Gaia's Revenge  

James Lovelock has caused quite a stir with his prophecy of climate chaos doom. Hopefully he is wrong about the inevitability of impending disaster and we do still have the ability to change our ways (once the current generation of Australian and American political leaders vanish into the dustbin of history anyway) before the situation does become irretrevably bad.

Crikey comments on the benighted state of the global warming debate in the pages of our national Murdoch daily "The Australian", which seems to think for some inexplicable reason that Mark Steyn isn't a demented misanthrope and has something meaningful to say on the subject (instead of identifying him as the member of a shrinking lunatic fringe).

Crikey also notes that the word "conservative" was supposed to mean risk averse. That's the old meaning of the word of course, before it was replaced with "corrupt, zealous ideologue who refuses to acknowledge reality".

The state of the world's environment is complex, critical and contentious enough without needing to turn it into a political or ideological issue. Yet according to The Australian, the debate about global warming is being sensationalised by "environmental activists" for whom it is "an article of green faith that the world's climate is changing for the worse." And according to one of that newspaper's climate collaborationists, columnist Mark Steyn, climate change is "the new buzz phrase" created by "Kyotocrats" who "are, literally, a church, and under the Holy Book of Kyoto their bishops demand that the great industrial nations of the world tithe their incomes to them."

What, then, to make of the views of James Lovelock, a distinguished environmental scientist, who says in today's London Independent that the world has "already passed the point of no return for climate change" and that "civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive." Thirty years ago, Lovelock worked out that the earth possessed a "planetary-scale control system" which kept the environment "fit for life." Dubbed Gaia, the theory argues that the Earth System contains "myriad feedback mechanisms" which in the past have acted together to keep the Earth much cooler than it otherwise would be. Now, however, they'll "come together to amplify the warming being caused by human activities such as transport and industry through huge emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide." And the results of damaging the living planet's "ancient regulatory system" are likely to "accelerate uncontrollably."

Who is right and who is wrong? Lovelock or Steyn? The Australian or the New Green Weekly? Well, unlike most other political or ideological debates, this one has dire consequences if the conservatives have got it wrong. Surely this is an issue where taking the benefit-of-the-doubt approach is the truly conservative path, even if conservatives aren't the ones taking it.

Lovelock's column does contain some real estate investment tips for those paying attention - sell Britain and buy Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia...

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 percent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilization is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the UK.

Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanized as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

I'm never sure of the wisdom of saying "you're all going to die" to the world at large and not providing some sort of carrot for people to change their ways - maybe he genuinely believes we are all doomed, but if thats the case, why not just shut up about it and go off and enjoy yourself somewhere ?

Moving on to a less grim analysis of events, Henry Thornton quotes the weekend Financial Review on the impact of global warming on Australia's economy, which points out that relying on fossil fuel exports is going to leave us in a sorry way as the world abandons them in the coming years and we find out that an economy based on being Asia's quarry (which still can't afford the goodies we want right now) is just a house of cards.

David Bassanese in the weekend fin discusses a longer term threat - global warming. "Global warming could wreak havoc with Australia's coasts, not to mention agriculture. Meanwhile, our energy-importing customers will aggressively seek ways to cut reliance on fossil fuels. To maintain our leading status as an energy exporter, Australia should be in the vanguard of these efforts - not resisting them. Or we'll be left behind, like today's change-resistant pharmacists."

Crikey also has an interesting post from the inventor of the Sunball on the lack of government support for clean technologies like solar power.

Greg Watson, inventor and solar power expert, writes:

By eliminating solar PV rebates, the federal government is saying to the vast majority of Australians who want to generate their own electricity on their rooftops: DON'T. This is basically denying their legal right to decide who they buy their electricity from – and that includes themselves if they want to generate their own.

My company has developed the SunBall, which won the ABC New Inventors 2005 People's Choice Award against 123 other inventions. It generates electricity on rooftops at a much lower cost than electricity bought from the grid. We have been trying to get the Australian Greenhouse Office to tells us what testing they need us to put the SunBall through to qualify for rebates and allow us a level playing field against less efficient and more costly flat panels.

After about six months of attempted discussions the AGO is no longer answering our emails.

This action and the elimination of the solar PV rebate seem to suggest the government is not interested in giving people their rights to get power from their own rooftops and to reduce their electricity bills. I would hope this is not an attempt to protect fossil fuel suppliers, electricity generators, electricity distributors or electricity retailers profit margins.

In a world where, almost every day, another state or country announces leading edge rebate programs for solar rooftop installations, it seems strange that here in Australia we're going back to a fossil fuel-based economy and walking away from all the wider benefits that solar can bring such as reduced hot summer network peak demands.

We live in a strange world.

And while I'm linking to Crikey, here's their view on the moves towards impeaching George Bush.

Without Watergate, the Clinton impeachment would have been unthinkable. Although Nixon was brought down by a bipartisan majority, the Republican Party suffers from collective amnesia about its role, and has come to regard his fall as a Democrat political assassination. Hence much of the bitterness of the Clinton era.

But the failure of Clinton's impeachment in turn made future impeachments less likely. No president will be at risk for a long time unless they actually deliver their opponents a smoking gun.

Yet that is what George W Bush seems to have done. His unapologetic admission to wiretaps of US citizens without warrants, in apparently clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, has put impeachment back on the agenda, however tentatively. As John Dean, Watergate conspirator and whistleblower, put it before Christmas, he is "the first president to actually admit to an impeachable offence."

This week, The Nation carries a long article by Elizabeth Holtzman, who was a Democrat member of the Judiciary Committee that voted Nixon's impeachment, presenting the case for impeaching Bush. Yesterday former vice-president Al Gore called for the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the wiretapping affair. And Sunday's New York Times editorial, without mentioning the "i" word, used unusually strong language to condemn the president:

The administration's behaviour shows ... how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

So why is Bush so set on a course that has revived a previously taboo subject? It's not as if FISA warrants were hard to get; they can be applied for retrospectively, and it's said that out of many thousands of applications only four have ever been turned down. Maybe Bush is using the wiretaps to spy on political opponents, although as yet there is no evidence of that.

More likely, the administration just wants power for its own sake. That, after all, is what governments do. As Holtzman says, "it may well be that the warrantless wiretap program has had much more to do with restoring the trappings of the Nixon imperial presidency than it ever had to do with protecting national security.

And to close, a joke:

President Bush met with all the former secretaries of State and Defense for advice on Iraq. This is quite a change. This is the first time Bush has listened to anybody. Well, if you don't count the wiretaps. — Jay Leno