Paul Gilding

There will probably be some kind of agreement at Copenhagen. It’s hard to imagine all those world leaders walking away without one. However I’m not spending anytime at all wondering what the result will be. Why? Because it just doesn’t matter.

You see we’re not ready to fix climate change, not yet. We have not accepted the scale of the problem. Nor have we established the political conditions necessary to fix the problem when we do. However Copenhagen does signify the shift between two eras and if you watch carefully you can see the new world emerging. That is the interesting thing happening at Copenhagen.

But before I move on to that, let me go back, because most of you are probably stuck on my statement that the result at Copenhagen doesn’t matter. Isn’t this the most important meeting in history? Surely failure here will set us back a decade? Surely having a global agreement of any type would be an important first step? No, no and no. Here’s why.

Firstly, it was always going to be a failure because the pass mark set in this important test for civilisation is actually at a level that indicates failure. The correct pass mark is simple. We need to deliver a safe climate; a climate in which we can have a reasonable chance of running an economy that can feed, house and clothe 7 – 9 billion people. As my favourite climate strategist Winston Churchill said:

“It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”

The science is very straightforward on what is necessary. The 450ppm CO2 concentration limit, which is the best possible result Copenhagen is aiming for, would give us a 50% chance of not passing 2 degrees of warming. Even reaching 2 degrees would almost certainly see the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, the melting of most of the world’s sea-ice, a number of island countries ceasing to exist and shifts in climate and water supplies that will lead to war, refugees and global food crises. This is all considered to be relatively manageable! The logic of that conclusion aside, what we also know is that going beyond 2 degrees takes us into system breakdown territory and quite possibility into unmanageable consequences. We then risk civilisation’s collapse.

So the best we can possibly hope for in Copenhagen is a target of 450ppm, which gives us a 50% chance of widespread global ecological damage, geopolitical instability and massive human suffering – that would be the good result under that plan. The other 50% chance is of a civilisation-threatening crisis. So 450ppm is failure, pure and simple. And besides the likelihood of a strong global agreement to a 450ppm target is miniscule anyway. We’re not even ready for that level of failure.

Nevertheless, Copenhagen is fascinating because all the ingredients for change are emerging and can be clearly observed. As I argued in the One Degree War paper I wrote with Jorgen Randers, we will soon wake up to what is needed and get to work. Here’s my top 4 trends we’re seeing in Copenhagen that tell us where we’ll go when we are ready.

No one is in charge. The US no longer rules the world. China knows it and Obama knows it. While it remains the world’s dominant military power, you can’t shoot CO2 emissions, making that power useless against this problem. China is on the rise and this week a China/US deal is the likely first step if we’re to have any deal at all.  That however is just the beginning of a massive geopolitical power shift, because China and the US are only 50% of global emissions. We are moving to a world we’re we act together or go down together. There is no alternative that will work and that is a seriously transformational and beneficial shift.

Angry Islanders. Like a scene from the 1976 movie Network, a group of island states is yelling at the world “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more”. They’ve woken up to the reality their countries are literally underwater at around 450ppm. They are angry, articulate and thanks to the modern connected world we’re going to hear a lot more from them. This is the world’s conscience and they’re telling us loud and clear “your cars and coal are killing my country.” It’s like an invisible army slowing destroying them, every building, every farm, every business. The significance here is not the islanders but the idea : those who caused the pollution will be held to account by the victims of it. This means global justice is firmly on the table.

The science won, the sceptics lost. Despite the media’s fascination with the scientific debate no-one with any power or sense is questioning the science any more. In the end facts rule and that’s why the Angry Islanders are saying 350ppm is the right target. We should now completely ignore the sceptics and let them whip themselves into a frenzy of self-delusion as they fade into being crazy old men (yes men, how many prominent women sceptics have you heard from?)

A dot com boom on steroids with military support. Winning or losing is a choice and China is now clearly winning the green energy race. The USA is shifting on climate because they know they’re losing and they hate that. India is chasing China’s tail and South Korea and many others are closing in. This will be an exciting time as governments increasingly panic about the targets they have agreed to and act to mobilise the market like never before. HSBC says this will be a $2 trillion per annum market by 2020.

So whether we get a political agreement in Copenhagen or not just doesn’t matter. But if you want to see the future then take good look for a taste of what’s to come. You see we will, certainly and inevitably, wake up. Not yet, but soon. Then the fun really begins.

Amidst the noise of the day-to-day debates, we have lost sight of the simple logic of the advice coming from the world’s top climate scientists. Despite the uncertainties in the details, the science carries one underlying message from which we can draw only one rational conclusion.

It is time to declare a global emergency and mobilise all available resources, political will and human ingenuity towards one task – to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change to an acceptable level.

Today, we are releasing a paper detailing our response to this conclusion. ‘The One Degree War Plan’ began to take form a few years ago, the product of a challenging conversation between myself and Professor Jorgen Randers. Jorgen, a lifelong advocate for action on sustainability, rose to prominence in 1972 as one of the original authors of the Club of Rome’s famous “Limits to Growth”, the bestselling environmental book of all time – over 30 million copies in 37 different languages.

Jorgen and I had both accepted the scientific reality and were discussing the question it posed – what would a rational response to the climate science look like? If you stripped away all the politics and debate and took a fresh look, what would be the logical action plan?

In 2008, after many more such conversations, we decided that we needed to articulate our answer to that question, in detail and on paper.

We started by considering what the science meant, in human terms.  This was the simple part, as the peer-reviewed climate science is very clear on the level of risk. There is a high degree of certainty that humanity will face severe disruption to the global economy and society, with widespread economic damage, geopolitical instability and human suffering. Perhaps more importantly, there is a lower but still material risk of catastrophic collapse and tipping points being past that would see the effective collapse of our current civilisation and economy. Once this was understood, we could begin to consider what a logical response to this level of risk would be.

But before we got there, we made another initial but fundamental conclusion: that the momentum in the climate system is now so great that the world will, before long, wake up to a threat of this magnitude. It will recognise that despite the remaining uncertainties, we cannot afford to risk the collapse of the global economy and civilisation. Thus an appropriate response – one that recognises the science and the true scale of the risk – will occur.

When this emergency response is designed, we concluded it would need to aim to bring warming below 1 degree, and therefore, CO2e concentrations below 350ppm. Anything less would leave civilisation at too great a risk of catastrophe, and would therefore be irrational. Our remaining task was then to develop a plan of action that was capable of achieving this outcome.

The attached paper is the result. It has taken over a year of development and research, including considerable feedback from colleagues and modelling by C-Roads, the climate simulator developed by MIT, the Sustainability Institute and Ventana Systems.

We were actually surprised by the outcome of our work, which showed that not only is One Degree and 350ppm possible, it is surprisingly achievable and practical. It certainly requires that we act very soon and that we act with a level of determination and commitment not seen since WWII, but it can be achieved. In recognition of this comparison, we called our paper The One Degree War Plan.  It is a plan that shows what humanity can achieve – and we believe will achieve – when it develops a rational response to the climate threat.

We are releasing our paper for public reaction and comment, because we recognise that this is not an intellectual exercise. A response like the One Degree War Plan, if it is to be implemented, is going to require years of development by global experts across many disciplines. It will also require strong public support globally if our political leaders are to have the courage to adopt such an approach.  This in turn will only happen if many millions of people engage and decide that, in the end, we are a rational species and this is the way forward we consciously choose to take.

Building a robust plan and the support to implement it is of course an enormous task. So we think now is a good time to start.

We encourage you to consider this paper, to circulate it amongst your networks and to help us together build the courage we need to face reality.

Click here to download the full paper

Regular readers may be a little surprised by this column. I am regularly arguing that the science shows we are inevitably approaching, or may have past, a tipping point where widespread, rolling ecological and economic crises take hold.

But there’s another critical tipping point, of a very different character – where the world’s political and business leaders turn firmly towards action. Here’s the surprise – I think we may be at this tipping point already.

Scientists have become increasingly alarmed in recent years, as climate change reality has raced ahead of the political response. They point to countless examples of accelerating feedbacks, such as the reduction in the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 and rapid Arctic melting.

While they regularly point these out to our political masters, many of them express despair at the slow response.

So on what basis do I think the global political system has started to turn?

I think we have recently seen a number of developments that, taken together, indicate a profound shift is under way. When such a shift takes hold, it will rapidly accelerate – with significant implications for campaign and business strategy in this area over the years ahead.

The most significant and encouraging shift is what Tom Friedman in his recent NYT column called the shift from Red China to Green China. The Chinese leadership has for many years been talking about the need to act on climate but has in recent months shown serious potential to lead on this issue.

The rationale for them to do so is certainly there. As they have reeled under the negative economic and social impacts of pollution, China has accepted that the growth model followed by Western capitalism cannot work for them. Will they now pursue clean energy so vigorously they will dominate this new global market? Could climate even provide the issue on which China can manifest its global leadership ambitions?

I increasingly think the answer to both questions is likely to be yes, with far reaching economic and geopolitical implications. There is a good summary of recent developments and this potential for leadership, including China’s potential to see its emissions peak by 2030 in the article “Peaking Duck” by the Centre for American Progress’ Julian L. Wong.

Another important indicator is the recognition in the US political debate that the strength of the Chinese response is an economic threat to the US. The fear is growing that the resistance to change in the US may leave that economy floundering in what will be the largest economic transformation in history. As argued by Tom Friedman in the column referred to earlier, while America is currently strong on innovation, research ultimately follows the market. Friedman pointed out that “America’s premier solar equipment maker, Applied Materials, is about to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility — in Xian, China.”

The goal posts are also shifting in the science. An increasing number of scientists are coming to the view that the global CO2 target should be closer to 350ppm rather than 450ppm. In recent months we’ve seen this get global credence in response to the 350.org campaign, with eminent figures like the climate economist Nicholas Stern and the IPCC Chair Pachauri coming out in personal support of the 350 target. They would both be well aware that such a target would require cuts far more dramatic than anything on the table now.  With such a goal, the task becomes the elimination of net CO2 emissions from the economy rather than their reduction.

At a deeper level, Stern also lent his considerable intellectual weight to the debate on economic growth, stating what was previously heresy – that economic growth itself must now be questioned. He recently put the case that there were probably only 20 years left for further economic growth before the earth was full.

Equally important as these scientific and political developments are shifts in the business community. While debates are raging in Western economies including in the US, Japan and Australia on climate policy, there are signs of a profound underlying shift emerging in corporate attitudes. Symbolising this in the United States is the rapid withdrawal of major companies from the US Chamber of Commerce over their lobbying against action to regulate greenhouse gases. In recent weeks, major corporates such as PG&E and Apple have resigned, Nike has quit the Board of the organisation and GE and Johnson & Johnson have both publicly distanced themselves from the Chamber’s anti-climate action lobbying efforts.

Another example was a recent initiative by Cambridge Program for Sustainability Leadership’s Corporate Leaders Group, with 500 companies signing on to the Copenhagen Communiqué which endorsed strong action on climate by the world’s governments including keeping warning below 2 degrees and urging early action. “There is nothing to be gained by delay”, the communiqué states.

Many other countries previously in the background on the global climate debate like Indonesia (which is the world’s 3^rd largest net emitter due to its extensive deforestation) recently announced its intention to cut emissions by 26% by 2020 compared to Business As Usual and by 41% if they get international financial support to go further. They also believe they can turn their forests into a net carbon sink by 2030.

And of course there is a storm of grassroots campaigning erupting around the world in the lead up to Copenhagen with campaigns like 350.org and many others.

Many of you will have the correct response that these are all only words – that we are yet to see action of real substance. That’s certainly true. Words are early signs, not conclusive evidence. But I think I can smell it now, and when these things do turn, they do so remarkably quickly – as we saw when governments responded to the recent financial crisis.

Of course this does not mean we can relax and it will all be OK! The climate system is now rapidly descending into crisis and the consequences will be felt for decades even with strong action now. What it does indicate however is that we will not be the proverbial boiling frogs who just sit here passively as the system collapses around us. It is only early signs of the turn, but it gives us an indication of what’s coming.

So we mustn’t back off, not even a little bit, with the pressure being applied to the system to encourage change. But we should perhaps reconsider tactics.

I think some of our energy should be focused for example on developing an emergency plan to fix the climate. The science clearly lays out what a stable climate looks like and it requires the elimination of net CO2 emissions from the economy within decades. Any rational analysis says this is going to require the equivalent of a war plan to achieve it. In future columns I’ll be saying a great deal more on that topic.

But for now, take a look around. The world is turning our way and while the crisis is still coming, the crisis response may not be as far behind it as we thought.

“It is, sadly, probably too late to save much of Australia”.  With these disconcerting words Joe Romm, from the leading US climate blog “climateprogress.com”, reacted yesterday to Sydney’s dust storms. Joe Romm is no casual blogger and I take his views very seriously, as do others. His writing has been described by NYT’s Tom Friedman as “indispensible” and the U.S. News & World Report called him “one of the most influential energy and environmental policymakers in the Obama era”.

So is Joe Romm right? Is Australia’s environment now past a point of no return in terms of climate change impacts? Are we already in an ecological crash? You certainly wouldn’t think so listening to our political debates. So let’s take a look at what the science is saying. (this is an edited version of a post I wrote for Climate Progress)

For those readers outside Australia, yesterday morning Sydney awoke to an eerie red hue. Our city was already coated in red dust and the air was thick with more of it. At its peak every hour saw over 100,000 tonnes of delicate topsoil blown off drought stricken farms and deserts and sent across the country. At full strength, this giant dust cloud was 1,600 km long and 400 km wide as it hit major cities along the east coast. (An excellent satellite image can be found at the [NASA website])

Air particle concentrations in Sydney are normally around 20 micrograms per cubic metre (mcg/m³) with health risk levels starting at 200 mcg/m³. Yesterday concentrations reached 15,400 mcg/m³! The airports were closed, harbour ferries cancelled and people at risk were warned to stay indoors. (For those outside Australia, Climate Progress has a [good video report] on the local impacts)

By day’s end, the best estimates were that several million tonnes had been stripped from deserts and farms across three states and sent to the city and then out to sea.

As we know, no single event is proof of climate change, and while this may be the worst dust storm on record here, that by itself doesn’t prove anything. But it sure makes us wonder what the future holds.

Of course, this is not the first major event that is putting Australia amongst the head of the pack in terms of climate change impacts. Earlier this year Melbourne broke its record February temperature by a full 3 degrees centigrade to hit 46.8 C (116 degrees F). This was also the day of Australia’s worst ever bushfires with 173 people killed and 2,000 homes destroyed. The fire conditions that day were unprecedented. In our Forest Fire Danger Index – which combines factors such as heat, humidity, wind and drought – a score of 100 reflects the conditions during our previously worst-ever fires in 1939. Any score above 50 is considered extreme. On that fatal February day this year, the Index ranged between 120 and 190 in many places across the country. All our warning and ratings systems are now being revised to better suit our new reality.

The impacts are consistent around the country. The Murray Darling Basin is our food bowl, with nearly 40% of Australia’s agricultural production based around the water of the giant Murray Darling river system. The area’s been in so-called “drought” since 2002 and is the worst ever recorded. I say “so called” because evidence is increasing this may be closer to “the new normal” – a long-term decline associated with climate change. With drought and over allocation of water permits to struggling farmers, flow levels are now down to 5% of their long-term average. As a result, it’s now assumed that the globally significant wetlands and lake system at the river’s mouth will face ecological collapse over the next few years.

On the other side of the country in Western Australia, the city of Perth has now acknowledged they are dealing not with drought, but a system shift. Inflows into Perth’s dams since 2001 are only 25% of what was the long-term average before a marked decline began in the 1970s. While it’s too early to be sure, scientist’s current view is that around 50% of this is directly related to human-induced climate change. This drop is mirrored across the country with stream flows, measured as a percentage of the long-term average, now well down in most major cities with Canberra at 43%, Melbourne 65%, Adelaide 62% Sydney 40% and Brisbane at 42%. State Governments are now urgently building energy intensive desalination plants across the country to ensure our major cities don’t run out of water completely.

The tourism industry, a major part of the Australian economy and a significant export earner, is becoming increasingly nervous about the shifting climate. In the far north at the Kakadu National Park, a World Heritage-listed system of sensitive coastal and freshwater wetlands, the change is coming thick and fast. In the past 50 years, tidal creeks have moved 4 km inland, saline mud flats have increased nine-fold, and 2/3 of Melaleuca forests have been killed by salinity.  Kakadu seems destined for much greater loss as sea levels rise further.

In the North East, the Great Barrier Reef is now at serious risk of widespread, permanent loss over the coming decades. In 1998 and again in 2002 it experienced major coral bleaching events, with 50% and 60% of the reef affected respectively. In 2006 major bleaching again occurred in significant sections of the Reef, with up to 40% of coral killed in some areas. While it has recovered each time so far, everyone knows it won’t always do so.

So it goes on. And on and on. The debate here in Australia certainly doesn’t indicate an acceptance we are in a state of ecological crash. Is this because we’re in the middle of it? Are we boiling frogs blinded by dust storms?

Certainly other outsiders see things here the same way Joe Romm does. The UK’s independent ran a story before the February 2009 bushfires titled [“Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in”] and the LA Times ran a story in April 2009 [“What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia.”]

Both these stories make disturbing reading for Australians because this is not the way the debate is running here. As we all know, single events and even a whole decade of data doesn’t prove anything. But how much data will it take before our global political leaders, including here in Australia, move on from earnest words and shift into the emergency response we now need?

Let me close with the opening paragraphs from the LA Times story referred to above.

Frank Eddy pulled off his dusty boots and slid into a chair, taking his place at the dining room table where most of the critical family issues are hashed out. Spreading hands as dry and cracked as the orchards he tends, the stout man his mates call Tank explained what damage a decade of drought has done.

“Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It’s devastation,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men — big, strong grown men. We’re holding on by the skin of our teeth. It’s desperate times.”

A result of climate change?

“You’d have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise,” Eddy said.

Indeed you would.

.

Some days my head hurts, as I shift between what feels like two parallel universes in the climate change debate. First I have these conversations with world-class scientists who calmly lay out the scientific view of the various risks posed by climate change and their relative scale and likelihoods. They tell me the science says it is almost certain the impacts will be serious and destabilising for our society and our economy. The science also describes a lower level of risk – which they find hard to quantify but generally say between 10% and 50% – that the impacts of climate change will be catastrophic, perhaps even civilisation threatening. This could include widespread famine, war and economic collapse. Not certain, but a reasonable possibility.

It is very clear when you listen to these scientists and read their peer-reviewed reports that, on any calm and rational analysis, we should be preparing for a carbon reduction war. Yes, a war – with all that implies about focus, effort and sacrifice. The threat posed is, after all, a “clear and present danger” and the response should be strong, global and immediate. This should be a ‘whatever it takes’ moment.

Then I shift into the parallel universe.

I spend time in corporate boardrooms and listen to the analysis of business executives who explain how we mustn’t damage the economy by “over-reacting”. They explain their concern about protecting jobs and economic growth, how we must not jeopardise “our” (insert India, China, South Africa, USA, Australia etc) national competitiveness by acting “early” because, after all, without a global solution what difference will our actions make anyway? When I engage with policy makers, even those supportive of climate action, I get only a marginally stronger response.

Of course, each of these arguments has its narrow appeal. There’s always a bit of truth and rationality, and that’s why people use them. But the collective consequence of these arguments is the real story here – the story that historians will tell. We have had the risk thoroughly analysed and explained to us and we are choosing, with endlessly shifting reasons for prevarication and delay, not to act commensurate to the level of risk.

I wonder what it was like in the lead up to WWII, the last time we had a serious and clear global threat. When Hitler invaded Poland, did Winston Churchill order an economic modelling exercise to understand the implications of spending over a quarter of GDP on the war effort? When Pearl Harbour was bombed, did US industry argue we shouldn’t over-react, that America shouldn’t respond until there was a global agreement to act so as to avoid a disproportionate share of the cost?

No, fortunately for us, that wasn’t their response. In fact, just four days after Pearl Harbour was bombed, the auto industry was ordered to cease all civilian production in order to focus on the war effort. Such actions soon spread across the economy. I imagine US political leaders thoughts were something like this: “Well damn the objectors, this is a threat to our freedom and to our way of life. In fact, this is such a profound threat we will throw everything we have at it and make it work, even though we don’t know whether we will succeed nor the costs of trying.”

They would have said: “We will have to do this because if we don’t, our children will curse our lack of courage and our selfishness. If we act we may fail. But if we don’t act, we won’t be able to live with ourselves for not trying.”

In our present day to day lives, when the weather is a bit warmer than normal but often rather pleasant, and our economy is showing signs of improving, it is hard for most of us to think like this. The business leaders I talk to about this topic are not bad people. Nor are the policy makers grappling with the complexities of transforming an economy and the uncertainty of the outcomes. They are normal people with children and friends – they go to church, they volunteer in their communities and they care about the world. (OK, there are a few exceptions, but not many!)

But they still fall for the easy way out, the path of denial and avoidance. Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re not thinking clearly and courageously.

My message on this topic is clear and direct. We are at a crucial moment in human history. 2009 is to climate change what 1939 was to WWII. Poland has been invaded – the Arctic is melting, the bushfires are burning, the droughts are strengthening and the floods are sweeping away communities. There is only one question you have to ask yourself: “what will I tell my children?”

So now, imagine yourself in 2030. The world is teetering on the edge of geopolitical and economic chaos (this is not a certainty, but it is certainly a reasonable risk). You are talking to your children (add 20 years to their current age) and explaining what it was like in 2009 – what the scientific consensus was and how you personally responded, then and there, when the reality became clear. What did you do in 2009 and why?

In 2030, the parallel universes will have closed and there will only be one left. It will be called reality and you and your children will be living in it. Imagine the conversation. Do it now, then decide what to do.

“They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent…Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger.  The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close.  In its place we are entering a period of consequences …We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now…”

Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936