By John Seed

Northern Star March 10 2007

For the past six years, more than 2,000 scientists from around the world have been writing the most definitive and up-to-date assessment of climate change. It is the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since it was set up by the United Nations in 1988.

The first volume published last week in Paris added yet more weight to the scientific consensus that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases in average global temperatures are higher than at any time over the past 650,000 years.

As Pullitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan points out in his book “Boiling Point”, the ability of the world to address this issue was set back by more than 10 years by US oil and coal companies paying scientists under the table to make it look as though there was scientific uncertainty long after scientific consensus had been reached.

The macabre success of these efforts can be seen from the following: way back in 2004, a study by Naomi Oreskes examined 928 randomly chosen scientific papers on climate change. Not one disagreed with the consensus position that climate change is really happening.

The same year Boykoff and Boykoff analyzed a random sample of 636 articles from the five most prestigious newspapers in the US. Their results showed that over half of these stories were structured on the journalistic norm of balanced reporting - equal time to proponents and skeptics, giving the impression that the scientific community was embroiled in a rip-roaring debate on whether or not humans were contributing to global warming long after the debate was closed and the results were in.

You might say that this is now ancient history, but consider that these companies continue to profit from spewing 70 million tones of CO2 into our atmosphere each day and their tactics have evolved. Now (while continuing to offer vast financial support to global warming skeptics), they now want us to believe that, even if we accept that global warming is a reality, all we need to do is to pay a few dollars to some company which will then “offset” our pollution. That is, we can continue with business as usual pouring all this pollution into the atmosphere as long as we pay someone to plant a few trees on our behalf. Then we can breathe easy because this miraculously makes our lives “carbon neutral”. This is reminiscent of the medieval practice where the church sold pardons and indulgences – each sin had a price and as long as we paid, we could be spared the flames of hell. A very funny new website which looks at carbon offsets is www.cheatneutral.com/

Global temperatures have already risen about ¾ of one degree to the highest they’ve been since homo sapiens evolved on the Earth. This may not seem like much but it is implicated in everything from the death of 20% of the coral reefs, the quadrupling of the incidence of malaria and the spiraling number of extreme weather events. Because of a lag time between the emission of greenhouse gasses and their reflection as temperature rise, scientists agree that the CO2 that we have already emitted commits us to a rise of another ¾ of a degree this century even if we were to rein in our greenhouse gas polluting activities immediately.

It is in this context that we need to view the refusal of either of the major political parties to seriously address Australia’s dependence on coal both for export and for generating our own electricity. John Howard changes the subject to nuclear (which is no answer to climate change – see for example www.peakoil.org.au/nuclear.co2.htm ) while the ALP only talks about so-called “clean” coal - a completely unproven technology which may or may not prove to be of any use whatsoever but meanwhile threatens to monopolise all the research funds that should be going into developing solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy.

Australian coal alone is responsible for more that 1% of the world’s greenhouse gasses and is the reason why Australia, with a quarter of the population, is responsible for more pollution than highly industrialized Germany.

If the proposed Newcastle coal export terminal goes ahead it would, in one fell swoop, be the equivalent of DOUBLING NSW greenhouse gas emissions.

With NSW elections only a couple of weeks away, please take the time to write to both Premier Morris Iemma thepremier@www.nsw.gov.au and to Lib leader Peter Debnam peter.debnam@nsw.liberal.org.au (or by letter to Parliament House, Macquarie St Sydney 2000) .

Let them know that the people of New South Wales are prepared to make the necessary changes to our lifestyles to avert threatening climate change, including paying more for electricity and ask them to cease the approvals of new or expanded coal mines, coal-fired power stations and coal export infrastructure, beginning with the proposed Anvil Hill and Moolarben mines, and support the development of alternative, sustainable industries in the Hunter and other coal-mining regions.

The Rainforest Information Centre has produced a DVD titled “Climate Change, Despair & Empowerment” available free to anyone who will use it to educate their family, friends or community. Contact johnseed1@ozemail.com.au or RIC Box 368 Lismore 2480.