Climate Change Fraud - Because the debate is not over

Cooler climate for Rudd

Written by Christopher Pearson, The Australian

Saturday, 14 June 2008

FREEMAN Dyson is a polymath. His first career was as a Cambridge mathematician.

Then he developed an interest in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. He's also something of a futurologist, an authority on nuclear non-proliferation issues and a gifted explainer of science to general audiences.

For 40 years his day job was as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Another claim to fame is that he's one of the most eminent scientists among the growing band of global warming sceptics.

To its credit, The New York Review of Books numbers Dyson among its stable and in its June 12 edition has published a fascinating review by him of two climate science books.

Characteristically, he uses familiar data on the annual cycles of growth and decay in vegetation to put the scale of the potential problem posed by human-induced global warming into an unexpected perspective.

"About 8 per cent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere each year," Dyson writes. "This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterwards released, is about 12 years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming."

Certainly the speed of the exchange suggests that, in the unlikely event that human-induced global warming were to prove a real problem, we'd have far more time up our collective sleeve to finetune a preferred level of atmospheric CO2 than any of the catastrophist scenarios allow for. Unlike geosequestration, we know that carbon sinks work on a grand scale. Dyson thinks that extending the scale of naturally occurring carbon sequestration in temperate zone forests, by biotechnological means, holds out most hope of managing atmospheric carbon without crippling the global economy.

He says: "If we control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands ... The science and technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to read or write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly and the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more rapidly. I consider it likely that we will have 'genetically engineered carbon-eating trees' within 20 years and almost certainly within 50 years.

"Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon they absorb into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp ... If one-quarter of the world's forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about 50 years."

If all this sounds too good to be true, Dyson invites us to consider the transformative technologies of the past 60 years: "It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our economic activities during the second half of the 21st century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and economic activity during the second half of the 20th. Biotechnology could be a great equaliser, spreading wealth over the world wherever there is land and air and water and sunlight."

The main vehicle for Dyson's essay is a review of an economic analysis of climate change policies by William Nordhaus, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options in Global Warming Policies (Yale University Press). While Dyson deplores that Nordhaus devotes little attention to his preferred ultra-low-cost biotech solution, he quotes with approval a rule of thumb covering all the other options that Nordhaus directs to the general reader: "Whether someone is serious about tackling the global warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidising ethanol, or providing research support for solar power, but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not serious and does not recognise the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies."

This was precisely the point on which Treasurer Wayne Swan declined to be drawn in an interview with Sky News' David Speers this week. Swan's evasions prompted a lot of adverse commentary, not least from The Sydney Morning Herald's Ross Gittins, who's usually more ideologically sympathetic to the ALP.

Gittins wrote: "The thing I find most disillusioning about the Rudd Government's performance is its weak-kneed pretence that the latest rise in oil prices is some kind of hideous natural disaster, brought on us by a terrible god inflicting death and destruction on the innocent. This is not a brave Government. What it lacks the courage to admit is that the price rises global market forces have been inflicting on us are merely a foretaste of the price rises the Government plans to impose on us through the emissions-trading scheme it will introduce in 2010. The basic principle of such schemes is brutally simple: they force up the price of fossil fuels so as to discourage us from using them. That's what Swan was refusing to admit."

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, of course, and Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt do not show much sign of understanding John Howard's carefully considered approach to the politics of global warming.

All are inclined to go along with the Government's comic-book caricature of him as Mr Magoo.

In government, I've no doubt that there are plenty of Rudd's ministers who are quietly envious of the luxury of a calibrated position on carbon politics rather than being stuck with the evangelical simplicities and hard left rhetoric of Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, known to her colleagues as The Wongster. Most of cabinet must be dreading the release of the Garnaut report and the thankless task of trying to sell an emissions-trading regime sure to hurt fickle voters in outer metropolitan seats.

Yet it was an entirely predictable disaster in the making. A more seasoned Opposition leader than Rudd was would have paid lip-service to a cooler planet while keeping his options open and his reform timetable far more provisional.

The beauty of Howard's position is that it was so adaptable. Confronted with science that was far from settled, it played for time and funded research and projects that could be sold as greenhouse-related while avoiding the worst of the damage to the national interest that was inherent in signing the Kyoto Protocol. It pandered to the ethanol lobby, admittedly, and took the renewable sector more seriously than it deserved.

But at least it recognised that cutting Australian emissions would make virtually no difference to a global outcome unless China and India accepted similar self-denying ordinances, which has never looked remotely likely. The main drawbacks of Howard's stance were that it was cautious and rational when recklessness and millennial unreason were the order of the day.

It's a given among the commentariat that Labor's policy on climate change was a crucial element in its victory last year. It's early days yet, but I can't help wondering if the self-same policy, together with a lot of recent, unforced errors, is going to turn it into a one-term wonder. I can't remember a federal government that went from invincibility to looking decidedly flaky in eight short weeks, much of the decline attributable to the political persona of its leader. Perhaps, after an improbable enthusiasm for Rudd, swinging voters will feel a corresponding wave of revulsion. Perhaps they'll just conclude that there's less to him than meets the eye or, as Gertrude Stein penetratingly observed of the bleak Californian city Oakland, "when you get there, there's no there there". Source