term viability and health of our forests in the South West. These threats are the decline in rainfall since the 1970s and damage by wildfire to the sustainable production of all the renewable products found within our forests including biodiversity, water and recreational opportunities, as well as continued production of jarrah, WA’s iconic timber species and a world class furniture timber.
Both of these major threats can be satisfactorily managed by:
(1) thinning the overstocked regrowth stands which date back to the inadequately managed logging of the 1870s to the 1920s, well before the first Forests Department was formed.
(2) conducting more prescribed burning to decrease the high fuel loads existing in large parts of forested land.
The south west has not experienced a major bushfire in our publicly-owned forests since the Dwellingup fire of 1961. The introduction and application of a science-based prescribed burning program in 1965 required a burning frequency similar to that conducted by Aboriginal people prior to the arrival of European settlers in 1826. However, successive governments have failed to apply the lessons learned from the Dwellingup fire and today large tracts of dangerously high fuel in the jarrah forest pose a major risk of very fierce fires occurring under hot summer conditions. This risk will increase each year burning is delayed.
Retaining a native hardwood timber industry provides important benefits to WA. First, more people will be working in the forest environment every day and they will have the experience and equipment to fight fires in forest fuels. While volunteer bush fire brigades are trained and competent to tackle scrub and grass fires, few are forest fire fighters and should not be exposed to the dangers involved. They have more than enough to attend to in their rural and semi-rural areas.
The government’s recent reduction of Forests Products Commission (FPC) staff levels by about 100 people, many of whom had decades of fire fighting experience in forests, makes it even more important to retain teams of logging contractors throughout the forest who can be diverted to fighting forest fires.
Some of the erroneous claims made by green activists in recent letters and articles demand the following responses.
Conservation Council stalwart Beth Schultz says fauna have ‘retreated’ to the forest areas. If she is claiming that wildlife has moved or migrated to the forest as the agricultural areas were cleared in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, she’s incorrect. Fauna do not migrate in this way: species that live in the forest today are there because they evolved a preference to live in south west forests tens of thousands or millions of years ago, well before European settlement. Different forest habitats suited different bird and animal species, with virtually all still existing there, even after almost 200 years of ‘exploitation’ of timber, water, minerals and other natural assets. Preserving most of the south west’s forests for timber production all those years ago and managing it in a suitable fashion have retained environmental conditions that in turn continue to provide homes for those species which are forest dependent. For many of the smaller species, predation by foxes and feral cats are major threats - the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) has a fox baiting program in place to manage these predators - along with the expanding threat of invasive weeds including the soil-borne Phythopthera dieback.
Ms Schultz’s claim that there are ‘few hollows for certain bird species’ is an often repeated but largely baseless claim. The scientific evidence that hollow-dependent species in the forest are declining significantly as a result of fewer tree hollows is lacking. Many old trees with hollows are still present throughout the forest and it has been policy for decades to leave more trees with hollows than in the past. The most urgent problem relating to the availability of nesting hollows is their use by European bees which prevent birds and animals from using them.
Activist John Vukovich claims prescribed burning destroys large numbers of birds and animals, many of which are unknown. Recent research from the DEC has shown this to be completely untrue. Prescribed burning directly or indirectly results in the death of wildlife as a result of prescribed burning. However, if the burning regime is based on sound scientific principles, the years following fire allows species diversity and abundance to return to pre-fire levels as damaged habitats regenerate. Survival of young birds and animals is usually higher for most wildlife species in the years after fire than before, thanks to prolific flowering and growth of trees and understorey plants. In contrast, uncontrolled bushfires burn at far greater intensities than prescribed burns, with recent CSIRO research showing wildfires cause very high numbers of native fauna deaths.
Mr Vukovich’s statement about “unknown” species being lost is a meaningless, ambit claim which is impossible to prove or disprove one way or the other. However, common sense tells us that vertebrate fauna such as mammals, birds, reptiles and birds have been well surveyed and few new species have been discovered in recent decades. Occasional new species may still be discovered, of course, most likely amongst the frogs and reptiles, but the implication that hundreds or thousands of currently unknown species will be lost is fanciful.
Serial anti-everything campaigner Peter Murphy refers to recent comments by the WA Environmental Protection Authority about the continued harvesting of timber in medium and low rainfall sections of state forest. The EPA’s valid concerns do not relate to harvesting as such but to a large reduction of soil moisture resulting from reduced rainfall over the last 35 years. Reduced moisture levels in forest sub-soil profiles mean that far too many trees are potentially competing for the available moisture resource. All biological components in a forested ecosystem will be stressed due to inadequate soil water, but trees under stress are much more vulnerable to disease and insect attack. The inevitable outcome is that many trees will die of drought this summer and in subsequent years if current climate changes do not reverse themselves. Harvesting some of these trees before they die and begin to rot makes a lot of sense: the timber can be used, with the health of remaining trees improved. Doing nothing and just watching more trees die makes little sense.
Mr Murphy raises the question of the Forest Products Commission not running at a profit. This is a furphy, Mr Murphy! Few government agencies run at a financial profit. Main Roads, Police, Education, Health, Agriculture, FESA and DEC do not make a profit and nor are they designed to do so. The services they provide cannot be valued in monetary returns. The FPC is required by law to provide many environmental and research services to help better manage our forests; it is not just a collector of revenue from log sales.
As a former state MP and a qualified zoologist, it is my experience that anti-logging campaigns usually start in earnest whenever a non-Labor government is elected in WA. Of the people I know who support the Greens and are concerned about our environmental future on this planet, the overwhelming majority are genuine in their desire to see more and better management of our natural assets. Over the last 20 years, however, state Liberal and Labor governments have consistently reduced funding to conservation agencies, even as the conservation estate and the state’s population pressures increase. The simplistic solution of closing our forests to activities which look bad is the wrong one: as our forests are locked up and logging declines, so illegal timber removal, the spread of dieback and feral pigs, and the inappropriate use of fire increase.
The goal of the anti-logging campaigners is clear: to stop logging. Should this be achieved, it will be the death of our forests as essential management actions continue to be under-funded. Future generations will not thank us when they have to pick through the bones of decaying and aging forest ecosystems to implement urgent and expensive recovery plans for most of our natural forest assets. They will be the ones paying the price for today’s emotional but grossly misguided anti-logging campaigns.
For more information, visit http://www.bushfirecrc.com/publications/fire_note.html for Fire Note 64 from the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre which reports that our forest ecosystems are highly resilient to appropriate fire regimes.
For a better understanding of how fires behave, CSIRO scientist Dr Phil Cheney has written an important article available at http://www.dec.wa.gov.au/content/view/2321/482/1/1/ .
The recent “agreement” reached in Tasmania between environment groups, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFEMU) and logging contractors caught in the cross fire has recommended closing the native forest products industry in that state. Negotiated behind closed doors, the agreement appears likely to be accepted by the Tasmanian Labor/Green coalition government.
The closed discussions in Tasmania were extraordinary because they consisted entirely of self appointed arbiters with limited understanding of or qualifications in forest management. That these types of people should decide the future of Tasmanian forests and the native forest products industries is anti-democratic and unscientific. The forestry profession has been involved with forest management in Tasmania for almost a century. Its members possess a wealth of knowledge and practical experience on the complexities of forest management but they were not invited to offer an opinion on the future of forestry in that state. It is the equivalent of holding a meeting to decide how the Royal Hobart Hospital will be managed from now on but without inviting medical professionals such as doctors and nurses and specialists. Instead, shop stewards, delivery drivers and visitors make the decisions about hospital management.
Environmental activists in WA have long objected to the use of native forests for timber production, their arguments being long on emotion but short on credible science. To support their position, they have recently dusted off past campaign rhetoric and rebadged it in a move to achieve the same result in WA that now seems likely in Tasmania. The first shot in the renewed anti-logging campaign in WA was in a plethora of articles and letters to the South Western Times in November. The letters brought nothing new to the debate: the script is the same one that forest activists have been preaching for the last 20 years.
There are good reasons why a native forest industry should continue in WA. The negatives listed by environmental activists are mostly unscientific opinions, unsupported by evidence-based research. Even so, their alarmist claims pale into insignificance compared to current threats to the long term viability and health of our forests in the South West. These threats are the decline in rainfall since the 1970s and damage by wildfire to the sustainable production of all the renewable products found within our forests including biodiversity, water and recreational opportunities, as well as continued production of jarrah, WA’s iconic timber species and a world class furniture timber.
Both of these major threats can be satisfactorily managed by:
(1) thinning the overstocked regrowth stands which date back to the inadequately managed logging of the 1870s to the 1920s, well before the first Forests Department was formed.
(2) conducting more prescribed burning to decrease the high fuel loads existing in large parts of forested land.
The south west has not experienced a major bushfire in our publicly-owned forests since the Dwellingup fire of 1961. The introduction and application of a science-based prescribed burning program in 1965 required a burning frequency similar to that conducted by Aboriginal people prior to the arrival of European settlers in 1826. However, successive governments have failed to apply the lessons learned from the Dwellingup fire and today large tracts of dangerously high fuel in the jarrah forest pose a major risk of very fierce fires occurring under hot summer conditions. This risk will increase each year burning is delayed.
Retaining a native hardwood timber industry provides important benefits to WA. First, more people will be working in the forest environment every day and they will have the experience and equipment to fight fires in forest fuels. While volunteer bush fire brigades are trained and competent to tackle scrub and grass fires, few are forest fire fighters and should not be exposed to the dangers involved. They have more than enough to attend to in their rural and semi-rural areas.
The government’s recent reduction of Forests Products Commission (FPC) staff levels by about 100 people, many of whom had decades of fire fighting experience in forests, makes it even more important to retain teams of logging contractors throughout the forest who can be diverted to fighting forest fires.
Some of the erroneous claims made by green activists in recent letters and articles demand the following responses.
Conservation Council stalwart Beth Schultz says fauna have ‘retreated’ to the forest areas. If she is claiming that wildlife has moved or migrated to the forest as the agricultural areas were cleared in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, she’s incorrect. Fauna do not migrate in this way: species that live in the forest today are there because they evolved a preference to live in south west forests tens of thousands or millions of years ago, well before European settlement. Different forest habitats suited different bird and animal species, with virtually all still existing there, even after almost 200 years of ‘exploitation’ of timber, water, minerals and other natural assets. Preserving most of the south west’s forests for timber production all those years ago and managing it in a suitable fashion have retained environmental conditions that in turn continue to provide homes for those species which are forest dependent. For many of the smaller species, predation by foxes and feral cats are major threats - the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) has a fox baiting program in place to manage these predators - along with the expanding threat of invasive weeds including the soil-borne Phythopthera dieback.
Ms Schultz’s claim that there are ‘few hollows for certain bird species’ is an often repeated but largely baseless claim. The scientific evidence that hollow-dependent species in the forest are declining significantly as a result of fewer tree hollows is lacking. Many old trees with hollows are still present throughout the forest and it has been policy for decades to leave more trees with hollows than in the past. The most urgent problem relating to the availability of nesting hollows is their use by European bees which prevent birds and animals from using them.
Activist John Vukovich claims prescribed burning destroys large numbers of birds and animals, many of which are unknown. Recent research from the DEC has shown this to be completely untrue. Prescribed burning directly or indirectly results in the death of wildlife as a result of prescribed burning. However, if the burning regime is based on sound scientific principles, the years following fire allows species diversity and abundance to return to pre-fire levels as damaged habitats regenerate. Survival of young birds and animals is usually higher for most wildlife species in the years after fire than before, thanks to prolific flowering and growth of trees and understorey plants. In contrast, uncontrolled bushfires burn at far greater intensities than prescribed burns, with recent CSIRO research showing wildfires cause very high numbers of native fauna deaths.
Mr Vukovich’s statement about “unknown” species being lost is a meaningless, ambit claim which is impossible to prove or disprove one way or the other. However, common sense tells us that vertebrate fauna such as mammals, birds, reptiles and birds have been well surveyed and few new species have been discovered in recent decades. Occasional new species may still be discovered, of course, most likely amongst the frogs and reptiles, but the implication that hundreds or thousands of currently unknown species will be lost is fanciful.
Serial anti-everything campaigner Peter Murphy refers to recent comments by the WA Environmental Protection Authority about the continued harvesting of timber in medium and low rainfall sections of state forest. The EPA’s valid concerns do not relate to harvesting as such but to a large reduction of soil moisture resulting from reduced rainfall over the last 35 years. Reduced moisture levels in forest sub-soil profiles mean that far too many trees are potentially competing for the available moisture resource. All biological components in a forested ecosystem will be stressed due to inadequate soil water, but trees under stress are much more vulnerable to disease and insect attack. The inevitable outcome is that many trees will die of drought this summer and in subsequent years if current climate changes do not reverse themselves. Harvesting some of these trees before they die and begin to rot makes a lot of sense: the timber can be used, with the health of remaining trees improved. Doing nothing and just watching more trees die makes little sense.
Mr Murphy raises the question of the Forest Products Commission not running at a profit. This is a furphy, Mr Murphy! Few government agencies run at a financial profit. Main Roads, Police, Education, Health, Agriculture, FESA and DEC do not make a profit and nor are they designed to do so. The services they provide cannot be valued in monetary returns. The FPC is required by law to provide many environmental and research services to help better manage our forests; it is not just a collector of revenue from log sales.
As a former state MP and a qualified zoologist, it is my experience that anti-logging campaigns usually start in earnest whenever a non-Labor government is elected in WA. Of the people I know who support the Greens and are concerned about our environmental future on this planet, the overwhelming majority are genuine in their desire to see more and better management of our natural assets. Over the last 20 years, however, state Liberal and Labor governments have consistently reduced funding to conservation agencies, even as the conservation estate and the state’s population pressures increase. The simplistic solution of closing our forests to activities which look bad is the wrong one: as our forests are locked up and logging declines, so illegal timber removal, the spread of dieback and feral pigs, and the inappropriate use of fire increase.
The goal of the anti-logging campaigners is clear: to stop logging. Should this be achieved, it will be the death of our forests as essential management actions continue to be under-funded. Future generations will not thank us when they have to pick through the bones of decaying and aging forest ecosystems to implement urgent and expensive recovery plans for most of our natural forest assets. They will be the ones paying the price for today’s emotional but grossly misguided anti-logging campaigns.
For more information, visit http://www.bushfirecrc.com/publications/fire_note.html for Fire Note 64 from the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre which reports that our forest ecosystems are highly resilient to appropriate fire regimes.
For a better understanding of how fires behave, CSIRO scientist Dr Phil Cheney has written an important article available at http://www.dec.wa.gov.au/content/view/2321/482/1/1/ .
Monday, November 29, 2010
Adapting to climate change - Facing the consequences
Global action is not going to stop climate change. The world needs to look harder at how to live with it
Nov 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
ON NOVEMBER 29th representatives of countries from around the world will gather in Cancún, Mexico, for the first high-level climate talks since those in Copenhagen last December. The organisers hope the meeting in Mexico, unlike the one in Denmark, will be unshowy but solid, leading to decisions about finance, forestry and technology transfer that will leave the world better placed to do something about global warming. Incremental progress is possible, but continued deadlock is likelier. What is out of reach, as at Copenhagen, is agreement on a plausible programme for keeping climate change in check.
The world warmed by about 0.7°C in the 20th century. Every year in this century has been warmer than all but one in the last (1998, since you ask). If carbon-dioxide levels were magically to stabilise where they are now (almost 390 parts per million, 40% more than before the industrial revolution) the world would probably warm by a further half a degree or so as the ocean, which is slow to change its temperature, caught up. But CO2 levels continue to rise. Despite 20 years of climate negotiation, the world is still on an emissions trajectory that fits pretty easily into the “business as usual” scenarios drawn up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Copenhagen accord, a non-binding document which was the best that could be salvaged from the summit, talks of trying to keep the world less than 2°C warmer than in pre-industrial times—a level that is rather arbitrarily seen as the threshold for danger. Many countries have, in signing the accord, promised actions that will or should reduce carbon emissions. In the World Energy Outlook, recently published by the International Energy Agency, an assessment of these promises forms the basis of a “new policies scenario” for the next 25 years (see chart 1). According to the IEA, the scenario puts the world on course to warm by 3.5°C by 2100. For comparison, the difference in global mean temperature between the pre-industrial age and the ice ages was about 6°C.
The IEA also looked at what it might take to hit a two-degree target; the answer, says the agency’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, is “too good to be believed”. Every signatory of the Copenhagen accord would have to hit the top of its range of commitments. That would provide a worldwide rate of decarbonisation (reduction in carbon emitted per unit of GDP) twice as large in the decade to come as in the one just past: 2.8% a year, not 1.4%. Mr Birol notes that the highest annual rate on record is 2.5%, in the wake of the first oil shock.
But for the two-degree scenario 2.8% is just the beginning; from 2020 to 2035 the rate of decarbonisation needs to double again, to 5.5%. Though they are unwilling to say it in public, the sheer improbability of such success has led many climate scientists, campaigners and policymakers to conclude that, in the words of Bob Watson, once the head of the IPCC and now the chief scientist at Britain’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “Two degrees is a wishful dream.”
The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over. Analysts who have long worked on adaptation to climate change—finding ways to live with scarcer water, higher peak temperatures, higher sea levels and weather patterns at odds with those under which today’s settled patterns of farming developed—are starting to see their day in the uncomfortably hot sun. That such measures cannot protect everyone from all harm that climate change may bring does not mean that they should be ignored. On the contrary, they are sorely needed.
Public harms
Many of these adaptations are the sorts of thing—moving house, improving water supply, sowing different seeds—that people will do for themselves, given a chance. This is one reason why adaptation has not been the subject of public debate in the same way as reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions from industry and deforestation have. But even if a lot of adaptation will end up being done privately, it is also a suitable issue for public policy.
For a start, some forms of adaptation—flood barriers, for instance—are clearly public goods, best supplied through collective action. Adaptation will require redistribution, too. Some people and communities are too poor to adapt on their own; and if emissions caused by the consumption of the rich imposes adaptation costs on the poor, justice demands recompense.
Furthermore, policymakers’ neat division of the topic of climate change into mitigation, impact and adaptation is too simplistic. Some means of adaptation can also act as mitigation; a farming technique which helps soil store moisture better may well help it store carbon too. Some forms of adaptation will be hard to distinguish from the sort of impact you would rather avoid. Mass migration is a good way of adapting if the alternative is sitting still and starving; to people who live where the migrants turn up it may look awfully like an unwelcome impact.
Its frequently private and slightly blurry nature is not the only reason why adaptation has been marginalised. The green pressure groups and politicians who have driven the debate on climate change have often been loth to see attention paid to adaptation, on the ground that the more people thought about it, the less motivated they would be to push ahead with emissions reduction. Talking about adaptation was for many years like farting at the dinner table, says an academic who has worked on adaptation over the past decade. Now that the world’s appetite for emissions reduction has been revealed to be chronically weak, putting people off dinner is less of a problem.
Another reason for taking adaptation seriously is that it is necessary now. Events such as this year’s devastating floods in Pakistan make it obvious that the world has not adapted to the climate it already has, be it man-made or natural. Even if the climate were not changing, there would be two reasons to worry about its capacity to do more harm than before. One is that it varies a lot naturally and the period over which there are good global climate records is short compared with the timescale on which some of that variability plays out. People thus may be ignoring the worst that today’s climate can do, let alone tomorrow’s. The other is that more lives, livelihoods and property are at risk, even if hazards do not change, as a result of economic development, population growth and migration to coasts and floodplains.
The three-degree difference
In a late 21st-century world 3°C warmer than the pre-industrial norm, what changes are most marked? Start with the coldest bits. Arctic summer sea ice goes, allowing more shipping and mining, removing a landscape of which indigenous peoples were once an integral part. Permafrost warms up, and infrastructure built on it founders. Most mountain glaciers shrink; some disappear. Winter snows melt more quickly, and the risks of spring floods and summer water shortages on the rivers they feed increase.
Sea level rises, though by how much is hard to say (see chart 2). Some of the rise will be predictable, in that oceans expand as they get warmer. Some, though, will depend on the behaviour of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps, which cannot be predicted with any certainty. Less than half a metre by 2100 would be a lucky break; a metre-plus is possible; more than two is very unlikely, but possible later.
Even as the waters rise, many coasts will be sinking because of the subsidence that follows as cities suck up groundwater. Deltas are doubly damned, since any subsidence is often coupled with a lessened supply of replenishing sediment, which is often trapped upstream by irrigation, hydropower production and flood-control projects. One estimate puts 8.7m more people at risk of flooding in deltas by 2050 if sea level follows current trends.
Tropical cyclones, which account for much of the damage the sea does to the land, may become less frequent. But the share of the most destructive—category 4 and category 5 hurricanes—seems likely to increase. And bigger storms do disproportionately greater damage.
In warmer oceans, coral bleaching triggered by temperature stress will be more common. This is bad for fishing and tourism but not necessarily fatal to all the reefs: bleached reefs may be recolonised by new corals. Reefs may also face damage from ocean acidification, an effect of higher CO2 levels rather than of warming, as may other ecosystems, though the size of the impacts is uncertain. In warmer oceans nutrients in deeper water will be less easily recycled to the surface, which may lead to lower biological productivity overall.
On land, wet places, such as much of South-East Asia, are likely to get wetter, and dry places, such as much of southern Africa and the south-western United States, drier. In northern climes some land will become more suitable for farming as springs come sooner, whereas in the tropics and subtropics some marginal land will become barely inhabitable. These places may be large sources of migration. Such effects are already visible in, for example, the large part of the population of Côte d’Ivoire who come from Burkina Faso.
Increases in average temperature will be less noticeable than those in extremes. According to a comparison of over 20 climate models, by 2050 the probability of a summer warmer than the warmest yet recorded will be between 10% and 50% in much of the world. By 2090 it will be 90% in many places (see map).
Watching the weather
People will also have to contend with unpredictable shifts in weather patterns. Many models say the factors that give rise to the Indian monsoon are likely to weaken. The strength of the rainfall within it, though, is likely to rise, because the air will be warmer, and warmer air can hold more water. No one can say how these two trends will play out. Similar uncertainties dog predictions about the great slopping of warmth back and forth across the Pacific known as El Niño and other climatic oscillations. In general, the closer you want to get to firm statements about what is likely to happen, the less adequate current climate science is revealed to be.
It is tempting to imagine that adaptation decisions might wait for models that can provide greater certainty about what might happen where. This is a forlorn hope. Faster computers and new modelling techniques might well provide more details and finer distinctions. But they will not necessarily be more accurate, or capable of being shown to be so: if different models become more precise and as a result their disagreements grow rather than shrink, which are you going to trust? Decisions about adaptation will be made in conditions of pervasive uncertainty. So the trick will be to find ways of adapting to many possible future climates, not to tailor expectations to one future in particular.
Even then, adaptation can help only up to a point. A 2009 review of the cost of warming to the global economy suggests that as much as two-thirds of the total cannot be offset through investment in adaptation, and will be felt through higher prices, lower growth and misery regardless. But adaptation can still achieve a lot.
The best starting point for adaptation is to be rich. It is not foolproof: not even the rich can buy off all hazards, and rich countries and individuals will make poor decisions. The need to restrict farming with subsidised water in a drier south-western United States does not mean that the political means of doing so will be found before damage is done. But wealth buys information (a lot of people are studying what to do in the south-west) and it opens up options. Resources help people adapt both before the fact, by reducing risks, and after it, by aiding recovery from harm.
Wealth can create hedges against the effects of climate change, even if they are not conceived of as such. Insurance markets are a case in point, though they have flaws: a lack of relevant history makes evolving risks hard to price, and government policies often dampen the signals that would otherwise make people more realistically wary of coasts and floodplains. Public-health systems are another: in better-off countries these did far more to reduce the effects of malaria in the 20th century than warming did to worsen them. Economic development should see improvements in health care that will, in aggregate, swamp the specific infectious-disease threats associated with climate change.
The indiscreet charm of being loaded
Rich countries can also afford big, expensive projects. Studies suggest that although much of the Netherlands lies below sea level or is at risk of river flooding, the Dutch can view the prospect of a rising sea level with a certain equanimity, at least for their own land. Plans outlined in 2008 to deal with a rise of more than two metres by 2200, as well as increased winter flow along the Rhine and Meuse rivers, put the cost of holding at bay the worst flood expected for 10,000 years at €1 billion-2 billion ($1.5 billion-3 billion) a year for a century. That is easily affordable.
Other rich coastal areas have considered similar commitments. The Marina Barrage offers Singapore some protection against floods, as well as improving its ability to store fresh water. London has its Thames Barrier, first imagined after floods in 1953. The barrier was intended to deal with the worst flood expected over a millennium or more. That period looks more testing now than when the barrier was built, but Britain’s Met Office thinks the barrier, combined with other measures, is pretty much fit for purpose for this century.
London versus the ocean
New York might, in principle, protect itself against a hurricane-driven storm surge on top of a higher sea level with a much more massive set of barriers that could seal the Verrazano Narrows and the smaller spans of Throgs Neck, at the base of Long Island Sound, and the Arthur Kill, west of Staten Island. However, as Matthew Kahn, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, points out in his book, “Climatopolis”, the politics of such huge and hugely costly engineering might prove difficult. New Amsterdam does not have the attitudes of old Amsterdam.
Poor countries will often lack the financial means, technical expertise or political institutions necessary for such endeavours. Yet they are often at increased risk, principally because they are usually more dependent on farming than rich countries, and no other human activity is so intimately bound up with the weather. Crops are sensitive to changes in patterns of rainfall and peak temperature, as well as to average temperature and precipitation; so are the pests and diseases that attack them.
In its 2007 assessment, the IPCC’s picture of agriculture in a warmer world was one of two halves. In low latitudes higher temperatures are likely to shorten growing seasons and stress plants in other ways. In high latitudes, if warming is moderate, growing seasons are expected to lengthen and yields to rise, in part because raised CO2 levels aid photosynthesis.
The IPCC thus sees agriculture as being not too badly affected by 2°C of warming, as long as you stick to global averages. Above that (probably towards the end of the century) things look bad. Some think they look bad well before that. One worry is that a lot of harm may be done if temperatures breach certain thresholds even briefly. A fine-grained analysis of historical data from the United States by Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University and Michael Roberts of North Carolina State University found such thresholds for maize (corn), soya and cotton, America’s largest crops by value. One extremely hot day, their model suggests, can cut annual productivity by 7%. Applying their findings to models of a world with unabated emissions, they found yield declines of 63-82% by the end of the century, with hefty drops even in the relatively clement first half.
This study, like many, made no provision for CO2 fertilisation. The question of how to do so is vexed. If plants grow in chambers with high concentrations of CO2, yields rise a lot (which is why tomato farmers and others use CO2 in their greenhouses). More realistic experiments using carefully contrived sprays of CO2 upwind of crops show a much lower bonus. Remarkably, experiments like this, which provide the nearest analogues to what the world may be like in a few decades’ time, are carried out in only a handful of places. None regularly looks at tropical crops.
Against the uncertainty over thresholds and CO2 fertilisation must be weighed farmers’ ability to adapt to change and improve yields. Despite many warnings of doom, yields of arable crops have grown remarkably in the past half-century. Among other things, this intensification of farming has saved a great deal of wilderness from the plough: to feed today’s population with 1960’s yields would require an area of extra farmland roughly as big as Russia. In that it avoids deforestation, intensification is one of a number of adaptation strategies which also help mitigation.
Successful adaptation will require not just expanded research into improved crop yields and tolerance of temperature and water scarcity, but also research into new ways of managing pests, improving and conserving soil, cropping patterns and crop-management techniques that add resilience. Such research—and its application—will make it more likely that enough food for 9 billion people can be grown in a three-degrees-hotter world without much of the planet’s remaining uncultivated land or pastures coming under the plough.
If yields cannot be improved sufficiently, though, desperation may lead to more wilderness being uprooted or burned. A headlong rush for biofuels might have similar effects. This would be one of those adaptations to climate change that looked a lot like an adverse impact. Faster loss of species is highly likely in many ecosystems as a result of warming; greatly expanding farmlands will make this worse. It will also add to the fundamental problem, as clearing forests releases greenhouse gases.
Keeping the poor always with us
Even if the world contrives to keep feeding itself without too much ecosystem damage, many of those dependent on agriculture or in poverty could still suffer a great deal. Regional droughts could wreak havoc, with bad ones causing global surges in food prices.
Many of the millions of poor farming households in poor countries, who make up the bulk of the world’s agricultural labour force if not its agricultural output, already face more variable weather than farmers in temperate countries do. That and a lack of social safety-nets makes most of them highly risk-averse, which further limits their ability to undertake some adaptation strategies, such as changing crop varieties and planting patterns. They will often prefer surer chances but lower yields. Worse, in bad weather a whole region’s crops suffer together.
Farmers may be cheered by the thought that food prices are likely to rise. For poor farmers, who spend much of their income on food, this is a mixed blessing, especially if higher frequencies of drought make prices more volatile too. For poor people more generally, it is even worse news.
Even if prices are higher, crops more resilient and insurance more readily available, abandoning the farm may be the way many farmers choose to adapt. It may be prudent even before the fact. Paul Collier, Gordon Conway and Tony Venables, three British development specialists, have suggested that attempts to provide anticipatory help to poor African farmers could be badly overdone. Better to encourage them into cities and to reform labour markets, restrictions on the opening and closing of firms and so forth in ways that will help them earn money.
More than half the world’s people live in cities already. Three-quarters or more may do so by mid-century. Encouraging this trend further, at least in some places, may be a useful way of reducing the economy’s exposure to climate change. Statistical analyses by Salvador Barrios of the European Union’s Joint Research Centre and his colleagues suggest that climate change is already a factor in African urbanisation. A related study shows strong climate effects on sub-Saharan agriculture in Africa not seen elsewhere, which is not perhaps surprising given the huge effect of the 1980s droughts across the Sahel.
A downside to urbanisation is that cities are hotter than the surrounding countryside, creating what meteorologists call “urban heat islands”. But there are ways of dealing with this. More greenery in a city, spread through streets and over roofs, means more cooling as water evaporates from leaves; the bits which are not green can be painted white, to reflect sunlight.
And cities have intrinsic advantages. City dwellers’ emissions per person tend to be lower, and the more planners can do to increase population density the better. Protecting a single port city from floods is easier than protecting a similar population spread out along a coastline of fishing villages (though when things go wrong disasters can be correspondingly larger and harder to address). Cities have higher rates of innovation and of developing new businesses, business models and social strategies, formal or informal.
Ideally, there would be opportunities to move to cities in other countries, too; the larger the region in which people can travel, the easier it is to absorb migrants from struggling areas. This is one reason why adaptation is easier for large countries or integrated regions. Within the EU, Greeks and Italians will be better placed to move to cooler climes than inhabitants of similarly sized countries elsewhere.
Powers of example
The cost of all this adaptation is hard to judge—and is another area where adaptation and impact become confused. Melissa Dell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues argue that in developing countries GDP growth has been lower in hotter years than in cooler ones. This may carry over into longer-term increases in temperature. The mechanism is obscure: it may simply be that overheated people work less hard. That can be seen either as adaptation or as a worrying impact, slowing down the economic growth which is the surest foundation for other, more positive adaptations.
If climate change does slow poor countries’ growth rates, the onus on rich ones to help will be even larger. This was recognised to some extent in the Copenhagen accord, which proposed that $100 billion a year should flow from north to south by 2020, to be split between investments in mitigation and adaptation. But whereas investments in mitigation are fairly easy to understand—build windmills not coal-fired power stations, and so on—those in adaptation are harder to grasp. Action on climate bleeds into more general development measures.
The poorest countries all have wish-lists for adaptation funding, drawn up in the UN climate-convention process of which the Copenhagen and Cancún meetings are part. Money and know-how are essential, but so is example. Rich countries can show, through their own programmes for flood defence, zoning laws, sewerage and so on that adaptation must be part of the mainstream of political and economic life, not an eccentric and marginal idea. Adaptation by and for the poor alone is likely to be poor adaptation.
Nov 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
ON NOVEMBER 29th representatives of countries from around the world will gather in Cancún, Mexico, for the first high-level climate talks since those in Copenhagen last December. The organisers hope the meeting in Mexico, unlike the one in Denmark, will be unshowy but solid, leading to decisions about finance, forestry and technology transfer that will leave the world better placed to do something about global warming. Incremental progress is possible, but continued deadlock is likelier. What is out of reach, as at Copenhagen, is agreement on a plausible programme for keeping climate change in check.
The world warmed by about 0.7°C in the 20th century. Every year in this century has been warmer than all but one in the last (1998, since you ask). If carbon-dioxide levels were magically to stabilise where they are now (almost 390 parts per million, 40% more than before the industrial revolution) the world would probably warm by a further half a degree or so as the ocean, which is slow to change its temperature, caught up. But CO2 levels continue to rise. Despite 20 years of climate negotiation, the world is still on an emissions trajectory that fits pretty easily into the “business as usual” scenarios drawn up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Copenhagen accord, a non-binding document which was the best that could be salvaged from the summit, talks of trying to keep the world less than 2°C warmer than in pre-industrial times—a level that is rather arbitrarily seen as the threshold for danger. Many countries have, in signing the accord, promised actions that will or should reduce carbon emissions. In the World Energy Outlook, recently published by the International Energy Agency, an assessment of these promises forms the basis of a “new policies scenario” for the next 25 years (see chart 1). According to the IEA, the scenario puts the world on course to warm by 3.5°C by 2100. For comparison, the difference in global mean temperature between the pre-industrial age and the ice ages was about 6°C.
The IEA also looked at what it might take to hit a two-degree target; the answer, says the agency’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, is “too good to be believed”. Every signatory of the Copenhagen accord would have to hit the top of its range of commitments. That would provide a worldwide rate of decarbonisation (reduction in carbon emitted per unit of GDP) twice as large in the decade to come as in the one just past: 2.8% a year, not 1.4%. Mr Birol notes that the highest annual rate on record is 2.5%, in the wake of the first oil shock.
But for the two-degree scenario 2.8% is just the beginning; from 2020 to 2035 the rate of decarbonisation needs to double again, to 5.5%. Though they are unwilling to say it in public, the sheer improbability of such success has led many climate scientists, campaigners and policymakers to conclude that, in the words of Bob Watson, once the head of the IPCC and now the chief scientist at Britain’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “Two degrees is a wishful dream.”
The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over. Analysts who have long worked on adaptation to climate change—finding ways to live with scarcer water, higher peak temperatures, higher sea levels and weather patterns at odds with those under which today’s settled patterns of farming developed—are starting to see their day in the uncomfortably hot sun. That such measures cannot protect everyone from all harm that climate change may bring does not mean that they should be ignored. On the contrary, they are sorely needed.
Public harms
Many of these adaptations are the sorts of thing—moving house, improving water supply, sowing different seeds—that people will do for themselves, given a chance. This is one reason why adaptation has not been the subject of public debate in the same way as reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions from industry and deforestation have. But even if a lot of adaptation will end up being done privately, it is also a suitable issue for public policy.
For a start, some forms of adaptation—flood barriers, for instance—are clearly public goods, best supplied through collective action. Adaptation will require redistribution, too. Some people and communities are too poor to adapt on their own; and if emissions caused by the consumption of the rich imposes adaptation costs on the poor, justice demands recompense.
Furthermore, policymakers’ neat division of the topic of climate change into mitigation, impact and adaptation is too simplistic. Some means of adaptation can also act as mitigation; a farming technique which helps soil store moisture better may well help it store carbon too. Some forms of adaptation will be hard to distinguish from the sort of impact you would rather avoid. Mass migration is a good way of adapting if the alternative is sitting still and starving; to people who live where the migrants turn up it may look awfully like an unwelcome impact.
Its frequently private and slightly blurry nature is not the only reason why adaptation has been marginalised. The green pressure groups and politicians who have driven the debate on climate change have often been loth to see attention paid to adaptation, on the ground that the more people thought about it, the less motivated they would be to push ahead with emissions reduction. Talking about adaptation was for many years like farting at the dinner table, says an academic who has worked on adaptation over the past decade. Now that the world’s appetite for emissions reduction has been revealed to be chronically weak, putting people off dinner is less of a problem.
Another reason for taking adaptation seriously is that it is necessary now. Events such as this year’s devastating floods in Pakistan make it obvious that the world has not adapted to the climate it already has, be it man-made or natural. Even if the climate were not changing, there would be two reasons to worry about its capacity to do more harm than before. One is that it varies a lot naturally and the period over which there are good global climate records is short compared with the timescale on which some of that variability plays out. People thus may be ignoring the worst that today’s climate can do, let alone tomorrow’s. The other is that more lives, livelihoods and property are at risk, even if hazards do not change, as a result of economic development, population growth and migration to coasts and floodplains.
The three-degree difference
In a late 21st-century world 3°C warmer than the pre-industrial norm, what changes are most marked? Start with the coldest bits. Arctic summer sea ice goes, allowing more shipping and mining, removing a landscape of which indigenous peoples were once an integral part. Permafrost warms up, and infrastructure built on it founders. Most mountain glaciers shrink; some disappear. Winter snows melt more quickly, and the risks of spring floods and summer water shortages on the rivers they feed increase.
Sea level rises, though by how much is hard to say (see chart 2). Some of the rise will be predictable, in that oceans expand as they get warmer. Some, though, will depend on the behaviour of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps, which cannot be predicted with any certainty. Less than half a metre by 2100 would be a lucky break; a metre-plus is possible; more than two is very unlikely, but possible later.
Even as the waters rise, many coasts will be sinking because of the subsidence that follows as cities suck up groundwater. Deltas are doubly damned, since any subsidence is often coupled with a lessened supply of replenishing sediment, which is often trapped upstream by irrigation, hydropower production and flood-control projects. One estimate puts 8.7m more people at risk of flooding in deltas by 2050 if sea level follows current trends.
Tropical cyclones, which account for much of the damage the sea does to the land, may become less frequent. But the share of the most destructive—category 4 and category 5 hurricanes—seems likely to increase. And bigger storms do disproportionately greater damage.
In warmer oceans, coral bleaching triggered by temperature stress will be more common. This is bad for fishing and tourism but not necessarily fatal to all the reefs: bleached reefs may be recolonised by new corals. Reefs may also face damage from ocean acidification, an effect of higher CO2 levels rather than of warming, as may other ecosystems, though the size of the impacts is uncertain. In warmer oceans nutrients in deeper water will be less easily recycled to the surface, which may lead to lower biological productivity overall.
On land, wet places, such as much of South-East Asia, are likely to get wetter, and dry places, such as much of southern Africa and the south-western United States, drier. In northern climes some land will become more suitable for farming as springs come sooner, whereas in the tropics and subtropics some marginal land will become barely inhabitable. These places may be large sources of migration. Such effects are already visible in, for example, the large part of the population of Côte d’Ivoire who come from Burkina Faso.
Increases in average temperature will be less noticeable than those in extremes. According to a comparison of over 20 climate models, by 2050 the probability of a summer warmer than the warmest yet recorded will be between 10% and 50% in much of the world. By 2090 it will be 90% in many places (see map).
Watching the weather
People will also have to contend with unpredictable shifts in weather patterns. Many models say the factors that give rise to the Indian monsoon are likely to weaken. The strength of the rainfall within it, though, is likely to rise, because the air will be warmer, and warmer air can hold more water. No one can say how these two trends will play out. Similar uncertainties dog predictions about the great slopping of warmth back and forth across the Pacific known as El Niño and other climatic oscillations. In general, the closer you want to get to firm statements about what is likely to happen, the less adequate current climate science is revealed to be.
It is tempting to imagine that adaptation decisions might wait for models that can provide greater certainty about what might happen where. This is a forlorn hope. Faster computers and new modelling techniques might well provide more details and finer distinctions. But they will not necessarily be more accurate, or capable of being shown to be so: if different models become more precise and as a result their disagreements grow rather than shrink, which are you going to trust? Decisions about adaptation will be made in conditions of pervasive uncertainty. So the trick will be to find ways of adapting to many possible future climates, not to tailor expectations to one future in particular.
Even then, adaptation can help only up to a point. A 2009 review of the cost of warming to the global economy suggests that as much as two-thirds of the total cannot be offset through investment in adaptation, and will be felt through higher prices, lower growth and misery regardless. But adaptation can still achieve a lot.
The best starting point for adaptation is to be rich. It is not foolproof: not even the rich can buy off all hazards, and rich countries and individuals will make poor decisions. The need to restrict farming with subsidised water in a drier south-western United States does not mean that the political means of doing so will be found before damage is done. But wealth buys information (a lot of people are studying what to do in the south-west) and it opens up options. Resources help people adapt both before the fact, by reducing risks, and after it, by aiding recovery from harm.
Wealth can create hedges against the effects of climate change, even if they are not conceived of as such. Insurance markets are a case in point, though they have flaws: a lack of relevant history makes evolving risks hard to price, and government policies often dampen the signals that would otherwise make people more realistically wary of coasts and floodplains. Public-health systems are another: in better-off countries these did far more to reduce the effects of malaria in the 20th century than warming did to worsen them. Economic development should see improvements in health care that will, in aggregate, swamp the specific infectious-disease threats associated with climate change.
The indiscreet charm of being loaded
Rich countries can also afford big, expensive projects. Studies suggest that although much of the Netherlands lies below sea level or is at risk of river flooding, the Dutch can view the prospect of a rising sea level with a certain equanimity, at least for their own land. Plans outlined in 2008 to deal with a rise of more than two metres by 2200, as well as increased winter flow along the Rhine and Meuse rivers, put the cost of holding at bay the worst flood expected for 10,000 years at €1 billion-2 billion ($1.5 billion-3 billion) a year for a century. That is easily affordable.
Other rich coastal areas have considered similar commitments. The Marina Barrage offers Singapore some protection against floods, as well as improving its ability to store fresh water. London has its Thames Barrier, first imagined after floods in 1953. The barrier was intended to deal with the worst flood expected over a millennium or more. That period looks more testing now than when the barrier was built, but Britain’s Met Office thinks the barrier, combined with other measures, is pretty much fit for purpose for this century.
London versus the ocean
New York might, in principle, protect itself against a hurricane-driven storm surge on top of a higher sea level with a much more massive set of barriers that could seal the Verrazano Narrows and the smaller spans of Throgs Neck, at the base of Long Island Sound, and the Arthur Kill, west of Staten Island. However, as Matthew Kahn, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, points out in his book, “Climatopolis”, the politics of such huge and hugely costly engineering might prove difficult. New Amsterdam does not have the attitudes of old Amsterdam.
Poor countries will often lack the financial means, technical expertise or political institutions necessary for such endeavours. Yet they are often at increased risk, principally because they are usually more dependent on farming than rich countries, and no other human activity is so intimately bound up with the weather. Crops are sensitive to changes in patterns of rainfall and peak temperature, as well as to average temperature and precipitation; so are the pests and diseases that attack them.
In its 2007 assessment, the IPCC’s picture of agriculture in a warmer world was one of two halves. In low latitudes higher temperatures are likely to shorten growing seasons and stress plants in other ways. In high latitudes, if warming is moderate, growing seasons are expected to lengthen and yields to rise, in part because raised CO2 levels aid photosynthesis.
The IPCC thus sees agriculture as being not too badly affected by 2°C of warming, as long as you stick to global averages. Above that (probably towards the end of the century) things look bad. Some think they look bad well before that. One worry is that a lot of harm may be done if temperatures breach certain thresholds even briefly. A fine-grained analysis of historical data from the United States by Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University and Michael Roberts of North Carolina State University found such thresholds for maize (corn), soya and cotton, America’s largest crops by value. One extremely hot day, their model suggests, can cut annual productivity by 7%. Applying their findings to models of a world with unabated emissions, they found yield declines of 63-82% by the end of the century, with hefty drops even in the relatively clement first half.
This study, like many, made no provision for CO2 fertilisation. The question of how to do so is vexed. If plants grow in chambers with high concentrations of CO2, yields rise a lot (which is why tomato farmers and others use CO2 in their greenhouses). More realistic experiments using carefully contrived sprays of CO2 upwind of crops show a much lower bonus. Remarkably, experiments like this, which provide the nearest analogues to what the world may be like in a few decades’ time, are carried out in only a handful of places. None regularly looks at tropical crops.
Against the uncertainty over thresholds and CO2 fertilisation must be weighed farmers’ ability to adapt to change and improve yields. Despite many warnings of doom, yields of arable crops have grown remarkably in the past half-century. Among other things, this intensification of farming has saved a great deal of wilderness from the plough: to feed today’s population with 1960’s yields would require an area of extra farmland roughly as big as Russia. In that it avoids deforestation, intensification is one of a number of adaptation strategies which also help mitigation.
Successful adaptation will require not just expanded research into improved crop yields and tolerance of temperature and water scarcity, but also research into new ways of managing pests, improving and conserving soil, cropping patterns and crop-management techniques that add resilience. Such research—and its application—will make it more likely that enough food for 9 billion people can be grown in a three-degrees-hotter world without much of the planet’s remaining uncultivated land or pastures coming under the plough.
If yields cannot be improved sufficiently, though, desperation may lead to more wilderness being uprooted or burned. A headlong rush for biofuels might have similar effects. This would be one of those adaptations to climate change that looked a lot like an adverse impact. Faster loss of species is highly likely in many ecosystems as a result of warming; greatly expanding farmlands will make this worse. It will also add to the fundamental problem, as clearing forests releases greenhouse gases.
Keeping the poor always with us
Even if the world contrives to keep feeding itself without too much ecosystem damage, many of those dependent on agriculture or in poverty could still suffer a great deal. Regional droughts could wreak havoc, with bad ones causing global surges in food prices.
Many of the millions of poor farming households in poor countries, who make up the bulk of the world’s agricultural labour force if not its agricultural output, already face more variable weather than farmers in temperate countries do. That and a lack of social safety-nets makes most of them highly risk-averse, which further limits their ability to undertake some adaptation strategies, such as changing crop varieties and planting patterns. They will often prefer surer chances but lower yields. Worse, in bad weather a whole region’s crops suffer together.
Farmers may be cheered by the thought that food prices are likely to rise. For poor farmers, who spend much of their income on food, this is a mixed blessing, especially if higher frequencies of drought make prices more volatile too. For poor people more generally, it is even worse news.
Even if prices are higher, crops more resilient and insurance more readily available, abandoning the farm may be the way many farmers choose to adapt. It may be prudent even before the fact. Paul Collier, Gordon Conway and Tony Venables, three British development specialists, have suggested that attempts to provide anticipatory help to poor African farmers could be badly overdone. Better to encourage them into cities and to reform labour markets, restrictions on the opening and closing of firms and so forth in ways that will help them earn money.
More than half the world’s people live in cities already. Three-quarters or more may do so by mid-century. Encouraging this trend further, at least in some places, may be a useful way of reducing the economy’s exposure to climate change. Statistical analyses by Salvador Barrios of the European Union’s Joint Research Centre and his colleagues suggest that climate change is already a factor in African urbanisation. A related study shows strong climate effects on sub-Saharan agriculture in Africa not seen elsewhere, which is not perhaps surprising given the huge effect of the 1980s droughts across the Sahel.
A downside to urbanisation is that cities are hotter than the surrounding countryside, creating what meteorologists call “urban heat islands”. But there are ways of dealing with this. More greenery in a city, spread through streets and over roofs, means more cooling as water evaporates from leaves; the bits which are not green can be painted white, to reflect sunlight.
And cities have intrinsic advantages. City dwellers’ emissions per person tend to be lower, and the more planners can do to increase population density the better. Protecting a single port city from floods is easier than protecting a similar population spread out along a coastline of fishing villages (though when things go wrong disasters can be correspondingly larger and harder to address). Cities have higher rates of innovation and of developing new businesses, business models and social strategies, formal or informal.
Ideally, there would be opportunities to move to cities in other countries, too; the larger the region in which people can travel, the easier it is to absorb migrants from struggling areas. This is one reason why adaptation is easier for large countries or integrated regions. Within the EU, Greeks and Italians will be better placed to move to cooler climes than inhabitants of similarly sized countries elsewhere.
Powers of example
The cost of all this adaptation is hard to judge—and is another area where adaptation and impact become confused. Melissa Dell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues argue that in developing countries GDP growth has been lower in hotter years than in cooler ones. This may carry over into longer-term increases in temperature. The mechanism is obscure: it may simply be that overheated people work less hard. That can be seen either as adaptation or as a worrying impact, slowing down the economic growth which is the surest foundation for other, more positive adaptations.
If climate change does slow poor countries’ growth rates, the onus on rich ones to help will be even larger. This was recognised to some extent in the Copenhagen accord, which proposed that $100 billion a year should flow from north to south by 2020, to be split between investments in mitigation and adaptation. But whereas investments in mitigation are fairly easy to understand—build windmills not coal-fired power stations, and so on—those in adaptation are harder to grasp. Action on climate bleeds into more general development measures.
The poorest countries all have wish-lists for adaptation funding, drawn up in the UN climate-convention process of which the Copenhagen and Cancún meetings are part. Money and know-how are essential, but so is example. Rich countries can show, through their own programmes for flood defence, zoning laws, sewerage and so on that adaptation must be part of the mainstream of political and economic life, not an eccentric and marginal idea. Adaptation by and for the poor alone is likely to be poor adaptation.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
More Comments on Climate Change - what can we agree on? and What initiatives should governments offer?
Addendum # 1 - Letter to the Editor of Business Review Weekly
A common technique in dispute resolution is for both sides to look for issues they agree upon. In the climate change debate, this has not yet happened.
Climate change skeptics and supporters should gather in one room and discuss their areas of agreement. Most would agree that our planet is warming up, rainfall in southern Australia is diminishing and sea levels are rising. Regardless of the cause of these climate changes, both parties should agree that we are consuming our limited resources of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) at rates which will cause shortages at some point in the future. Actions providing cost-effective economic and meaningful environmental benefits should also gain support.
A range of policy initiatives then becomes clear once these higher level agreements have been reached. Solar hot water systems and ceiling insulation (via a properly planned and implemented incentive program) provide economic pay-back periods of less than 10 years; most diesel-fueled cars are cost-effective after 60,000 km; green building regulations reduce energy and water usage by 50% or more; energy and water audits for businesses; and so the list goes on.
Government would not need to introduce 'a great big new tax' to achieve any of these mutually agreed upon outcomes, instead offering taxation incentives such as accelerated depreciation, year of purchase write-off or return of the GST payments.
The lack of any attempt to reach agreement between opposing climate change groups shows that ideology and politics still remain their primary motivations. No wonder the public is losing faith in political parties who want higher tax income and environmental groups who want a return to the dark ages.
Addendum # 2 - Policy Initiatives arising from Path # 3
If we're prepared to act on issues which people with a concern about the future can agree on, then the following email to someone who asked for my views on 'relevant economic solutions' to climate change may be of interest:
The best economic solutions to environmental problems will be those that have a reasonable economic pay-back period (say, less than 10 years for the big, long term expenditures or less than 5 years for solutions with a shorter working life) which also deliver useful or important environmental benefits. Some examples include:
* solar hot water system - 15 to 20 year life, with a 3 to 6 year pay-back period depending upon the type of hot water system that is being replaced. Current government increases in electricity prices to reflect the actual cost of generating and supplying electricity can only help shorten the pay-back period and hence make solar hot water systems more attractive.
* ceiling insulation in houses - in spite of Peter Garrett making a complete mess of the scheme, the principles behind it were fine. 50+ year life, pay-back period of 4 to 10 years depending on how home heating is generated.An added benefit is that Perth's highly inefficient domestic air conditioners won't need to work so hard in summer, hence reducing the amount of electricity Synergy has to supply each afternoon/evening on a hot summer's day to meet the air conditioning load.
* compact fluorescent lights
* energy audits - the businesses and industries that I've worked in over the years have paid little attention to fine tuning their energy use. This was in spite of energy consultants promising a one year pay-back on the cost of their advice (although you had to also pay for new equipment, etc)
* passive solar energy heat-gain design in dwellings. In theory, design and construction costs impose no extra costs with energy savings of half or more, although occupants need to accept behavioural change to open windows when cool sea breezes are blowing, close curtains when outside air temperatures go up, open curtains in winter when sun is shining into the north-facing rooms, etc.
If electric cars consume less energy (assuming a common basis for comparison exists between electric and liquid fuel motor vehicles) than other cars, then government could encourage their use by eliminating motor vehicle registration fees or refunding GST on equipment purchases.
I'm certainly not a supporter of the concept of trading in older vehicles that may be giving 12 litres per 100km fuel consumption just to buy a new car that might be giving 10 litres per 100 km. A $30,000 motor vehicle loses 20% (at least) in value the second it leaves the dealer's yard, so $6000 in lost value may take 10 or 15 years for an economic pay-back derived from the small fuel saving.
A common technique in dispute resolution is for both sides to look for issues they agree upon. In the climate change debate, this has not yet happened.
Climate change skeptics and supporters should gather in one room and discuss their areas of agreement. Most would agree that our planet is warming up, rainfall in southern Australia is diminishing and sea levels are rising. Regardless of the cause of these climate changes, both parties should agree that we are consuming our limited resources of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) at rates which will cause shortages at some point in the future. Actions providing cost-effective economic and meaningful environmental benefits should also gain support.
A range of policy initiatives then becomes clear once these higher level agreements have been reached. Solar hot water systems and ceiling insulation (via a properly planned and implemented incentive program) provide economic pay-back periods of less than 10 years; most diesel-fueled cars are cost-effective after 60,000 km; green building regulations reduce energy and water usage by 50% or more; energy and water audits for businesses; and so the list goes on.
Government would not need to introduce 'a great big new tax' to achieve any of these mutually agreed upon outcomes, instead offering taxation incentives such as accelerated depreciation, year of purchase write-off or return of the GST payments.
The lack of any attempt to reach agreement between opposing climate change groups shows that ideology and politics still remain their primary motivations. No wonder the public is losing faith in political parties who want higher tax income and environmental groups who want a return to the dark ages.
Addendum # 2 - Policy Initiatives arising from Path # 3
If we're prepared to act on issues which people with a concern about the future can agree on, then the following email to someone who asked for my views on 'relevant economic solutions' to climate change may be of interest:
The best economic solutions to environmental problems will be those that have a reasonable economic pay-back period (say, less than 10 years for the big, long term expenditures or less than 5 years for solutions with a shorter working life) which also deliver useful or important environmental benefits. Some examples include:
* solar hot water system - 15 to 20 year life, with a 3 to 6 year pay-back period depending upon the type of hot water system that is being replaced. Current government increases in electricity prices to reflect the actual cost of generating and supplying electricity can only help shorten the pay-back period and hence make solar hot water systems more attractive.
* ceiling insulation in houses - in spite of Peter Garrett making a complete mess of the scheme, the principles behind it were fine. 50+ year life, pay-back period of 4 to 10 years depending on how home heating is generated.An added benefit is that Perth's highly inefficient domestic air conditioners won't need to work so hard in summer, hence reducing the amount of electricity Synergy has to supply each afternoon/evening on a hot summer's day to meet the air conditioning load.
* compact fluorescent lights
* energy audits - the businesses and industries that I've worked in over the years have paid little attention to fine tuning their energy use. This was in spite of energy consultants promising a one year pay-back on the cost of their advice (although you had to also pay for new equipment, etc)
* passive solar energy heat-gain design in dwellings. In theory, design and construction costs impose no extra costs with energy savings of half or more, although occupants need to accept behavioural change to open windows when cool sea breezes are blowing, close curtains when outside air temperatures go up, open curtains in winter when sun is shining into the north-facing rooms, etc.
If electric cars consume less energy (assuming a common basis for comparison exists between electric and liquid fuel motor vehicles) than other cars, then government could encourage their use by eliminating motor vehicle registration fees or refunding GST on equipment purchases.
I'm certainly not a supporter of the concept of trading in older vehicles that may be giving 12 litres per 100km fuel consumption just to buy a new car that might be giving 10 litres per 100 km. A $30,000 motor vehicle loses 20% (at least) in value the second it leaves the dealer's yard, so $6000 in lost value may take 10 or 15 years for an economic pay-back derived from the small fuel saving.
Friday, July 09, 2010
The Climate Change debate - what path do you want to be on?
Our climate is changing. Media reports from around the world are showing us on a daily basis the truth of our changing climate. Locally, when Carolina and I first moved to south west Western Australia in the mid 1970s, the Scott River area on the south coast was receiving almost two metres of rainfall each year. Today, the annual rainfall has halved, with rain gauge recordings proving that the climate in this part of the world has changed profoundly in less than 40 years.
What then is causing the climate to change? Scientists believe that the large high pressure cells in the northern part of the southern hemisphere have become larger, in turn pushing the low pressure cells which contain rain-bearing cold fronts further to the south. This then causes these cold fronts to drop most of their rain 200 or 300 kilometres further south than before, resulting in much lower rainfall for the most parts of the south west of the state.
We then need to ask why are these high pressure cells larger than they once were. The obvious answer, once again confirmed by scientific data, is that the world is getting warmer. As air heats up, it expands and this is a plausible explanation of why our climate is changing.
But now we come to the hard part. Why is planet earth warming up? Here, there are many theories, the most popular one being a human-caused increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas: it traps heat from the sun that would otherwise escape back out into outer space after being reflected off clouds and the surface of the planet. However, water vapour is also a greenhouse gas and it is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It plays critical roles in regulating global climate, yet the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) division admits that "though the basics of the hydrological cycle are fairly well understood, we have very little comprehension of the complexity of the feedback loops. Also, while we have good atmospheric measurements of other key greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, we have poor measurements of global water vapor, so it is not certain by how much atmospheric concentrations have risen in recent decades or centuries, though satellite measurements, combined with balloon data and some in-situ ground measurements indicate generally positive trends in global water vapor." NOAA further states "The feedback loop in which water is involved is critically important to projecting future climate change, but as yet is still fairly poorly measured and understood."
We also know that the burning of fossil fuels has increased CO2 levels from about 280 parts per million to about 370ppm. Since CO2 is a greenhouse cause, it is reasonable to accept that the higher CO2 levels are trapping more heat. Unfortunately, as NOAA has implied, there are still many important uncertainties about the exact level of warming we should attribute to different components of our atmosphere.
To summarise, we have excellent scientific records to show that climate change is occurring; we know that CO2 levels have gone up; we know that water vapour is a greenhouse gas; and we know that we don't know all the answers.
At this point in the climate change debate, we can choose to go down one of several different paths.
Path # 1: we can accept the widely held scientific view that the human-induced rise in CO2 is the cause of the problem and agree to reduce our burning of fossil fuels. This has profound economic and social consequences for billions of people in developing countries who aspire to a standard of living close to that enjoyed by most Australians, Americans and Europeans. To date, no global agreement on reducing CO2 levels has been reached (forget about the Kyoto agreement - it never had a chance of making a difference to global CO2 emissions). Even so, the lack of meaningful action to date has not stopped many scientists and environmental activists from urging radical change to the way in which we live on this planet.
Path # 2: we can accept that rising CO2 levels are just one cause of global climate change and that other factors such as water vapour and heat from the sun are equally or far more important. Since human beings have virtually no control over the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere nor over the amount of heat put out by the sun, there seems to be no action we can take to make any difference to global warming and to all the adverse social and economic consequences which are likely to manifest themselves over the next century or two.
Path # 3: we can accept that climate change is occurring, that we human beings don't know all the possible causes and, as a result, we can't know all the possible solutions, but that we can act now to minimise the impacts of climate change on the millions or billions of people who will be adversely impacted by a warming planet over future years. People who accept this path believe it is a waste of time to enter into long and spiteful debates about whether one is a climate change denier or skeptic or supporter: these are just labels which define or denigrate people and which ignore the need for action, whatever that action might need to be. Instead, people on path # 3 accept that we need to conserve our fossil fuels which exist in finite amounts on the planet and which we should not be wasting in ways that will disadvantage future generations. These people also believe that we should be planning for a hotter, dryer future with higher sea levels. By planning ahead, we can mitigate or reduce the severity of future impacts on human beings if the worst of the climate change predictions come about.
At present, we have people such as Hrimnir Benediktsson from Dalyellup who, as politically motivated environmental activists, want everyone to accept path #1, regardless of how difficult it is to achieve a political solution to rising CO2 levels - just ask former PM Kevin Rudd how hard it was. We also have the so-called deniers such as Professor Ian Plimer who believe no action is needed by human beings since the climate will continue to change no matter what we do.
And then we have the least vocal group - path # 3 - of which I happen to be a member, where we accept that climate change is occurring, we admit that we don't know for sure what's causing it, but we agree to act appropriately to conserve our limited supplies of fossil fuels and to reduce the adverse impacts of the climate changes which we believe will occur over the coming centuries.
What then is causing the climate to change? Scientists believe that the large high pressure cells in the northern part of the southern hemisphere have become larger, in turn pushing the low pressure cells which contain rain-bearing cold fronts further to the south. This then causes these cold fronts to drop most of their rain 200 or 300 kilometres further south than before, resulting in much lower rainfall for the most parts of the south west of the state.
We then need to ask why are these high pressure cells larger than they once were. The obvious answer, once again confirmed by scientific data, is that the world is getting warmer. As air heats up, it expands and this is a plausible explanation of why our climate is changing.
But now we come to the hard part. Why is planet earth warming up? Here, there are many theories, the most popular one being a human-caused increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas: it traps heat from the sun that would otherwise escape back out into outer space after being reflected off clouds and the surface of the planet. However, water vapour is also a greenhouse gas and it is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It plays critical roles in regulating global climate, yet the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) division admits that "though the basics of the hydrological cycle are fairly well understood, we have very little comprehension of the complexity of the feedback loops. Also, while we have good atmospheric measurements of other key greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, we have poor measurements of global water vapor, so it is not certain by how much atmospheric concentrations have risen in recent decades or centuries, though satellite measurements, combined with balloon data and some in-situ ground measurements indicate generally positive trends in global water vapor." NOAA further states "The feedback loop in which water is involved is critically important to projecting future climate change, but as yet is still fairly poorly measured and understood."
We also know that the burning of fossil fuels has increased CO2 levels from about 280 parts per million to about 370ppm. Since CO2 is a greenhouse cause, it is reasonable to accept that the higher CO2 levels are trapping more heat. Unfortunately, as NOAA has implied, there are still many important uncertainties about the exact level of warming we should attribute to different components of our atmosphere.
To summarise, we have excellent scientific records to show that climate change is occurring; we know that CO2 levels have gone up; we know that water vapour is a greenhouse gas; and we know that we don't know all the answers.
At this point in the climate change debate, we can choose to go down one of several different paths.
Path # 1: we can accept the widely held scientific view that the human-induced rise in CO2 is the cause of the problem and agree to reduce our burning of fossil fuels. This has profound economic and social consequences for billions of people in developing countries who aspire to a standard of living close to that enjoyed by most Australians, Americans and Europeans. To date, no global agreement on reducing CO2 levels has been reached (forget about the Kyoto agreement - it never had a chance of making a difference to global CO2 emissions). Even so, the lack of meaningful action to date has not stopped many scientists and environmental activists from urging radical change to the way in which we live on this planet.
Path # 2: we can accept that rising CO2 levels are just one cause of global climate change and that other factors such as water vapour and heat from the sun are equally or far more important. Since human beings have virtually no control over the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere nor over the amount of heat put out by the sun, there seems to be no action we can take to make any difference to global warming and to all the adverse social and economic consequences which are likely to manifest themselves over the next century or two.
Path # 3: we can accept that climate change is occurring, that we human beings don't know all the possible causes and, as a result, we can't know all the possible solutions, but that we can act now to minimise the impacts of climate change on the millions or billions of people who will be adversely impacted by a warming planet over future years. People who accept this path believe it is a waste of time to enter into long and spiteful debates about whether one is a climate change denier or skeptic or supporter: these are just labels which define or denigrate people and which ignore the need for action, whatever that action might need to be. Instead, people on path # 3 accept that we need to conserve our fossil fuels which exist in finite amounts on the planet and which we should not be wasting in ways that will disadvantage future generations. These people also believe that we should be planning for a hotter, dryer future with higher sea levels. By planning ahead, we can mitigate or reduce the severity of future impacts on human beings if the worst of the climate change predictions come about.
At present, we have people such as Hrimnir Benediktsson from Dalyellup who, as politically motivated environmental activists, want everyone to accept path #1, regardless of how difficult it is to achieve a political solution to rising CO2 levels - just ask former PM Kevin Rudd how hard it was. We also have the so-called deniers such as Professor Ian Plimer who believe no action is needed by human beings since the climate will continue to change no matter what we do.
And then we have the least vocal group - path # 3 - of which I happen to be a member, where we accept that climate change is occurring, we admit that we don't know for sure what's causing it, but we agree to act appropriately to conserve our limited supplies of fossil fuels and to reduce the adverse impacts of the climate changes which we believe will occur over the coming centuries.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Politics is a game, and rotten to the core - Time for Independents?
The following article appeared on the ABC's The Drum website on 10 June 2010. I don't agree with Hewson's comments about mining companies and big polluters manipulating government but I totally agree with his views on the poor quality of the typical modern politician. So I wonder if the time has now arrived for Australian voters to start sending good quality independents free of political party affiliations into Parliament as their elected representatives?
Politics is a game, and rotten to the core
John Hewson
In a recent blog Peter Martin has provocatively suggested that, in relation to the Rudd Government's mining tax, what is at stake is the idea of government.
It is a very real question whether our governments can actually govern anymore, with the power of vested interests, the shrillness of minorities, short-termism, and the superficiality of much of the media.
It is even more significant to ask whether those who are elected are actually capable of governing.
So much of what we call "governing" today is more about winning and keeping government, than it is about actually governing, more about politics and the politics of governing, than "the idea of government".
Politics today is little more than a "game" played out in a 24-hour media cycle. The players will now virtually say or do what they believe is required to win the media on the day, or influence next week's polls.
In this world, our politicians feel that they have to be seen, on any day, to be doing "something", to be responding to "the crisis", even if of their own making.
Moreover, politics now increasingly attracts "apparatchiks" as key players, to whom the game is their "end", and many of those who seek to gain personally in terms of the monetary rewards and the trappings of office, rather than those who bring a particular skill set or experience of relevance to "governing".
Few of those appointed as ministers, for example, have any particular experience or expertise in the portfolios to which they are appointed, or in actually managing anything, let alone a well-entrenched, change-resistant bureaucracy.
In this world, principles are cheap, policy promises are a means to an end, and too, even ephemeral, and policy detail and genuine debate can be a severe disadvantage. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
To the punter, daily media reports of the contest are often little better than Hollywood gossip.
It is little wonder that they increasingly tune out, feel disenfranchised and become disillusioned.
Problems don't get "solved", real needs are not addressed, and "bad (political) behaviour" is expected, but perhaps ultimately not yet excused.
Hasn't all this, and more, all come together in the current political contest over the mining super profits tax?
Powerful, multinational, well funded, mining giants, fearful that this may be the thin end of the wedge from the point of view of the taxation of their global mining activities, hell-bent on intimidating a government out of "governing", where they and their narrow interests are concerned.
Why shouldn't they give it a go? There is clear, recent evidence, that both sides of Australian politics can be "bullied" or "bought", as demonstrated by the success of the "big polluters" in the climate change "debate", over the Howard, Rudd and Abbott teams.
The time couldn't be better, with Rudd on the back foot on so many fronts, having backed off, or failed to deliver on, so much, and the ultimate opportunist in Abbott, the master of the negative.
With a complex, conceptual issue, driven by a Treasury that clearly understands and believes in the concept, but is largely incapable of advising on its implementation, or even on how the issue can be managed. They can see it working in practice, but wonder how they can improve its workings in theory.
With a media, little better than Google experts on the subject, and probably with even less genuine interest, but now fascinated at the prospect of a one-term Rudd Government, the first since Scullin in the 30s, the possible demise of the angry, control freak.
It matters little, indeed, it may even be something of a badge of honour, that they previously helped "make" him, putting him on a pedestal, promising genuine "change" and "reform", a new "vision".
Unfortunately, it's the contest that matters, not the policy substance, not the governance!
It is said that a fish rots from the head. Our "governance" is rotting through a distinct lack of effective leadership, and delivery, in a political system that is in desperate need of reform, on so many fronts.
But, unfortunately, those in the game have no incentive to really change.
Dr. John Hewson was the federal leader of the Liberal Party of Australia from 1990 to 1994.
Politics is a game, and rotten to the core
John Hewson
In a recent blog Peter Martin has provocatively suggested that, in relation to the Rudd Government's mining tax, what is at stake is the idea of government.
It is a very real question whether our governments can actually govern anymore, with the power of vested interests, the shrillness of minorities, short-termism, and the superficiality of much of the media.
It is even more significant to ask whether those who are elected are actually capable of governing.
So much of what we call "governing" today is more about winning and keeping government, than it is about actually governing, more about politics and the politics of governing, than "the idea of government".
Politics today is little more than a "game" played out in a 24-hour media cycle. The players will now virtually say or do what they believe is required to win the media on the day, or influence next week's polls.
In this world, our politicians feel that they have to be seen, on any day, to be doing "something", to be responding to "the crisis", even if of their own making.
Moreover, politics now increasingly attracts "apparatchiks" as key players, to whom the game is their "end", and many of those who seek to gain personally in terms of the monetary rewards and the trappings of office, rather than those who bring a particular skill set or experience of relevance to "governing".
Few of those appointed as ministers, for example, have any particular experience or expertise in the portfolios to which they are appointed, or in actually managing anything, let alone a well-entrenched, change-resistant bureaucracy.
In this world, principles are cheap, policy promises are a means to an end, and too, even ephemeral, and policy detail and genuine debate can be a severe disadvantage. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
To the punter, daily media reports of the contest are often little better than Hollywood gossip.
It is little wonder that they increasingly tune out, feel disenfranchised and become disillusioned.
Problems don't get "solved", real needs are not addressed, and "bad (political) behaviour" is expected, but perhaps ultimately not yet excused.
Hasn't all this, and more, all come together in the current political contest over the mining super profits tax?
Powerful, multinational, well funded, mining giants, fearful that this may be the thin end of the wedge from the point of view of the taxation of their global mining activities, hell-bent on intimidating a government out of "governing", where they and their narrow interests are concerned.
Why shouldn't they give it a go? There is clear, recent evidence, that both sides of Australian politics can be "bullied" or "bought", as demonstrated by the success of the "big polluters" in the climate change "debate", over the Howard, Rudd and Abbott teams.
The time couldn't be better, with Rudd on the back foot on so many fronts, having backed off, or failed to deliver on, so much, and the ultimate opportunist in Abbott, the master of the negative.
With a complex, conceptual issue, driven by a Treasury that clearly understands and believes in the concept, but is largely incapable of advising on its implementation, or even on how the issue can be managed. They can see it working in practice, but wonder how they can improve its workings in theory.
With a media, little better than Google experts on the subject, and probably with even less genuine interest, but now fascinated at the prospect of a one-term Rudd Government, the first since Scullin in the 30s, the possible demise of the angry, control freak.
It matters little, indeed, it may even be something of a badge of honour, that they previously helped "make" him, putting him on a pedestal, promising genuine "change" and "reform", a new "vision".
Unfortunately, it's the contest that matters, not the policy substance, not the governance!
It is said that a fish rots from the head. Our "governance" is rotting through a distinct lack of effective leadership, and delivery, in a political system that is in desperate need of reform, on so many fronts.
But, unfortunately, those in the game have no incentive to really change.
Dr. John Hewson was the federal leader of the Liberal Party of Australia from 1990 to 1994.
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Threats to Western Democracy
In a recent edition of Quadrant, Professor James Allen outlined some of his observations on how democracy is declining in many parts of the world. However, he didn't address the issue of the major causative factors which are helping to weaken democracy. In the following letter that I sent to the editor of Quadrant, I suggest what some of these factors are.
James Allen's valuable article on "Intimations of the Decline of Democracy" (Quadrant May 2010) correctly points out how democracy has been weakened in various ways. He appears not to have asked himself why or how these changes have come about? Had he done so, I would have suggested three of the major reasons as being: the power of the media; government being all about the leader rather than the team and its policies; and the almost unbelievable level of wealth within those democracies.
The media's ability to control and direct public opinion has never been stronger, in spite of the diversity of media types, with the internet and world wide web being the most recent. As people's lives in most free (i.e., democratic) countries become even more complex and time poor, so they turn to the all-pervasive media not just for the news from which to form an opinion about an issue but to adopt opinions already prepared for public consumption by the media. Countless examples exist of important but complex issues being synthesised down into simple, one dimensional 15 second statements on radio or TV or encapsulated within a single emotionally-charged photo in newspapers or on the internet. Here in Australia, human-caused climate change, logging of native forests, saving the whales, illegal immigrants in leaking boats, the expected high achievement by a new prime minister being replaced by realisation of his and his ministerial team's short-comings plus the proposed Resources Super-Profits Tax are just some of the issues where the media doesn't just present the news as a source of objective information. Instead, the media quickly chooses its position and then attempts (usually with success) to sell that position to the Australian public.
In a similar vein, the media has to accept much of the blame for Australia's state and federal elections being turned into little more than presidential campaigns. Whether our prime minister has broken every promise or not; whether the leader of the opposition ever speaks the truth: these are relatively unimportant issues compared to what the Rudd government has actually achieved in its two and a half years and compared to the policies that Abbott will be taking into government, should he win the next election. Focusing on the person rather than the policies trivialises the intent of what the democratic process is trying to achieve: good governance by an honest, competent government, yet the media can't seem to stop itself focusing on personalities.
So, in turn, this begs the question of why the media behaves this way. I believe the key determinant that controls media behaviour is also what motivates 99% of people around the world: money and the desire to own all the things that money can buy. The media doesn't need to be relevant or accurate or even responsible to make money for itself. It only needs to sell more newspapers or have more people watch its TV programs or subscribe to its online services. If it dumbs down the message so that even a 12 year old enjoys and understands the news, the photo, the video or the TV program, it's not the media's problem if this causes the population at large to ignore important issues or events happening in the world around them or to vote at election time on the basis of which leader is better looking or has involved him or herself in more media-savvy but irrelevant campaign stunts.
The third cause of weaker democracies in many countries is financial: our modern society seems to have an unthinking and unyielding determination for individuals to make an amount of money that is beyond what is necessary for the sustenance of a comfortable life (admittedly, 'comfortable' is a relative term but most people can quickly visualise what it means and how it should be unnecessary to go beyond a certain comfortable level of existence). The recent global financial crisis can be simply described as an excess of financial capital wanting to be traded on as many new, different but often artificial financial constructs as can be created by human imagination. Long ago, the name of the game ceased to be investment for long-term economic and societal reward, instead replaced by short-term speculative gambling, in part to create even more wealth even though the actual need for more wealth was absent, as exemplified by the excessively large bonuses paid to investment bankers, for example. The end result of this financial fanaticism includes perverse outcomes such as the investment in speculative holdings of crude oil contracts being twelve times larger than the actual value of the world's annual production of and trade in crude oil. The physical market has been overwhelmed by the artificially constructed, non-material market.
One only has to look at the unbelievably large amounts of money that have been lost as a result of the global financial crisis: trillions of dollars. The amount of money promised by the European Community and the IMF to help sustain the financial and psychological crisis caused by Greece's debt problems is far greater than that country's total private and public debt. Yet this crisis money is primarily required because the developed world (which is mostly democratic) has too much money to profitably put into medium- and longer-term, nation-building investments, so speculation becomes the only alternative. In fact, the amount of money is so great that, when things go wrong, virtually no single country is economically large enough nor financially secure enough to save itself. Instead, as has happened in Europe, rescue is required from multiple countries, not just one or two near neighbours or those with strong cultural links.
To conclude on this final point about the amazing wealth held within democratic countries, Adam Smith correctly pointed out that the invisible hand of the market, guided by the aspirations and dealings of the billions of people in both local and global marketplaces, was the ultimate determinant of an individual's and a nation's wealth. Today, however, the concentration of money into a relatively small number of very wealthy hands has allowed short-term speculation to dominate and control the decision-making processes of democratically elected governments. Personally, I see no merit in 'naked' short selling - offering to sell something I don't own. I see no merit in computer-controlled market purchases and sales of shares or commodities carried out in micro-seconds for profits of a fraction of one percent. The artificiality of these transactions and the almost total lack of on-ground outcomes able to improve national economic outputs or provide social benefits (buildings, roads, ports, schools, services to people, etc) should suggest that they're not really needed in a modern wealthy society. Yet these types of financial activities are now so large and so important to government through the employment they generate and the taxes they pay that meaningful regulation (or bans if appropriate) by government or its regulators is almost impossible to countenance. Our democratic processes are simply not up to the task of standing up to these people and institutions with their incredible wealth.
Professor Allen's article describes the indisputable weakening of democratic processes within countries like the USA, Australia and New Zealand and within supra-national bodies such as the new Europe. If my explanations of why democracies are now under threat are correct, then we now face the hardest task of all: arriving at solutions to the problems posed by a dominant media, the presidential nature of modern politics, and the power and influence of enormous amounts of money largely surplus to the day-to-day needs of its personal, corporate or national owners.
James Allen's valuable article on "Intimations of the Decline of Democracy" (Quadrant May 2010) correctly points out how democracy has been weakened in various ways. He appears not to have asked himself why or how these changes have come about? Had he done so, I would have suggested three of the major reasons as being: the power of the media; government being all about the leader rather than the team and its policies; and the almost unbelievable level of wealth within those democracies.
The media's ability to control and direct public opinion has never been stronger, in spite of the diversity of media types, with the internet and world wide web being the most recent. As people's lives in most free (i.e., democratic) countries become even more complex and time poor, so they turn to the all-pervasive media not just for the news from which to form an opinion about an issue but to adopt opinions already prepared for public consumption by the media. Countless examples exist of important but complex issues being synthesised down into simple, one dimensional 15 second statements on radio or TV or encapsulated within a single emotionally-charged photo in newspapers or on the internet. Here in Australia, human-caused climate change, logging of native forests, saving the whales, illegal immigrants in leaking boats, the expected high achievement by a new prime minister being replaced by realisation of his and his ministerial team's short-comings plus the proposed Resources Super-Profits Tax are just some of the issues where the media doesn't just present the news as a source of objective information. Instead, the media quickly chooses its position and then attempts (usually with success) to sell that position to the Australian public.
In a similar vein, the media has to accept much of the blame for Australia's state and federal elections being turned into little more than presidential campaigns. Whether our prime minister has broken every promise or not; whether the leader of the opposition ever speaks the truth: these are relatively unimportant issues compared to what the Rudd government has actually achieved in its two and a half years and compared to the policies that Abbott will be taking into government, should he win the next election. Focusing on the person rather than the policies trivialises the intent of what the democratic process is trying to achieve: good governance by an honest, competent government, yet the media can't seem to stop itself focusing on personalities.
So, in turn, this begs the question of why the media behaves this way. I believe the key determinant that controls media behaviour is also what motivates 99% of people around the world: money and the desire to own all the things that money can buy. The media doesn't need to be relevant or accurate or even responsible to make money for itself. It only needs to sell more newspapers or have more people watch its TV programs or subscribe to its online services. If it dumbs down the message so that even a 12 year old enjoys and understands the news, the photo, the video or the TV program, it's not the media's problem if this causes the population at large to ignore important issues or events happening in the world around them or to vote at election time on the basis of which leader is better looking or has involved him or herself in more media-savvy but irrelevant campaign stunts.
The third cause of weaker democracies in many countries is financial: our modern society seems to have an unthinking and unyielding determination for individuals to make an amount of money that is beyond what is necessary for the sustenance of a comfortable life (admittedly, 'comfortable' is a relative term but most people can quickly visualise what it means and how it should be unnecessary to go beyond a certain comfortable level of existence). The recent global financial crisis can be simply described as an excess of financial capital wanting to be traded on as many new, different but often artificial financial constructs as can be created by human imagination. Long ago, the name of the game ceased to be investment for long-term economic and societal reward, instead replaced by short-term speculative gambling, in part to create even more wealth even though the actual need for more wealth was absent, as exemplified by the excessively large bonuses paid to investment bankers, for example. The end result of this financial fanaticism includes perverse outcomes such as the investment in speculative holdings of crude oil contracts being twelve times larger than the actual value of the world's annual production of and trade in crude oil. The physical market has been overwhelmed by the artificially constructed, non-material market.
One only has to look at the unbelievably large amounts of money that have been lost as a result of the global financial crisis: trillions of dollars. The amount of money promised by the European Community and the IMF to help sustain the financial and psychological crisis caused by Greece's debt problems is far greater than that country's total private and public debt. Yet this crisis money is primarily required because the developed world (which is mostly democratic) has too much money to profitably put into medium- and longer-term, nation-building investments, so speculation becomes the only alternative. In fact, the amount of money is so great that, when things go wrong, virtually no single country is economically large enough nor financially secure enough to save itself. Instead, as has happened in Europe, rescue is required from multiple countries, not just one or two near neighbours or those with strong cultural links.
To conclude on this final point about the amazing wealth held within democratic countries, Adam Smith correctly pointed out that the invisible hand of the market, guided by the aspirations and dealings of the billions of people in both local and global marketplaces, was the ultimate determinant of an individual's and a nation's wealth. Today, however, the concentration of money into a relatively small number of very wealthy hands has allowed short-term speculation to dominate and control the decision-making processes of democratically elected governments. Personally, I see no merit in 'naked' short selling - offering to sell something I don't own. I see no merit in computer-controlled market purchases and sales of shares or commodities carried out in micro-seconds for profits of a fraction of one percent. The artificiality of these transactions and the almost total lack of on-ground outcomes able to improve national economic outputs or provide social benefits (buildings, roads, ports, schools, services to people, etc) should suggest that they're not really needed in a modern wealthy society. Yet these types of financial activities are now so large and so important to government through the employment they generate and the taxes they pay that meaningful regulation (or bans if appropriate) by government or its regulators is almost impossible to countenance. Our democratic processes are simply not up to the task of standing up to these people and institutions with their incredible wealth.
Professor Allen's article describes the indisputable weakening of democratic processes within countries like the USA, Australia and New Zealand and within supra-national bodies such as the new Europe. If my explanations of why democracies are now under threat are correct, then we now face the hardest task of all: arriving at solutions to the problems posed by a dominant media, the presidential nature of modern politics, and the power and influence of enormous amounts of money largely surplus to the day-to-day needs of its personal, corporate or national owners.
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