David Spratt on rallies and four degrees of warming Part2

In his second interview with BZE's Vivien Langford, David Spratt talks about the Four Degrees of Warming Conference and describes what Australia would look like if our climate was four degrees warmer.

BZE interviews David Spratt

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Vivian: Welcome back. This is the Beyond Zero Emissions show or radio 3CR. Our guest is the author, and the intellectual David Spratt. He wrote a fine article for the recent climate summit magazine called Talk Climate, and it’s all about what the world would be like if we let the runaway climate change warm us by 4 degrees.

So David, welcome back. Could you just with start with telling us what the normal temperature of this planet is, consistent with life as we know it?

David Spratt: Well, as you know, the temperature of the planet has gone up and down over hundreds and millions of years, but what I think we have to understand now, is that for the last million years, we’ve been through colder periods, the ice age dropped down to 4-5 degrees below now, and obviously humans and the natural world in terms of bio-diversities had to move closer to the equator as the poles got colder and frozen out, but we really haven’t been more than about probably not much warmer in the last million years, which is the history of the human species as we are now. So if the temperature goes up any further, we really are in a new ball game, and asking people to live in a world, that collectively they haven’t experienced.

And if you look at the failure of Copenhagen and other places, there’s a couple of really interesting websites perhaps the best is climate interactive http://climateinteractive.org/ which people will quickly Google climate interactive.

On there they have a scoreboard, where they take all the promises that governments have made around the world so far, and say, if all these promise actions for mitigations occur, and they are not that great, we find that the mid point is, that even if they promise has been made, we would be 4 degrees warmer than for pre-industrial, or about 3.5 degrees warmer than now by 2100. So that’s a fairly frightening prospect. And therefore its important to start thinking and understanding and educating people what 4 degrees means, because it should be very sobering and it should make people think again about how much we are prepared to do, and how quickly we are prepared to act. So that’s the basis of 4 degrees issue.

It had its first conference in Oxford 2 years ago in 2009, and next week in Australia, from 12th-14th at Melbourne University there’s an Australian version of the 4 degrees conference. We get the big picture, but we also get the impacts and what Australia would look like, how and where we would live, and what the natural world would look like if it was 4 degrees warmer.

Vivian: David, let’s just talk of imagery then, on the cover of your book Climate Code Red, you’ve got a polar bear on a little ice flow. Well, that’s one image, polar bears, we have had that the last few years with all of that, with the frost melting…

David Spratt: In the arctic….

Vivian: Yes, that’s a big image in my mind. The one I have in my mind. The one that comes to my mind is the Amazon, which is a place I actually saw when I was young, in my mind I can see the vastness of it….

David Spratt: 4 degrees there wouldn’t be an Amazon…

Vivian: No…

David Spratt: as we know it. For people that want to have a look, we put out a little primer called 4 Degrees Hotter, it can be found on the climate action website.

And in there we have maps they’ve done where the models have ran out to have a look at the temperature, and also what would happen to precipitation in a 4 degree warmer world, and those maps for various reasons perhaps outside of the poles, the greatest area of warming is over the Amazon. Less rain, and a lot hotter, a lot more than 4 degrees, and it would certainly bring the Amazon rainforest as we know it crashing down.

When you get warmer, you get drought and fire, and it would come back as a much drier form of forest rather than a rain forest. I think enough research has been done to show that to be the long term prospect if it gets so hot.

Vivian: And what image comes to your mind? What sort of….

David Spratt: Oh look, I think as Australia, at 4 degrees warmer, we know several things. Basically the Murray-Darling system, will be dry, there will be no agriculture throughout there. We are less than a degree away from acidification of warming levels that would take out the Barrier Reef.

We know that certainly up for 1 or probably 2 metre sea level rise and Kakadu will selenate, and because it’s so low and it runs out to sea, with these surges of less than one metre, what my question is so, if it was 4 degrees warmer in Australia, where and how would we live?, and where and how would we grow crops? And that is one if the reasons I want to go to the conference, because guess looking at it, and what people have to understand, is at 4 degrees of global warming on average, warming is less over the oceans, because they have greater capacity to draw down heat, and it’s hotter over the continents, so a 4 degrees warmer world, is 4-6 degrees warmer over land, and about 2 degrees or so over oceans, so we are talking 5-6 degrees over Australia, not 2.

And my guess where you could live would be in Tasmania, and probably the coast from Brisbane, around to Adelaide. That is without a permanent air conditioner, an2d a desalination plant, we have enough technology to live in a bubble I guess, including the middle of the Sahara.

Practically speaking, I think we’re talking about simply not living inland, because it will be too hot and too dry, and I think we are talking about just living on the coast and in Tasmania. And it’s one of the frightening things that we have to come to grips with is.

The principal guest at the 4 degrees conference next week is a bloke called Dr. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber who is head of the Potsdan Institute in Germany, a really well known climate institute; he’s been adviser to the EU, and adviser to Angela Merkel, probably the most pre-eminent climate scientist in Europe.

And 2 years ago he gave a presentation, and said that if the world gets 4 degrees warmer, he thinks the carrying capacity for the planet is less than 1 billion people, out of a population of about 7 billion…

Vivian: And plus other species too, it would be a massive extinction, wouldn’t it?...

David Spratt: We are talking about the temperate bands moving towards the poles moving very quickly. We know that technically the tropical region has already expanded south and north, and means the tropical region by counting species and so on, but 4 degrees this century, the rate of change would be such most species would have trouble shifting to the poles quick enough.

So this is not a happy story, and it’s a sobering reminder as to where an action has led us, and why there is the need for very radical, strong, large scale action. It really underlay’s the case for building the zero emissions economy.

Vivian: Exactly. Well as you say, we have to face it, and Australia at the moment as you said, are offering 5% reductions with the carbon tax, and you say this is a sorry suicide note?...

David Spratt: You have to say 5 out of 100 isn’t a pass score is it?

Vivian: God no. Give us some hope David, on the international level you read all the articles, and I know you funnel information all the time. Where do you see some signs of hope in the international, big countries, like China, and America? What are they offering?

David Spratt: Look some people have been doing it, if you look at Taiwan, South Korea, and China, and Germany in Northern Europe, they are doing this. They are not waiting for the rest of the world.

Vivian: Just tell us in some detail. Like South Korea, I know they are pretty….

David Spratt: Well look if any just look at their case, when the global financial crisis came along 2 or 3 years ago, and various governments came with stimulus packages, to pour money back in, most countries put 10, 20 even up to 30% packages in to climate related things, like in Australia we had the pink batts fiasco, which wasn’t a really good policy choice.

In places like South Korea, they put 75-80% into their packages directly into climate measures, so they really connected the global financial crisis, and the real need for spending it on this issue, so I think that was really encouraging.

I think that all the work has been showing how quickly the cost of renewable is coming down, and there is a lot of work particularly on, I was just reading on the weekend about PV solar panels because of the tech changes is really happening really quickly, and even some big companies, like GE, are talking about PV becoming parity with coal within 5 years or so.

I think that rate of innovation and scale up is really important in really changing the technological foundations of this and, as that happens the money will go where the profits are to be made, whether we like it or not.

So I think that’s a really good news story, and there are a lot of people, Schellnhuber who is coming out here, who advises Angela Merkel, and she’s pretty up on this issue, and really pushing hard. If people get the chance to hear him, and I guess it will be on their website afterwards. He is a very challenging, and up and avid speaker.

Vivian: Well we will perhaps be able to report on what he says…

David Spratt: Sure, and for people who are in Melbourne, he is giving a public lecture…

Vivian: that’s right…

David Spratt: the 12th of July at Melbourne University. People can check on their website, just need to google 4 degrees 2011 and I think that’s what the websites called. There is a public lecture on the Tuesday night, click on that, and get one of those free online tickets, so I think Ross Garnow is doing a free lecture the following night, so for people that can’t get there during the day, or afford the fees, there are 2 good public events two nights in a row.

Vivian: Fantastic. Okay David, so the renewable are building up and prices going down, and all of that, but what about fossil fuels? Because I had a speaker just the other day, we had a whole program on gas, and apparently we are poised on a boom in gas, and coal’s still pumping out.

David Spratt: One of the brutal facts is, that we have got a whole lot of infrastructure, and a whole lot of money, and a whole lot of companies who get their share dividends on capital that simply has to be scrapped.

And some of it has to be stranded, which means it is going to have to be closed down before its normal working life is out. Because if we just let all the fossil fuel infrastructure just runs out until its working life has ended, it’s not going to be a good story.

It’s very challenging because, we have a government in the system that thinks the market is supreme, and makes great decisions all the time, and the market can produce the change we want, and I am not convinced that it is. And I think that we really have to talk about closing down that sort of capital whether they like it or not.

We would be damned if we have, for example, the air travel industry we do, and a zero emissions economy. It’s just not sustainable. And I think what’s difficult for people, that if we leave it to the market we will get the transition that we need, and I really do believe a great deal of government intervention in support of renewable, and base-load renewable and closing down fossil fuel has to be done. The notion that fair politics and economy will solve this is something I just can’t conceive of happening.

Vivian: No. And people talk about after the second world war the American economy stopped producing civilian vehicles and turned it all to making tanks, it was with the co-operation of business and governments. It’s possible isn’t it?

David Spratt: Well if you’ve got a big problem and you really want to solve it you can. That’s the lesson from the war economy. If a society, I mean there is a lot of planning and people still make good money, wages went up, because in fact the economy boomed because a lot of the money is just borrowed, to fund the war through war bonds and so on.

The war economy shows that if you want to really solve a problem you can really get your head into the space of solving it, and not letting things get in the way of that, and that’s the positive part of those sort of stories. The war economy, the Japanese transformation, the Chinese transformation, the Asian tigers, not exactly great democratic models, but they show really rapid technological change at a large scale.

Vivian: And just for out last question, there was just something in the article you wrote for the climate summit about dissonance between what scientists say, and what governments seem to be hearing, and I think the real problem is that the government is not going to put us on a war time footing because they don’t seem to be seeming to get the message, and this conference, 4 degrees warming, these scientists, is there something wrong with the way they are projecting themselves, or what’s the problem?

David Spratt: I talked about dissonance, got interested in it, because there is obviously a gap between what needs to be done, and what is conceivably going to be done.

It’s the gap between the scientists saying we are heading for 4 degrees, and need to be under one degree, and the politicians through their lack of action we are heading towards 4 degrees.

So I think the gap between the science and the politics is getting bigger and bigger, and Schellnhuber is on the record as saying, that he thinks the political process doesn’t understand the problem, and he publically in the past has identified this as a key issue, they don’t understand, they don’t want to understand because the implications of what they need to do is a little uncomfortable.

And I think that is why conferences like this are so important, because there are going to be some high flyers there, and hopefully the penny will drop for a few more people, that the issue is different from the scientific realities and that is the gap that we have to overcome.

Vivian: The media is there too in giving it a serious go, and give it some serious coverage..

David Spratt: I am sure there will be some interviews on television and so on.

Vivian: Thank you very much David.

David Spratt: My pleasure.

Vivian: It was very nice to give your time to us, and thank you again for all of your articles coming out….

David Spratt: Well there are a lot of people in this movement.

Vivian: Well thank you.

David Spratt: Thanks Vivian. Bye.

Vivian: Bye.

transcript by Matthew