The Archdruid makes sense on climate change and much else

With the world's attention on Copenhagen, we illuminate our own views by attending to those that resonate.

Whether or not the current round of climate instability is entirely the product of anthropogenic CO2 emissions is actually not that important, because it’s even more stupid to dump greenhouse gases into a naturally unstable climate system than it would be to dump them into a stable one. Over the long run, the only level of carbon pollution that is actually sustainable is zero net emissions, and getting there any time soon would require something not far from the dismantling of industrial society and its replacement with something much less affluent. Now of course we would have to do this anyway, since the world’s fossil fuel supplies are depleting fast enough that production limits will begin to bite hard in the years and decades ahead, but this simply sharpens the point at issue.

Even if it turns out to be possible to power something like an industrial society on renewable resources, the huge energy, labor, and materials costs needed to develop renewable energy and replace most of the infrastructure of today’s society with new systems geared to new energy sources will have to be paid out of existing supplies; thus everything else would have to be cut to the bone, or beyond. Exactly how big the price tag would be is anybody’s guess just now, but it’s probably not far from the mark to suggest that the population of the industrial world would have to accept a Third World standard of living, and the population of the Third World would have to give up aspirations for a better life for the foreseeable future, for such a gargantuan project to have any chance of working.

I encourage those who think this latter is a politically viable option to try to convince their spouses and friends to take such steps voluntarily. Any politician rash enough to propose such a project would be well advised to kiss his or her next election goodbye. Any president who even took a step in that direction – well, I doubt many people have forgotten what happened to Jimmy Carter. For that matter, I’m sure there must be climate change zealots who have given up their McMansions, sold their cars, and now live in one-room apartments in rat-infested tenements with six other activists so all their spare money can go to building a renewable economy, but I don’t happen to know any who have done so, while I long ago lost track of the number of global warming bumper stickers I’ve seen on the rear ends of SUVs.

Nobody, but nobody, is willing to deal with the harsh reality of what a carbon-neutral society would have to be like. This is what makes the blame game so popular, and it also provides the impetus behind meaningless gestures of the sort that are on the table at Copenhagen. It’s a common piece of rhetoric these days to say that “failure is not an option,” but this sort of feckless thoughtstopper misses the point as totally as any human utterance possibly could. Failure is always an option; when trying to prevent it will lead to highly unpleasant personal consequences, without actually having the least chance of preventing it, a strong case can be made that the most viable option for anyone in a leadership position is to enjoy the party while it lasts, and hope you can duck the blame when it all comes crashing down.

Those who have their doubts about anthropogenic climate change can apply the identical logic to the industrial world’s sustained nonresponse to the peaking of world oil production, or to any of half a dozen other global crises that result from the collision between an economy geared to infinite growth and the relentless limits of a finite planet. In each case, the immediate costs of doing something about the issue are so high, and so unendurable, that very few people in positions of influence are willing to stick their necks out, and those who do so can count on being shortened by a head by others who are more than willing to cash in on their folly.

There’s another way to understand the paradox that makes failure the only viable option, but it will involve a glance backwards over the history of the sustainability movement and the theoretical structure – systems theory – that once undergirded it. That glance, and its implications, will occupy the second part of this series.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/human-ecology-of-collapse.html

The coral reef crisis and climate change

Not our usual remit but this item summarises the view we take of the climate change issue.

audio

Robyn Williams: Charlie Veron is one of the top scientists in the world, working on corals. He's the former Chief of the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, and his book A Reef in Time covers the issues now before the world in Copenhagen. Dr Veron.


Charlie Veron: About a year and a half ago, I recorded an item on this program called 'The Plea of the Great Barrier Reef', in which I laid out the case that Australia's greatest natural treasure is on the brink of wholesale destruction from the effects of climate change. I am happy to say that this plea was heard very widely; I am less happy that the dire predictions I made then, remain on track.


There are now two further books on this subject. In September, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority released their long-awaited Outlook Report, a government profile of The Reef which spells out just how the Authority sees the Reef's future, and just out is an excellent book for students called Coral Reefs and Climate Change, prepared and published by the University of Queensland. The bottom line for all three volumes is essentially the same: they show how and why the Great Barrier Reef is, indeed, in very serious trouble.


Among the many that heard my talk last year was an English zoologist who promptly came to my home in Townsville to discuss the lead-up to Copenhagen. 'It would be effective, Charlie', he said, 'if the Royal Society were to stage a full presentation of what you have to say, and have you introduced by David Attenborough, and have it spread around the world by Google'. Surprisingly, this all happened as he planned. A drop in the ocean perhaps, but it has helped highlight the plight of coral reefs. If you, listener, can spare an hour to hear me out, the URLs for this talk are on this program's website.


How well are Australians facing up to climate change? Do other countries give so much media coverage to so-called climate change sceptics? Do other countries politicise climate change issues like we do? The answers are 'no', and 'no'. The so-called anti-climate change lobby which has now transformed itself into an anti-climate-science lobby, seems to have no equivalent in other countries except, perhaps in the bible-belt of the United States.


There are real parallels between the anti-climate-change proponents in Australia and the anti-evolution lobby in the United States. Both claim that science is on their side yet both constantly make assertions that have no scientific basis whatsoever. Both are promoted by zealots who fancy themselves as crusaders acting for the greater good of God or country. Most significantly, both have proponents who call themselves scientists, but knowingly misrepresent science to support some story or other they want to put across. We all want to believe that human-induced climate change is not happening, but unfortunately the science is showing that it is. This science is overwhelming on every imaginable front.


All this reminds me of a time when I used to argue evolution issues with creationists. A complete waste of time, but harmless. However, when it comes to climate change, nothing less than the future of our planet is at stake., Seeing what has recently happened in Canberra, I feel that Australian scientists must give much more of their time and effort to raising awareness of real science for the general public, let alone parliamentarians. This is something most scientists hate doing, but if Australia does not lift its game, we will not play our part in avoiding the climate catastrophes that lie ahead. We are now the worst polluter per capita of any developed nation, and are on track to become the world's foremost exporter of pollution. Because of the Howard years, we are already lagging far behind. Among the G20 nations, a recent study ranked Australia 15th in preparedness for a clean energy future. Any comment I have about this will immediately be out of date, but in retrospect I believe we hit rock bottom with the popular Liberal Party view that Australia is too small to make a difference, so why not leave it to the big guys. That same argument would have been equally applicable to Australia's participation in both World Wars: should we have opted out of those also?


Dozens of major international conferences have now been held in the lead-up to Copenhagen. The overwhelming focus of these is on the science of climate change, on economic impacts, and on political issues. What is missing in all this? The plight of natural ecosystems. European climate change research organisations habitually forget this, as I have repeatedly discovered when giving seminars. With corals we are not just making predictions. The impacts have been happening for decades and are well recorded. This puts them in a class of their own.


The bottom line is this. We can argue computer predictions, economics and politics all we like, but we must never forget that we are ultimately dependent on the health of our planet's ecosystems, for our own existence.


Coral reefs are the natural ecosystems at the forefront of climate change. This is not only because of the recent track record they have left, but because corals are the Earth's natural ancient historians. Being carbonate platforms, reefs are very sensitive to ocean chemistry changes. This means that they respond quickly to disturbances in the carbon cycle, the sorts of disturbances which are at the root cause of extinctions. The mechanisms involved are not complicated. The carbon cycle is the greater matter cycle that links the biosphere to the geosphere. All life forms are part of it; so are rocks. Carbon dioxide is the fast-acting currency of the carbon cycle and it is carbon dioxide that is acidifying our oceans. This process alone seems capable of plunging our planet into a mass extinction.


When it comes to climate change, corals have two separate adversaries: global warming and ocean acidification. These are largely independent.


Coral reefs have been tracking global warming via the process of mass bleaching for 30 years. Bleaching occurs when the food-providing algae in the coral's tissues start producing lethal levels of oxygen in response to elevated temperature. Mass bleaching started occurring world-wide when carbon dioxide levels reached about 320 parts per million. This was in the late 1970s. By the early 1980s, sporadic, highly destructive bleaching occurred in response to levels of about 325 parts per million. We see this only in the rear-vision mirror today. Carbon dioxide has now reached 387 parts per million. At this concentration, were it to be held constant, we can be almost certain that most reefs world-wide would slowly decline. Up till now, this decline is linked to El Nino cycles, natural weather events which take place very 4-7 years. In future, bleaching is set to decouple from these cycles and become annual events. The whole process is speeding up.


Ocean acidification, the other great adversary of corals, is caused by changes in the ocean chemistry in response to carbon dioxide, dissolving in surface water and forming carbonic acid. The chemistry is simple and has been understood for a long time. Carbonic acid is neutralised by ocean carbonate buffers. When this process is speeded up, there is a shift in the ratio of carbonate to bicarbonate ions which, in turn, reduces ocean alkalinity, or pH. The acidification process is now well established in the cold Southern Ocean where carbon dioxide is relatively soluble. It will move towards the equator over the next few decades. Just how this will affect reefs is not known in detail, but it may already be slowing the rate of coral growth. As growth slows, branching corals will develop a sort of coraline osteoporosis as skeletons become progressively weaker. They will then cease to provide the three dimensional habitat which most reef species depend upon. It's analogous to taking trees out of forests, the whole ecosystem ultimately collapses. Without its biodiversity, reefs will be overtaken by algae and bacterial slime. I have seen such instances in many parts of the world now. They are deeply depressing sights because they point to the future.


If humans do not successfully curb carbon dioxide emissions now, we will reach the level of 450 parts per million by 2030 or soon after. This is the limit most climate change brokers are going for at Copenhagen because of the general belief that a maximum of 450 will limit global warming to 2 degrees, the global temperature widely believed that humans can endure without global collapse of agriculture and completely catastrophic sea-level rise. But what about natural ecosystems? At that level, reefs will be in rapid, terminal decline world-wide. First from temperature-induced bleaching, then through ocean acidification. There will also be knock-on effects to all ecosystems associated with reefs. Reefs will cease to be large-scale nursery grounds for fish and will cease to have most of their current value to humanity.


By around mid century, our predicament will, at current rates of emissions, become much worse. Carbon dioxide will have reached 600 parts per million and climate change will be in full runaway mode. Reefs will have little in common with their counterparts today. They will be eroding geological structures. Extinctions will be very widespread, for about a quarter of our planet's entire marine biodiversity is linked to reefs.


Although mass bleaching is a reef phenomenon, the effects of ocean acidification will directly impact not only corals, but calcareous algae, most molluscs, many crustaceans, echinoderms and planktonic life. It will also directly affect other taxa that rely on carbonates for skeletal growth and for normal cellular function. This includes fish which are particularly vulnerable during early stages of their life-cycle and also krill, the lynch-pin of the Southern Ocean. Research on these issues is still in its infancy, but the enormity of the threat, nevertheless, is real. What I am describing is the start of a mass extinction the likes of which the Earth has not seen for tens of millions of years.


Are we seriously, really seriously, on the verge of plunging the Earth into a mass extinction event? We can't be sure, but the evidence pointing in that direction is frightening. What we are doing is driving our planet into uncharted waters which, at the very least, is putting the health and welfare of all life on it at extreme risk.


Efforts at emissions reductions have so far been very limited. Recent slowing in carbon dioxide emissions seems more an outcome of the global economic crisis than anything to do with emissions reductions. It is critical that this situation be reversed through rapid and dramatic cuts. Even so, the outlook is grim: cumulative carbon emissions to date have already committed atmospheric carbon dioxide to remaining above 330 parts per million for at least the next thousand years. Returning to a safe level will necessitate creating new mechanisms of extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.


Now we are talking geoengineering, a name given to human attempts to artificially control our climate. Personally I believe it will come to this, no matter what the cost or the risks. The Royal Society's review of geoengineering, published a few months ago, more or less says that the only safe way to extract carbon dioxide from the air is to give the job to plants. There are a lot of options here. We need to adopt them all.


Even so, we may well have left it too late for the Great Barrier Reef. This incredible place is on Death Row and at this point I see no clear way for a reprieve. But perhaps we will not be too late for most other ecosystems. Not if we are prepared to act decisively. Now.


I believe children alive today will celebrate the foresight of today's leaders for heading off a global disaster or else curse us all for failing to face up to the greatest challenge in human history when we had the chance.

When we had the chance! Dr Charlie Veron is the former Chief Scientist of the Australian Institute for Marine Science in Townsville. His book on all this is called A Reef in Time.



Dr Charlie Veron
Former Chief Scientist,
The Australian Institute of Marine Science,
Townsville,
Queensland


Corals on the EDGE: a message for Copenhagen

Climate change and the global energy policy nexus

A fine piece. News Kontent does not endorse paranoia and denial and asks if its the climate science community or the owners of fossil carbon infrastructure who have the biggest incentive to muddy the debate. We think the later.



CLIMATE CRISIS: CHOOSING
POLICIES FOR A NEW FUTURE
by Andrew McKillop
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission
December 9, 2009

Basic Complexity of the Issues

On December 7, some 56 leading newspapers in 45 countries took the unprecedented step of publishing a common joint editorial. The reasons for this were described by these papers as due to humanity facing a profound emergency. The editorial said that unless there is worldwide and vigorous common action, climate change will 'ravage our planet and with it our prosperity and security'. The same editorial gave examples of the grave menaces that it says have been building for a generation. It said :'Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc'.

In the same way, and with a little more creative networking of ideas, global warming and climate change can be blamed, or heavily implicated in many other fields. These can include erosion, salination of agricultural lands, high building land prices, global spread of seasonal and other virus diseases including influenza, economic migration from poor countries to rich - but not, for example, low natural gas prices or low interest rates.

Given the intensity of world mining, fishing, agriculture, industry, transportation and urbanization it would be surprising if there was no anthropogenic climate change, or human-intensified natural climate change. As the 'climate sceptics' say, world climate change has always existed: our problem, today, is accelerated climate change joining other long-term processes making a secure and prosperous future less and less likely. Among these, mineral depletion and bioresource loss or species extinction are major long-term features of the 'environmental pessimists' agenda, and a constant challenge to technological optimists.

Single and Multiple Causes

The search for key causes, or even unique causes, is constant but it is constantly frustrated by complexity, which itself has a one-way tendency to increase. This can be explained by the present global crisis issue of climate change. This change is certain, while global warming is not certain. The identification of CO2 as the overwhelmingly most important, or even the nearly unique driver of both global warming and climate change is also uncertain and theoretical, although saying this is not politically correct.

CO2 is at least the driver that we can act on, reducing CO2 emissions by large or massive amounts in a short period - which could or should also stop oil prices from rising, if oil demand is also capped or reduced. If we find that reducing CO2 in the atmosphere (or in fact, slowing its growth) does not slow climate change, but appears to reduce global warming, and helps slow the growth of world oil demand and limits oil price growth, and also helps launch "the green economy", this could be considered a large if partial victory. This might be the situation by let us say 2025.

In turn however this will demand the implementation and pursuit of very large alternate energy spending. This will particularly concern carbon capture and sequestration at coal fired electric power stations, which worldwide supply around 55% of all today's electricity. These already complex, high cost and uncertainly feasible long-term actions focused in the energy sector, we can call 'energy levers for CO2 reduction', but several other sectors are also clearly concerned. These include agriculture, forestry and other land use, where many accompanying measures and actions will be needed, also on a long-term basis, if we want to achieve the first goal of a final cap on global CO2 emissions, perhaps around 2025-2035, before moving on to large and reliable annual reductions in total CO2 emissions.

The dates are of course "fuzzy". Media and political attention is riveted on the renewable energy sources, where bigger and bigger targets are announced. Satisfying even 5% to 7% of world total commercial energy demand from non-hydro renewables like wind farms and solar photovoltaic power plants, by 2030, would however be quite a heroic task. This particular goal is costed by myself in published studies at around US $ 11 trillion in 2006 USD value, over 20 years. Many other spending and investment scenarios exist, and new ones are published almost daily. Amounts proposed are always increasing - but the most effective framework assumption of quickly achieving zero growth in world energy demand, then reducing it, is as yet rarely considered.

The reasons for this careful avoidance of the 'zero option' are so evident we do not have to list them, but can simply take the 'per capita' argument used by Chinese and Indian leaderships for refusing global, immediate and binding CO2 emissions cuts. If or when these two countries achieved even one-haf the present oil or gas intensity (demand per capita in barrels or barrel equivalent) of the OECD in 2009, their combined CO2 emissions from oil and gas burning would make any chance of capping global emissions impossible. The 'zero option' for both OECD and nonOECD countries is therefore latent, and certain in the future, but for the present is not politically correct.

This in turn and however generates further powerful complexities. Some of them are evident and others less so. Missing a certain key target, either national or global for a key date may make the set of options and policies related to attaining or achieving those goals obsolete or inapplicable. This is similar to problems in range finding and targeting of artillery fire, missile fire control, or celestial mechanics - exactly the bases of cybernetic science. Systems theory is needed for planning various 'critical paths' with various levels of redundancy, at various levels of confidence.

Global Warming versus No Global Warming

If there is no global warming (GW) why support actions to prevent or limit human-caused emissions of GW gases and particulates or aerosols ? Unfortunately for the sceptics, both sides in the climate change debate have substantial theoretical credibility and supporting scientific evidence. Modelling and forecasting planetary change of a 'simple thing' like daily weather requires the largest computing power outside the world's military. Weather forecasts are not always right, and usually there are few excuses offered by national and world weather forecasting institutions when they get their daily forecast scenarios wrong. In no way does this mean we lose all faith in computing power, and return to bark strips or tea leaves for weather forecasting, although removal of 'offending' tree ring data by GW researchers and theorists, because its 'performance' in showing constant GW was disappointing, is also too radical.
Exactly the same applies to intervention or non-intervention in global, regional and national energy economies. This can use a business application of systems thinking: the "marginal" concept used in business planning, which starts with a comparison of risks and probabilities for each action, at and for a certain time, and with various degrees of investment spending or intensity of action. If we take actions to reduce greenhouse gases, but find later on that human GW was actually insignificant or less than we feared, our net loss would be the cost of these actions, as well as hypothetical alternate uses for the same resources through the same period.
We however have another and much more certain driver for transiting away from fossil fuels and developing alternate and renewable sources and systems: Peak Oil, qnd the sure and certain depletion of the easiest and largest reserves and sources of oil, coal and gas. As with population control to limit the demographic crisis, this is another politically incorrect, carefully avoided driver for alternate energy, but in no ways prevents it from being real. Large spending to force energy transition away from fossil fuels and other resource conserving features of "the green economy" will also generate the benefit of earlier substitution of non-renewable resources in the economy, causing a situation very similar to that when coal started substituting wood as a major industrial heat source, or petroleum oil started substituting whale oil for street lighting.

If we take no action, the laisser faire path, there will inevitably be higher future monetary costs, and lost options, for correcting or mitigating the higher level of accumulated damage to our planet. Running out of oil will no longer be a theoretical graph curve, but a reality. Comparing the consequences of these two extreme alternatives (no action versus massive action) it is very apparent that the most basic lever for change - depletion of fossil fuels and need for alternate energy - will become more critical and costs will rise radically, if we do not soon act to replace non-renewable fossil fuels. This will probably be joined by action to cap and then reduce world total commercial energy utilization, preceded by this option becoming politically correct and able to be discussed. Not taking action, now, only pushes forward the date when we, or our descendents will have to take action. Calculating the 'opportunity cost' of different policy sets or ensembles will tend to show we have plenty to gain with little to lose by taking action now.

Policy Making for Transition

Current and recent policy making across the wide, interdependent and converging fields of energy-economy-environment and climate has always been sector isolated, often short term, many times ad hoc. This applies not only to public policy, but also corporate private enterprise and other entities and groups, all of which, however, have a common interest in a managed, optimized and predictable future. When results do not match expectations, locating the causes, bottlenecks, conflicts and interference between different policies, or elements of operated policies is usually difficult. Those responsible for setting policy of course seek 'overall best fit' or good 'system performance', but the areas where they should focus their effort are not necessarily clear, nor their actual choices. They are often left with no choice but to rely on ad hoc methods, on intuition, or abandoning current policies without attempting to bridge conflicting goals with various critical path modelling techniques. Doing this, could enable lower cost and effective reforms and modifications to be made, without abandon of the policy implementation structures and any cumulative positive results obtained.

This challenge will be especially strong as energy-economy-environment become more welded together, less easy to dissociate and treat separately. Negative feedback from incompatible and divergent policy mixes will rise quickly in cost, and could threaten overall progress towards the highest levels goals: preventing runaway climate change and substituting first oil, then gas and coal in the global energy mix.

Examples of this are easy to give. The long and hesitant process of generating recovery in OECD economies and elsewhere has included, or still includes government subsidies, cash gifts or soft loans to car buyers. Cars purchased are almost exclusively oil-fuelled, if somewhat higher fuel efficient than the traded in, and often scrapped cars, in some countries often including cars less than 6 years age. Given that car lifetimes in OECD countries are usually above 13 years, this economic recovery policy has at least two negative impacts. Future oil demand for private road transport tends to be maintained, and future subsidies needed to encourage trade in of these 'economic recovery cars' and replacement by electric or hybrid cars will have to be higher, than in the absence of the state aid to buying cars. To be sure other negative impacts can be included, for example subsidies given to private car buying make it difficult to also give subsidies to urban mass transit development, or intercity high speed rail.

Financing Global Energy Transition

One essentially avoided critical issue, at present, is financing what will inevitably be a worldwide transition away from fossil fuels. Although heavily implicated in, and basic to transition away from fossil energy to green energy, the linkage is presently not formal and open. More important for operation of what can only be a massive, long term and global process, no explicit energy transition fund or funding framework exists. Many reasons exist for the absence of decision leading to creation of a 'global energy transition fund'. These range right across the spectrum from scientific and technological, to industrial, economic, monetary and other factors, even political ideology, opposed to multilateral 'big government' or world government action. This type of action we can note is usually reserved for post-catastrophe, postwar situations. Climate crisis plus oil depletion have as yet to achieve that status. If we believe the statements of leading G20 politicians on the climate issue, this is an oversight that is now being corrected.

As noted by myself in previous articles (www.financialsense.com/editorials/mckillop/2009/0930.html)
we already face what will become radical either-or decisions in global energy financing due to spiralling needs for conventional oil and gas capex, versus ever growing estimates of what is needed in alternate and renewable energy spending. Choosing both is likely impossible even today, and will become yet more impossible by as early as 2020, notably because of further capex needs due to oil depletion being joined by gas depletion and global coal infrastructure limits by that date. Action to mitigate climate change by massive investment in renewable and alternate energy, as noted above, only jumpstarts certain inevitable longer term investment and spending decisions, not only in the energy sector.

This is a complex issue, not easily brought into the political arena, but planning ahead is always appreciated when it delivers proven, and provable results. To this end, therefore, financing frameworks will enormously benefit from systems-based design, definition and implementation. Upstream from this, the needed global policy mixes or ensembles for ensuring best possible 'system performance' will necessary include the consideration of energy, economy and environment as fundamentally linked and convergent.

A Few Conclusions

The pace of events in climate change alarm, and G20 government climate-related energy and economic policy (with environment soon to enter), all tend to underline the critical lack of coherent and mutually-reinforcing policy sets or ensembles. In addition, the lack of any real global financing framework or system for green energy transition will likely deliver even lower success or 'bang for the buck', than the complex, speculative, limited and specialized 'semi private', but in fact public-private, financing frameworks typified by emissions cap-and-trade. This could be called a worst case mix of public policy irresponsibility and incompetence, and private sector opacity and greed.

To be sure every possible financing method and process can be suggested. Mass issuance of 'citizen energy credits' is suggested by several NGOs and associations. The other extreme is similar. The two extremes meet in an increasingly possible IMF-managed creation and issuance of a new world money, the "CO2 Bancor", at least nominally restricted to energy-and-climate financing, but also designed to relieve pressure on the US dollar as world reserve money.

Green energy financing by strict market-only mechanisms is unlikely, now, simply because public expectations have risen fast with political grandstanding by G20 leaders, and because oil depletion will not wait another 5 years or more, for trial-and-error to eliminate inefficient and low net energy candidates, such as crop base fuel ethanol. By 2015, loss of world oil export capacity could reach 2.5 Mbd a year, about the present total import need of South Korea or Germany, yet world biofuels production growth is at best a few hundred thousand barrels/day each year. We are forced to conclude that costs and time requirements for free market trial-and-error policy and programme selection are too high. This is due to accumulated impacts of past inaction, notably the long period of cheap oil through 1986-2000, and through market mediated wrong choices, shifting too many resources to poor energy performers, while starving potential high performers of resources needed for their sustained development.

Probably the key factor for ensuring sufficiently rapid and reliable transition away from the fossil fuels and global capping of greenhouse gas and particulate emissions by around 2035 is policy. Present policy making in the energy, economy, and environment plus climate fields remains sector focused, often firewall separated, generating mutual antagonism and weakening of initiatives and programmes implemented. Apart from not attaining initial goals, programme costs are raised by unnecessary duplication of single-sector policies that soon lose credibility. The default solution is often abandon of the policy, major financial and economic loss, and the start of a new cycle of ad hoc 'solutions'.

The real answer is simple to identify but difficult to apply: coherent policy ensembles of convergent or non-antagonistic programmes, implemented only after comprehensive study of all single policy interactions and elimination of unproductive policy sets. Regional and national effort will be prime in setting these ensembles, with regional and national financing and funding mechanisms dovetailed into global frameworks, for example through reinforced versions of currently emerging climate-related aid and assistance to most affected low income countries. In this way, the goal of setting and achieving long term transformation and transition of the economy and society will have a higher chance of being realised.


© 2009 Andrew McKillop

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/mckillop/2009/1209.html




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On swine flu; Speaking Personally I strongly advise vaccination

Many people I have a lot of respect for tend to rework a loss of respect for financial elites and the excesses of medicine into anti vaccination diatribes. Clean water and a place to shit that doesn't spread disease and the discovery of vitamins and vaccination against illness are the fundamental bedrock of 90% of the great improvements in human life in the last century. Doctors might have lost the plot with the over medication of the middle aged but for the record this blogger does not recommend throwing out the babies with the bathwater.
I'm a big proponent of the sciences, sense and the power of information and therefore think the elites of the library, the sciences and the academy deserve more respect, not less. The masters of con-commerce and dollar-finance and the bullies of business who seek political advantage over a better mousetrap I have no time for. Don't confuse the two, imo.


Nearly 5000 people worldwide are known to have died of swine flu so far. But on average 36,000 are said to die of flu each winter in the US alone. On the basis of such numbers, many have concluded - wrongly - that swine flu is less dangerous than normal flu.

These numbers should not be compared directly. The 36,000 figure comes from epidemiological studies. Because the timing of flu outbreaks varies from year to year, the normal number of deaths in any month can be compared with the number of deaths in the same month when there was a flu outbreak, says Lone Simonsen of George Washington University in Washington DC. Such studies reveal a bulge in deaths during and just after the flu season every year, mainly among the elderly. Many are clearly due to flu and other lung infections that can follow it, but more than half are not obviously connected, because flu often kills in indirect ways, by triggering heart attacks or strokes, for instance.

By contrast, the deaths attributed to swine flu are those directly caused by respiratory infection with the pandemic virus. Indirect deaths - the majority of the 36,000 figure for regular flu - are not being counted. The full death toll for 2009 H1N1 flu will not be known for a while, if ever. Perhaps there will be fewer deaths than normal because older people, more at risk from secondary events such as heart attacks, have some immunity to the virus. However, the total seems likely to be higher simply because the virus will infect far more people than normal, and it kills directly more often.

The impact of a pandemic is not simply about the number of deaths, though. This pandemic, like previous ones, is killing mainly young people, not the very elderly as flu normally does (see diagram). By early October, 76 children and adolescents in the US had already died of swine flu (see diagram). That is more than the usual winter toll, and the winter has just begun.

(Update 30 October: 114 children in the US have now died of H1N1 flu.)

Think of it this way. 2009 H1N1 flu is effectively two diseases: ordinary flu for most, a lung disease that can kill quickly in a few. Most of the severe cases are in babies, and adults aged between 20 and 50. The impact of the deaths of young adults, on dependent families and the economy, will be much greater than that of the deaths among the elderly.

The real worry, though, is the severe form of the disease - a direct viral attack on the deep lungs. That is more likely in people with underlying conditions that damage lungs (such as asthma and smoking), suppress immunity (pregnancy) or involve long-term inflammation (including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease). Of those few getting the severe form, however, between a third and two-thirds of adults and 80 per cent of young children have no underlying condition.

Tests in ferrets show that the 2009 virus binds deeper down in the lungs than normal flu viruses, explaining why it can cause serious lung disease. But why do only a few people succumb?

Keeping healthy may make a mild case of flu even milder. And stopping smoking, losing excess weight and avoiding binge drinking will reduce your chances of getting the severe form of pandemic flu. But beyond this, little of the advice proliferating on the internet is backed by any evidence.

Being obese definitely increases your risk of severe disease but there is no evidence that eating organic food, or any other kind, helps at all. Vitamin D has been touted as a preventive, but the latest study found no such effect. People with flu are told to drink plenty of fluids, but a recent review found no evidence for or against this, and some signs that too much fluid can be harmful in pneumonia.

Many people believe a mask will protect them, but Canadian nurses wearing an N95 mask, which keeps out most viral particles, got flu just as often as they did wearing a cloth mask, which doesn't - suggesting neither works very well. Surprisingly, there is little evidence that hand-washing works either, except among young children.

News Snippets ~ UK , predictions, silver, Mitch's desert planet boomtown.. Ag/Au on the up..

Britain better put the IMF on speed dial.....

As the UK's public borrowings reach record levels, Britain's credit outlook has been lowered from stable to negative by the ratings agency Standard & Poor's. The agency cited government debt and political uncertainty with an election looming for its decision. It is the first time that Britain has been on negative outlook since S & P introduced outlooks in the 1980s. The move could eventually lead to a cut in the UK's Triple A rating and leave the Government in a position where it would have to pay more to borrow on financial markets. Official data released overnight also shows British public borrowing hit a record high for the month of April. The pound tumbled sharply and shares also fell in response to the Standard & Poor's decision..
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On the qualification of predictions...

The late JK Galbraith, one of the twentieth century's most prominent economists, observed wryly that the purpose of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. The American baseball star Yogi Berra, famous for his malapropisms, said: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Recent history bears that out. Just about every official forecaster around the world underestimated the impacts of the global financial crisis. Over the past year the International Monetary Fund has revised down its forecasts for the global economy month after month. Just ten months ago, it was predicting that the global economy would expand by more than 4 per cent over the year to the end of 2009. Now it sees global growth going backwards by 1.3 per cent.

The Reserve Bank and the Treasury, too, have been consistently wrong during the course of the crisis - or, to put it more kindly, their forecasts have been overtaken by events. Within weeks of being issued in February, the updated economic and financial outlook from Treasury predicting that Australia would avoid recession looked heroic, bordering on ludicrous. Of course, it's almost certain that these forecasts were based on assumptions chosen to accentuate the positive. The last thing the central bankers or the econocrats want to do is undermine public confidence by predicting a recession until it would be utterly implausible not to.

Silver breaks out...



Mitch Hooke is a boso spruiker not to be taken seriously... the hyperbolic dimple will say anything,imo
The mining industry has released modelling saying 23,500 jobs will be lost by 2020 under the Federal Government's emissions trading scheme.
Around half the job losses are forecast to be in Queensland's coal industry, and Minerals Council head Mitch Hooke says those figures will multiply in the future, with job losses doubling by 2030."New South Wales would be the second highest level of job losses - a bit over 4,000 direct jobs [lost]," he said."Put a multiplier on that and you can see these figures really start to become quite significant."

He says one of the fundamental failures of Australia's emissions trading scheme is that its targets are far ahead of other countries. (Liar, liar, pants on fire Mitch...)

Hey Mitch, how many job losses in agriculture and tourism under this senario.....

Now, the MIT study has been published in a peer-reviewed journal -- The American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate (subs. req'd) -- which obviously it makes it much more credible and high-profile. Reuters has a good story on it, "Global warming could be twice as bad as forecast." The study concludes:
The MIT Integrated Global System Model is used to make probabilistic projections of climate change from 1861 to 2100. Since the model's first projections were published in 2003 substantial improvements have been made to the model and improved estimates of the probability distributions of uncertain input parameters have become available. The new projections are considerably warmer than the 2003 projections, e.g., the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.2°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study. Many changes contribute to the stronger warming; among the more important ones are taking into account the cooling in the second half of the 20th century due to volcanic eruptions for input parameter estimation and a more sophisticated method for projecting GDP growth which eliminated many low emission scenarios.

[Note: That rise is compared to 1981-2000 temperature levels. So you can add at least 0.5 °C and 1.0 °F for comparison with pre-industrial temperatures, which I did in the headline -- see "A (Hopefully) Clarifying Note on Temperature."]

The MIT press release calls for "rapid and massive" action to avoid this. Study co-author Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the Joint Program and director of MIT's Center for Global Change Science, says, it is important "to base our opinions and policies on the peer-reviewed science... There's no way the world can or should take these risks." Duh!

Global warming will hit us so quickly and dramatically going forward that idiots like Mitch will carry the shame of their denial for the rest of their lives round their necks like a dead albatros...

Standard Chartered say buy Gold Silver...

Standard Chartered is including gold and silver as one of four main recommendations to its private banking clients, according to a presentation by chief investment strategist, Lim Say Boon, in Dubai today.

The UK’s second largest bank by market capitalization has been winning clients in a flight to quality from its crashing rivals, and this global trend has also been evident in the Middle East.

Clients are being recommended to purchase gold and silver on price pull backs as the precious metals have a low correlation to traditional asset classes. The bank will recommend on different ways to invest in the metals.

Stem Cells Cut AIDS Virus in Patient, Ending Need for Drugs

Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) -- A German AIDS patient was able to stop drugs he had been taking for 10 years after getting a transplant of stem cells from a donor with a rare gene variant known to resist the deadly disease. The transplant also cured his leukemia, researchers reported.

The stem cell donor was among the 1 percent of Caucasians who have the variant gene that lacks a section known as CCR5 that helps the AIDS virus enter a cell, according to a report today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Doctors in Berlin hoped that putting the donor’s stem cells in the patient would rebuild his immune system and blood cells so they would lack the CCR5 piece.

The results of the experiment may point researchers to a new way of controlling the AIDS virus HIV that doesn’t force patients to take drugs for the rest of their lives. Scientists will now intensify their search for therapies that achieve the same effect, predicted Jay Levy, a University of California, San Francisco, AIDS researcher.

“I think this article is going to stimulate a lot of companies to put more emphasis on gene therapy,” Levy said yesterday in a telephone interview. He wasn’t involved in the research and wrote an editorial published today that accompanied the study.

One such trial sponsored by Sangamo Biosciences of Richmond, California, recently began at the University of Pennsylvania. It will test a gene therapy that aims to modify the immune cells in 12 patients infected with HIV so they lack the CCR5 receptor.

Right Track

Reports about the successful treatment of the German patient presented at a medical meeting last year bolstered the company’s belief that they were on the right track, said Elizabeth Wolffe, a Sangamo spokeswoman.

“The fact that you could put back into the patient CCR5- deficient cells and have those cells work to clear the virus -- that gave us a lot of confidence,” she said in a telephone interview yesterday.

The 40-year-old patient described in today’s journal report had been treated in Germany with antiviral drugs for 10 years, since his HIV infection was diagnosed. In July 2006, he developed leukemia and was given chemotherapy in an effort to eradicate the cancer.

While the chemotherapy controlled the blood cancer, it also made him ill, causing liver and kidney failure, said Gero Hutter, a hematologist at Benjamin Franklin Hospital in Berlin who led his treatment and was co-author of the report. When doctors halted his antiviral drugs, his levels of the AIDS virus spiked until he resumed taking them after a few weeks.

Replacing Cells

After a few more months went by, his leukemia returned and doctors decided to try a stem cell transplant, a risky procedure that kills nearly a third of patients. They figured that as long as they were doing a transplant, they might as well look for a donor who didn’t have the key section of CCR5.

“Our thinking was that if we do this and replace his immune system with cells that are resistant to HIV, we can do two things at once” by stopping his leukemia and his HIV infection, Hutter said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Stem cells from bone marrow, which are also found in circulating blood, have the ability to form blood cells including the white blood cells that fight infection. These are the cells that are attacked by the virus, crippling patients’ immune systems.

Hutter and his colleagues scanned the genomes of 60 potential donors and found one who lacked the CCR5 section. The day after they transfused the donor’s stem cells into the patient, they stopped the antiviral therapy that had suppressed his HIV levels.

‘No Rebound’

“There’s been no rebound of HIV,” Hutter said. “Now, two years after transplantation, we can’t find any HIV in this patient.”

Hutter also said that gene therapy experiments that try to achieve the same goal of inactivating CCR5 hold promise. While the stem cell transplant is too risky to try in most AIDS patients, there may be some who are so sick that it would be worth the danger. First, he said, it should be tried in another patient with both AIDS and leukemia.

When people missing this gene fragment get infected with HIV, they don’t usually develop AIDS symptoms or produce large amounts of the virus.

One drug on the market, Pfizer’s Selzentry, is designed to block the CCR5 receptor so the AIDS virus can’t enter healthy cells. While the drug helps some patients, it must be used with other medications and doesn’t keep the virus from sneaking in.