The climate war we have to have

It has taken decades, yet finally the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has delivered to humanity an undisputedly-high level of statistical certainty on global warming.

The panel’s 2,000 or more scientific experts from around the world are 90 per cent-plus sure, which makes it “very likely”, that people are causing a dangerous build-up of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere.

Six years ago, when the Third Assessment Report was released, the verdict on the key question of whether human activities were the underlying cause of unnaturally rapid global warming was a less compelling “likely”. Though, in any case, the world wasn’t really listening as it focused on other serious matters like 9-11 and its aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This latest report, however, has fallen on incredibly fertile ground. In Australia, and around the world, the past six months has delivered extraordinary and unprecedented change in the level of public and political engagement with the climate change challenge.

This is true even in President George W. Bush’s America, although outside of California and some progressive north-east states its real global warming awakening is still to come. The fascinating question now is this: what happens when an issue that for so long struggled to be taken seriously because of scientific uncertainty suddenly becomes seen as very certain? What do we do when we have to shift from managing yet another troubling issue among the general noise of an ever-busy global agenda, to actually addressing a fast-emerging crisis for human civilisation?

It’s ironic then that a few days after the report’s release in Paris on February 2, the Australian Parliament resumed sittings for the first time in 2007, an election year with a most intriguing set of political possibilities. Intriguing because environment is finally shaping as the top election issue, carried along by water and climate fears; and ironic because the Coalition and Labor sides immediately launched into a classic parliamentary verbal slugfest on climate change - as though it were an ideological issue instead of a scientific one.

Labor damned the Government benches as a nest of diehard climate sceptics, while the Coalition hit-back with accusations of Labor climate fanaticism and anti-nuclear hypocrisy. Stirring rhetoric, but rather missing the point. This being that climate change is not a subjective issue like industrial relations or even economic management, where ideology legitimately shapes policy positions. Rather, it represents a fundamental physical shift in what the world we live in, and therefore our lives, will be like.

No amount of partisan political squabbling will sway the planet’s climate from adjusting itself to match a new atmospheric composition, just as eloquently-argued political points were never going to stop the Japanese from invading Australia in World War II, or the Germans from overrunning all of Europe including the UK. Such threats lie beyond rhetoric and demand action; armed forces on land, sea and air in the case of military invasion threats, and dramatic efforts to cut greenhouse gas pollution in the case of climate ones.

Military-style war, not political point-scoring, is the right framing within which to think about resisting climate apocalypse; merely talking, or trying to appease the enemy, or pandering to collaborators, will only make things worse.

In the past six months, this war analogy for our climate challenge has been everywhere. Al Gore says global warming will be tougher to defeat than Hitler. Lord Oxburgh, retired chairman of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, warns we face World War II-plus. Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, has toted up a $9 trillion future bill that matches the cost of world wars or a Great Depression.

A colleague of mine, a former head of Greenpeace International Paul Gilding, talks of a “long emergency with a World War II level of mobilisation”. I see a nation already at war - with the drought-driven devastation in the Murray-Darling Basin, the raging bushfires across much of the nation that began back in early spring, and the threat that hotter temperatures pose to icons like the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the Australian Alps.

The potential cost, in environmental and economic terms, is likely to be staggering. Unthinkable even, just as losing World War II was unthinkable for the Allies and would have meant a very different world if it had gone that way.

So if it is to be war, the next question is: what’s the battle plan? Where do we make a stand? For a start you can’t fight a war if you can’t define the enemy. Australia and the human race need to know what they are up against. Not whether climate change is real or if it is a serious problem? By now, most serious players are way past those debates. It is more questions of what are the enemy’s positions, and most importantly, what would constitute a victory? As it turns out, this equation is really quite simple.

As the IPCC has re-confirmed, Earth is already most of the way to a human-induced 1C of global warming. This warming can be attributed in large part to a surge in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began in the second half of the 18th century - about 280 parts per million then, to 383 now, higher than at any time in at least the past million years and probably up to 30 million years. Based on the mainstream science, about 2C of global warming already appears inevitable by the middle of this century. Yet if we can contain average temperature rises to 2C, and that’s a big if, then we may score a victory of sorts.

I say “of sorts” because even that level of unnaturally rapid warming can mean massive ecological and economic damage. At 3C, we are talking about the potential loss of up to half of all species and many millions of human lives, and trillions of dollars of economic loss as canvassed by the recent Stern Review report out of the UK. That’s not much of a victory.

What I call The 3rd Degree, the territory between 2-3C, represents our defining battleground. Go beyond 3C and humanity will get the metaphorical third degree, including the clear threat of runaway climate change. Runaway means rapid, uncontrollable and irreversible, with scenarios where we trigger the inevitable loss of everything from the Amazon forests to the Greenland icecap.

The Earth’s been this hot before, as some of the climate sceptics like to point out, though just never with 6.5 billion-plus people on board - heading for 9 billion by 2050!

The threat message has been laid out clearly for the world’s political leaders, including Prime Minister John Howard, backed by the best climate science available, led by the IPCC process. This quite conservative science has been broadly consistent for 20 years, although recently it’s become a lot more certain.

The CSIRO and scientists advising the United Nations, including eminent figures like UK chief scientist Sir David King, are forecasting at least a 3C rise in the average global daily temperature by the end of this century. That’s without dramatic action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

As early-movers plan for the war against climate change, we need to focus our strategy and actions on avoiding The 3rd Degree. Holding warming at close to 2C and CO2 levels at no more than 450ppm is the stand we have to take. Anything short of meeting that objective will be planning for defeat, and for mass death and destruction and global instability.

In World War II terms, it would have been like the US and the UK circa 1941 planning to let Nazi Germany conquer all of continental Europe, and Japan the whole Asia-Pacific region, while proposing that Americans and Britons would be safe in that new world.

A lot of other war words and phrases come to mind:

Appeasement, when we see our leaders playing Pollyanna and closing their minds to the clear early warning signs.

Phyrric victory, if we fool ourselves into thinking a few easy, early wins like planting a few million trees or government funding for novelty solar power plants will be enough to win this war.

Blitzkrieg, when we discover it won’t just be a gentle linear warming, but rather will involve instances of dramatic, unexpected, lightning-fast shifts.

Triage, which we’ll have to apply to many species as habitats are wiped out; and also to farms and businesses, and even whole communities.

Power imbalance, when we see how puny the empire of humans really is when it goes up against a planet’s climate.

The war analogy is being used with calculated intent to shock people everywhere out of their comfort zone. It is designed to penetrate our cocoons, getting inside our air-conditioned castles and plasma-screen lives, to tell us loud and clear that a great enemy is massing on our borders.

The language of war is the best we have to capture the massive scale of the problem, and to drive urgency in responding at equally massive scale. The 3rd Degree, the strategic space between 2C and 3C of warming, defines our challenge as climate war skirmishing gets under way. In this context, we have to be ready to throw out all of the current orthodoxies - such as regarding the American or Australian lifestyle as non-negotiable, or excluding pollution from the cost of energy - and re-think how we run the nation.

As some countries have embraced in times of war, a government of national unity could be one option, while without doubt we’ll have to elevate social and environmental sustainability to equal or greater status as that enjoyed by the economic kind.

Finally, in a war it’s also vital to know your enemy. That’s the trickiest part of all on the climate front. Ultimately the enemy is the face each of us sees in the bathroom mirror every morning, and our own energy-intensive, high-consuming, wasteful lifestyles. Each of us has a voice, a vote and a wallet. We better start deploying them to get politicians and business leaders acting at speed and scale commensurate with the threat.