Conversations: Climate change is happening

Posted June 17, 2011 15:52:17

Today the Drum, in collaboration with The Conversation, a website that publishes commentary, research and analysis from Australian universities and the CSIRO, is bringing you a new series, Clearing up the Climate Debate.

The majority of the world's climate scientists agree: climate change is real, we are causing it and it's happening right now. But despite the scientific consensus, Australia is still deeply divided about what we should do and whether we should do anything at all. We've asked some of Australia's leading academics and researchers to look at the science supporting climate change and the efforts to discredit it.

An open letter from Australia's science community asserts that climate change is happening, but vested interests and the media are distorting the facts.

The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes. Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. Understandable economic insecurity and fear of radical change have been exploited by ideologues and vested interests to whip up ill-informed, populist rage, and climate scientists have become the punching bag of shock jocks and tabloid scribes. Aided by a pervasive media culture that often considers peer-reviewed scientific evidence to be in need of "balance" by internet bloggers, this has enabled so-called "sceptics" to find a captive audience while largely escaping scrutiny.


Bureau of Meteorology scientist Karl Braganza explains why we know the climate is changing, and what's causing it.

By choosing a range of indicators, by averaging over decades rather than years, and by looking at the pattern of change through the entire climate system, scientists are able to clearly discern the fingerprint of human-induced change. The climate of Earth is now a closely monitored thing; from instruments in space, in the deep ocean, in the atmosphere and across the surface of both land and sea. It's now practically certain that increasing greenhouse gases have already warmed the climate system. That continued rapid increases in greenhouse gases will cause rapid future warming is irrefutable. More here


CSIRO's James Risbey explains why it's not "alarmist" to describe the threat of climate change to the public and how the climate system will respond to half measures.

Climate science doesn't tell us what to do. It doesn't tell us whether to have a carbon price or where it should be set. Those decisions ultimately involve a range of normative and deliberative issues which are beyond the scope of climatology. Climatology can tell us, however, what is likely to happen if we don't act, or if we don't act with sufficient speed to keep total emissions within specific carbon allocations... Pointing out that we are close to one of the largest tipping points imaginable in the climate system is well within the remit of science. It's not alarmist to describe the threat accurately; it's alarming if the political and social culture can't absorb this. More here

Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute and Professor of Geology Mike Sandiford explores the staggering ways we influence the shape of the globe.

Aren't we too puny to rival the great forces of nature that shape our planet? Certainly some prominent Australian geologists sceptical of our ability to impact our climate have said as much. But the facts show that we are fundamentally impacting planet Earth in unprecedented ways, and we've known about it for a century... We are a geological agent of unprecedented power. Faced with that stark reality now, it would be folly at best to maintain the fiction that we are too puny to impact the planet – at worst, it is just plain reckless. Whether we like it or not, for better or for worse, we are already engineering our planet. More here

Director of the Global Change Institute, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg submits some climate "sceptics" to peer-review and finds them wanting

I used the Web of Science to see if Carter, Evans, Franks and Kininmonth were legitimate experts in the areas that they claiming superior knowledge in with respect to the Climate Commission's report... The number of peer-reviewed papers that adequately expose the ideas of Carter and co-authors to the scientific peer-review system on the climate change issue is 0, 0, 0 and 0. We are left, then, with the observation that the Climate Commission's report, peer-reviewed and assessed by scientists with appropriate expertise, is being challenged by four individuals who refer to websites and blogs and who have not had their core claims about climate change tested in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. More here

Topics: climate-change, environmental-policy, environment, social-policy