Dr. Peter Christoff talks about the "Four Degrees or More" conference in Melbourne

Beyond Zero's Vivien Langford speaks to Assiociate Professor in Environmental Studies, Peter Christoff about the "Four Degrees Or More" conference (12-14 July) and the list of great speakers that will be attending.

Peter Christoff interview

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Vivien: Peter Christoff is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Melbourne University and he has worked very hard to convene an international conference for 12th to 14th July. It’s the Four Degrees or More? Australia in a Hot World conference.

Thank you for joining us Peter. I’d like you to talk to us about something that was said at the Oxford conference of a similar name, the Four Degrees Conference, trying to confront us with the reality of all our present policies, that is, that they will lead to four degrees of warming. There was a Professor Kevin Anderson there. He said that politicians have the rhetoric of reducing the emissions, which sounds familiar, but in fact they are actually accepting a high probability of extremely dangerous climate change. So could you tell us what your response to that is.

Peter: Vivien, I was actually at the Oxford conference and I’ve got to say that one of the reasons that this conference is occurring in Melbourne is because of that experience. Now the thing about the Oxford conference in 2009 was that it occurred before the Copenhagen negotiations and at that stage everyone was thinking ‘oh look, this is just too extreme – we’re not going to go to four degrees – it’s just a fanciful look at an unachievable, fortunately unachievable, alternative future’ and then of course Copenhagen went the way in which it did.

So this conference in Australia became more urgent in the context of the outcomes of Copenhagen and Cancun, where we know, that with the agreements that are currently in place, the voluntary pledges countries have made, we will still hit a warming of about four degrees by the end of this century. This conference really was about just getting people to focus on the reality of climate policy, the real underlying implicit goal of climate policy, even though policy makers don’t understand it.

The point that Kevin Anderson was making at the Oxford conference was that there is really a vast gap between what policy makers understand themselves to be doing, operating incrementally, and what the science tells us is possible. So the real world is completely out of whack with policy and, if that was a threat before 2009 in Copenhagen, it’s an absolute and profound and dreadful reality at this point in time.

Vivien: The next question I want to ask you is about the economy. You have some economists there. Ever since I started learning about global warming I have thought that this is going to be a really great threat to capitalism. How can we go on with this huge amount of consumerism? All I can imagine myself is that we’d have to have a period of enormous austerity in order for the developing countries to just get to a point of sustainability. We should stop exporting coal in our case, Australia’s case, and help export renewable energy. From an economics point of view, you chose these speakers, what were trying to get at by choosing these particular economists?

Peter: Well just to let the listeners know, amongst the five who are coming out we have Schellnhuber who is probably the most important international speaker, talking about carbon budgets. So there’s the scientific version of economics, if you like.

In terms of economics we’ve got Ross Garnaut. The line that Ross would take would not be one that says that global capitalism is going to collapse as a result of what we need to do, to deal with climate change. But what he would say is that we have to radically decarbonise our economy. That may or not happen under capitalism but it’s certainly a massive imperative. So, in the short term, one would want to argue, I think, that in fact decarbonisation may create more jobs and more opportunities than not.

Inevitably, in terms of our use of material goods, and in particular the use of fossil fuels, our economies have to change radically and probably dematerialise. Whether the debate is about dematerialisation and the end of global capitalism, I think at this point in time we have to focus on decarbonisation and worry about the other bits later.

Vivien: Yes, we had a speaker earlier this year, Tony Kevin, who said we just need to keep the message very simple – decarbonise our economy – just keep it at that.

There are a lot of scientists at this conference and they will be talking about future patterns of disease, the risk projections that they can model, oceanic ecosystems, terrestrial ecosystems, impacts on agriculture. I think you’ve been working very hard to get such a wonderful array of people. Tell us what we can expect from these speakers.

Peter: It is quite an extraordinary program and I’m not saying that because it’s something I pulled together. I think that the interesting thing was that this was an idea that everyone responded to. So, on the program, for example, we’ve got Professor Hans Joachim Schellenhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and Professor Malte Meinshausen, who is one of the most eminent climate modellers, again from Potsdam. From Australia we’ve got Penny Whetton (CSIRO) and David Karoly (University of Melbourne), Kevin Hennessy (CSIRO) , Professor Lesley Hughes (Macquarie University) and Professor Ove Hoegh Guldberg (University of Queensland).

Vivien: Tell us what they’ll talk about. These names might not be familiar to people.

Peter: Well, Penny Whetton is the chief climate scientist at the CSIRO. David Karoly at Melbourne University in the Earth Sciences Department has been one of the most prominent climate scientists speaking out about this issue.

Lesley Hughes is an ecologist who is also a climate commissioner, as is Professor Will Steffen. So we’ve got a couple of climate commissioners there. Professor Ove Hoegh Guldberg is internationally renowned for his work on marine sciences.

The cast of scientists is absolutely stellar. They were all, not only willing but eager, to talk about the implications of what they saw policy leading us towards. For example, Ove Hoegh Guldberg is going to be talking about the implications of ocean acidification, sea level rise and ocean warming, for things like our iconic barrier reef, and the implications not only for ecosystems but also the more narrowly defined implications for human and economic systems, the likely collapse of tourism and the loss of a billion dollar industry.

Mark Howden from CSIRO is going to talk about the implications for agriculture and the very substantial transformation that will occur in mainland Australia under the four degrees scenario, effectively leading to the end of agriculture as we know it and possibly to issues with food security, so an utter transformation from the sort of expectations we have for life as usual in Australia.

Vivien: I want to make it a bit more graphic for the listeners, Peter. When we say four degrees of warming, it doesn’t actually sound very much unless you’ve been reading obsessively about it as I’m sure you have, and I have too in a way. When I think of four degrees’ warming I think about the Amazon rainforest, which I did see when I was young. I travelled there by boat and I keep it in my mind as a vast area of richness, almost like a fabled land. Much of it has been destroyed by deforestation since I was there but when I think about what would happen with four degrees’ warming, I think this place, which is the lungs of the world, would be almost wiped out and just turned into a dry scrubland. That’s my image. What image comes to your mind?

Peter: I think it’s very important to go from the dry statistics, the facts as they are told by scientists, to actually imagining and visualising the sort of consequences we are talking about here and to respond against those consequences. I spend a lot of my time going to the beach. I surf. I think a great deal about our coastal environment and I am particularly taken by the image of an up to seven metre sea level rise occurring as an inevitable consequence of this sort of temperature rise. It may not happen by the end of this century but if we get to four degrees, if we stabilise at four degrees, then we have locked in a very significant transformation of our coastal environment. So, the sort of summers that I think most of have enjoyed would be utterly transformed.

Similarly, we have lived through a decade of extraordinary drought. The last few years of that drought were particularly devastating for all of us, traumatic for all of us, including and because of the fires that we endured. The landscape that we’ll be living in will be one that is much more drought-prone and much more vulnerable to extreme events like major fires. So, we are going to be living in a landscape, in an Australia that will be vastly different from the one we experience at the moment, extremely different in terms of the coastal environment that we’re going to be operating with, very different in terms of our forests, in terms of our wildlife, in terms of our everyday experience of nature, even when it comes to our backyards in suburban Melbourne.

Vivien: Nick would like to ask you something, Peter.

Nick: Hi Peter. I was just thinking, as you were talking about visualising some of the changes, about something that really helped me with that. Someone years ago explained to me that the earth is a like a finely tuned, finely balanced machine. When I try to explain climate change to people who, for example, can’t understand why deforestation of the Amazon rainforest can have an impact on the climate, I have found that this is a very good analogy to use, that the earth’s climate is a finely tuned instrument and changes that we make can affect the climate.

Peter: I think that’s right. It’s also useful to use other images that I think we are extremely familiar with and attached to. The fact that we are now perilously poised to lose sea ice at the North Pole and significant melting of Greenland, and also the Antarctic, should give rise to us visualising transformation of those quite extraordinary wilderness landscapes and the transformation of environments and species that we have all grown up with. We all grow up with stories about polar bears and penguins and so on. The impact on wildlife, the impact on images of life as we know it, is going to be quite substantial.

Vivien: Peter, let’s talk about mitigation because you have some speakers talking about adaption and mitigation. First could you explain what the difference is.

Peter: Strictly speaking mitigation is about the reduction in emissions. Adaptation is about trying to accommodate to climate change, in other words to make ourselves more resilient and less vulnerable to the sorts of things that global warming is likely to deliver to us. Sometimes the two are actually measures that work together. So it’s possible for us to develop mitigation measures that are actually also good forms of adaption. An example is changing the types of cropping that we’re doing, growing crops that are more likely to be carbon sequestering than not. Some of these things work hand in hand.

Vivien: One of the measures we have talked about on this program with Clive Hamilton is geo-engineering. A lot of people don’t really know much about that. They think it’s a fairly benign thing but Clive Hamilton really frightened us with the thought of global cooling which could be done unilaterally. He said someone like Richard Branson could just get into seeding the clouds and creating a global cooling effect, ostensibly to get some time for us to get our emissions down. But maybe it would just be to keep business as usual. Do you think that’s an option that scientists are seriously talking about?

Peter: Even five years ago this was regarded as being in the realms of wacky science fiction. What is really alarming is the extent to which it has now become mainstream. There have been a couple of very important conferences overseas and some very important papers, including by the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, on this very issue. There are considerations about exactly what the implications are for a major geo-engineering exercise, such as seeding the oceans, or putting sulphates in the atmosphere, or mirrors in outer space, to think of some of the wilder and wackier ones. They have significant implications for existing treaties and existing forms of international cooperation.

The reality is that, the more we delay the sort of mitigation effort that we need to undertake, the more these options are going to have to be considered very seriously, if we actually still want to preserve some semblance of the climate that we are currently left with. Under those circumstances, there are really serious issues in terms of international cooperation, to make sure that individual nations, or even individuals, don’t start haring off and doing things which are unrestrained and in many senses possibly as dangerous as the things we are trying to avoid at this point in time.

Vivien: Yes, that’s what Clive Hamilton said.

Peter: It is a discussion that’s under way. I think, as with a lot of the discussion that occurs around climate science and climate policy, this is ramping up very quickly. I don’t think it’s simply something that people are ignoring or that’s under the radar at this stage. It’s now a very serious point of concern.

Vivien: One of the analogies that comes up is the second world war analogy. People say that four days after Pearl Harbor, the car industry was stopped and they had to switch to making tanks. Petrol was rationed and government and business all cooperated. Do you think that’s a helpful analogy? I feel that the scientists are talking and describing very detailed and very ethical scenarios for us to think about. But government’s just going with a simplistic view, not at all on that war footing. What do you think about that war analogy?

Peter: I don’t like the war analogy at all. One of the reasons I don’t like it is that it externalises climate change. It makes us think that climate change is an enemy ‘out there’ whereas in fact, as we all know, it’s very much the product of our own behaviour. That’s the first problem I have with it.

The second problem is that going to war really is the case of responding to a clear and immediate perceived threat. One of the problems with climate change is, while we know about it intellectually and sometimes sort of viscerally, it’s a distant threat. People still believe, most of us still believe, that it’s out there in the future and therefore that it’s a deferred possibility.

The third problem I have with the war analogy is that it depends on a high degree of mobilisation, in fact a ceding of power to the State, in ways in which people are very unlikely to do unless they believe that what government is doing is highly legitimate. We can see at the moment, with the carbon price debate, really miserably inadequate in its own way, that we are a long way from being able to accommodate those sorts of changes.

So, while we do need a very high level of mobilisation if we are going to get to that point, we are first of all going to have to build consensus. I know this is exactly what the climate action network and movement are doing. We have to build a very high and a very deep level of consensus about the need for action. Otherwise that sort of mobilisation is fanciful.

Vivien: Yes, I agree. What about media, Peter? Will you be getting really good coverage for the conference? Are any of the television channels coming?

Peter: We’ve just started doing the media work over the last couple of weeks. I’ve got to say that the response so far has been exceptionally good. Lateline is going to be there. The Big Idea is going to be there. So the ABC is going to be there in force. My understanding is that we will get some very good coverage in the daily media, including the print media. One can never be entirely sure of the quality and the nature of that coverage. But I think that, all things going as they might, this should be a conference that is covered quite well.

The other issue, of course, that we’re working with or against – I don’t know how you want to think about this in terms of media – is that it’s highly likely that there will be an announcement about the carbon tax, probably later this week. So, it’s in that context that this conference moves. Of course, a day is a long time in politics. God knows what it is in terms of the media!

Vivien: Well, they need their heads read if they’re not at your conference to be reporting on that, because I think that’s really where the action’s going in this society. Could you just tell us in brief why this conference is important, what impact you hope it will have.

Peter: When I thought about this conference first of all, it seemed to me that it was worth us talking about the implicit goals of public policy. Most people believe that governments do the right thing and they believe that the policies that are being put in place are the right ones because, of course, if things were more serious, governments would behave otherwise. So I think it’s really important to say what is the real likely outcome of both Australian and international climate policy, to actually realise where we’re heading, rather than believing we’re going somewhere else.

The second thing is to try and get us collectively to imagine what the consequences of that policy might be. At the moment the debate is a very narrow debate, pretty much in the parameters set by John Howard ten years ago, about the immediate narrowly defined economic implications of a few very very small and inadequate measures. While I think a price on carbon is very important, as a first step, in itself it’s not going to be anything near sufficient to do what we need to do within this critical decade.

The focus is on this critical decade and what we have to do by 2020 if we’re going to have any real chance of collectively, that means globally, averting the sort of things that this conference will be visualising, talking about, defining.

Vivien: Thank you very much, Peter.

transcript by Bronwyn