1 November 2016, The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef: why are government and business perpetuating the big lie? At the core of the Australian government’s failure to protect our Great Barrier Reef is the big lie. Through its actions and inaction, rhetoric, funding priorities and policy decisions, the Australian government has implicitly pursued the line that it is possible to turn things around for the reef without tackling global warming. This is the big lie. Last year, when the federal and Queensland governments released the Reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan, experts were emphatic about the deceit. Eminent coral reef scientist Prof Terry Hughes commented that the “biggest omission in the plan is that it virtually ignores climate change, which is clearly the major ongoing threat to the reef”. Great Barrier Reef historian Iain McCalman wrote that the new measures “deliberately ignore the dire long-term threats to the reef that are contained in the now unutterable words ‘climate change’”. “They are akin to investing in cures for a patient’s skin diseases while ignoring their cancer symptoms,” he wrote. As the experts make plain, any attempt to decouple the future of the Great Barrier Reef from the quest to contain global warming is simply dishonest. As another expert, Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland, has said, we either “re-examine the current plans for unrestricted coal exports, taking proper account and responsibility for the resulting greenhouse emissions, or watch the reef die”. Read More here
Yearly Archives: 2016
1 November 2016, Independent, Climate sceptics widen their net to claim all science – from medicine to physics to computing – is ‘in deep trouble’. Climate change deniers have long tried to cast doubt on the science behind warnings about global warming, but now Lord Lawson’s sceptic think tank has taken things a step further. For, if the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is to be believed, not only are climatologists exaggerating the risks of burning fossil fuels, but all science is “in deep trouble” with “fraudulent research” finding its way into the most eminent, peer-reviewed journals. Medicine, physics, economics, chemistry, computer science and psychology are just a few of the subjects were this is a problem, according to a new GWPF report. Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, a leading research centre based in London, suggested the report showed the sceptics’ frustration that their flawed theories were not being taken seriously. “This attack on the practice of peer review is another example of propaganda from the Global Warming Policy Foundation aimed at illegitimately undermining confidence in climate research,” he told The Independent. “The ideology-driven claims made by the Foundation simply would not stand up to the rigours of peer review by independent experts, which is why their inaccurate and misleading claims about the causes and potential consequences of global warming appear in pamphlets and newspapers columns instead of academic journals.” Read More here
31 October 2016, The Conversation, Turnbull wants to change Australia’s environment act – here’s what we stand to lose. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is seeking changes to Australia’s national environment act to stop conservation groups from challenging ministerial decisions on major resource developments and other matters of environmental importance. Turnbull is reviving a bid made by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott to abolish Section 487 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) – a bid rejected in the Senate in 2015. If it goes ahead, the change will significantly diminish the functionality of the act. The EPBC Act, introduced by the Howard government in 1999, has an established record of success. Judicial oversight of ministerial discretion, enabled by expanded standing under Section 487, has been crucial to its success. Section 487 allows individuals and groups to challenge ministerial decisions on resources, developments and other issues under the EPBC Act. An organisation can establish standing by showing they have engaged in activities for the “protection or conservation of, or research into, the environment” within the previous two years. They must also show that their purpose is environmental protection. Repealing this provision would remove the standing of these groups to seek judicial review of decisions. Standing would then revert to the common law position. That means parties would need to prove they are a “person aggrieved” by showing that their interests have been impacted directly. Read More here
31 October 2016, The Conversation, Unnatural disasters: how we can spot climate’s role in specific extreme events. These days, after an extreme weather event like a cyclone, bushfire, or major storm, it’s common to find people asking: was it climate change? We also often hear people saying it is impossible to attribute any single weather event to climate change, as former prime minister Tony Abbott and the then environment minister Greg Hunt said after the bushfires in New South Wales in 2013. While this may have been true in the 1990s, the science of attributing individual extreme events to global warming has advanced significantly since then. It is now possible to link aspects of extreme events to climate change. However, as I describe in an article co-written by Susan Hassol, Simon Torok and Patrick Luganda and published today in the World Meteorologcal Organization’s Bulletin, how we communicate these findings has not kept pace with the rapidly evolving science. As a result, there is widespread confusion about the links between climate change and extreme weather. Evolving science The science of attributing individual extreme weather events to climate change dates back to 2003, when a discussion article in Nature raised the question of liability for damages from extreme events. The idea was that if you could attribute a specific event to rising greenhouse gas emissions, you could potentially hold someone to account. This was soon followed by a 2004 study of the 2003 European heatwave, which caused more than 35,000 deaths. This analysis found that climate change had more than doubled the risk of such extreme heat. Read More here