Or “Why am I standing in this election?”
My grandsons will be young men in 20 years’ time. At the current rate of climate change, I fear for their safety. Will there be enough water for them to live here in Australia? Will there be enough food? Will they have jobs or will the economy have been shattered by catastrophe like New Orleans? Will millions of refugees from low lying lands in Asia and the Pacific swamp our fragile continent? Will wars break out over access to water and land?
It all adds up to the big question: Will my family survive Climate Change?
I realise – looking at these two little boys – that I won’t be of much help to them if the wheels really fall off. So I am doing what I can do about it right now, while I can.
That’s why I am standing as a candidate for the Electorate of Parkes in the upcoming Federal Election. I am standing to set a fire inside people like you, to make you feel the danger and the urgency of this threat.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS LIKE WAR!
Climate change is not an environmental issue. It is not even an issue. It is the issue. It is like war – it effects everything we do and hope to do in our lives. Like a war, there will be casualties. The first we are seeing are the farmers relying on our disappearing river systems for their living. And the farmers being dispossessed by woody weed invasion in the far west. Consumers will feel the pinch soon when food prices go up. More towns will be flooded like Newcastle. More bushfires will destroy homes. More electrical storms will cause havoc. Entire species of fish will disappear from the market. New diseases will appear: Ross River Fever is coming south. Cane toads are coming south. There are predictions that old diseases like scarlet fever and diptheria will reappear. And this is only the mild version of Climate Change.
IS CLIMATE CHANGE REAL OR A MYTH?
But how likely is all this? Many scientists (and people who describe themselves as scientists) say Global Warming is a myth. They say that all these extreme weather events – melting ice caps, chronic drought, seasons coming 2 weeks early, massive flooding in Asia, catastrophic bushfires in Greece, coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef – are normal. These people are called “sceptics”. Many people believe them, especially in the bush. Farm journals feature ‘sceptics’ as regular columnists in their pages. Regional radio presents them as experts. I once heard an expert from the University of Newcastle say “Tim Flannery doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Who are the sceptics being sceptical of? The biggest group of scientists ever assembled by the nations of the world – 2500 of them – agree that climate change is real, that it is caused by us, and mainly by burning fossil fuels. They have been appointed by their governments to work together in a United Nations body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These scientists are all experts in climate change, up-to-date and working in their fields, and their scientific papers appear in peer-reviewed journals. They are respected by their scientific colleagues.
The ‘sceptics’ have been discredited by a series of investigations into their activities.(1) The scientists they quote are usually not climate change specialists, many of them are retired, most do not have recently published papers in legitimate, peer-reviewed scientific journals, and few of them are highly regarded by their scientific colleagues. The journals that accept their papers have been established by sceptics to give their fellow sceptics a place to be published. (2)
Sceptics do not debate the science with the climate scientists directly, by publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals or participating in international conferences on climate science. Instead, they focus their attention on the media, the general public, and politicians with the goal of delaying action on climate change
Do many legitimate scientists support the sceptics? One study examined every article on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals over a 10-year period. Of the 928 articles on climate change the authors found, not one of them disagreed with the consensus position that climate change is happening or is human-induced.
As they do in the USA, local sceptics have formed a series of inter-linked front organizations to give the appearance that theirs is a grassroots movement. In Australia these groups include the Australian Environment Foundation, the Lavoisier Group, the Carbon Sense Coalition, and the Institute of Public Affairs.
SCEPTICS FUNDED BY BIG EMITTERS
Worldwide, the sceptics front groups have been financed by the big CO2 emitters, notably Exxon Mobil. Their aim is to create doubt about the science of Climate Change. They succeeded: President Bush and PM Howard used the argument “uncertainty about the science” to justify walking away from the Kyoto solution that the rest of the world has chosen to follow. This action sabotaged the global response to climate change and delayed serious action by at least a decade. The ‘confusion’ strategy was developed by an American PR firm employed by Exxon Mobil. (3)
A documentary called The Denial Machine identified several ‘scientists’ who were hired to create uncertainty about the link between tobacco and cancer and the cancer risk with asbestos. The same names are now prominent in the attack on the link between CO2 and global warming.
Finally, sceptics dismiss the 2500 IPCC scientists and their findings, charging them with cooking the books and faking their results because they want to keep their high-paying jobs and climate change is paying the bills. This is an astonishing attack on the integrity of these scientists. Sceptics accuse Al Gore of being only in it for the money. (4)
WHAT IF THE SCEPTICS ARE RIGHT?
What if the 2500 scientists are wrong? What is the worst that can happen if Climate Change is a myth and the sceptics are right? The world will spend a lot of money on a problem that doesn’t exist. Britain’s chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern (and former Governor of the Reserve Bank) estimated that if we move quickly, the cost of action would reduce worldwide GDP 2%-3%. At worst it could spark a worldwide economic collapse like the Great Depression. Horrible.
WHAT IF THE SCEPTICS ARE WRONG?
But what if the sceptics are wrong and we act on their advice and do nothing? What is the worst that can happen? Imagine Sydney slammed by a Hurricane Katrina and reduced to a wasteland like New Orleans. The Newcastle Floods. The Death of the Murray Darling. Climate change will not simply make it hotter or dryer. It can destroy the foundations of civil society. The transport system, the police service, the emergency services system, the health system, the food distribution system, the water supply… things we take for granted can be stripped away in an instant.
For my money, I would rather look a bit silly if climate change suddenly sorts itself out. The odds of it being a threat to our way of life, to world peace, and to the future safety and wellbeing of our children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren are too great – even at 50:50 – for me to sit by and let it happen.
WHAT WILL THE CLIMATE CHANGE COALITION DO FOR YOU?
The Climate Change Coalition has three jobs it wants to do for you if we are elected to Parliament:
1. We will be the voice of urgency, ringing the bell and keeping the issue in the faces of our leaders.
2. We will inspect every piece of legislation and government plan to see where it could be harnessed to the war on climate change.
3. We will act as a resource for others wanting to take part in the waron climate change.
We are all in this together. We each of us have a responsibility to the future, to do what we ca to protect those who are not yet born. They will inherit our legacy. You will decide what that legacy will be by the decisions you make.
Decide. Vote 1 Climate Change Coalition
FOOTNOTES:
(1) “The Denial Machine”, ABC's 4 Corners, (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) 26/2/2007, "The Greenhouse Mafia", ABC 4Corners, 13 February, 2006, Clive Hamilton, “Scorcher”, Black Inc., 2007, Guy Pearce, “High & Dry”, Viking, 2007
(2) These include journals with legitimate-sounding names like Energy & Environment, Climate Change, and World Climate Review (which became World Climate Report) which was funded by the coal industry.
(3) The Royal Academy of Science wrote to Exxon Mobil to formally request that it cease financing these denialist organizations which are undermining public confidence in the scientific community. This is the first time in history the Academy has done such a thing.
(4) One respectable gentleman who heads a sceptics organization called Al a ‘charlatan’, most unbecoming language coming from someone who objected to my revealing on a blogsite that he has a background in the mining industry – a very relevant fact given his climate change views – complaining that it was bad manners.
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