When the authorities put the figures together, the death rates in Melbourne and Adelaide will show a spike in response to the record temperatures over Eastern Australia last week.
As in the European heatwave of August 2003, when 35,000 people died, the elderly are most vulnerable as the heat overwhelms the body’s natural cooling mechanism and organs fail. Swamped by the disaster, undertakers in France were obliged to take over a refrigerated warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. Across central France the temperature reached 40°C, and in Britain 38.5°C, or 100 degrees under the old scale, an all-time record. In Melbourne and Adelaide last week temperatures of 44 and 45°C were recorded. Forty is the new thirty. One night in Adelaide the minimum temperature was 34°C, perhaps the first time the city has experienced a nocturnal scorcher. In Melbourne the wail of ambulance sirens was heard up and down every high street. Brush-tailed possums expired and fell out of the trees. Australians are already dying from climate change. As Professor David Karoly, one of our most respected climate scientists, said: “The system can’t cope now, and it is just going to get much worse”. Anyone who is not very scared about global warming is not listening to what the scientists are telling us. It is not enough to be vaguely worried. The scientists are telling us we have only a few years left for global emissions to peak, then decline sharply, if we are to avoid catastrophe. But now the widely agreed ‘safe’ level of warming, 2°C above pre-industrial levels, has been challenged because even that amount won’t prevent summer sea-ice in the Arctic from melting, with knock-on effects in Greenland and the Siberian permafrost. If he serves two or three terms, by the end of Mr Rudd’s time in office it will be too late to get serious about warming. His Clayton’s emissions trading system, which rewards big polluters for polluting, is nowhere near what the science demands and is better rejected outright. When the world’s scientists concluded before the Bali conference that rich countries must cut their emissions by 25-40 per cent by 2020 if we are to have a good chance of stabilising at 2°C of warming, they were not putting in an ambit claim. Yet when the Prime Minister says, as he has more than once, that his task is to ‘balance’ the claims of industry and the sceptics against those of the scientists and environmentalists he is saying that the scientists are political actors and the facts of climate science are up for negotiation. Echoing the post-modern approach to truth, Mr Rudd seems to believe that the science is not objective but relative and contestable. The election of Labor at the end of 2007 seemed like a breakthrough; after all, climate change was one of the three big points of difference between Labor and the conservatives. For years I have written about the extraordinary power of the self-described greenhouse mafia in Canberra, yet even I believed that its influence was on the wane because it had over-played its hand under Howard. How wrong I was. It was apparent early in 2008 that behind the scenes the fossil fuel lobby was organising. They martialled their troops and rearmed themselves with arguments, fighting funds, lobbyists and dodgy economic studies. They rebuilt their networks in government and the public service, insinuated themselves into policy processes, schmoozed back-benchers and dined privately with ministers and their staff. They whispered about how important the old energy industries are to the economy, how Labor voters value their jobs, and how they will take their business offshore. And always hanging in the air was the unspoken threat that if the Government went too far they would unleash the most virulent campaign to punish it. So 2008 saw the new government run from its commitment to be a bold leader on climate. Contrary to Kevin Rudd’s declaration to the world at Bali, in 2009 Australia does not stand ready to assume its responsibility and his Government is not prepared to take on the challenge and deliver a sustainable future. It turns out that Peter Garrett’s indiscrete prediction before the election that “once we get in we’ll just change it all” has come to pass, except that instead of pursuing a bold secret agenda the Rudd Government has reneged on its promises. Instead of going too far, as the conservatives feared, it has not gone far enough. The climate emergency has turned into a crisis of democracy. The government is meant to protect the interests of the people, but it has instead protected the interests of the big polluters. The Government is in the thrall of a powerful group of energy companies and it is apparent even to the most dim-witted observer that these corporations are, as Thoreau wrote, “more interested in commerce than humanity”. The scientists are beginning to understand that human-induced climate change has disturbed a sleeping giant. Mr Rudd’s belief that he, along with other leaders, can legislate to tame it is reminiscent of a syndrome Marx called ‘parliamentary cretinism’. Paraphrasing Engels, parliamentary cretinism is an aliment whose unfortunate victims are permeated by the lofty conviction that the future of the world is determined by a majority of votes of the institution that has the honour of having them as members. The announcement of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was a king hit on the mainstream environment groups that had invested so much in working on the inside of the parliamentary process. Seduced into believing they can influence the Government, in truth they were crushed by the greenhouse mafia. Fossil fuel delegations could get an hour of quality time with the minister, while environment groups felt lucky to have 15 minutes with a bored staffer. This failure underlines the importance of the ‘new environment movement’, a surprisingly large network of community-based activist groups that came together in Canberra last weekend for the Climate Action Summit. Led by a new generation of young people whose politics have not been shaped by the old movement, they represent a return to radical activism. They are determined, angry, savvy and brave. They believe that baby boomers are bequeathing to them a world much worse than the one the boomers inherited. Their objective was perfectly captured in the words on a T-shirt worn by one of them: “Unf-ck the world”. Clive Hamilton is the author of Scorcher: The dirty politics of climate change (Black Inc.)
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Global climate trends represent a combination of several superposed factors. Since the 1980s greenhouse gases emerged as the major driver (accounting for ~ +2.6 Watt/m2) whereas solar insolation rose by ~ +0.12 Watt/m2. (IPCC 2007 Fig. 2.4). The 11-years sunspot cycle accounts for ~ +/- 0.2 Watt/m2. The ENSO cycle accounts for sea surface temeprature variations of +/- 1.5 degrees C in the affected areas.
Regarding the difference between the weather and the climate (which not everyone seems to appreciate): Whereas the former fluctuates wildly on time scales of days or weeks, the climate changes are expressed by mean multi-year to decades-long trends. Climate projections predict that global warming involves stronger fluctuations between extreme weather events, due to increasing land-sea and latitudinal zone temperature contrasts.
Climate skeptics focus their attention on short-term to annual oscillations. Should the current trends continue, major temperature drops can be expected in ocean regions receiving the Greenland ice melt a nd west Antarctic ice melt freshwater, i.e. western Europe and NE America.
Such events happend 8500 years ago and during the “Youngest dryas” 12 900 years ago. Unfortunately these will only represent the side effects/symptoms of continuing global warming.
How about stopping the World Bank and/or IMF from selling off the rainforests of the world to their buddies. According to an article last year in the UK Independent, the Amazon is disappearing by an area the size of Belgium every year (which is why Brazil’s Minister for the Environment resigned late last year); and heck knows what the current state of the lungs of the world are in Congo, Borneo or Sumatra. If the world, UN and Greenpeace were truly serious about stopping global warming, they need to get out in the streets and stop globalism (the new word for imperialism).
ETS is a croque – a new tax originally planned as a global impost which ultimately falls on the people. But that is starting to unravel as the economic downturn gets totally out of hand.
And by the way how do we explain the unprecedented cold spell in the Northern Hemisphere – is that also global warming?
Andrew,
I think we agree about far more of these related issues than the one we disagreed about last week, but I have to ask what you mean by a rise in the sun spot cycle?
This ‘quiet’ sun is an external event in the sense that it has nothing to do (surely?) with the serious and voluminous release of fossilized carbon.
Good on you Clive. Fist Howard and now Rudd. Neither either did not iunderstand the science or did not want to. I think Rudd understands the science but is too afraid to act on it. I am afraid we can kisss the future of our decendants good bye unlees the younger generation can wield some clout.
Thankyou for your book Clive it was a ripping yarn! Like you I thought that just maybe Rudd and his entourage would make a difference. Of course with the benefit of hindsight this thinking was a little bit silly. Rudd has an arts degree. Evidence, particularly of the scientific kind has no place in his world. It’s all about perception. His greenhouse person, Wong is a labour lawyer. One who worked for the CFMEU. I don’t know if you have had anything to do with them. I have. The financial self interest of their members is their primary concern, it is also their secondary concern and tertiary concern. The public interest is a complete anathema to them. Wong thinks the whole carbon thing is an industrial deal. Just get it negotiated away, have a session down the pub and then move on to the next exciting issue. Ferguson is a captain of the old IR club. Some of his best mates would be the mining managers who have got him out of the “you know what” with his members in the past. A bit like Corrigan and the MUA. Fergy understands big carbon. They think like Big Unions. The world owes them a living and they are doing us ungrateful bastards a favour. I was also going to mention the Rock Singer, but that would be too embarrasing. In fact he is so embarrasing he wasn’t even allowed to join in the game. None of them have a clue about scientists. Scientists are just those nerdy people who did a science or engineering degree who have to deal with the hard facts of the inhuman physical world.
Let’s face it mate we and especially our children are stuffed.