Climate Change Follies

...classic quote from one of my colleagues in response to my frustration today:

'If it requires change, then we need more science!'

My frustration was caused by an email doing the rounds [note: no references!] - this is what we are dealing with:

'Let's put this into a bit of perspective for laymen (and women)...read the following analogy and you will realize the insignificance of carbon dioxide as a weather controller.

Here's a practical way to understand Mr. Rudd's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Imagine 1 kilometre of atmosphere and we want to get rid of the carbon pollution in it created by human activity. Let's go for a walk along it.

The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.

The next 210 metres are Oxygen.

That's 980 metres of the 1 kilometre. 20 metres to go.

The next 10 metres are water vapour. 10 metres left.

9 metres are argon. Just 1 more metre.

A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.

The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre - that's carbon diooxide.
A bit over one foot.

97% of that is produced by Mother Nature. It's natural.*

Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left. Just over a centimetre - about half an inch.

That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.

And of those 12 millimetres Australia puts in .18 of a millimetre.

Less than the thickness of a hair. Out of a kilometre!*

As a hair is to a kilometre - so is Australia 's contribution to what Mr. Rudd calls Carbon Pollution.

Imagine Brisbane 's new Gateway Bridge...

It's been polished, painted and scrubbed by an army of workers till its 1 kilometre length is surgically clean. Except that Mr. Rudd says we Have a huge problem, the bridge is polluted - there's a human hair on the roadway. We'd laugh ourselves silly.

There are plenty of real pollution problems to worry about.

It's hard to imagine that Australia 's contribution to carbon dioxide in the world's atmosphere is one of the more pressing ones. And I can't believe that a new tax on everything is the only way to blow that pesky hair away.'


Hmmm - would you say a drop of arsenic is any less lethal because its only a drop? That a virus is ineffective because you cannot see it? Hands up who has had swine flu? The smaller we are, the MORE we need to be prepared: the argument that what smaller countries like Australia do is of little consequence, because emerging giants like China and India will dwarf our impacts, in fact strengthens the argument for swift action. If China, India and the rest of the world are increasing their demand for resources, and our economies and cities are not prepared for this competition, we will be the first casualty in a resource-constrained world.

Ice ages and interglacials occur by increase or decrease in parts per million of any climate warming gases [water vapour is also one, yes that is natural, so is the C02 we exhale - *digging up millions years worth of stored carbon and releasing it in 200 years is NOT natural]...the argument that its natural, the earth has always evolved etc - yes it has [not withstanding this*], but for the most part of human history we didn't have trillions tied up in infrastructure and crop growing that is not easily moved!!! We can't up stumps and move our cities in a 'fuller' world where land uses are already competing!

Without climate change, the earth will evolve, but with climate change, it will change in a much much shorter timeframe, and humankind will struggle to adapt:

www.amazon.com/Catastrophe-Investigation-Origins-Modern-Civilization/dp/0345408764

Climate change of a few degrees [in this case cooling, from a volcanic eruption] in 500 AD created environmental change that caused crop failures, destabilised societies that then went on the march for new lands and created conflicts, expanded a disease-carrying rat population beyond their normal boundaries on the east coast of Africa and in doing so unleashed the Plague that wiped out a third of the population of Europe, and contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire!

'A.D. 535-536 - a massive volcanic eruption sundering Java from Sumatra - was the decisive factor that transformed the ancient world into the medieval era. Ancient chroniclers record a disaster in that year that blotted out the sun for months, causing famine, droughts, floods, storms and bubonic plague. Keys, archeology correspondent for the London Independent, uses tree-ring samples, analysis of lake deposits and ice cores, as well as contemporaneous documents to bolster his highly speculative thesis. In his scenario, the ensuing disasters precipitated the disintegration of the Roman Empire, beset by Slav, Mongol and Persian invaders propelled from their disrupted homelands. The sixth-century collapse of Arabian civilization under pressure from floods and crop failure created an apocalyptic atmosphere that set the stage for Islam's emergence. In Mexico, Keys claims, the cataclysm triggered the collapse of a Mesoamerican empire; in Anatolia, it helped the Turks establish what eventually became the Ottoman Empire; while in China, the ensuing half-century of political and social chaos led to a reunified nation...'

We can't stop volcanoes from erupting, but we can address our own activities to prevent whatever consequences will happen from going a few degrees up instead of down...