Tag: 2010

Categories
Arctic

January 11, 2010 – Bad news study about trees and the warming Arctic… 

 

Thirteen years ago, on this day, January 11, 2010 a report appeared about trees….

Contrary to scientists’ predictions that, as the Earth warms, the movement of trees into the Arctic will have only a local warming effect, UC Berkeley scientists modeling this scenario have found that replacing tundra with trees will melt sea ice and greatly enhance warming over the entire Arctic region.

Because trees are darker than the bare tundra, scientists previously have suggested that the northward expansion of trees might result in more absorption of sunlight and a consequent local warming.

Sanders,  R. (2010) .Trees invading warming Arctic will cause warming over entire region, study shows . Berkeley News, January 11.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 388.9ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.

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The context was, well, this is a predictable and predicted outcome.  Was it coming faster than expected (as many of the impacts have been)? Don’t know, and for my purposes, it doesn’t matter.

What I think we can learn from this

  1. Blah blah albedo and feedback loops blah blah.
  2. The world is changing, thanks to things we have started, are fully aware of and are so far unwilling/unable to stop. So it goes.

What happened next

Emissions kept climbing. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide kept climbing. It kept getting warmer.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

References

Sanders,  R. (2010) .Trees invading warming Arctic will cause warming over entire region, study shows . Berkeley News, January 11. https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/01/11/arctic_warming/

And this from 2022-The march of the Arctic trees and what it reveals about the climate crisis

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/the-march-of-the-arctic-trees-and-what-it-reveals-about-the-cli/13726420

Categories
Australia Carbon Pricing Economics of mitigation Politics

Jan 21 (2010) – The flub that sank a thousand policies #auspol

On this day, in 2010, – yes, another Australia one, but it “matters” –  Australian  Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, was caught out having to admit that his proposed “carbon pollution reduction scheme” was dead and that he was kicking the whole climate issue into the long legislative grass.

The CPRS was an insanely complex piece of legislation. Economist Ross Garnaut said of it in December 2008 that  “”Never in the history of Australian public finance has so much been given without public policy purpose, by so many, to so few,”“ – and that’s before the further watering down. Green groups had called it a give-away to the fossil fuel lobby, and the Green Party had refused to support it in parliament in late November 2009, meaning that it failed to become law.

Rudd was in Norwood, a leafy, and relatively affluent suburb of a large country town called Adelaide in South Australia.

As leader of the Australian Labor Party, Rudd had used climate change as a battering ram to differentiate himself from Prime Minister John Howard, and been elected to do something about the issue. As Prime Minister from late 2007, he had been playing chicken with the Liberal National Party, especially its leader Malcolm Turnbull, and had initially rejoiced when Turnbull was replaced by the dark horse (and subsequent wrecking ball) Tony Abbott. 

But the climate conference in December 2009 in Copenhagen didn’t go well. And in the aftermath, Rudd ignored the urging of senior Labour Party members to call a snap election on the question of climate policy, and then didn’t even come up with a plan B. So he was caught on the hop. We know all of this because the period is intensely reported in the battle of the memoirs. And I’d alert you to Philip Chubb’s Power Failure. Julia Gillard’s My Story, Paul Kelly’s Triumph and Demise. 


What happened next?  Australia entered a period of extreme volatility about climate change that  has brought down successive prime ministers and left the country with enormous policy failures around climate, energy, renewables, you name it. If Rudd had had the courage of his convictions, or even just taken on the Green Party idea of a temporary carbon tax while an Emissions Trading Scheme was devised/an election held, none of this needed to have happened. And here we are. 

Why this matters? Because I think you can make an argument that Australia’s confusion and cynicism about climate change and politics is directly related to Rudd’s failure to pursue the climate agenda to the ballot box again, if needs be.,

Rudd had enjoyed going on and on about climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation” (which it is). People believed him. Rudd’s popularity remained stratospheric. Then, when people decided that Rudd had been using climate as just another “positioning issue,” they felt cheated, betrayed, taken for fools. Rudd’s personal approval ratings took a massive hit. Climate was the only issue, but it certainly was the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

So if you, as a political leader, are going to use climate change as an issue, you better bring your A game and if your A game doesn’t work, you better switch to your B game, which is as good as your A game. And if you don’t, you will cause havoc. And it is now harder than in Rudd’s day, because everyone is cynical, everyone is kinda terrified, whether they can articulate it to themselves or not.