Author: drmarchudson

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Australia Denial International processes IPCC

August 30, 1990 -Australian diplomats (probably) tried to water down IPCC recommendations

On this day August 30 1990, the IPCC’s meeting in Sundsvall, Sweden featured attempts by the USA and Australia to water down policy findings.

The IPCC had been set up in 1988, in part to stop climate scientists being too independent and making a repeat of what happened over ozone less likely (The Reagan Administration had felt ‘bounced’).  It had delivered its first report ahead of the Second World Climate Conference (which had been pushed back a few months so that it could also serve as the starting point for international negotiations for the impending climate treaty).

Some nations (but not – at this point – Australia) had said, with varying degrees of sincerity/seriousness, that they would try to cut their emissions by 20 per cent by 2005. This target had been agreed at a conference in June 1988, and so was known as the “Toronto Target” (Some NGOs at Toronto had been pitching even higher, btw).

The Australian Federal Labor Government was wrestling over this – The previous Environment Minister, Graham Richardson, had lost a Cabinet battle over it in May 1989.  HIs successor, Roz Kelly, was still trying to get it through, in the face of opposition – e..g.  A “Labor Party’s caucus primary industries and resources committee report, [chaired by] Brian Courtice (Qld). The report said the Government had been conned by green groups and would risk future electoral success if it continued to “appease” them.”

So, anyway, against that backdrop, this is entertaining – 

“Mrs Kelly said reports last week that the Australian delegation to the International Panel on Climate Change in Sweden [IPCC 4th Session SUNDSVALL 27-30 August 1990] had supported moves by the United States to water down its policy findings were being investigated. The delegates had been told before leaving for the meeting to support the Toronto targets.”

Seidel, Helen (4 September 1990). “Emissions target a hard sell for Kelly”. The Canberra Times.

My Conversation piece about the Sundsvall meeting here.

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 353 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

There are no “pure” processes from which we fall. Everything is messy, contested. Organisations (states, corporations etc) defend their interests, try to shape narratives.

What happened next?

A weak weak treaty was agreed in 1992.

Since 1990, human emissions have gone up by about 67% per cent. The age of consequences is here for some (ironically mostly those least to blame) and is imminent for everyone.

Categories
Australia

August 29, 1990 – The Australian mining and forestry industries threaten to spit the dummy

On this day, August 29, 1990, the Australian mining and forestry industries – so long accustomed to freezing the greenies out of policymaking forums, had a tantrum.

“The mining and forestry industries last night threatened to pull out of the Government’s sustainable development consultations unless the Prime Minister, Mr Hawke, repudiated highly critical comments by the Minister for the Environment, Mrs Kelly.

In a speech to the Fabian Society last night, Mrs Kelly attacked the Australian Mining Industry Council and the National Association of Forest Industries for their views on sustainable development.

Mrs Kelly said AMIC’s idea of a sustainable industry was “one in which miners can mine where they like, for however long they want. It is about, for them, sustaining profits and increasing access to all parts of Australia they feel could be minerally profitable even if it is of environmental or cultural significance”.”

Garran, R. 1990. Mining, forestry groups threaten to leave talks. Australian Financial Review, 30 August.

On this day the ppm was  353 ppm.  Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

Sometimes, for reasons to do with public pressure, the normally closed shop of government (politicians and civil servants) and industry is prised open, briefly… It doesn’t last, and it rarely ends well…

What happened next?

The Ecologically Sustainable Development Process ended up happening, and some decent suggestions got put forward by various green groups, especially folks from the Australian Conservation Foundation. And it all got filed in the “circular file” thanks to the next Prime Minister, Paul  Keating, and Federal bureaucrats (see earlier post this month!). Turns out the state is not a wise neutral arbiter. Who knew…

Categories
Denial

August 28, 1971 – snarky opinion piece in New York Times. Stephen Schneider rebuts days later.

On this day , August 28, 1971, a snarky opinion piece appeared in the New York Times, written by an oil lobbyist called Eugene Guccione (not the Penthouse guy!).  It ran with the now-all-too-familiar sneers and (deliberate?) misunderstandings of what was being said.

A few days later, scientist Stephen Schneider wrote a good rebuttal, his first ever letter to a newspaper.

There’s a very good piece on this in Real Climate by Gavin Schmidt.

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 325.43 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

The ignorance, complacency and motivated reasoning? Goes way back,

What happened next?

Schneider spent the rest of his life being very very sound on climate change. A mensch.

Categories
Fossil fuels

 August 27, 1859 – The Oil Age begins. UPDATED TO BE a) accurate b) less Eurocentric

UPDATE – Drake was not the beginning. Two years previously, some Romaninans had been at it in the city of Ploiesti (h/t to Jonathan Schofield – @schofield).

Meanwhile, as @AmitavGhosh has pointed out

Wikipedia here – “home to one of the world’s oldest petroleum industries, with its first crude oil exports dating back to 1853”

But that’s only crude oil exports. You’ve also got this.

Yenangyaung (or Yenan Chaung) can be translated as ‘creek of stinking water’ and the fact that ‘yenan’ became the Burmese word for ‘oil’ gives a clue to what those early travellers witnessed. In 1755 George Baker and John North en route to King Alaungpaya’s capital, Shwebo, found “about 200 families who are chiefly employed in getting Earth-oil out of Pitts (sic)”. Forty years later, in 1795-96, Major Michael Symes was leading a delegation from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava at Amarapura and gave a more detailed account of the Yenangyaung riverside export point:

“…the celebrated wells of Petroleum which supply the whole empire (of Ava) and many parts of India, with that useful product were five miles to the east of this place….The mouth of the creek was crowded with large boats waiting to receive a lading of oil, and immense pyramids of earthen jars were raised in and around the village… The smell of oil was extremely offensive. We saw several thousand jars filled with it ranged along the bank. Some of these were continually breaking, and the contents mingling with the sand…”

When (not if) I get things wrong

a) please tell me

b) I will correct the record, without pretending I didn’t make the mitake.

On this day, August 27 in 1859 “Colonel” Drake hit oil

The Drake Well is a 69.5-foot-deep (21.2 m) oil well in Cherrytree Township, Venango County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, the success of which sparked the first oil boom in the United States. The well is the centerpiece of the Drake Well Museum located 3 miles (5 km) south of Titusville.

Drilled by Edwin Drake in 1859, along the banks of Oil Creek, it is the first commercial oil well in the United States.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Well

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 286 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

The oil age begins… We have been doing this a long time.

What happened next?

You are living it.

Categories
Activism United Kingdom

August 26, 2006 – First “Climate Camp” begins

On this day, 26 August 2006, after many months of planning the first “Camp for Climate Action” begins, near Drax Power Station, in Yorkshire.

However, we now know that the police let it happen as a “wave through”. Given how many undercovers there were (just the ones we know about!) they could have stopped this if they’d wanted to. They didn’t, because they didn’t want to. Too many opportunities to track who got involved. A honey pot. And here we are.

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 380.6 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

We mustn’t forget previous resistance, or what happened to it. Hell, we might even learn something from it, and not make exactly the same mistakes, over and over again.

What happened next?

Climate Camp kept having annual camps for a few years, and then imploded.

Climate camps happened in other countries, for a whiile.

Categories
United States of America

August 25, 1970 – Margaret Mead and James Baldwin rap on race…

On the evening of August 25, 1970,

“Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901–November 15, 1978) and James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) sat together on a stage in New York City for a remarkable public conversation about such enduring concerns as identity, power and privilege, race and gender, beauty, religion, justice, and the relationship between the intellect and the imagination.” https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/19/a-rap-on-race-margaret-mead-and-james-baldwin/

Here’s the pdf – https://archive.org/details/raponrace0000mead

This only tangentially has much to do with climate change, but Mead and Baldwin are both stone-cold geniuses, so indulge me here.

Mead was part of Roger Revelle’s subgroup about the atmosphere for President Johnson’s science advisory committee in 1964.

Baldwin? Stone cold genius, on so many issues. Key quote – ”Not everything that is faced can be dealt with, but nothing can be dealt with until it is faced.”

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 324.69 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

If we don’t want to listen to the smartest among us, then what is the point?

What happened next?

Mead would go on to co-chair the 1975 ‘Endangered Atmosphere’ conference with Stephen Schneider, that has the denialists all aerated [see here].

Categories
Denial Industry Associations International processes United States of America

August 24, 1994 – first signs of a split in the anti-climate action business coalition…

On this day, August 24th, in 1994 the first signs of a split in the business opposition to climate action appeared.

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 357.59 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

“An additional factor was the splintering of industrial interests. The Global Climate Coalition and the Climate Council had been the main industry participants in the INC, representing mainly coal and oil interests. However, a development within INC 10 was the emergence of an industry lobby in favour of the convention’s further C02 reductions (ECO, 24 August 1994: 4; 26 August, 1994: 1). There was now a wide coalition of industrial interests favouring action on climate change. One consisted of parts of the insurance industry, scared of losses from freak weather (and whose interests have been forwarded, interestingly, by Greenpeace). Another was the ‘sunrise industries’ of renewables and energy efficiency. Yet another was the gas industry. 

Matthew Paterson 1996 page 194

Why this matters. 

Splits in the previously united church/state/business sector are part of ‘how things change’ if you believe all that dialectic stuff. It’s immaterial now though, given how the atmospheric concentrations have climbed, will climb…

What happened next?

A few re-insurers turned up for a day at the COP1 meeting in Berlin the following year, but were of course outnumbered, outgunned and outfought by the fossil lobbyists. (See Jeremy Leggett’s “The Carbon War” for an account of this).

Then, in 1997, BP became the first sizeable defector from the Global Climate Coalition. Now actual outright denial is relatively rare. But resistance to appropriate action continues…

Categories
Science United States of America

August 23, 1856 –  Eunice Foote identifies carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas

On this day in 1856 American scientist and women’s rights campaigner Eunice Foote illustrated her findings in a paper entitled, “Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays,” which was accepted at the eighth annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting on August 23, 1856 in Albany, NY. Back in the day, what we now call carbon dioxide was known as carbonic acid…

See Alice Bell’s “Our Biggest Experiment” for more about Foote, and also the wikipedia entry linked to above…

On this day the atmospheric carbon dioxide was 285 ppm (see here).  Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.

As David Morrow usefully notes

“You can read more about the significance of Foote’s research in Raymond Sorenson’s 2011 article on Foote’s research and his 2018 addendum to it, as well as in Leila McNeill’s 2016 article on Foote’s discovery in Smithsonian Magazine.”

Why this matters. 

An interesting foote-note? (sorry, it was there, had to use it). Good for thinking with around (lack of) opportunities for women/amateurs.

What happened next?

John Tyndall wrote about this a few years later. Had he seen Foote’s work? We will never know. Maybe. Probably.

Categories
Ignored Warnings

August 22, 1981 – New York Times front page story costs #climate scientists their jobs.

On this day, August 22, 1981 the New York Times had a front page story about climate change. Written by its legendary science writer Walter Sullivan, it began

STUDY FINDS WARMING TREND THAT COULD RAISE SEA LEVELS

A team of Federal scientists says it has detected an overall warming trend in the earth’s atmosphere extending back to the year 1880. They regard this as evidence of the validity of the ”greenhouse” effect, in which increasing amounts of carbon dioxide cause steady temperature increases.

The seven atmospheric scientists predict a global warming of ”almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century. It might even be sufficient to melt and dislodge the ice cover of West Antarctica, they say, eventually leading to a worldwide rise of 15 to 20 feet in the sea level. In that case, they say, it would ”flood 25 percent of Louisiana and Florida, 10 percent of New Jersey and many other lowlands throughout the world” within a century or less.

It was based on a study by James Hansen. Hansen’s unit was punished by having Department of Energy funding pulled – 5 people lose their jobs  (See Bowen Censoring Science page 212)

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 338.48 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

Scientists getting punished for reporting the facts. Always a good look, eh? Never ever sends a chilling message.

What happened next?

Hansen and others kept going. That’s what good scientists do. By 1985, they realised shit was about to get real.

Categories
Australia Climate Justice

August 22, 1988 – scientists say “Australia, expect #climate refugees”

On this day, August 22, 1988, two Australian scientists warned that eventually Australia might need to take in Pacific islanders whose homes had disappeared under the waves.

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 350.49 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

Australia may need to take in a wave of environmental refugees from coral atolls in the Pacific and Indian oceans, according to two scientists.

The islands’ inhabitants face being displaced by a likely rise in sea level due to the greenhouse effect, they say.

The prospect was raised yesterday at the 26th Congress of International Geographical Union in Sydney by Dr Peter Roy, of the NSW Department of Mineral Resources, and Dr John Connell, of the University of Sydney.

Quiddington, P. 1988. Scientists warn of islands’ peril. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 August

Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans mentioned this sort of thing. Did nowt significant, but it came up in at least one of his speeches, iirc.

Why this matters. 

The levels of injustice, the harm caused to future generations. It’s just mind-boggling.

What happened next?

Australia has basically continued to shit on everyone’s future.