Category Archives: Science & Politics

Many Liberal-National Party politicians have trouble understanding climate change.

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See ABC Lateline report on survey.  CLICK here for a summary of the survey methods and results.

It’s official: Coalition politicians are less certain than their Labor counterparts that climate change exists and less likely to consider it a serious threat to human existence, a new survey shows.

The inaugural Political Leaders and Climate Change Index (PLCCI) – co-sponsored by the Global Change Institute and the Institute for Social Science Research, both at The University of Queensland – demonstrates that beliefs about climate change diverge dramatically along political lines.

Dr Kelly Fielding, Institute for Social Science Research (http://www.issr.uq.edu.au), said preliminary results from the survey confirmed that Labor politicians have a greater belief and comprehension of climate change and its impacts.

“Liberal/National politicians, on the other hand, are expressing uncertainty about climate change – they aren’t convinced that it is a serious threat to humans or that the current impacts are serious,” Dr Fielding outlined.

The survey of more than 300 federal, state and local government political leaders highlights that the political debate around climate change is based on significantly different levels of knowledge and understanding of the issue.

And Labor and Liberal political leaders are also influenced by different sources. While the results show that scientists generally have the most influence over politicians’ knowledge of climate change, the level of influence varies significantly between politicians on the left and right of the spectrum.

“Labor politicians are more influenced by scientists than Liberal/National politicians – 85% of Labor politicians are highly influenced by this group compared to 44% of Liberal/National politicians,” Dr Fielding said.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute, said he was surprised by the results.

“They suggest that many politicians are not going to the experts for information on this important matter,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“The survey confirms suspicions of a great political divide.  On one hand, you have political leaders that are listening to the science on climate change and are taking it extremely seriously.  On the other, you have others who have less regard for the science and appear not to fully understand the serious nature of climate change for Australia and the world.

“It is of great concern that a large number of political leaders do not feel compelled by the overwhelming scientific case for climate change. So the question needs to be asked – where do those political leaders who are not highly-influenced by science get their information on climate change?

“Why they would not be influenced by climate change experts who have spent their careers exploring this critically important issue in a non-biased fashion needs answering.”

In addition to scientists, environmental groups, international figures and constituents were considered as influential sources by all respondents, irrespective of their political persuasion.

Labor politicians are more influenced by environmental groups than their Coalition counterparts with just over one-third of Liberal/National respondents reporting they are not at all influenced by environmental groups on the issue of climate change.

For Coalition politicians their top priority lies with ‘managing a strong economy’, a big bottom line (60.3%), but only 2.7% rank ‘tackling global warming’ as paramount, and 5.5% nominate ‘protecting the environment’.

By comparison, almost one-quarter of Labor politicians highlight ‘tackling poverty and social disadvantage’ as the most important issue (24.7%), followed by ‘managing a strong economy’ (19.6%), on an equal footing as ‘tackling global warming’ (19.6%) and ‘protecting the environment’ (11.3%).

Interestingly, a sample of the general population surveyed on the same issues as part of the PLCCI, highlights that political leaders overall are less likely to believe in climate change, and the need to act, than members of the public.

“What is surprising is that the community remains convinced that climate change is a major challenge and yet some political leaders appear to be denying climate change.  There is a significant political divide on climate change and it would be good politics to rethink this particular issue,” Prof Hoegh-Guldberg said.

Despite this, politicians think that their own belief in the facts that underpin climate change is stronger than their electorate’s beliefs.

“The idea that there might be a disparity between what politicians think the electorate believes about climate change, and what their electorate actually does believe has significant implications for how politicians prioritise climate change as an issue,” Dr Fielding said.

Climate change ignorance unacceptable.

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  • Andrew Trounson, Higher Education Supplement,
  • The Australian,
  • August 11, 2010 12:00AM

    • LABOR’S Science and Research Minister Kim Carr has hit out at anti-scientific opinion on climate change. He has warned that the scientific method was coming under public attack, undermining science and replacing it with irrationality.

    “In all fields we want to encourage debate, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept the earth is flat,” Senator Carr told the HES yesterday after launching Labor’s science policy, which includes a $21 million science literacy project.

    “We don’t have to accept every lunatic proposition that comes along as the basis of a legitimate view, which now seems to be increasingly present.”

    He took aim at what he called the increasingly rampant irrationality of some Coalition senators. “There is a fundamental change in attitude, and people are now prepared to argue positions that they wouldn’t have been prepared to a few years ago,” he said.

    Senator Carr announced the $21m program to promote science awareness in the community, including ongoing support for science prizes and events, as well as media training for scientists and cadetships for science journalists.

    But the program will be paid for by cuts in three existing research programs: Enterprise Connect, the Co-operative Research Centres and Collaborative Research Networks scheme.

    Australian Nobel prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty backed Senator Carr’s comments.

    He said the attacks on climate science made it easier for people to dismiss the threatening implications of climate science, and distracted the debate from focusing on solutions.

    “People are just rejecting the scientific conclusions and they are being helped in that by people who should know better,” Professor Doherty said.

    The Australian Academy of Science yesterday called for scientific advisers to be appointed to every government department.

    “Despite the emphasis given in recent years to the value of evidence-based policy by major political parties, new policy announcements and spending initiatives are rarely referenced with peer-reviewed research to substantiate the arguments,” the academy said.

    Fish evolve to tolerate colder temperature in just three years

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    A stickleback may be a long way from a coral reef, but here’s an interesting paper showing one of the fastest evolutionary responses in a vertebrate.  The key here is that generation times are short (less than 6 months), unlike those in corals: From ScienceDaily:

    University of British Columbia researchers have observed one of the fastest evolutionary responses ever recorded in wild populations. In as little as three years, stickleback fish developed tolerance for water temperature 2.5 degrees Celsius lower than their ancestors.

    The study, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides the some of the first experimental evidence that evolution may help populations survive effects of climate change.

    Measuring three to 10 centimetres, stickleback fish originated in the ocean but began populating freshwater lakes and streams following the last ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, marine and freshwater sticklebacks have evolved different physical and behavioural traits, making them ideal models for Darwin’s natural selection theory.

    “By testing the temperature tolerance of wild and lab-raised sticklebacks, we were able to determine that freshwater sticklebacks can tolerate lower temperatures than their marine counterparts,” says lead author Rowan Barrett from the UBC Department of Zoology. “This made sense from an evolutionary perspective because their ancestors were able to adapt to freshwater lakes, which typically reach colder temperatures than the ocean.”

    To learn how quickly this adaptation took place, Barrett and colleagues from Switzerland and Sweden “recreated history” by transplanting marine sticklebacks to freshwater ponds and found that in as little as three generations (or three years), they were able to tolerate the same minimum temperature as freshwater sticklebacks, 2.5 °C lower than their ancestral populations.

    “Scientific models have suggested that climate change could result in both a general, gradual increase of average temperatures and an increase in extreme temperatures,” says Barrett, who received his PhD last week.

    “Our study is the first to experimentally show that certain species in the wild could adapt to climate change very rapidly — in this case, colder water temperature. However, this rapid adaptation is not achieved without a cost. Only rare individuals that possess the ability to tolerate rapid changes in temperature survive, and the number of survivors may not be large enough to sustain the population. It is crucial that knowledge of evolutionary processes is incorporated into conservation and management policy.”

    Human being and fish can coexist peacefully

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    … or at least that seems to be what Australia’s Opposition leader thinks would happen if he stopped the expansion of marine protected areas in Australian waters:

    In a policy aimed at marginal Queensland seats, Mr Abbott said a Coalition government would ”immediately suspend the marine protection process which is threatening the livelihoods of many people in the fishing industry and many people in the tourism industry”.

    ”All of us want to see appropriate environmental protection, but man and nature have to live together,” Mr Abbott said as he toured the seat of Dawson, in Mackay, which is held by Labor by 2.6 per cent.

    Citing “Real action to protect our marine environments and fishing communities” , Mr Abbott wants to balance environmental protection with economic growth by first suspending the marine protected area process. But doesn’t tourism in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park  generate billions of dollars for the Australian economy annually?

    The GBRMP re-zoning that resulted in an increase in strict protection from 4.5% to over 30% was of course intiated under the previous Howard government, and undertaken through a comprehensive research and consultation process. According to Mr Abbott, things have  gone awry since then, although so far the details on this are scanty.

    Coalition policy would require consideration of peer reviewed scientific evidence of threats to marine biodiversity before future decisions are made about marine park establishment:

    “We would not be interested in just putting lines on maps. If there’s something out there that needs to be protected, if it’s iconic and needs protection, we’d want to see the science and that science would have to be peer-reviewed.”

    Fortunately, there is already a lot out there to suggest that the marine environment is under threat, fishing kills fish and that marine parks have benefits for biodiversity and maintaining fish stocks. Conservation planning software used world wide, and developed in Queensland, is used to assist in the creation of marine parks  in a way that seeks to achieve protection for biodiversity while balancing socio-economic objectives.  The science is light years ahead of lines on maps (although, this can be helpful as part of the community consultation process).

    It’s encouraging to see the high regard that Mr Abbott places upon peer reviewed science on this issue, so for someone who gets his ‘facts’ about climate change from Heaven + Earth, perhaps a bit of consistency wouldn’t go astray?

    No quick fix for climate with geoengineering

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    It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, but the artificial manipulation of the Earth’s climate has been touted as a possible strategy to reduce the effects of unmitigated climate change. Thanks to the painfully slow progress that has been made towards reducing our carbon emissions, there has been some surprisingly serious discussion about the prospect of geoengineering the climate in order to suit the needs of humans.

    Of the various forms that have been suggested (large machines to suck CO2 from the air, space-borne mirrors to reflect sunlight, iron filings in the ocean), the mostly widely discussed option is the injection of vast quantities of sulphur into the stratosphere. In theory, the airborne particles would have the effect of reflecting solar radiation, and thereby the reducing warming effects of climate change.

    Of course, this would do nothing to actually reduce carbon pollution (which would continue to increase with human development), not least anything to reduce the effects of ocean acidification and a myriad of other impacts upon biodiversity, ecosystems and human health. Geoengineering is certainly a drastic option fraught with uncertainty, but advocates of the approach have been considering back-up plans for the worst possible case scenario, while others have been looking into what effects may come if geoengineering became a reality.

    A new study published in Nature Geoscience[1] last week has examined the possible consequences of large scale geoengineering on the planet from the baseline year of 2005. The authors simulated a range of geoengineering scenarios by making use of thousands of home computers that were volunteered as part of a large scale climate forecasting experiment.

    They found that although the injection of trogospheric sulphur aerosols did in fact reduce global average temperatures compared to the unmitigated climate change scenario, global net precipitation would decrease as a result. The disparity between temperature and precipitation anomalies became increasingly apparent the longer that geoengineering activities were maintained in the modelled scenarios – meaning that over time it would become more and more difficult to regulate temperature and precipitation within “20th century climate conditions” simultaneously.

    On top of these effects, the results also indicate that the degree of climate engineering undertaken (i.e the amount of aerosols pumped into the air) would impact upon different parts of the world in different ways. This regional variation in the effects of geo-engineering would make it even more difficult to choose an “optimum” level of climate manipulation – for example, keeping China close to its baseline climate meant undesirable conditions for India, and vice versa.

    Although some of these results may be model-specific (such as the specific regional effects), this new study gives a frightening glimpse into the risks and uncertainties of climate geoengineering. The fact that we’re even considering the idea of large scale climate manipulation seems to be  indicative of society’s desire to seek technological fixes to treat the symptoms of a problem, instead of addressing the root cause. Clive Hamilton[2] describes the penchant of wealthy Texans to enjoy a log fire despite living in a hot climate, and so likens geoengineering to “responding to overheating by turning up the air-conditioning while continuing to pile more logs onto the file”.

    But with the stifling of action on climate change both at home and abroad, is geoengineering a reality we are rapidly moving towards?

    [1] Ricke, K. L., Morgan, M. G. & Allen, M. R. Nature Geosci. Advance online publication doi:10.1038/ngeo915

    [2] Clive Hamilton. 2010. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change

    Page photograph from Nature News article “Geoengineering can’t please everyone”  doi:10.1038/news.2010.357

    Breaking news: Stanford climate scientist Steve Schneider passes away at age 65

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    “No one, and I mean no one, had a broader and deeper understanding of the climate issue than Stephen,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. “More than anyone else, he helped shape the way the public and experts thought about this problem — from the basic physics of the problem, to the impact of human beings on nature’s ecosystems, to developing policy.”

    World renowned climate scientist Steve Schneider, Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University died unexpectedly today of a heart attack whilst returning from a meeting in Sweden. For those that don’t know of him, it’s a huge loss to climate science: Real Climate weights in with eulogy. See Schneider’s work via his lab website here.

    University of Queensland Scientist named Coordinating Lead Author for next IPCC report

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    Go Ove!

    The Director of UQ’s Global Change Institute, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, has been selected as the Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 30, “Open Oceans”, to the Working Group II (WGII) contribution of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

    The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), scheduled for completion in 2013-2014, will be the next comprehensive assessment of all aspects of climate change by the IPCC.

    UQ Vice-Chancellor & President Professor Paul Greenfield said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg was an excellent scientist and a fine choice by the IPCC.

    “Ove has pioneered knowledge of the links between climate change and coral reefs,” Professor Greenfield said.

    “His service to the IPCC will exemplify how UQ researchers can help communities around the world understand and manage the most challenging issues.”

    The IPCC Working Group II assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change, negative and positive consequences of climate change, and options for adapting to its consequences.

    Coordinating Lead Authors play a leading role in ensuring that any cross-cutting scientific or technical issues, which may involve several sections of a report, are addressed in a complete and coherent manner and reflect the latest information available.

    The author teams will conduct the scientific-technical assessment using procedures that emphasise comprehensiveness, scientific independence, openness, thorough review and transparency.

    Professor Hoegh-Guldberg has published works that include over 180 refereed publications and book chapters and is one of the most cited authors within the peer-reviewed literature on climate change and its impacts on natural ecosystems.

    Other Coordinating Lead Authors from Australia in Working Group II include:

    • Roger Jones, Victoria University, Ch. 2, “Foundations for Decision Making”
    • Ian Noble, The World Bank, Ch. 14, “Adaptation Needs and Options”
    • Roger Kitching, Griffith University, Ch. 25, “Australasia”
    • Roger McLean, University of New South Wales, Ch. 29 “Small Islands”

    A number of other Australians have also been selected to participate in WGII as Contributing Authors and Reviewing Editors, as the work on the Fifth Assessment Report progresses.

    A full list of the authors may be accessed at http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/AR5_authors.html.
    More information about the IPCC’s 5AR may be found at http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/ar5.html.

    Expert credibility in climate change: not all climate research and expertise are equal.

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    A fairly convoluted (but interesting none the less) paper just got published in PNAS by Anderegg et al (2010) looking at climate change and scientific credibility (more coverage by the Guardian here). Why don’t we trust climate scientists? To answer this question, the authors conducted a literature search of 1,372 climate researchers whose work “constitutes expertise or credibility in technical and policy-relevant scientific research”, and conclude what we’ve been blogging here for some time: “Despite media tendencies to present both sides in debates, which can contribute to continued public misunderstanding,not all climate researchers are equal in scientific credibility and expertise in the climate system”

    Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

    Here’s the nuts and bolts of the paper (CE = convinced by the evidence, UE = unconvinced by the evidence):

    So: not only is there a pretty considerable difference between the number of expert researchers between CE and UE groups, the mean expertise of the UE group was around half (60 publications) that of the CE group (119 publications). Here’s the real interesting statistic: researchers with fewer than 20 climate publications comprise ≈80% the UE group, as opposed to less than 10% of the CE group. To quote the authors: “This indicates that the bulk of UE researchers on the most prominent multisignatory statements about climate change have not published extensively in the peer-reviewed climate literature.”

    From a subsample of the 50 most-published researchers from each group, there was a considerable difference in relative expertise between the CE and UE groups:

    Of these top 50 researchers, the CE group have an average of 408 climate publications, whilst the UE researchers averaged only 89 publications. Again, to quote the authors. “this suggests that not all experts are equal, and top CE researchers have much stronger expertise in climate science than those in the top UE group“.

    So who’s citing who? Anderegg et al use citation metrics to determine “…the quality and impact of a researcher’s contribution—a critical component to overall scientific credibility—as opposed to measuring a researcher’s involvement in a field, or expertise“. In examining the top four most-cited papers for each CE and UE researcher with 20 or more climate publications, the disparity in citation metrics between the CE and UE groups is astonishing:


    Conclusions?

    (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

    (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

    As Phil M commented on a post the other day, the UE group:

    1) Also happen to have close ties to fossil fuel & mining industries.
    2) Have ties to right wing lobby groups.
    3) Have only a handful of scientists who back the denier side, of whom few have published or conducted research in any relevant climate science field, much less publish any papers in reputable journals debunking AGW.
    4) Have not a single scientific instituion backing them.

    Anderegg W.R.L., Prall J.W., Harold J. & Schneider S.H. (2010 Online Early) Expert credibility in climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 21 June 2010, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107

    Is cap and trade the solution? Don’t bank on it!

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    Watch this: “The Story of Cap and Trade” from the people that brought you “The Story of Stuff”. I love this animation for so many reasons, starting with the Einstein quote in the opening credits, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”.

    Annie Leonard outlines that there are three major problems with cap and trade: free permits, false offsetting, and distractions from the real solutions.

    Cap and trade has previously been used for sulfur dioxide to stop acid rain. Its success was limited because the permits were over allocated and “banked” by the polluters so that they could drag out their emissions. And while some reports claim that cap and trade worked, a 40% reduction in SO2 emissions is not entirely a success.

    K-Rudd recently tried to bring cap and trade to Australia but his Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was opposed and now he is directly attacking the polluters with the proposed Mining Tax. This carbon tax methodology is similar to the cap and trade except that it doesn’t involve trading on the market and has the potential to be implemented fairly by the government.

    Unfortunately, these solutions are essentially the same- the carbon tax is just implemented through the government while cap and trade is implemented through the market. Through the market, there are loopholes and incentives to cheat which could lead to the next bubble and stock market crash. Through the government, the same loopholes and cheating incentives exist but the bubble could crash the Australian budget rather than the carbon market. As Annie Leonard points out, a crash in the market (or budget) is too risky when our planet is the collateral. Furthermore, we haven’t really been very creative here… what happened to using a new kind of thinking as Einstein suggested?

    K-Rudd couldn’t get the ETS through and now he has shifted to the Mining Tax in an attempt to save his position as Prime Minister. K-Rudd’s incentive relies on the power of the democratic voter. However, there is no monetary incentive to vote for Cap and Trade or the Carbon Tax because both of these methods will potentially lead to less money in the bank as the costs are passed on to the consumer. If there is no incentive to vote for it, then there is no incentive for K-Rudd to bring in the policy. At the moment, green energy costs more than fossil fuel energy and this needs to change. K-Rudd should give money to green energy initiatives now so that the price of green energy is cheaper than fossil fuel energy. To fund this we will need to stop fossil fuel subsidies and add the carbon tax. But the only way this will work is if the voters can see that Carbon Tax + Green Energy = no extra cost to consumer. Good luck! I still think we need some more creativity in our solution to this problem.

    And while Watts tours, global warming continues.

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    Professor Neville Nicholls, Monash University

    Contrary to the impression you might have gained from the media, the global climate is NOT cooling. In fact, the last twelve months, June 2009 – May 2010, has been the hottest June-May period on record, in both the 31-year satellite record of lower atmosphere global temperature and the 131-year surface global temperature record. In both data series the last 12 months have been more than 0.4C hotter than the average temperature of the last two decades of the 20th century.

    The figure below plots the time series of twelve-month (June-May) global mean temperature anomalies. The data in the figure are the Spencer-Christy lower atmospheric temperatures from satellites (labelled “UAH” in the figure) and the surface temperatures from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (labelled “GISS”). Both datasets are freely available (UAH from http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt; GISS from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt). Both datasets have been plotted as anomalies relative to 1979/80-1998/99, ie the first twenty years of the satellite observations.

    Simply eyeballing the graphs of the surface and satellite temperature record should convince anyone that global warming never “stopped”. Fitting linear trends to the data since the start of the satellite observations produces virtually identical trends in the two data sets. Even the variations from year-to-year in the two temperature series are close matches.

    The close match between the surface and satellite variations and trends confirms that the warming trend at the surface is NOT due to the urban heat island effect. Nor is it due to changes in the numbers of stations used in the surface analysis, or any problems with the locations of the surface instruments. None of these potential problems affects the satellite data, and the satellite data are completely independent of the surface data.

    Nor is the warming due to the Sun getting stronger. Satellite measurements show that total solar irradiance has decreased since the start of the 21st century, and this would probably have caused some weak cooling rather than any warming (http://acrim.com/TSI%20Monitoring.htm).

    Neville Nicholls is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University, President of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (www.amos.org.au), and an Executive Editor of Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change (wires.wiley.com).