A Open Letter to People Who Think Combating Global Warming is Too Hard

It would seem that the Sydney Morning Herald is outdoing itself criticizing the Kyoto Treaty.  I read this article today called "Sins of Omission Cast Shadow over Kyoto" by Ross Gittins and this prompted me to write this letter to all people who rubbish the Kyoto treaty as worthless and say that combating Global Warming will cost jobs and cost too much.  The article by Ross concludes that we should join up to the Kyoto Treaty even though it is worthless and will cost jobs.  This is the part I do not get - he spends a whole article casting doubt on the treaty yet at the end says we should join anyway.   In this article I will try to illuminate why the arguments for not combating Global Warming are a smokescreen put in place by lobby groups intent on maintaining their extremely profitable status-quo.  I will also give some insight into the possible consequences of not combating Global Warming and provide some cost neutral methods of cutting emissions.

First lets start with what will  happen if the Earth heats up 1.4 to 5.8 degrees.  This is the figure that is considered most likely by the IPCC (Q3.6-7 & Q3.11 Synthesis Report IPCC 2001).  This is not so bad if you live in Melbourne then 1.4 degrees warmer would be great.  Even 5.8 degrees is not too bad.  The problems with this is the AVERAGE temperature increase.  Think of the Australian population.  Lets us say that the average height of Australia is 170 cm.  This does not mean that  everyone in Australia is 170 cm it means that taking the tall people and the short people together the average height is 170 cm.  In exactly the same way this 1.4 or 5.8 degrees rise is the average over the whole Earth.  Some places could warm 10 degrees and some places, because of climate change induced by global warming,  could even cool by 2 degrees.  Taking these changes in temperature together the average increase will most likely be 1.4 degrees to 5.8 degrees.  What this means is that Melbourne or Perth could have 50 degree summer days.  "No problem: you say" just turn up the air-conditioner."  Sorry - the power generation capacity of the major cities is at breaking point already.  More demand could cause it to collapse as generators are pushed to the limit trying to cope and incidentally releasing more and more CO2.  A lesser known effect of Global warming is the spread of diseases. In the book "Green or Gone" by David Shearman et al on page 97 there is a section of the spread of malaria.  The mosquitoes that transmit malaria can only survive average winter temperature's of 15 degrees.  Optimal conditions are between 20 and 30 degrees and humidity of 60%.  As the Earth warms more areas will be favorable for Malaria causing it to spread to area now Malaria free.  The populations in areas that currently do not experience malaria have no immunity and will be hard hit by this incurable and debilitating disease.  Not all the effects of a small rise in temperature are obvious and totally unexpected events may occur that we cannot predict.

The reason that is usually given for not signing the Kyoto Treaty is that it does not go far enough and does not include developing countries.  A very interesting fact (ref 1)is that it was George Bush Senior that negotiated for  developing countries to be allowed to increase emissions.  With this in mind it now becomes laughable that George W Bush and allies (John Howard) now cite this as why they will not sign.  Did George Senior deliberately sabotage Kyoto?.  The original aim of of Kyoto was to cut emissions to 5% below 1990 levels( 1997 - Conference of Parties III in Kyoto Japan ).  Australia got special treatment to try and get the Howard Government negotiators to sign (Senator Hill was the Environment Minister at the time).  We got to increase our emissions by 8% and to be able to include land clearing so that no infrastructure reductions had to be made.  In short we can pollute and then promise to stop land clearing and we will fulfill our objectives.  The US and Canada held out  for 'carbon sinks' to be included so they could include forests and reduce the need for structural changes (COP VI - In the Hauge, Netherlands).  This nearly scuttled the whole agreement. The upshot of this is that we, with the US and Canada, made Kyoto the worthless document it is today.  Now we have the hide not to sign for the very reasons that we negotiated .  Also many people have written and made speeches that Kyoto is worthless however, they never mention that it was supposed to be a lot tougher but we forced it to be weaker.

Reducing CO2 emissions will cost jobs is one of the other standard arguments that George W and John Howard cite as to why they will not sign the Kyoto Treaty.  OK lets have a bit more of a look at this.  In 1999 Westpac Bank shed 3000 jobs in the "Preparing for Growth" campaign they had.  Dr Morgan, CEO of Westpac and a fine upstanding business man, had no problem telling 3000 employees, some of them who thought they had a safe job for life, to go.  I was an employee of Westpac at the time.  I saw the remaining workers, as I was in IT and got to see all the different sections of the bank,  doing the same amount of work with sometimes half the staff as a result of these dismissals.  This caused an immense amount of stress to these quite loyal people.  So where was John Howard and the author of the article then.  I did not hear anybody saying "The "Preparing for Growth" campaign will cost  jobs so we will force Westpac not to do this."  Why is it OK to cost jobs when a corporation's profit and share price are at stake but not OK when the environment is endangered?  Westpac is not an isolated case.  There are many many examples of corporate downsizing costing millions of people jobs all around the world yet the same people when confronted with possible jobs losses in signing Kyoto suddenly are so concerned.  Where were they when the Commonwealth bank sacked 4000 employees, Telstra (partly government owned) sacked 2000 technicians or IBM sacking people in Australia.  Why are the people's jobs endangered by the Kyoto treaty more worthy of saving than these other people?  The answer is that the argument that Kyoto will cost jobs is simply a good emotive sound bite that these people can use.  George W and John Howard care nothing for job losses, they would see them as market corrections.  The fossil fuel industries lobbying them do not care about job losses either.  They are using this emotive term to push their point and most of the popular press are parroting this line.  Signing the Kyoto Treaty may or may not cost jobs.  To think that this is a reason not to sign goes completely against the market decisions that corporations make all the time when it is their interest.  It is time we regarded the protection of the environment in the same way as corporations regard the protection of their share price.

Another argument used by Kyoto naysayers is that "The market should decide what happens"  The market however is built on the economic premise that resources are infinite and that the environment can absorb all pollution for ever. (ref 2) So how can a market economy with this as a core respond to environmental issues?  The answer is that it cannot.  This is where Government regulation must step in.  The US is the closest to a market economy whereas in Australia we have a good mix of the market economy and socialism that results, in my opinion a fairer and better society. Governments do, and should continue to, fetter unrestrained capitalism in the public interest.  Even in the US this is true.  Regulations to reduce Global Warming are but one example of this.  They were was brought about because it is obvious to anyone that, left unrestrained, our market economy will continue to pollute until there is nothing left because unlike the premise that it is based on the environment is not a perfect sink for our economic pollutants and resources are not infinite.  The market is changing at least for the countries that have signed the Kyoto Treaty.  It is moving to new market where emissions count.  This is totally in accord with the economic rationalism that John Howard and George W subscribe to.  Government policy sets the constraints for the market and then let the markets decide.  However the industries lobbying the leaders of Australia and the US do do not want the markets to decide this time.  It is OK if the market's decision corresponds with increased corporate share prices or profits but not when these decisions might be endanger industries making large profits and unwilling to change.  Instead these lobbyist want the market that allows these huge profits, where environmental issues are sidelined.  In short they only want the market to decide if it agrees with them.  Anything else has to be stopped.  The fossil fuel industry by spending lots of money and time have successfully done it in the US and Australia. They want to choose the market to do the deciding.  Kyoto is a change brought on by environment concerns. Far from letting the market rule as their philosophy dictates they're trying to manipulate the conditions.  They know that their old inefficient industries would not survive in the new market so rather than accept this they change the market to suit themselves.

The final nail in the coffin for combating Global Warming is cost, according to the economists.   Who will pay for all the wind generators and solar panels needed to reduce greenhouse emissions?  What it not widely known is that most of the electricity generated is not really wasted in inefficient machines and appliances.  Reductions in demand could eliminate the need for  new coal powered stations and bring the power grid within the reach of renewable power.   An example is home refrigeration.  There are according  to the Bureau of Statistics approx 7 million households in Australia (ref 5) .  Assuming they all have a refrigerator and it uses an average of 500 Kw Hrs per year then this uses  3500 GWhrs of electricity per year.  A very large 600 MW coal plant in a year will produce approx 4200 GWHrs of electricity.   Switching to more efficient refrigerators that use 280 Kw Hrs per year could save 1540 GWhrs of electricity or perhaps allow a new coal plant not to be built.  Another is air-conditioning.  If 40% of households have air-conditioning (ref 6) and cheaper 2 star models are more common then this is using  (500hrs a year * 3.15 Kw * 3000000)  4725 GWHrs per year.  Switching the majority of these households to a 6 star air-con unit would save 3600 GWhrs per year.  This is nearly the full output of a very large coal fired power plant and this is just domestic air-conditioning and refrigeration.  There is no reason to suppose that similar efficiency gains cannot be made in the industrial area as well.  The difference between high efficiency and low efficiency appliances can be as little as half  the energy use to a tenth of the energy consumed.  Very large scale reductions in energy demand could allow us to close many old coal plants.  The large coal plant closed would have emitted 600 tons of CO2 generating that 600 MW (ref 7).  A gas plant for comparison would emit 205 tons generating the same amount of electricity.  Closing a coal plant reduces the CO2 output by two thirds even if replaced by a gas plant.

Something as simple as a nationwide industry and domestic efficiency program financed from the money that currently subsidize fossil fuels, approx 8 billion dollars (ref 8),  and applied to demand management instead could  drastically reduce emissions with no net cost at all.  We currently pay the subsidies so their diversion to demand management would not be noticed.  Instead of rewarding CO2 emitters with money reward CO2 savers instead.  8 billion dollars would finance a massive incentive scheme as well as provide incentives for renewable energy sources.  Instead of 500 million dollars being spent of 'Clean Coal' spend it on renewables.   A perfect example of a subsidy that directly produces CO2 is the Diesel Fuel Rebate Scheme.  At a cost of a staggering 2.23 billion a year we pay people to use diesel.  This makes diesel power plants in remote areas more economical compared to renewable solutions. Removal of this subsidy and transferring the money to renewable power would decrease diesel use and promote renewable solutions as they would be closer in cost. An example of this is the recent power station built at Windorah comprised 3 200 Kw  of diesel generators, no wind, no solar.  Contrast this with a plant built at Denham in Western Australia that is a combined wind/diesel plant that saves 1 700 tons of CO2  and 550 000 liters of diesel a year (ref 9).   Removal of the diesel subsidy would have perhaps tipped the balance that so that the Windorah plant would have been built the same way as the Denham plant and saved thousands of tons of greenhouse gases.

Combating Global Warming may cost jobs.  It may cost money and growth.  Signing Kyoto is a very small step on the path to meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.  Corporations shed jobs if it suits them.  It is laughable for the economic rationalists to propose this as a reason to not implement  changes to reduce CO2 emissions.  As for cost we seem to subsidize the fossil fuel industry alright.  If we can afford these subsidies then we can afford to divert them to subsidies that reduce CO2 rather than subsidize CO2 emitters.  Demand management offers massive savings if done correctly.  Why are there a 3 star refrigerators and air-conditioners for sale in Australia when there are 6 star refrigerators and air-conditioners available.  A simple nationwide subsidy scheme to make 6 star appliances the same price as 3 star ones and banning anything under 5 stars could save gigawatts of power leading to the possibility of closing coal plants and not needing replacements.

The effort to reduce emissions will not affect 'the man in the street' much.  The result of reducing emissions will affect 'him' greatly.  Avoiding calamitous storms, malaria and drastic changes to local climate will save millions of lives.  The systems put in place to reduce emissions, renewable energy, distributed power grids electric cars and reduced power demand will place the 'man in the street''s life very well to cope with a future without oil.

The effort to reduce emission will affect corporations greatly.  They will have profitability reduced and some of the large oil companies could face the ultimate horror 'the loss of a brand'  The result of reducing emissions will not affect corporations greatly as they, like the opportunists they are, will sell life-rafts to the population and still turn a profit somewhere from someones misery.   The systems put in place to reduce emissions will reduce the branding opportunities and profit of large transnational corporations and place more of the power back in the hands of people. This of course must be stopped which is exactly what they are doing.

Ref 1 - http://www.greenpeace.ca/e/campaign/climate_energy/depth/kyoto/history.php
Ref 2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic
Ref  3 - http://www.sunfrost.com/refrigerator_specs.html
Ref 4 - http://www.energyrating.gov.au/index.html
Ref 5- http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/7fe024c77150f392ca256b350010b3f3?OpenDocument
Ref 6 - http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/09/1097261860502.html
ref 7 - http://www.energyusernews.com/CDA/ArticleInformation/features/BNP__Features__Item/0,2584,77769,00.html
Ref 8 - http://www.isf.uts.edu.au/publications/CR_2003_paper.pdf
Ref 9 - http://www.westernpower.com.au/

Comments

[Ray]

Dude, When do you find the time to write such long-winded tripe? Don't you have a job?
Check back to pre-history and you will find times when the earth was much warmer than it is now. Trying to glean a global weather pattern out of a few hundred years of weather records is like trying to read coffee leaves.-and probably less accurate. Relax, smell the roses. I bet you're not too much fun to be around with all this doom saying. Jeez!
Read a light novel for a change. What does your family say about this feversih obsession with left wing, aluminum foil hat silliness. They probably say, (or hope) "it's just a phase he's going through".
Holy cow dude

[Ray]

[Mike Mann is here http://realclimate.org/ where a thorough evaluation of the Hockey Stick bit is - have a look and get the conservative blinders off]

Here, this will cheer you up. From the 18/2/2005 Wall Street Journal shooting big holes in your beloved Global Warming Tailspin:

Where's Michael Mann now?

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Hockey Stick on Ice
Politicizing the science of global warming.

Friday, February 18, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

On Wednesday National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman canceled the season, and we guess that's a loss. But this week also brought news of something else that's been put on ice. We're talking about the "hockey stick."

Just so we're clear, this hockey stick isn't a sports implement; it's a scientific graph. Back in the late 1990s, American geoscientist Michael Mann published a chart that purported to show average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years. The chart showed relatively minor fluctuations in temperature over the first 900 years, then a sharp and continuous rise over the past century, giving it a hockey-stick shape.

Mr. Mann's chart was both a scientific and political sensation. It contradicted a body of scientific work suggesting a warm period early in the second millennium, followed by a "Little Ice Age" starting in the 14th century. It also provided some visually arresting scientific support for the contention that fossil-fuel emissions were the cause of higher temperatures. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Mann's hockey stick appears five times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark 2001 report on global warming, which paved the way to this week's global ratification--sans the U.S., Australia and China--of the Kyoto Protocol.

Yet there were doubts about Mr. Mann's methods and analysis from the start. In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign.
Still, questions persisted. In 2003, Stephen McIntyre, a Toronto minerals consultant and amateur mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph, jointly published a critique of the hockey stick analysis. Their conclusion: Mr. Mann's work was riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data.

This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal's Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions. All the same, Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data, and doubts about his statistical methods have since grown. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann's method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Other reputable scientists such as Berkeley's Richard Muller and Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS Center essentially agree.

We realize this may all seem like so much academic nonsense. Yet if there really was a Medieval warm period (we draw no conclusions), it would cast some doubt on the contention that our SUVs and air conditioners, rather than natural causes, are to blame for apparent global warming.
There is also the not-so-small matter of the politicization of science: If climate scientists feel their careers might be put at risk by questioning some orthodoxy, the inevitable result will be bad science. It says something that it took two non-climate scientists to bring Mr. Mann's errors to light.

But the important point is this: The world is being lobbied to place a huge economic bet--as much as $150 billion a year--on the notion that man-made global warming is real. Businesses are gearing up, at considerable cost, to deal with a new regulatory environment; complex carbon-trading schemes are in the making. Shouldn't everyone look very carefully, and honestly, at the science before we jump off this particular cliff?

I will try to cheer you up with these little notes here and there.
Though somehow I doubt you can be cheered up.

[michael]

First of all, Ray, talk about having too much time on your hands...

It's frightening the extent to which the political processes in major democracies have been captured by the energy industry of the last century, oil and coal. Unless we consciously innovate and encourage adoption of newer, more efficient and lower impact energy technologies, we'll never get this dreadnaught turned around.

[Ender]

Thank you michael for your support

[Shania Twain esq]

Global warming- u r rubbish
but i still love you. keep UP! the good work ;-)

p.s Nissan Micras suck!

[Nissan Micra]

i lurve nissan micras
nissan micras rule