A look at the Paris Accord from Wellington, New Zealand
This was to be an article in the SpinOff – we’ve since decide to create something shorter for them – probably next week. In the meantime I decided to publish this on the blog – it took a while to create and has some useful ideas in it.
This is a text-to-speech episode – I know that’s not for everyone – still the following episode with Aaron from 350 Aotearoa is only a week or so away. No robots in that one.
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The nuclear free movement in New Zealand did not begin with a government declaration.
— Tim Jones, Coal/Transport activist and writer.
There are so many graphs you could look at, and so many arguments possible around them. But perhaps you only need one:
This graph is the one climate scientists stare at in wonder. Homo Sapiens appeared around the 200,000 mark. The start of the graph marks Homo Erectus departure from Africa. A little before the earliest use of fire and long before the Neanderthal.
Since the invention of the steam engine (1775) humans have found that the more energy they obtain, the more they get to do. And we’re a very energetic species. The sharp rise at the end of that graph could be used to show the escalations in the use of coal and oil, the expansions of agriculture or colonialism or the increase in the use of cars, computers or cell phones. It could also describe the increase in extinction events, pollution levels, deforestation rates or population. Climate scientist Will Steffen combines a stack of these ‘hockey-stick’ graphs to demonstrate that humanity is on a run-away course that may prove uncontrollable. Its very hard to deny.
Look at the line labelled 350 parts per million. This was the level in 1988 and was said to be the point beyond which unsafe changes would start to occur. It’s worth noting that in no year since that point was the global average temperature below the previous average. When you get into an argument about global warming remember that CO2’s affect as a greenhouse gas is seldom contested. It’s been understood for more than a century and is simple to demonstrate. They did it on Mythbusters.
It’s also worth noting that climate changes have occured in our history plenty of times but they were always to lower temperatures, not higher. Humans survived the Ice Ages just fine (as did significant parts of the coral reefs), but when a human approaches 41°C cell death begins to occur. We can’t cool ourselves as easily as we can stay warm. And we can’t cool the habitats providing our food. In the last few weeks we saw reports of overheated bats falling from the sky and fish dying in rivers. I’m trying very hard not to be alarmist here but that’s just creepy.
If the Earth were a magician, it would be dying on the stage. Every set it tries – two month winters, eight month fire seasons and hurricanes that line up like city buses – gets met with blank stares. Did you know hurricanes are named in alphabetical order (Gert, Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia, Lee, Maria, Nate and Ophelia)? 2017 was the year to notice that. The Great Barrier Reef was just thrown down like a bad dinner. And that took half a million years to make.
Obviously there must be another side to this since, as Bill English rightly pointed out during the last election, “Kiwis don’t wake up thinking about climate change.” There are a few reasons. The first is that people in general don’t seem to know the basics about the effects of carbon in the atmosphere and that enables some wishful thinking. In addition, the government and the media have remained equivocal on the subject for the last 15 years, and especially during elections. I suspect that this is part of the ratings/polls feedback loop that keeps them away from things no one is comfortable talking about. If we’re being candid.
In 2003 National MP Shane Ardern mounted the steps of Parliament riding Myrtle the tractor to demonstrate his doubt that a cow’s wind could contribute to global warming. To many, it seemed like an open and shut case. Myrtle returned to re-state the point in Morrinsville during the 2017 election, and while National did not make a statement at the time, the end of their successful ‘tax’ ad included a farting cow. So climate change was obviously still a joke. It may represent the first time in our country’s history when the government had a ministerial portfolio for something it clearly assumed to be a wind-up.
Taking global warming seriously has been an uphill battle in this country. It’s a tall ask for anyone with a ruminant. There has also been a long history of scientists refuting the basic tenets from the IPCC. Some have enjoyed significant fame, one being a key figure in the Soon and Baliunas controversy – this became an important moment in climate change history since it provided a seed of doubt to the US Senate at a vital time, and the result of this study are still repeated in different forms any time an argument on Global Warming gets technical.
I will attempt to avoid using the words ‘sceptic’ and ‘denier’ in this article because they contain within them distinctly anti-science and pro-witchhunt. I will instead use the more science-appropriate terms ‘disproven’, ‘unpublished’, ‘refuted’, ‘flawed’, ‘not-even-peer-reviewed’ and ‘wrong’. So far, the climate science that challenges the basic facts of anthropogenic global warming have all wound up with a collection of these monikers. The scientists that stand on this point are now forced to include a complex narrative within which nearly all of their peers are wrong, science is in the pockets of ‘Big Green’ (whatever that is) and the climate is changing for unknown reasons. Which leaves you nowhere.
It’s not enough to find a single anomaly among the tens of thousands of scientific papers that describe global warming. If someone thinks we ought to ignore global warming the burden of proof now falls to them. The evidence falls on all of us now every day.
According to a 2015 study by research group Motu “Less than half of New Zealanders (49%) feel certain that climate change is really happening”. Of the others, many imagine this change happening on their terms. Herald journalist John Roughan expects it to arrive like a gift that he gets to grade somewhere along the tolerable/sensational spectrum. Whale Oil thinks warming is likely, but remains sanguine about the prospects of growing a Cab Sav in Otago. Even the Flat Earth society accepts anthropogenic global warming providing you are careful with language.
Surely this is the problem with “Our Generation’s Nuclear Free Moment”. We all knew to be terrified at the prospect of Nuclear energy in the 80s. There were people around that remembered Hiroshima. The Cold War was in high gear and we’d seen testing in the Pacific. Uranium was easy to worry about and hard to like.
Oil is the reverse. Of course it seems silly to suggest that the car in your driveway is more hazardous to future generations than plutonium. But that’s what makes Climate Change so inconceivable. Fossil fuels have had such a profound effect on the planet that, seen from a suitable distance or time, it would appear that burning them has been humanity’s only purpose.
Since we have been doing this for so long, many imagine that there is time enough to slow things down; that if we stay a reasonable course climate change will stop with a bump at some point a little warmer than now. To think this it to misinterpret the angle of the above graph. Perhaps the best indicator of the current rate of change is a book that wastes little time worrying about CO2. “The Bottomless Well” points out that over time we consume increasing volumes of energy in the extraction process. Where we once drew from a shallow well in the middle of a Texas plain now oil is extracted from tar sands in Alberta and pumped across the continent. This combined with the more recent contributions from developing nations means the rate of change is not linear. It also points out that our appetite for energy means that adding renewables may only serve to fill the extra demand, leaving coal and gas plants in business.
It is certainly important to understand, at this point, that things really won’t be all right. Any satisfaction you may have felt at knowing we signed the Paris Accord and created a ministerial portfolio for it, will leave once you take a look at what was achieved in the thirty years we’ve had. The Paris Accord can best be described as two hundred people in a boat discussing how much of the hull they can use for firewood. Thus far, we decided to buy firewood from other members of the crew, leaving Mike Hosking to complain about the price.
We’ve done many things to decarbonise our transport and energy infrastructure over the last century. Unfortunately, the lion’s share of that was done before we knew about global warming. And since then we’ve rolled much of it back, including electrified rail freight and electrified public transport. While electric cars and windmills are helpful they currently make up such tiny pieces of the overall picture that they resemble that glass of water an alcoholic might take between shots.
While some climate scientists remain optimistic about our chance of changing, anyone who looks more broadly across the issue soon begins to feel despair. We could make the changes, but we probably won’t.
Philosopher Tim Moreton describes Global Warming as a Hyperobject. This is a very fancy way of describing an elephant in a room. Hyperobjects are viscous; they stick to everything they touch, and they are so broadly distributed in space and time that we can’t see them properly. Global Warming even breaks our notion of ‘World’, since what we used to think of as “the world” is now as tightly bound as a biology experiment in a school science lab.
This renders Climate Change inconceivable. In my experience, most arguments about it wind up at this point. I normally stay in the fight until the other person tires of it. We always wind up at looking at the same impossible point: perhaps its dying coral this time, or maybe it will be the watery Arctic. The same feeling James Renwick experiences when he looks at the graph above. He has no choice but to accept it, but how can it be happening right now, here, in his lifetime.
The problem is terrifically urgent now because now is, strictly speaking, already too late. Any criticisms produced more than five years ago need to be revised since temperatures and extreme events have escalated sharply since then. We’re around 1.4°C increased now and it’s certain that this will sail past 2°C before long.
It’s also important to avoid wasting time arguing over the precision of the models. If someone ignites 10 litres of petrol in the lounge you know the house is on fire. From the bathroom, given enough data and processing power you could calculate the moment the flames will reach you. But it’s probably not the best use of your time.
Here are some things you really ought to know about global warming:
There’s a subtle point about Methane that often gets missed. Because it is the only greenhouse gas that degrades in a human timeframe it is the one that suggests a little control. Reducing livestock actually lowers warming, while halting CO2 emissions stops it from increasing. This is a strong reason to treat livestock emissions, which are largely methane, in a different way. It does not make them exempt: any pro-cow arguments about natural cycles or processes ignore the fact that humans dictate the number of livestock and that CH4 packs more than 80 times more heat than CO2 over a twenty year period.
Tim Moreton predicted that Global Warming would usher in a new era of hypocrisy, weakness and lameness. He uses these words in very specific ways to describe the ways people will fail to respond to the problem. For the most part, people feel they are too small to make a difference and that it oughtn’t be up to them to change. It’s worth noting that this appeared to be part of the Government’s defence when Sarah Thomson sued it. In fact, the reverse is true. If you are reading this then it is up to you personally.
If you are ready to do something about climate change here are some suggestions. First and foremost, start talking about it. To everyone. Climate communicator Katharine Hayhoe recently made the point that it is the most important thing people can could do.
Gather some information about it. It is everywhere. Investigate ways to decarbonise your life. Finally, remember that global warming is viscous. It connects to everything you do. Imagine yourself in a zero carbon world and start living that way.
While you are talking try asking the people that were responsible for informing you about this. The scientists and journalists and politicians, and pretty much anyone with the words ‘climate’, ‘environment’, ‘transport’ or ‘energy’ in their job titles. Let them explain to you what they did to educate people about carbon emissions, what they did to lower them or why they didn’t see the need to. List their answers and google each starting with the word ‘is’. Check that your answers come from a variety of sources.
Every tonne of carbon you emit is turning up the heat irrevocably for thousands of years to come. This weird and kind of preachy sentence simply happens to be true. But don’t let it paralyse you. Habits are viscous too, so work on them.
Here are some things that may deter you in your personal attempt to address climate change:
What should deter you is intractable, agreed-upon, rock solid evidence that the graph above and everything it implies is wrong. So nothing.
This crisis is not like Y2K or the Ozone Layer. You don’t get to wait on the sidelines. You have a position on Climate Change now. You vote on its course every day. From a not-terribly distant point, that position will define you.
Forget the fact that it feels hopeless. All great changes started this way. And forget that our government has a slim mandate and our nation enjoys no high ground on this issue. It doesn’t belong to a political party: mostly they’re still learning about the problem themselves. The changes are huge and they need a mandate. This nuclear free moment belongs to us.
Tim Jones of CANA joined us for a chat about the state of coal in NZ. There’s more than you think and there are more mines in the plans.
Here are some moments from the talk. Use these timestamps to find them:
5:10 What is CANA? A bit about the end of Solid Energy.
8:20 Some of the things that prevent a mining project from going ahead.
9:10 The aims of CANA
9:50 CANA’s aims and its relationship to other organisations.
11:30 Coal as the leader of subset technologies.
12:50 The different types of coal.
13:40 Dairy and Coal.
16:00 Steel and Coal
17:50 Conservation Land and the picture since the 2017 election.
19:30 The Te Kuha coal mine.
21:55 The Nuclear Free Moment.
24:20 Personal action and Collective actin.
25:50 Putting a price on Carbon, recalculations, real costs and finding alternatives.
27:50 A bit more on the Nuclear free moment.
29:50 Understanding the global emergency.
32:10 The disarming calm of climate scientists.
34:00 Exxon and sowing seeds of doubt.
35:40 Mainstream Media presenting climate as two equal discussions
36:50 Younger people getting involved in activism
37:20 Climate Voter initiative
38:20 Generation Zero
38:55 Bipartisan support for a climate commission
40:30 The climate denier fade-away
43:00 Generational differences
44:00 Incandescent light bulbs and Brexit
44:50 National – Farmers doing politics.
46:00 1972 election
46:47 Sense of identity
50:12 Coal and jobs
51:00 NZFirst – regional development
53:00 Zero Carbon Act, manifestos an dgetting two sides talking.
Tying together multiple groups and activities
57:00 Rethinking two revolutions
60:48 The number of cows and our dependence on a single industry. The economics of increasing stocking levels.
1:04:30 ECan. Seven Rivers Walking.
1:06:40 Synthetic milk.
1:10:10 Sefton Derby’s book ‘The ground between’
1:13:30 Expecting guidelines from the government and not getting them. The coal industries’ path to consent.
1:20:40 Visiting the industry
1:22:15 What a resource hearing actually looks like
1:27:10 The current global emergency.
1:31:10 Last questions – what will it take to stop us from burning coal
1:35:25 Changing boilers and the climate change exemption in the RMA
1:38:10 Who and what in government is currently working on this
1:41:05 Lobby groups and getting a mandate
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A response to this article:
Dear Mr Edmeades,
I read your opinion piece on Stuff with great interest. I thought that climate
change scepticism had gone out of fashion since the oil companies gave up on it. I also imagined that the weather events of 2017 would have put most minds to rest on the subject. And yet here you are.
Before I go on (this is a long letter) let me start by formally inviting you to appear on the podcast. You will talk to me alone about your position that I can rest easy over the climate situation and you will be afforded respect, time and a keen ear, the same that is provided to any visitor on the show.
I am not a scientist, yet I am one who accepts the scientific evidence of anthropomorphic global warming. I further recognize the work that describes humanity’s influence on the planet as the end of the Holocene era and the start of the Anthropocene. I also accept the findings that we are in the throes of a great extinction event that could quickly take the Homo Sapiens with it.
In short, I think we’re screwed. I further believe that people like you prevent any chance we have to avert this situation. You predicted that you would be accused of being a ‘denier’ and/or ‘a rejectionist’, but that what it is you are rejecting or denying will not be spelt out. Of course you are a rejecting of the consensus about climate change. So I don’t see your problem here: that seems pretty simple.
One reason I take this position is that I am not a scientist. I accept the scientific method and the notion that not all the information provided by science can be thought of as good news. I also recognize a philosophical position that humans are not the centre of the things and that we are just as subject to the indifference of the physical universe as anything else.
Neither of these positions is in anyway controversial of course. I accept the science that created my cell phone with the same set of assumptions and believe that someone who challenges these things is the one carrying the burden of proof.
So let’s get to your points.
1. The climate has always changed and there are other forces in play.
– Yes that’s true. Which is why it’s a science that requires a good deal of math. There are many variables in a climatic system, particularly over time. No argument there.
2. Ice core data shows temperature increases about 600 to 800 years before CO2 concentrations increased.
– You have to cite things like this. Since you have not, I am forced to google the statement and provide you with some articles that explain why this is a false assumption used by many climate change sceptics.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11659-climate-myths-ice-cores-show-co2-increases-lag-behind-temperature-rises-disproving-the-link-to-global-warming/
https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
I will not put more effort into this point than you did. Since you are the scientist making the extraordinary claim, I will just point out that you make an unsubstantiated statement in one sentence that is not new and appears to have been hashed out endlessly by those more qualified than us. If you want to pursue this one further, you’ll need to point out the flaws in the work above.
3. Water vapour makes up 90% of the greenhouse effect.
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2008/02/common-climate-misconceptions-the-water-vapor-feedback-2/
This appears to be another argument commonly used by sceptics. There are plenty of articles that explain why its wrong, I just provided this one because I happened to like the font. A quick read indicates that water vapour is more of a symptom than a cause in the global warming scenario. This makes sense to me since the burning of fossil fuels appears to be the real change humans are making to the overall system and the
increases to cloud cover are a predictable consequence to increased temperature since that’s how evaporation works.
4. There have been warmer and colder periods since the dawn of civilisation.
Let’s be more precise and more generous to your argument and call it the dawn of humans. The cooler periods are the Ice Ages that occurred due to changes to the earth’s axis and the Medieval Warm Period (the one warmer period you cite) appears to have been both cooler than now and more localised.
While the Medieval warm period was something of an unusual event (judged to be a combination of volcanic and solar activity at the time) the Ice ages were more predictable (see Milankovitch cycles) and the rate of change within them is what we apparently evolved for. Any form of life older than the last Ice Age can be seen as adapted by evolution for it. That includes, as it happens, barrier reefs and humans, most of whom I imagine lived closer to the equator at the time.
5. Sattelite data show no increase in global temperatures since 1998.
I have to say this one was a surprise. We know stuff is melting, glaciers are retreating, droughts are increasing and fires are breaking out. We also measure ocean and land temperatures which have been rising predictably. And this, it turns out, is why in science its useful to arrive at the proof in multiple ways.
The satellite data was wrong; it turns out since it had not allowed for the changes in readings due to decaying orbits. After it was corrected to allow for them the number fell into line with the rest of the observations.
It turns out that this is also a popular claim by the sceptics that has been refuted, and took me a minute to bring up with google. Find it yourself.
6. Stuff about the color of CO2 and pictures of polar bears and a paper you wrote but fail to cite.
Nothing there constitutes evidence; I’m just working through your article.
7. The IPCC stating there is no evidence that extreme weather events are increasing as a consequence of global warming.
Seriously? You’re saying the largest climate change organisation is not convinced by global warming? That will need a citation. We do know that extreme events like hurricanes are no more common than before but that the increased evaporation adds water to them that increases their intensity.
And anyone that missed the global wildfires, mudslides, floods, hurricanes and droughts in the last 18 months is not paying attention.
8. The warming hiatus.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-pause-in-ocean-warming/
Apparently not a thing either. That you are using this one in the middle of a sweltering summer should amuse me. But I think its just the start, and we’re all screwed and its because we’re attempting to bargain with an indifferent universe and so, you know, I don’t.