Canadian Tar Sands Means Game Over - Silence is Deadly

James Hansen writes that exploitation of the Canadian tar sands could be catastrophic. He writes:

...Although there are multiple objections to tar sands development and the pipeline, including destruction of the environment in Canada and the likelihood of spills along the pipeline's pathway, such objections, by themselves, are very unlikely to stop the project. An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC AR4 WG3 report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO2). Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize climate. Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the CO2 emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles....

The Critical Decade

Yesterday, Australia's Climate Commission released a new report with important messages:

The following points highlight the key messages arising from the accompanying report The Critical Decade:

1. There is no doubt that the climate is changing. The evidence is overwhelming and clear.

• The atmosphere is warming, the ocean is warming, ice is being lost from glaciers and ice caps and sea levels are rising. The biological world is changing in response to a warming world.
• Global surface temperature is rising fast; the last decade was the hottest on record.

2. We are already seeing the social, economic and environmental impacts of a changing climate.

• With less than 1 degree of warming globally the impacts are already being felt in Australia.
• In the last 50 years the number of record hot days in Australia has more than doubled. This has increased the risk of heatwaves and associated deaths, as well as extreme bush fire weather in South Eastern and South Western Australia.
• Sea level has risen by 20 cm globally since the late 1800s, impacting many coastal communities. Another 20 cm increase by 2050, which is likely at current projections, would more than double the risk of coastal flooding.
• The Great Barrier Reef has suffered from nine bleaching events in the past 31 years. This iconic natural ecosystem, and the economy that depends upon it, face serious risks from climate change.

3. Human activities – the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation – are triggering the changes we are witnessing in the global climate.

• A very large body of observations, experiments, analyses, and physical theory points to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - with carbon dioxide being the most important - as the primary cause of the observed warming.
• Increasing carbon dioxide emissions are primarily produced by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, as well as deforestation.
• Natural factors, like changes in the Earth’s orbit or solar activity, cannot explain the world-wide warming trend.

4. This is the critical decade. Decisions we make from now to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change our children and grandchildren experience.

• Without strong and rapid action there is a significant risk that climate change will undermine our society’s prosperity, health, stability and way of life.
• To minimise this risk, we must decarbonise our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050.
• That means carbon emissions must peak within the next few years and then strongly decline.
• The longer we wait to start reducing carbon emissions, the more difficult and costly those reductions become.
• This decade is critical. Unless effective action is taken, the global climate may be so irreversibly altered we will struggle to maintain our present way of life. The choices we make this decade will shape the long-term climate future for our children and grandchildren.

Murray Darling Plan turning into a fiasco, with the Wentworth Group of Scientists leaving the process

Late last year the then Chair of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Mr Mike Taylor, quit because the Government made demands that were not only in conflict with the Water Act but were impossible to achieve.

Now the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists have left the process on the grounds that the plan is proposing to let the river die by not ensuring sufficient flow. (A paper on the Murray-Darling by the Wentworth Group can be found here.)

A group of leading scientists contributing to the development of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's (MDBA) plan has pulled out of the process, calling the plan to fix the ailing river system seriously flawed.

The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists says it can not be part of a plan which it says will fail to fix the river system but waste billions of taxpayer dollars.

The group says no less than 4,000 gigalitres must be returned to the Murray-Darling river system in order to fix it, but says it appears that will not happen under the draft plan so it has resigned from the process.

"There's no point in us being part of a process if the process is fundamentally flawed, and unless there is an independent review of the science then we believe it is a fundamentally flawed process," Wentworth member Peter Cosier said.

The group says the MDBA is now aiming to return less than 3,000 gigalitres to the system following angry protests by irrigators when the initial figures and cuts to water entitlements were released last year.

More on the ABC website.

Quadrant article by Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth - how confusing

Here is a summary of the points raised by Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth in an articlepublished online in Quadrant yesterday (link below). I've loosely grouped the points they made into topics for clarity.  The statements are not direct quotations.  They represent a summary of the main points made by these eminent men in their short article.  I've put my added interpretation in brackets.

What they say about global temperature trends

1. The temperature is level - neither cooling nor heating.
2. The earth is cooling.
3. There has been late 20th century warming.
4. So what if 2010 was the hottest year on record?
5. The earth is not warming, or maybe it is warming (but we don't want it to be warming so it isn't).
6. The sun is quiet so it shouldn't be warming (therefore it isn't).
7. The Minister has just made it all up.
8. We don't believe any temperature record that includes the Arctic (and anyway, we don't like Dr Hansen of NASA; he's a bit of a pessimist).
9. All the thermometers are wrong.

What they say about reducing CO2 emissions

1. Even cutting CO2, it will take a long time to come out of the atmosphere, (therefore we should keep adding it instead).
2. Cutting CO2 would stop the rise in temperature and even cause it to decline slightly. (Therefore we shouldn't cut it.)
3. Increasing atmospheric CO2 is good for the environment.
4. Australia doesn't pollute any more than anywhere else with the same environmental regulations.

What they say about evidence
There is none.  Tell us, where is the empirical evidence:

• that warming is caused by CO2 emissions
• of an increase in weather disasters

What they say about terminology

• We don't like the term 'carbon pollution', (it's not nice; our friend Carbon would find it offensive).

What else they say

1. Other things have been the main cause of global warming in the past (therefore it can't be CO2 this time around).
2. It's a cycle (temperatures don't need a cause to go up and down)
3. Forty years ago, some scientists thought the world was cooling (therefore it is still cooling, even though forty years ago more scientists said it was going to warm).
4. We're not sure if global warming is a dangerous problem or not.

Summarised from this article in Quadrant.

Believe it or not, one of the authors is an active academic, two are retired academics and one was once a government employee (now a conspiracy theorist).  Will the current academic hold his job after this?  (Probably yes, unfortunately.)

Which companies will advertise on Andrew Bolt's new show on Channel 10?

How about telling the Channel 10 advertisers what you think of them supporting Andrew Bolt.

Glen Beck, infamous for spouting ultra-right wing views, has been effectively fired from Fox News. It appears that a large number of high profile advertisers pulled out, not wanting their products to be associated with his unAmerican sentiments. (You'd think the son of Lachlan Murdoch might have learnt a lesson from this.)

It will be interesting to see which companies support Andrew Bolt. So far he has been able to survive on the ABC Insider's program, which doesn't have advertising, and with a blog buried in a newspaper that has a lot of different journalists, some quite sane and rational. He has never been exposed out on his own before.

I might even watch one of his television episodes (with the volume turned off) just to see which businesses support him - and write to these advertisers letting them know what I think of their support for him and his opinions. Hopefully a few other people will do the same.

Julie Bishop's followers support a carbon tax!

Julie Bishop, deputy leader of the opposition (Liberal Party, Australia, welcoming climate catastrophe), ran a survey on her website, checking support for a carbon tax.

What's that?

80.2% support a carbon tax!

75.6% strongly support a carbon tax!

I grabbed this screenshot of her website last night:

Now this and all previous survey's on her website seem to have disappeared. What went wrong? Didn't she like what Australians told her?

On House Republicans overturning science - by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA)

The Republicans yesterday voted to increase pollution in the USA and to accelerate global warming and make weather disasters worse, more frequent and more widespread. This is what Rep Markey had to say about it:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/03/10/174942/markey-flat-earthers/