Test of climate politics

A DRAFT IPCC report suggests the science is unclear as to whether recent extreme weather events were caused by global warming.

Bangkok floodwaters

THERE has always been something peculiar about the UN climate change process, in which the world's top scientists investigate an issue but must negotiate the wording of their public findings with governments to ensure they pass the political test.

It has been happening again this week in the lead-up to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in Durban, South Africa, which begins on Monday.

A rigorous process to study the possible link between climate change and extreme weather events has come to a conclusion in Kampala, Uganda. Just how the politicians have dealt with the scientific advice they received will be a good test of whether the lessons from overstating the climate change case have been learned.

Damage has been done to public confidence in the IPCC process in the past through use of exaggerated claims of climate impact and the use of unreliable information from advocacy groups to bolster the case for action.

The process of publishing a politically approved summary document months before the full report on which it is based has led to accusations of cherrypicking the facts to suit an agenda. In June, the IPCC was criticised for using Greenpeace and renewable energy propaganda in a landmark study on alternative energy.

A headline briefing on the IPCC's special report on the potential of renewable energy, released in Abu Dhabi on June 9, said close to 80 per cent of the world's energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century, if backed by the right public policies. But the full report the following month showed the assumption was based on a real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption in the next 40 years and was the most optimistic of the 164 scenarios investigated.

This example may help to explain why details of the draft summary of the global analysis of the influence of climate change on extreme weather events were leaked to media outlets this week.

The official summary was due to be released in Kampala last night after IPCC delegates had spent the week analysing it to decide on an agreed text. If there are significant changes between the two documents a fierce debate about the politicisation of the IPCC process can be expected.

It is almost certain the headline reporting from the global review of the science will focus on the potential for future extreme weather events if climate change continues unchecked. These include fierce heatwaves in southern Europe, more frequent drought in North Africa and catastrophic storm surges on small island states.

But of more immediate interest will be how the official document deals with high levels of uncertainty outlined in the draft and presumably detailed in the full report. Also contentious are the draft findings that while extreme weather events have taken a heavier human and financial toll, this has been due mainly to altered patterns in human settlement and the greater exposure of infrastructure rather than worse weather.

The issue of funding developing nations to cope with climate change will be at the heart of negotiations in Durban. While Australia may be keen to bask in the glory of its carbon tax legislation, the big game in climate change politics moved on long ago.

It is widely accepted there will be no international agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol when it expires early next year. The best that can be hoped for is agreement to pump a bit more life into the existing deal so the institutions that feed off it can continue while the next phase is worked out.

Alongside that is a series of negotiations that represent a large transfer of funds and technology from the developed to the developing world. Issues such as the potential for increased extreme weather events and sea level rises are central to adding a moral dimension to these discussions. This is because developing nations argue developed countries are responsible for the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and therefore for the consequences.

But according to BBC environment correspondent Richard Black, who has been leaked a copy of the draft report, scientists have found there is "a lot more unknown than knowns" when it comes to climate change and weather.

In essence, the draft report challenges assertions that climate change is clearly responsible for recent extreme weather events. A comprehensive review of the science has concluded that because of the variability in weather patterns, a climate change signal will not become clear for many decades. This is not to underplay the potential impact. But the timing and extent is still up for debate.

According to Black, the draft report says there is only "low confidence" that tropical cyclones have become more frequent, "limited to medium evidence available" to assess whether climatic factors have changed the frequency of floods, and "low confidence" on a global scale even on whether the frequency has risen or fallen.

While it is likely anthropogenic influences are behind the changes in cold days and warm days, there is only "medium confidence" they are behind changes in extreme rainfall events, and "low confidence" in attributing any changes in tropical cyclone activity to greenhouse gas emissions.

The draft report says "uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability".

According to Jean Palutikof, director of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University, the effects of climate change on extreme weather will be clear by 2070. She says the highest certainty will most likely be in heatwaves. "This will be the first clear signal," Palutikof says. "It will appear sooner than others and will be recognised as due to global warming. Droughts would be the next most certain, with floods and wind storms more difficult to establish."

Given the complexity of weather systems, the high level of uncertainty should not be a surprise.

The federal government's chief climate science adviser Will Steffen told Andrew Bolt last week there was a lot of uncertainty about rainfall change and how it would play out across much of Australia. He said there was no statistically significant evidence of a change in behaviour of tropical cyclones. But most experts agreed there would be an increase in intensity in cyclones as warming continued, he said.

Nor was it possible to attribute the latest drought statistically to climate change because there had been very significant droughts before. "We never look at long-term climate trends on a few years," Steffen said. "You need a minimum of two to three decades or longer. When you look at it on that timescale, there is no doubt the climate system is continuing to warm precisely as we expect."

For non-conformist environmental campaigner Bjorn Lomborg, the findings of the IPCC review on extreme weather events provide the opportunity to take stock. "It seems likely we are going to see a UN document that is going to be a lot more realistic, saying this is not predominantly about global warming dramatically increasing the incidence of extreme weather but much more about vulnerability," he says.

"That would be beautiful because it is about helping people who are suffering right now from problems that we can easily alleviate with simple measures."

Lomborg says the fact the climate signature will not become apparent for several decades should encourage politicians to make a smarter response.

"The Kampala report does not indicate there is not a problem," he says. "There is a problem. But fortunately it gives us more time. The fact we are being told we are not going to be able to see the signature for four or five decades will reduce the urgency to cut right now and hopefully lead us to make smarter choices so we can reduce drastically over the last half of the century.

"It has always been the case that if you run the models it doesn't matter what you do in the next decade. What matters is what you do over the next half-century. By making people realise much more that this is not a now or never issue but that we need to cut emissions across the century it is likely we will do much, much better."

Lomborg thinks this will mean smarter decision-making.

"If we can start saying we have some time it does not mean we can ignore climate change but it does mean we do not have to act in desperation right now," he says. "We can focus a lot more on policies that will work in the longer run."

Rather than a carbon tax or carbon trading, Lomborg favours a commitment by governments to pump billions of dollars into researching alternative energies.

He believes solar may have the best potential and, rather than compulsion, the challenge is to make the technology so financially attractive - without subsidies - that it is irresistible.

Nonetheless, there are powerful political forces that have a vested interest in amplifying the influence climate change is having on extreme weather events.

In short, the weather conundrum adds another layer to the developed and developing nations divide that characterises the politics of climate change. Decades-long negotiations for a global response and a post-Kyoto agreement have reached a stalemate over how developing nations should participate.

Barack Obama made the US position clear on his Australian visit this week. For the US, a global deal must include binding targets on emissions for China and India.

Developing nations have argued, quite reasonably, the climate-changing build-up of atmospheric CO2 is the result of industrialisation in the First World. They expect the same right to develop.

But with China having overtaken the US as the largest carbon-emitting nation and India's parallel economic miracle, any deal that does not include them would prove futile.

It is true the biggest carbon-emitting nations are taking some action, but this is more often guided by self-interest in the form of resource security and air quality as by any global commitment to curbing climate change.

Within the IPCC, a similar moral obligation argument exists for the developed world to help impoverished nations cope. Developing nations have been promised billions of dollars in funding to deal with climate change, but the promises have not yet been kept.

The BBC's Black says it is "impossible to read the draft summary to the IPCC without coming away with the impression that with or without anthropogenic climate change, extreme weather impacts are going to be felt more and more simply because there are more and more people on planet Earth, particularly in the swelling mega-cities of the developing world that overwhelmingly lie on the coast or on big rivers close to the coast".

While the IPCC met in Kampala this week, the so-called Climate Vulnerable Forum was meeting in Bangladesh to keep up the pressure ahead of next week's IPCC event in Durban. The CVF was formed at the Copenhagen summit and includes small island states and countries prone to extreme weather and flooding, such as Vietnam and Bangladesh.

At the forum, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on governments to make an effort at Durban to establish the $100bn Green Climate Fund that was agreed at Copenhagen in 2009.

According to Lomborg, climate change politics has unnecessarily complicated what is more properly an issue of Third World development aid. "A lot of Third World nations have seen it in their interests to up play the climate change card to guilt the First World nations and to get some aid money," Lomborg says, but he believes the problem is twofold.

"First, it doesn't seem to work very well, in that they don't seem to get much extra money. And honestly, most of the climate change money is poorly spent compared to most other development aid funding."

Lomborg believes the climate process has been unhelpful in the way it hasstressed the importance of climate at the cost of adaptation: "There has been a sense in which the important point was to say we are going to get more hurricanes and more flooding, hence we need to cut carbon emissions."

He says what matters more is whether you are vulnerable, not whether climate increases your vulnerability. "If you care about helping people it is obvious you need to focus on adaptation. ... To put it bluntly, people are getting flooded all the time in Bangladesh, not because of global warming but because they are poor."

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LOMBORG ON THE OUTER
Lomborg is the political scientist the international green movement loves to hate. He presents easily understandable arguments about why the environmental Left's preferred orthodoxy - doing all possible to immediately cut carbon emissions at all costs - is counter-productive to saving the planet in the long term.

With his logical approach, engaging style and good looks, Lomborg makes great media talent, leaving orthodox environmentalists languishing as the public's eyes glaze over with their talk of megatonnes of CO2 emissions and the Kyoto Protocol.

Lomborg has been battling scientists who try to prove him a charlatan but never quite succeed, and for years his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, enjoyed $1.3m in funding from the Danish government.

But a few weeks ago the so-called "Red block", under Social Democrat Helle Thorning-Schmidt, took power and now, from Lomborg's point of view, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

"I say a lot of the current solutions don't work, and a lot of well-meaning people don't like that, and the new government is one of them," Lomborg says.

So, from January 1, the government is pulling the plug on the CCC, and Lomborg is touring the world, cap in hand, looking for funding.

That has brought him to Australia, where between meeting chief executives Lomborg is weighing into the carbon tax debate. He says a tax is "an incredibly divisive way to do virtually nothing".

So what are the most cost-effective ways of combating climate change?

Lomborg says carbon taxes are hugely inefficient: for every dollar of tax, they reduce climate damage by the equivalent of 2c.

The studies, Lomborg says, show the best "bang for your buck" is to be had in spending public money on research and development on reducing the cost of renewable energies to the point where they can compete in a free market with fossil fuels.
Ean Higgins