politicalowl

Years ago when I was doing a job or two for the Australian Automobile Association I had my then pollster colleague Rod Cameron study what Australians thought about their motor cars. One thing that became starkly clear to me from that research was that governments who interfered too much with a freedom to drive what they wanted, where they wanted and when they wanted would have motorists changing their votes in droves. Hence my belief that this story from the Australian Financial Review today is potentially the biggest problem Malcolm Turnbull (if he's still there) and his team will face at the next election. Australia's most popular cars face the carbon axe Australians' love affair with SUVs, four-wheel drives and heavy utes could become history, with the government considering hardline carbon-emission rules so tough even today's Toyota Prius buyers would be penalised. Under standards slammed by car sellers as "unrealistic and ill-considered", the governmen...

A cryptic reference in the New York Times today puts the Australian government on the side of big business in the continuing talks on the United Nations climate change agreement. The Times reports that developing nations and environmental groups are challenging some of the world’s biggest companies and wealthiest countries over the role corporate lobbyists play in United Nations climate change negotiations. The dispute opens an additional battle in the struggle over how to fashion a global response to climate change, one that corporate interests appear to be winning, for now. Though companies are not permitted to participate directly in the climate talks, representatives from almost 300 industry groups are free to roam the negotiations in Bonn, Germany, as “stakeholders,” and to lobby negotiators on behalf of corporations that may seek to slow action, the developing nations and their allies say. ... Negotiators from Uganda, Ecuador, the Philippines and other countries have proposed...

As part of my daily reading I look at the front pages of 80 or so newspapers from around the world. With the Paris climate change talks reaching their finale I thought that today there might be some coverage. And what did I find? Only two of them had the climate change talks on page one. And both of them were Indian. The Hindu - Paris climate draft goes into final round Times of India - New draft in Paris but little progress Make of that what you will

Pope Francis Steps Up Campaign on Climate Change, to Conservatives’ Alarm   – Since his first homily in 2013, Pope Francis has preached about the need to protect the earth and all of creation as part of a broad message on the environment. It has caused little controversy so far. But now, as Francis prepares to deliver what is likely to be a highly influential encyclical this summer on environmental degradation and the effects of human-caused climate change on the poor, he is alarming some conservatives in the United States who are loath to see the Catholic Church reposition itself as a mighty voice in a cause they do not believe in. Obama Finally Gets Angry At Climate Science Deniers And It’s Hilarious  b- President Barack Obama just gave pitch-perfect delivery to one of the most brilliant pieces of writing on climate change you are ever going to see. At the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night in DC, Obama used devasta...

Pope on Climate Change: Man Has ‘Slapped Nature in the Face’  - ‘Pope Francis said Thursday he is convinced that global warming is “mostly” man-made and that he hopes his upcoming encyclical on the environment will encourage negotiators at a climate change meeting in Paris to make “courageous” decisions to protect God’s creation. Francis has spoken out frequently about the “culture of waste” that has imperiled the environment and he elaborated en route to the Philippines. While there, Francis will meet with survivors of the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, which the government has said was an example of the extreme weather conditions that global warming has wrought. “I don’t know if it (human activity) is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face,” he said. “We have in a sense taken over nature.” “I think we have exploited nature too much,” Francis said, citing deforestation and monoculture. “Thanks be to God that today there are vo...

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology this week put out one of what it calls “The Bureau’s Special Climate Statements”. Such statements are “produced on an occasional basis for weather/climate events which are unusual in the context of the climatology of the affected region.” And this time the unusual event is about  Australia’s warmest spring on record . Spring 2014 was Australia’s warmest on record, the ABM reported. Seasonal mean temperatures, averaged nationally, were 0.1 °C warmer than the previous record set just 12 months ago, during spring 2013. Temperatures were 1.67 °C above the 1961–1990 average, the largest such departure from the long-term average observed since national records began in 1910. The previous record positive seasonal departure, set during autumn 2005, was 1.64 °C above the average. And more hot weather appears to be on the way. The latest  ENSO Wrap-Up , released yesterday, says many climate indicators remain close to El ...

Why don’t we hear about the beneficial side of climate change?  “There is a very good reason why excess winter deaths fell so sharply in the space of a year. Last winter was particularly mild: December and January were 2° Celsius above the long-term average. The winter 2012/13, by contrast, had prolonged periods of cold. There is a long term correlation between cold winters and excess winter deaths.” The Language of Climate Change  – “The data in this report will be used by policymakers when making reforms. This importance makes the act of understating the findings—so as not to repeat the wave of criticism of the fourth report—a questionable endeavor. It also strains the IPCC’s relationship with international policymakers. If it is muffling the data so as not to scare people, it might not be fully trusted to provide legitimate information for future changes.” Deficit fetishism  – John Quiggin writes: “As the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook approaches, talk about...

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning on how  a compost experiment that began seven years ago on a Marin County ranch has uncovered a disarmingly simple and benign way to remove carbon dioxide from the air, holding the potential to turn the vast rangeland of California and the world into a weapon against climate change. The concept grew out of a unique Bay Area alignment of a biotech fortune, a worldclass research institution and progressive-minded Marin ranchers. It has captured the attention of the White House, the Brown administration, the city of San Francisco, officials in Brazil and China, and even House Republicans, who may not believe in climate change but like the idea that “carbon farming” could mean profits for ranchers. Experiments on grazing lands in Marin County and the Sierra foothills of Yuba County by UC Berkeley bio-geochemist Whendee Silver showed that a one-time dusting of compost substantially boosted the soil’s carbon storage. The effect has pe...

Of the world’s five warmest years on record – 2010, 2005, 1998, 2003, and 2013 – all but 2013 began during a mature El Niño event. Hence the interest always paid to this measure reflecting ocean water temperatures in the Pacific and to the speculation that 2014 might be another record high temperature one when the climate model makers earlier in the year were  putting the chances of an El Niño at 80% . That probability has now retreated a little with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s  latest El Niño watch  being in the neutral range. Somewhat surprisingly the warm temperatures have kept coming without an  El Niño  influence. According to the latest report  of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): The combined average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces for August 2014 was record high for the month, at 0.75°C (1.35°F) above the 20th century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F), topping...

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology reported today that warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean over the past several months has primed the climate system for an El Niño in 2014. However, said the BOM, in the absence of the necessary atmospheric response, warming has levelled off in recent weeks. Positive Southern Oscillation Index values and large areas of warm water in the western Pacific and off northwestern Australia are also counter to typical El Niño development. Despite recent observations and some easing in the model outlooks, climate models surveyed by the Bureau still indicate El Niño is likely to develop by spring 2014. The Bureau’s ENSO Tracker remains at El Niño ALERT, indicating at least a 70% chance of El Niño developing in 2014. Most international climate models surveyed by the Bureau indicate that SSTs in the equatorial Pacific Ocean are likely to warm further over the coming months. Despite some easing in the predictions of how much the equatorial Pacific will war...

The seasonal Arctic sea ice melt is well and truly underway and the early indications are that 2014 will be another one with summer ice coverage well below the average for recent years. The latest figure from  the National Snow and Ice Data Center  shows the area of ocean with at least 15% sea ice is less (solid purple line) than in what turned out to be the record low year of 2012 (the dotted line). The pattern for the whole of the summer period (from which the graph above is taken) is shown below. Click on graph to increase to a readable size

News and views noted along the way. Germany seeks admission to spooks’ club  — “Despite all the public outrage over the surveillance of Angela Merkel, Berlin actually might be less interested in curbing US intelligence activities than eventually joining the elite Anglo-American spy club.” Why even California can’t stop catastrophic climate change   — “For climate change optimists, California is indeed the golden state when it comes to aggressive policies designed to avoid catastrophic climate change. But as  a new report makes depressingly clear , even Ecotopia will fall far short of hitting a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050 without the invention of new technologies and imposition of more draconian green mandates. That’s the number scientists believe must be met to keep climate change in check. And if California can’t meet such a mandate, what nation can, given the inability of governments to even to agree to take the most tentative s...

No morsel too miniscule . From a lengthy  New York Times  article  on Sunday analysing the recent disclosures about the operations of the US National Security Agency: News and views noted along the way. As climate change intensifies, the world faces an unpalatable choice: eat or drink Labor’s penance   — “And so the sins of the forefathers shall be visited upon the sons, or so it must feel like to Bill Shorten as he wrestles with the demons of Kevin Rudd’s ‘greatest moral challenge’ and Julia Gillard’s shameful broken promise. A more apt phrase, however, would probably be ‘damned if you do, Bill, and damned if you don’t.’” U.S. women are dying younger than their mothers, and no one knows why   — “While advancements in medicine and technology have prolonged life expectancy and decreased premature deaths overall, women in parts of the country have been left behind.” Broccoli’s extreme makeover   — “The ad agency Victors & Spoils has created ca...

A report from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency out this week ( Trends in global CO2 emissions ) shows that while actual global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) reached a new record of 34.5 billion tonnes in 2012, the increase in global CO2 emissions in that year slowed down to 1.1%. This, said the agency, was less than half the average annual increase of 2.9% over the last decade. “ This is remarkable, as the global economy grew by 3.5%. This development signals a shift towards less fossil-fuel-intensive activities, more use of renewable energy and increased energy saving. Increases in fossil-fuel consumption in 2012 were 2.2% for natural gas, 0.9% for oil products, and 0.6% for coal. “ The share of the ‘new’ renewable energy sources solar, wind and biofuel increased at an accelerating speed: from 1992 it took 15 years for the share to double from 0.5% to 1.1%, but only 6 more years to do so again, to 2.4% by 2012.” The report raised the possibility of a ...

News and views noted long the way. How climate change threatens the ability of global populations to rise out of poverty U.S. lawmakers call for action to curb internet child trading These 2 words will make you more selfish  — “Students were twice as likely to betray their partner in a Prisoner’s Dilemma if told they were playing a game called ‘Wall Street’.” One third of Australia’s media coverage rejects climate science, study finds  — “An academic study has found that 32% of articles dismissed or questioned the link between human activity and climate change.” The end of the British breakfast as we know it . The pressure for Britain to quit the European Union will surely grow now that officialdom in Brussels is seeking to reduce the minimum level of sugar that  a product calling itself “jam” or “marmalade” can contain. Lib Dem MP Tessa Munt argues that if the regulations change, as the government is proposing, “we’ll end up with something much more like the French and G...

The polar bear stranded on an ever shrinking ice berg has become a symbol of the evils of global warming but in the interests of species balance I bring you this research. You could call, I suppose, a 10-year study by University of Alberta biologist Scott Nielsen and his colleagues that monitored 112 bears in Alberta’s Rocky Mountain region, “warm the world and save the grizzly”. The team found that warmer temperatures and easier access to food associated with forest disturbances helped the grizzlies to build more body fat, known to increase the chances of successful reproduction for mothers. The findings , to be published in  BMC Ecology , are that in years when warmer temperatures and less late winter snow brought on earlier spring conditions, the body size of bears as adults was larger. Smaller bears were found in colder and less productive environments or years that were abnormally cool. “ We hypothesize that warmer temperatures in this ecosystem, especially during la...

Thursday, 8th February, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Environment and Water Minister Malcolm Turnbull - the House of Representatives is a strange forum in which many great lawyers before him have failed to shine. One thing tabloid newspaper editors are good at doing it is understanding the prejudices of their readers and then playing to them. There was thus a warning note sounded for politicians when the London Sun reacted to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s endorsement of the Stern report with the headline: "I'm saving the world...YOU lot are paying." There was another one this morning on ABC radio in Canberra. Not that the national capital is representative of the country as a whole. It certainly is not which is what made the phone in so remarkable. This is a left of centre city which traditionally votes 60% Labor yet the overwhelming reaction of talk back callers asked to give their reaction to global warming was scepticism about the scientific evidence....

Thursday, 8th February, 2007    - Richard Farmer   As Australia moves slowly toward following the Europe with an emissions trading scheme, motor industry lobbyists are already preparing to delay a second stage of proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that have just been proposed by the European Commission. In the House of Representatives yesterday, Prime Minister John Howard tabled an issues paper arguing that emissions trading is a "more flexible, market-based policy tool than imposing a carbon tax on industry." A few hours later in Brussels the EC proposed binding rules that would force car manufacturers to produce vehicles that would emit less carbon dioxide. The Financial Times reports that by 2012 the average new car in the European Union will have to emit no more than 120g of carbon per kilometre, from 161g at present, if the measures are approved by EU governments. The proposals were watered down after fierce lobbying from carmakers, who say t...