Fires, and Debates, are Raging

There are fires raging over much of Australia right now, triggering debate on the contribution of climate change to our current unseasonable weather.

This has also led to well-meaning people reposting articles from the climate denial industry. I thought I'd record a summary of my responses for posterity.

That the earth is getting warmer is a fact.* See the graph here.

There are two main possible reasons the earth is getting warmer. 1) more sunlight is coming in or 2) more heat is being trapped.

Option One isn’t true – solar activity has been carefully measured. See graph here. ** 

This leaves us with Option Two. The earth is getting warmer because more heat is being trapped in the atmosphere.

But why is it so?

There are several so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that can trap heat (this is called ‘forcing’). Carbon dioxide, water, methane, and CFCs are among the known greenhouse gases. 

Of these, carbon dioxide has the biggest impact on warming. The levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased from 185 ppm in 1850 to over 400 ppm, and these levels continue to rise rapidly. 

Some suggest this rise in CO2 be explained as primarily due to a natural cycle. But this idea totally defies common sense and what we know of earlier CO2 cycles. 

According to the Scientific American humans have added 1,480 billion tons of CO2 in the past 263 years, raising C02 to levels not known since before humans existed.

What is ‘natural’ about that?

Climate change will have a huge economic impact on Australia,  but it will particularly impact the world’s poor. As such it is a social justice issue.

Even without factoring in the cost to the economy of climate change, renewables are now cheaper to build than coal power, making further investment in coal an impractical option. 

Some claim concerns about climate change are only a fringe left-wing agenda. Apparently it’s a ‘left wing’ concern from the Reserve Bank of Australia,  the Insurance Council of Australia  and the Actuaries Institute. (So maybe not so left wing after all...)

Some suggest we shouldn’t act on climate change while there is still minor debate around the impact of human activities. But the level of ‘debate’ is wildly exaggerated. Why? There has been a systematic campaign to popularise doubt on climate science, funded by fossil fuel interests. This is analogous to the years where the tobacco industry sought to cast doubts on the link between cancer and disease in order to preserve their profits.  

So why respond?

Imagine you or someone you love has a diagnosis of cancer.

Imagine 99 % of oncology experts recommend a course of a particular kind of chemotherapy followed to by radiation treatment to give the best chance of survival. This recommendation is based on vigorous scientific evidence.

There is a herbalist lobby group that pay some medical professionals (and bloggers) to lobby their herbs as an alternative treatment. 99% of experts dismiss this treatment as unreliable or worse.

The sooner treatment begins, the better the chance of survival.

What course of treatment do you chose? Or do you do nothing and hope for the best?

In my mind, this in analogous to doing nothing on climate change (although the planet won't die, millions of people may under worst case scenarios predicted...)

It's time we acted.

*The only people who don’t believe this are conspiracy theorists who think the weather bureaus of the world are falsifying data in some kind of UN plot to create a new world order (or some such insane idea). 

**unless of course the science agencies of the world are involved in the falsifying data evil plot.