Rudd should swap denial for a baton

Today's edition of The Age carries my letter in response to the paper's coverage of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's recent address to the Lowy Institute on climate change. It was edited a little, but captured the essential point that Rudd needs to match his rhetoric - which was quite strong against the sceptics - with stronger actions he must take to Copenhagen. The unedited letter with links to the coverage follows this published version:

IT AMAZES me that our Prime Minister can show such a clear understanding of the problem (''Rudd blames climate sceptics for global sabotage'', The Age, 7/11), and of the interests ranged against its solution, yet propose action that can only fail by the measure of the science he so strongly invokes.

Rejection of the emissions trading proposal is not necessarily driven by scepticism, but also by the knowledge that the scheme should only pass the Senate if it is strong enough to do the job.

When the Prime Minister says the sceptics' ''prescription for inaction has all the legitimacy of a roulette wheel'', it's not so much bizarre but more of a denial that Rudd himself has a hand on the wheel in the global climate gamble.

A team of emergency services workers is running 6000 kilometres down Australia's east coast in the Run for a Safe Climate. On November 29 they'll arrive in Melbourne. Kevin Rudd should meet them with real solutions that back the force of his climate rhetoric. Pick up the baton, Prime Minister, and carry it to Copenhagen - time is running out and it's a sprint to the finish line.

Now, the original, with links to the coverage to which I was responding:

The prime minister's spirited climate address to the Lowy Institute reported in your newspaper was a welcome departure from the bland "balance" of many of his speeches. I therefore disagree with Michelle Grattan's appeal for the PM to turn the volume down ("Turn the voulme down, PM", 7/11), but that doesn't mean Kevin Rudd is right.

What amazes me is that our prime minister can show such a clear understanding of the problem, and of the vested interests ranged against its solution, yet propose action that can only fail by the measure of the science he so strongly invokes. Rejection of the current emissions trading proposal is not necessarily driven by scepticism - as in the case of the hopelessly denialist Opposition - but also by the knowledge that the ETS should only pass the Senate if it is strong enough to do the job.

So when the prime minister says the sceptics' "prescription for inaction has all the legitimacy of a roulette wheel", it's not so much "bizarre" as Grattan claims, but more a denial that Rudd himself has a hand on the wheel in the global climate gamble.

Right now a team of emergency services workers is running 6000 kilometres down the east coast of Australia in their Run for a Safe Climate. On 29 November they'll arrive in Melbourne. Kevin Rudd should meet them there with real solutions that back the force of his climate rhetoric. Pick up the baton, prime minister, and carry it to Copenhagen - time is running out and it's a sprint to the finish line.

Comments welcome.

Ferguson puts green light before spill inquiry

Update: See Peter Ker's excellent article, Crude Awakening, in the Focus section of The Age, 3/11. Ker also reports online, here.

It's hard to believe, but weeks after the Montara oil rig began leaking disastrously into the Timor Sea, the company that owns it was granted further access and exploration licences for Australian off-shore oil fields green-lighted by resources and energy minister, Martin Ferguson.

Now the rig is on fire. In response, Ferguson struggled on Radio National's AM Program this morning, before again squirming tonight on ABC TV's 7.30 Report - a performance followed by a possibly more uncomfortable prime minister Kevin Rudd.

Ferguson highlighted stopping the fire as the proper current focus, noting that the government had sprung into action only 15 minutes after learning of the disaster. Yet weeks, thousands of litres of oil and an inferno after the incident began back on 21 August, what does the government have to show for it but the promise of an inquiry and a huge question mark over WA fisheries and the broader ecosystem?

Greens Senator Bob Brown was accused of playing politics when he called for Ferguson's resignation, but at what stage does the scale of this environmental catastrophe intersect with ministerial accountability?

If the minister does not resign - and I believe he should - will he immediately call for the suspension of the oil exploration and access rights of the company that owns the oil rig pending the inquiry? If he will not, then the minister will have put his green light for the exploitation of fossil fuels before an inquiry that will determine the role of the company in the mishap.

Regardless of the specific causes of this incident, as the scarcity of global oil supplies increases, are we likely to see more such disasters as expanding worldwide exploration strikes reserves in potentially unsuitable geological formations? If we can't get oil safely out of the ground, what hope for carbon capture and storage to bury our carbon dioxide?

Oil leaks in pristine waters, spiralling carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, and the hazards of exploiting Australia's uranium all underline the risks of digging energy resources out of the ground when we could be pursuing clean, renewable energy. There's no impact when wave energy, the wind, or the sun escape our efforts to harness them. Until Ferguson gets that message, our local member for Batman will continue to wreak global damage.

ABC's muddled take on climate

I'm a big fan of the ABC, but it appears to be suffering from the same disease afflicting the broader media when it comes to climate change. That disease is the inclusion of unexamined, untested positions of so-called scepticism relating to climate science, ostensibly for the sake of balance.

There was a prime example of the malady in The Sunday Age last week, with Melissa Fyfe's strong article on brown coal and moves to muzzle protestors ("A show of power"), contrasted with James Kirby's weak apologia for Ian Plimer's climate denialist tome, Heaven and Earth ("Going against the current climate").

Fyfe delivered a tough-minded, factual account; Kirby suggested big sales of Plimer's book after it had been "sidelined" by major publishers meant that we have not been getting the full picture on climate (see today's letters in The Sunday Age for reader responses - beginning with Michael Down).

Now we have the ABC at it, with Margot O'Neill and her excellent Countdown to Copenhagen blog in the corner of climate science, and the 7.30 Report's Chris Uhlmann singing the praises of sceptics as one of the ABC's Off Air bloggers.

Uhlmann draws on Karl Popper to suggest there's something unscientific to claims about climate science being settled. First he notes Einstein's view that: "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong".

Fair enough, but this doesn't justify the massive leap he then attempts by invoking Popper:

Popper became famous for his epistemological work demarking science from pseudo-science. It boiled down to testability. If a theory could be falsified by experimentation it was science, if it couldn't it wasn't.

So Popper would argue that to say any theory is "settled" means that you are not talking about science but pseudo-science.

The false leap is in the second paragraph. The claim that climate science is settled in terms of the basic mechanisms and impacts of global warming is not a claim that the science is beyond Popper's challenge of verifiability.

What can be said is that the weight of scientific evidence has created an increasingly high probability that the globe's unprecedented rate of warming is resulting from human actions. Global warming could be falsified by experimentation, but the chances are beginning to compare with those of falsifying the claim that the earth is in orbit around the sun.

Instead, Popper's challenge was to claims where there is no question that could be asked that could lead to results capable of testing. An example might be the claim: "Green looks the same to everyone".

While there might be a high level of consistency across healthy populations in the ability to identify the colour green, just how could you test that the experience of seeing it was exactly the same for every person? The unique subjective experience can only be known to the person actually seeing the colour.

In contrast, Uhlmann's challenge to climate modelling is in fact an admission of defeat in terms of Popper's challenge of verifiability. That's because he suggests modelling can be wrong. It is therefore verifiable, and is amenable to rigorous scientific scrutiny - leaving aside his weak comparisons of financial modelling and the GFC, and climate models that are proving increasingly robust not only in their predictions, but also in their ability to reproduce past climatic conditions using historic data.

It is on this basis that we are able to compare the claims of climate scientists arguing the case for urgent action to address global warming, and denialists unable to back their spurious claims with peer-reviewed scientific evidence.

Balance is without value if it has no basis in fact. Imagine listening to Dr Norman Swan's excellent Health Report only to find alternative, 'balancing' coverage elsewhere on the ABC suggesting that sufferers of cancer give faith-healing a go (see also Lynn Frankes' letter on "quacks" in The Sunday Age).

If it's not on in medicine, why should it be acceptable with climate? As laypeople, we don't reject the science of CAT scans and chemotherapy because we do not fully grasp their technical detail. While we certainly seek second opinions, we should do so from authoritative sources.

That's my invitation to James Kirby and Chris Uhlmann on climate science - unless we drastically reduce our carbon emissions, they'll find the diagnosis is consistent among those qualified to make it.

Run for a Safe Climate

Run for a Safe Climate, a fantastic campaign by Safe Climate Australia, will see 25 runners run 6000km down the east coast of Australia, cut west along the Victorian border to Adelaide, and then finish in Melbourne on 29 November.

The runners are emergency service workers who know we're facing a climate emergency and are calling for strong action to meet the challenge of catastrophic climate change that, among many severe impacts, will raise sea-level and spark more frequent and devastating bushfires.

Their short film is a powerful statement of why they're doing it - they're running for a safe climate because we're running out of time. Every Australian should know about this campaign. Get involved to say you care about climate.

International climate action brings local message to Ferguson

The 350.org International Day of Climate Action has seen more than 5200 actions across 181 countries drive home the need for urgent action on climate change - in particular a rapid global reduction below 350ppm of carbon dioxide.

At Darebin Parklands, in the local electorate of federal energy and resources minister, Martin Ferguson, the community sent a clear message that he is failing them on climate - especially in his misguided support for fossil fuels at the expense of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power.

DarebinCAN 350 Event from DarebinCAN on Vimeo.

Organised by Darebin Climate Action Now, the Darebin Parklands event highlighted the local connection between Martin Ferguson as the local MP for Batman and Martin Ferguson the keen listener to the fossil fuels lobby. In a rapidly greening electorate, that's not a link that Ferguson will be keen to have made, but it's a necessary one if we are to get effective action on climate change by the Australian Government.

We simply can't take our scientifically unjustified climate position to international climate talks in Copenhagen. That's because, even if they were adopted by every other developed nation, our current policies would simply have no impact on catastrophic global warming.

Good on you, DarebinCAN!

Ferguson fuels the need for emergency climate action

Dangerous climate change starkly underscores the connection between the local and the global - when emissions-intensive brown coal burns in the Latrobe Valley to produce more than 90 per cent of the State's electricity supply, it fuels global warming and disastrous impacts that are felt around the world.

In the same way, a local politician can contribute to climate destruction through a broader role in government policy and the promotion of fossil fuels. That's the connection the residents of the federal seat of Batman need to make between their local federal MP, Martin Ferguson, and his role as energy and resources minister in the Rudd Labor Government.

Ferguson supports the continuing exploitation of brown coal even though he knows it is destructive to the climate. Claims that coal-fired electricity can be made cleaner are belied by the billions of dollars of compensation promised by the Government's so-called climate measures. Why would coal-fired electricity generators need to be compensated under carbon trading if they could cleanly exploit their vast coal reserves?

The answer is that they can't, so they claim the need to be compensated for a carbon price, even though they should have long known a change was in the wind. As well as continuing to exploit coal, they want to exploit taxpayers and monetise climate damage for their own profit and the world's detriment.

As Environment Victoria's Mark Wakeham pointed out on tonight's edition of Stateline Victoria, the priority seems to be to dig the brown coal out of the ground and burn it, or export it to India, before the 'social licence' to do so expires with the realisation of just how damaging the fossil fuel is to our safe climate future. For Ferguson, coal is simply too commercially valuable to be left in the ground.

Often there's an appeal about job losses in this context. It's a diversion. Not only are green jobs to be had in renewables, but the coal lobby is asking us to believe they want to protect workers, when in normal circumstances they'd be trying to cut their workforce to the bone. Surely it is possible to compensate and retrain workers rather than their polluting, profit-taking employers?

Fortunately, with tomorrow's international day of climate action, the local can also impact upon the global - albeit in a far more hopeful way. At Darebin Parklands, in Ferguson's Batman electorate, Darebin Climate Action Now will be holding a picnic from 3.00-3.50pm as its 350.org event, and will be asking participants to send a postcard to Martin Ferguson.

Unfortunately, the fossil fuel lobby is much more likely to be heard by Martin than his local constituents' valid concerns about the consequences of his short-sighted quarry vision.

As the champion of fossil fuels, and the defender of massive oil slicks, it's no wonder Ferguson likes to ride on the coat-tails of local green initiatives, is it? They're good PR.

Climate spells 'code red' for bushfires

With Bushfire Action Week upon us, it was good to see the Victorian Government announce a range of improved communication measures and finally urge early evacuation in the face of high-level bushfire risk. What they must also admit, however, is that climate inaction by Australia and other developed nations has given us more bushfires we can't defend.

To reduce our long-term risk, our current inadequate climate policies - including the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and those outlined in Victoria's Climate Change Green Paper - must be assessed according to whether they tend to increase, decrease or have no effect on climate impacts such as bushfires - any other approach amounts to climate blindness.

It was also ironic that 'code red' was chosen as the new warning for days of catastrophic bushfire risk when Climate Code Red is one of our leading books on the disastrous impacts of climate change. I commend that book to Premier Brumby, together with Mark Diesendorf's Climate Action, and, as of yesterday, the Greens' Safe Climate Bill (more on that soon).

Finally, The Age has today run my letter capturing some of these thoughts, unfortunately lopping the 'climate code red' bit at the end. Nevermind - it ends appropriately enough with the sad contrast of Bushfire Action Week and our climate inaction years (scroll down to 'Years of doing nothing' on their letters page).

So it's Bushfire Action Week in Victoria. No doubt Premier Brumby, climate minister Gavin Jennings and emergency services minister Bob Cameron will all be scrambling for the phone to tell Kevin Rudd that his emission reductions targets are so pathetic they will do nothing to reduce global bushfire risk even if adopted by all other developed nations.

Maybe they will tell the prime minister that all climate policies should be assessed to see if their broad international adoption would increase, decrease or have no effect on the range of climate impacts we're now facing.

Of course, Rudd may ask why all the fuss now, when the bushfires royal commission didn't bother to make even one recommendation about effective climate policy as a tool of long-term bushfire prevention. Why all the fuss from the State that continues its addiction to the coal-fired electricity that is propelling carbon emissions, global temperatures and climate risks relentlessly upwards?

And of course we now have the new 'code red' for the increasing number of days we'll be facing 'catastrophic' bushfire risk. Sadly, Bushfire Action Week isn't helped by our long stretch of climate inaction years - especially when, in the title of a leading Australian book on the topic, we have already reached climate code red.

Comments welcome.

Read more about the 2009 Victorian bushfires and climate change.