Community resilience and the hazards of climate

Despite four reports from the IPCC (1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007, each more confident and alarmist than its predecessor) we can now be certain that the basic premises of the 1985 Villach Conference Statement were false. The pre-industrial concentration of CO₂was about 290 ppm and by 2010 had increased to about 390 ppm. Over the last decade the annual increase has stabilised at about 2 ppm/yr and the trend has not accelerated as projected. At the current rate of increase a doubling from pre-industrial levels is not likely to be reached until after 2100; a doubling "possibly as early as the 2030's" was clearly alarmist speculation without foundation.

The pattern of global temperature rise has also failed to materialise as the alarmists predicted. Over the past decade atmospheric CO₂concentration has continued to increase but global temperature has not shown a warming trend. The evolving GCMs used for successive IPCC reports are claimed to be ever-improving but none identified the potential for an extended hiatus of temperature as has occurred. There was a recognition that "values outside the (projected) range" could not be excluded but the alarmist emphasis was on the added danger from exceeding the upper estimate of 4.5^oC (exceeding a 'tipping point', 'runaway' or 'irreversible' are terms often used). Little credence was given to the possibility that the rudimentary GCMs were grossly exaggerating the impact of CO₂on global temperature; that the 0.4^oC warming from 1976 to the late 1990s and subsequent hiatus are within the bounds of natural variability and have little relationship to anthropogenic CO₂.

An outcome from the anthropogenic global warming alarmism has been the implementation of government policies that can only reduce community resilience to the natural hazards of climate. The enormous research expenditure directed toward computer modelling and potential impacts has been at the expense of better understanding of the climate system and improved early warning of known hazardous events. None of the expenditure on climate change research over the past three decades has improved our ability to better understand and predict the onset and duration of drought, of tropical cyclones, conditions conducive to fire, or the extent of flooding. Yet each of these has been experienced across parts of Australia over the past 12 months, with significant loss of life, enormous private and public infrastructure destruction, and diminution of productivity.

Proposed Government actions to make energy more expensive, or raise barriers that deny community access to existing energy forms, will further reduce community resilience to the hazards of climate. Today's broad-acre farming is an outcome of mechanised production and transport based on fossil fuels; rural infrastructure is implemented and maintained with equipment driven by fossil fuels. From an economist's perspective, rural industries are a diminishing percentage of GDP and of declining importance to national welfare. This jaundiced view fails to understand Maslow's hierarchy of needs: we self-actualise (ie, expand the national GDP) only after satisfying our basic wants of food and shelter. A community that neglects what underpins the resilience of basic food production and infrastructure becomes more vulnerable to climate variability and extremes.

Past climate and paleoclimate data are a reliable guide to the future and we ignore history at our peril. The Greek-Roman period in the centuries before Christ and the medieval period of the 11^thand 12^thcenturies were warmer than now and beneficial for agriculture; the Dark Ages of the middle first millennium and the Little Ice Age at its coldest during the 17^thcentury were times of hardship. The future climate directions are not predictable and the evidence for CO₂ having a dangerous impact is wanting, especially as rudimentary GCMs are the only acknowledged predictive tool. It is essential for community resilience that government policies sustain the energy base that underpins productivity and has generated our relative but fragile wealth.