Perhaps these two gentlemen have explained climate change to Brendan Nelson

As part of its ongoing 'climate change is a myth perpetrated by green leftists' series, The Australian recently published the work of Messrs Evans and Jensen. Dr David Evans, a self-styled 'rocket scientist', is a former employee of the Australian Greenhouse Office. In hindsight, that appointment was probably as constructive as say, appointing Senor Fawkes pageboy for the House of Commons, for the good doctor appears to have had his head turned rather too swiftly for someone intimately involved in the climate modelling process. Dennis Jensen is one of the handful of Western Australian MPs who subscribe to the 'Howard as demigod' thesis, and are on the record as skeptical of the IPCC-inspired policies adopted by almost every social democratic party in the world.

Evans' piece, which has been dissected by Tim Lambert, boils down to three essential points. First, Evans does not give credence to the very modelling he was engaged to produce and hence will not accept any conclusions that either correlate observations with modelled outcomes, or predict the effect of various phenonmena on climate. This means Lambert's references to such visions of orbital forcing or carbon dioxide effects on temperature will fall on deaf ears.

On top of this rejection of modelling, Evans also rejects data showing temperature rises and adopts a very short-term view of climatic variability, suggesting the Earth is now cooling again. What makes me suspicious of such claims is the fact that climate skeptics do not suggest the Earth is reverting back to normal service but is in fact cooling (from the hottest part of the last several hundred years!).

Evans' third tenet is that the Vostok ice cores no longer support the C02-warming causal link as the warming follows the C02 by 800 years. This is widely accepted. He uses this fact as a stick to beat Al Gore as a misleading alarmist politician. Evans' problem lies in the second bit of data: for 800 years the temperature rises but C02 does not, then the two rise together for around 4200 years as the Earth emerges from an ice age. This supports the argument that increased sunlight raises temperature, gradually warms the earth and releases C02 and methane via melting permafrost. Has anyone spoken to Putin and Medvedev about the double-decker carbon sink they have in Siberia?

Basic common sense should cause someone with a scientific background to act cautiously and take appropriate precautions. Evans makes no mention of what will happen to the oceans absorbing ever larger concentrations of C02, nor the chemically proven fact that carbon dioxide is less soluble in warmer water. He ends his piece with the charge of 'criminal negligence and ideological stupidity' against the ALP. I would counter that by saying that if the ALP knew of both great environmental risk and the impending threat posed to our major coal and steel industries and did nothing to reposition the economy the charge would be made out.

Mr Jensen appears to be following Kipling's injunction to keep his head when all around him are losing theirs. His piece is basically a cry for nuclear power, regardless of climate change. It is also a cry for debate, although given those who seek that debate are largely disinterested in observations, conclusions, logical inferences and fair play, one does wonder what sort of debate the member for Tangney is advocating. Jensen believes that energy measures are tokenistic and that solar and wind are 'as yet unproved'. He implies climate advocates are today's flat-earthers, suggesting he subscribes to the Galileo Complex. Given most of Jensen's fellow-travellers would gladly locked Signor Galilei up for the term of his natural, it seems an odd piece of identification.

On the cost of emissions trading, Jensen states:

If all carbon in the stationary power sector were to have a $50-a-tonne price of carbon dioxide imposed (as is the case for the European price for CO2), it would mean a cost burden of $660 a year for every Australian, or more than $2500 per household, according to data I have received. These would not all be direct costs from the emissions-trading scheme, but also from higher prices of products that would flow through as a result of increased production costs. Those higher costs would make some businesses unviable, and they would have to close or move offshore.

Firstly, the Rudd Government's Green Paper indicates that $20 per tonne is the starting carbon price. Australia is years behind the EU and the $50 per tonne mark is unlikely to be reached for some years. Jensen makes no allowance for increased use of gas or an escalation in renewables (Rudd's 20% 2020 target seems to have escaped his notice). If we use the average power bill of $1020 per annum, we get a $163 rise at $20 a tonne for carbon. This means a $50 per tonne price adds $407.50 to your average bill. Assuming no renewable uptake, this means $252.50 is the price rise from stationary energy usage alone by business. All of which is great, except Jensen fails to include the compensation payable for price increases: remember, it's supposed to be the polluter pays, not the consumer. Also Jensen needs to answer, if these businesses are unviable because of associated emissions costs, is that because they cannot pass them onto the consumer? In which case, his $252.50 per household secondary emissions costing is surely higher.

Being a nuclear advocate, Jensen does not include the transport sector in his calculations, and the imposts created by high oil prices on freight costs. The biggest threat to business at present comes from oil prices and interest rates, and it will only be businesses that do not reform their practices early that will be vulnerable to the degree Jensen postulates. Given nuclear will require tremendous government support, surely that would feed into major stationary energy price rises of the very ilk Jensen criticises.

It is these true believers in business as usual (with nuclear variations) that Nelson's policy seeks to placate. Rather than offering certainty, the central demand of business, these dictates would add great uncertainty: whether any action would be taken at all under a Coalition Government and indeed the very viability of an export sector propped up by extractive carbon-intensive industry.

For the rest of us, we should learn some basic chemistry about carbon dioxide, keep a weather eye out to see if the birds are singing earlier this year and do what we can to make a difference, whether that be recycle, turn off the lights or push our politicians for action. Those are our best guides in sorting the climate fact from fiction.

Another global warming challenge

In the spirit of that fabled freedom of speech, Tim Dunlop has issued an invitation for any unpublished scientist whose (scientific) views are contrary to the global warming orthodoxy to send him a thousand word dissertation. Tree of Knowledge ups the ante to include explanations of why they differ from their fellow contrarians.

Global warming denial is both an inherently frustrating and fascinating phenomenon. Fascinating because of the psychological history, the experiences and influences that shape the views of the individuals that hold them. Frustrating for the standard political reasons. A level of intransigence by scientists and commentators either genuinely convinces politicians and the public the problem lacks urgency or provides a convenient excuse for inaction. It is not helpful in the modern massaged world of mass politics to be presented with the need to instigate a revolution across the economy and stimulate a domino-like consensus of opinion across both the developed and developing world.

It is understandable that conservatives in all walks of life, be they businessmen, unionists, politicians or commentators do not want to see the certainties of the modernity turned on their heads. Some see global warming belief as a triumph of faith over reason, others see it as an admission that the technologies of modernity cannot overcome the trials of nature. Both of these impulses have been criticial to the development of modern capitalism. Dependency on oil and baseload power are ciphers for an ideological conviction of humanity's inevitable progress. A narrative that despite the occasional conflagration has moved on apace since the medieval era.

The problem with this view is it ignores the inescapable facts that the oil reserves we rely on are finite and that it is simply unsustainable for the entire world's population to have the ecological footprint demanded by the modern western lifestyle. By definition, there are limits that constrain our access to resources. Hence in order to grow our way economically out of trouble, either we will have to find more arable and exploitable land or make our resource usage (across the whole gamut from food to metal production to energy itself) progressively more renewable. In short, while dealing with an exponential culture of achievement we will have to rediscover the cyclical resource use culture of our forebears.

As interesting in a 'angels dancing on a head of a pin' way as the global warming denial debate is, it does nothing to explain how proving the non-existence of anthropogenic global warming will solve humanity's forthcoming problems. It offers no solutions towards sustainable development and appears to buttress an ethic of land use and interaction which may be out of date and is certainly counterproductive.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for those poring over statistics, dissecting graphs and drawing conspiratorial conclusions is how are those intellectual endeavours going to secure the health, wealth and happiness of your grandchildren and their grandchildren. When the oil runs out and every nation from Guyana to Nepal demands a McDonalds on every street corner.

Dr Nelson slips his Freudian

I wonder if when the erstwhile Dr Nelson was responding to the indefatiguable Australian campaign to draft our former Formula 1 treasurer to the opposition leadership, he intended to say this:

"If Peter decides he is going to continue his political career, and serve the people of Higgins, and indeed the Liberal cause, I can assure you he will be on the frontbench with a bullet"

Would that be Mr Rudd's missing silver bullet or one to the back of the head, in the traditional manner of deserters?

Rudd's political honeytrap

The Rudd Government's Green Paper will no doubt earn the ire of some climate and environmental organisations for its gradualist approach to emission reduction.

Petrol is in the scheme but compensated by 'cent-for-cent' excise reductions until 2013. Agriculture is out until further notice (possibly starting in 2015) and coal power generators will receive government assistance. The Government appears to be easing voters into copping nanoeconomic pain, by hitting them first with upfront power bills (softened to an extent by increased government payments). This suggests that fast tracking renewable energy - as indicated by the proposed 20% national renewable energy target by 2020, is seen as a more palatable and effective option for achieving emission reductions. If stationary energy emissions make up 50% of all emissions, rising to close to 60% by 2020, a 20% rise in renewable market share would achieve between 10-12% emission reductions. That would suggest that Rudd's interim emissions target cannot be much higher than about 15% by 2020 from the current nominated suite of abatement options. Even to achieve these savings will require a considerable improvement in fuel efficiency and or energy efficiency at the current target levels. Such a target looks low by world standards and will barely be in the pack once developed nations crunch the carbon numbers.

This may well be the genius of Rudd's plan. The bar is so low that it reflects a pragmatic Liberal policy wish list. So low that in one sentence Nelson chastisted Rudd for lifting their excise-permit neutral idea and in the next called it a petrol tax. The end result of Labor's policy is that it puts the onus on the people to push it to take more action. It is almost the minimal possible response without jeopardising the integrity of action altogether. Rudd has effectively offered an election year handout with the electricity rebates and absolved the government of responsibility for excessive petrol hikes.

Nelson is left in nanoeconomic limbo. He has to either junk the scheme entirely or have a technical debate over the merits of 2012 action. Nelson has flirted with a faux policy debate about the hybrid model but if anything has smacked of 'The Hollowmen' in national politics, that search for an alternative was it. Possibly locking Turnbull, Hunt and Bishop into his Central Coast caravan for a weekend and designing a proper policy alternative would be more beneficial both to the debate and the long-term coherency of his party.

At the minute his argument boils down to 'there's a right way to do it (mine) and a wrong way (Rudd's)'. If the excise cut is my idea it's good policy and if it's his policy it is bad. The fact that all this operates in the future - i.e. after the battle has been won at the polls, makes Nelson's 'Rudd's 2013 review is Rudd-speak for ending the excise cut' ring hollow. If Rudd is to pay for injudicious action it will be in 2010. If he is to pay for inaction it will be 2013.

The scheme offers so much to the vulnerable polluters and the kind of targeted compensation scheme now becoming the Rudd trademark that it is highly unlikely the final draft will be any weaker. If anything, the challenge is being thrown down to voters to tell the government they want action and are prepared to pay for it.

Watching Penny Wong at the Press Club demonstrated a player in control of her material, confident in the merits of the argument and open to being pushed to further action. Watching Greg Hunt on Lateline demonstrated a puppet forced to parrot a line he did not believe in, wishing he had something coherent if not constructive to say. Only when Hunt got onto his pet subject of solar panel rebates did he seem to have conviction. Perhaps he should show some boldness and adopt the German bipartisan solar feed-in tariff where homeowners get four times the price for their surplus solar energy fed into the grid.

The danger with Rudd's policy is that in forcing the Liberals over the climate cliff, it will force a very swift acceleration of targets in the medium term. But by then Greg Hunt might be PM.

A Liberal dose of climate chaos

Opposition is tough enough when your party is roughly on the same wavelength. When your party is undergoing a crisis of relevance and historical purpose, it becomes akin to herding cats. Brendan Nelson was elected to the leadership based on being a compromise candidate. Instead, he has become the compromised candidate who seems to be the last person to know when his policy has changed.

This has been the case on WorkChoices, the apology debate and now climate change. Nelson is frequently trying to be both progressive and conservative in the same sentence and the first thing that goes is the syntax of his sentences, then subjected to Rumsfeld-style ridicule.

The diabolical mess that is the Liberal party's position on climate change comes from Nelson's futile attempts to reconcile two mutually exclusive positions. On one wing we have the bipartisan actors such as Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull who genuinely want to get the carbon reform ball rolling. On the other lie the science deniers led by Tony Abbott, representing the growth-is-king mantra of the Howard era. One suspects that they hold exorcism ceremonies around a portrait of Bob Brown clad with faux-Viking horns such is their distrust of Green policy. Whereas a compromise on the apology was possible but looked churlish and nonsensical, there is no way to balance these two positions down the middle. Either Nelson must lean towards the do-nothing denialists or he must lean toward the progressive wing of the party.

Nelson seems to have realised this himself but has not conjured up the escape route. His first attempt was to stand by the Howard policy of an ETS commencing in 2012. However, while Rudd can deal with both nanoeconomic and enviro-economic issues in turn, Nelson has based his entire leadership (if that's what one can call it) on nanoeconomic pain alone. He emotes on behalf of carers, pensioners, shoppers and motorists and is thus rendered allergic to price increases.

So by default Nelson is left with a leadership philosophy which does not allow him to support any price rises. Hence the compromised nonsense of 'petrol included but no net increase in taxes'. Perhaps he got caught in the GST comparison. While both the GST and the ETS result in pricing realignments, the essential purpose of an ETS is to input the price of carbon emission rights into the economic system. That means that products requiring higher level of carbon emissions will increase in price relative to those that require lower levels. Its operation can only be revenue neutral in the short term by government recompense.

However the reality that caused Howard to adopt the 2012 ETS in the first place has not changed. So Nelson cannot ditch the policy entirely but reopens it to consultation, digging up the hybrid alternative that Howard's Shergold report left on the cutting room floor. It will not take very much effort for Penny Wong to start citing Shergold's reasons for rejecting Nelson's proposal and exposing it as a fig leaf for denial. Denying climate change is as politically toxic now as advocating for asylum seekers was during the Tampa saga.

Further, the incoherency of Nelson's position makes him look an incompetent and weak leader and will do nothing for his electoral stocks. By not developing a progressive, innovative, liberal-philosophy based position on climate change, Nelson is not just undermining bipartisan action but his own party.

Rudd's Climate Change Game Plan

Much of the media talk, well at least prior to the spectacular Liberal policy implosion, on climate change has centred around the difficulties it presents to the Rudd Government. This is largely based around a conventional view of Australian politics which casts Labor as the union-worker party and the Liberals as 'good economic managers'.

However the odd thing about this analysis is that it ignores the fact that it was the previous Labor government that introduced free market reforms which made the market economy paradigm a bipartisan project and hence an inherent part of the political landscape. Consequently, the supposed opposition of former ACTU members such as Martin Ferguson is seen as fatal to Rudd's project. The narrative goes that coal mining unions will revolt and suburban battlers concerned with the new nanoeconomics of interest rates, fuel and grocery prices will descend on Canberra with pitchforks and lead Kevin to the one-term electoral guillotine.

The flaw in this theory is that it relies on the assumption that the public's long held interest in climate action will dissolve in the face of the economic consequences. It is clear that when Rudd was elected, the public flicked the switch from concern over Labor's macroeconomic credentials to a more nuanced worry about nanoeconomic issues and the integration of environmental and economic concerns. Not only that, but whereas immigration eroded Labor's position (roughly 70% of voters supported Howard's detention programme at its height), a similar level of support exists among Liberal voters for climate action. Given climate change and its economic underpinnings challenge the very basis of conventional politics, failure to act with bipartisanship may deal a cruel blow to the future of the Liberals.

In order to turn Liberals to the Labor cause, Rudd needs to complete the evolution process begun during the 1980s by breaking the final bonds with the vested coal industry interests. He also needs a second economic reform programme. Hence the Garnaut Report. It is no coincidence that Garnaut played a key role in the 1980s reforms. Rudd's plan appears to be to offer bold action on climate change, hence his defence of the 2010 starting date for the ETS. Thus he will get credit for 'strong action', but also leaves the way open to 'listen to the people' if problems arise that need a 2012 date. If the Liberals fail to at least meaningfully contest the climate action field, they are setting themselves up for irrelevance.

The draft legislation for the ETS is not due until late this year. This will give ample time for the customary Rudd technique of kite flying to see which measures the public will bear and which need more careful handling. Hence the equivocation on petrol, which may depend as much on the oil price in November as anything else. Rudd will probably remove the GST on excise as a minimum and possibly mandate no GST on carbon permits. As the essential purpose of an ETS is for prices of carbon fuels to increase, the Liberal policy of 'no net tax increase' contradicts this basic aim. A coherent policy either leaves petrol in and increases the price, or leaves it out and places the burden on other sectors. Energy price compensation will be means tested in line with the strategy pursued with the solar panel rebate, remembering of course that while energy usage does not change much versus income, the ability to purchase energy efficient appliances does.

On the global front, Rudd will push for Australia to play a major role as an emissions intense middle power, bridging China, India, the US and Europe into some kind of coalition. China has expressed interest in an emissions trading scheme and expect Rudd to cite the ETS and Chinese moves as complementary. This also dovetails with Labor policy to increase the role of Australia's financial services sector in China and India.

The Rudd Government has demonstrated a committment to climate action and expect to see a lot more claims to be exercising national and diplomatic leadership in this area, while we are told how we are acting behind the rest of the world. This paradox is vital to understanding the politics of climate change and their implications. The need to act is clear but the traditional sense of caution towards major reform is also alive and well.

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The political inversion of the climate change debate

A number of journalists ranging across the spectrum from Fairfax's Annabel Crabb to News Limited stalwarts Dennis Shanahan and Andrew Bolt have identified the apparent contradiction between Rudd's 'I feel your pain' pitch to 'battlers' (or as the Piping Shrike has put it 'The New Sensitivity') and the inherent need for energy prices to rise to combat climate change.

On paper, it looks like a recipe for a Latham-Downeresque implosion. However, it both gives the voters no credit by implying they cannot hold two ideas in their collective heads at the same time and misunderstands the reasons for Howard's demise. Firstly, it is a well-established fact that voters can differentiate between state and federal politics. For at least two terms of the Howard government, large swathes of the country voted for completely different parties at the state and federal level. In fact, where Labor has run into trouble in the past is by dismissing many voters as 'ignorant' or 'unsophisticated'. The key basis of politics is persuasion, and a failure to persuade, while open to inteference from outside forces, ultimately comes down to whether the audience sees an essential truth in your message and your capacity to deliver. Rudd seems to be aware of the dangers of underestimating the public mind.

Secondly, Howard's fall from grace came from Rudd altering the economic debate from the macroeconomic level to the nanoeconomic level. Hence he recognised the problems of petrol and grocery price vulnerability and promised government assistance around the margins. Petrol and food prices operate however as free markets without government command and control influence, so real power here is limited to a 'watching brief', keeping an eye on price fluctuations and opening up the field for more competition.

What Rudd aims to do with climate change is again redefine the economic debate, this time on the macroeconomic level. Setting a price for carbon will integrate environmental costs into the economic system. That is the first step. The second will be for environmental and economic management to be seen as covalent. The third step is to break the nexus between economic growth and environmental emissions growth thus ensuring a political, economic and environmentally sustainable future. Unlike previous reforms such as the GST, support for an emissions trading scheme is consistently over 50%, while opposition sits around 25% with around 20% of people waiting to hear more details. Thus aligning economic and environmental action is what the people want at this point in time.

Unlike petrol and food commodities, the Rudd Government will have the power to set the starting price for carbon, define the parameters of the market and redistribute revenue from carbon permits to compensate the people. This market will afford government a measure of control rather than the watching brief seen in the nanoeconomic field.

The other thing that climate change does is transform energy increases into issues of personal responsibility. It thus becomes almost a civic duty to accept and embrace higher energy prices and encourage a larger share of renewable energy usage. In this climate, the goodwill to government is not dependent on keeping prices down but ensuring there is appropriate action being taken which is manageable on both the national and personal level. So government will both have more power to act and a proportionally lower need to act to ease public concerns.

The critical factors with the climate change carbon transition process will be the quality of the Rudd Government's communication with the people and its capacity to persuade voters that action is in all our interests. On this, expect to see a lot of Garrett and Rudd, and very little of Wong, who will be behind the scenes dealing with business and other large stakeholders.

Something is missing from this picture

The Australian Astronomical Society has just announced the release of a rather obtuse-sounding paper "Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?". This would normally pass into the scholarly ether but for the efforts of numerous global warming deniers to promote it as evidence of 'global cooling'.

The paper contains various observations regarding the orbit of the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn which have been helpfully translated to mean the Earth will experience diminished sunlight in the next decade and a consequent lowering of mean global temperature by 1-2 degrees. This trend is predicted to last around twenty to thirty years.

Precisely why certain blogs have immediately accepted this one paper rather than the weight of scientific opinion that anthropogenic climate change is unclear. However, even if we do accept these findings that a new global dimming is upon us, this only delays the impact of temperature rises from increased carbon in the atmosphere.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report offers a range of scenarios for temperature change, giving a projected increase of between 0.8 and 1.2 degrees C by 2040. It is quite possible that the two phenomena, if scientifically sound, could offset one another. However, the dimming period is predicted to last only 20-30 years which means by 2050 there would be a reasonable chance that the full force of high atmospheric carbon levels would be felt.

In other words, far from evidence that global warming is bunk, the global dimming phase at best offers a temporary reprieve and an unexpected opportunity to make better, more strategically sound long-term decisions.

Rather than use this as evidence for opposing any climate action, it should give us hope that we can adapt out society for sustainable development over the long term. We need to gain a better appreciation of both the dynamics of carbon in the atmosphere and the trends towards higher or lower solar radiation. At the same time, we need to continue picking low-hanging efficiency fruit and researching long-term fossil fuel replacements.

These decisions will be best made with open minds rather than ideological obsession.