Climate Tasmania

Tony Abbott’s climate “policy” and Tasmania’s emissions analysis confirm what we’re up against in our battle to reduce emissions.

[Peter Boyer: posted 9 February 2010]

Five years ago, with no climate policies in place, Australia’s challenge to cut carbon emissions seemed immense. A couple of events last week strengthened my view that it’s now ten times harder.

First there was Tony Abbott’s release of his party’s climate policy. I call it a policy because that’s the name he gave it, but the word suggests focused, coherent, organised thinking, which was clearly absent when these ideas were cobbled together.

Tony Abbott has succeeded in one thing. His policy makes the Rudd Government’s “carbon pollution reduction scheme” (CPRS) look like a real, cohesive plan — some achievement given the mess that was the CPRS legislation in the dying days of last year’s parliamentary sittings.

There are parts of the Liberals’ “tax-free” option that are worth holding on to, but only as peripheral measures. Where the CPRS offers faint hope of some sort of signal that emitting lots of carbon comes at a cost, the Opposition policy offers none at all. Yet it may resonate electorally, for all the wrong reasons, and that’s cause for dismay.

I’ll take a more detailed look at the Federal scene next week, but for Tasmanians, facing an election in a little over a month, the more significant development last week was the release of a report modestly titled “Understanding the potential for reducing Tasmania’s greenhouse gas emissions”.

This first systematic look at Tasmanian carbon emissions contains valuable data and good ideas for cutting emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, as required by legislation, and its signposts imply a clear future path. But there are some nagging questions (graffiti on the signposts?) that suggest the pathways are anything but clear.

The study, by the Melbourne-based energy-environment consultants McLennan Magasanik Associates, utilised a US-developed “wedges” approach, in which the most effective actions to reduce emissions to achieve the 2050 target are identified for different sectors (shaped like wedges on pie charts) of the Tasmanian economy.

Releasing the report, the Minister assisting the Premier on Climate Change, Lisa Singh, said it provided critical information for moving Tasmania to a low-emission economy in the most efficient and cost effective way while pointing to opportunities available from a low-carbon economy. All very positive, which is what you’d expect of the minister.

Ms Singh has some reason to feel pleased. The report, a result of Paul Lennon’s efforts a couple of years ago to register climate action as a top government priority, is a handy guide to Tasmania’s emissions performance in the recent past and likely sources of savings in the future.

Energy, transport and industry were identified as the three sectors with the greatest potential to contribute to cuts, while agriculture and forestry were seen as valuable though less measurable contributors.

The report indicates that without any abatement measures Tasmania’s greenhouse gas emissions will increase from today’s figure of about nine million tonnes annually to 13 million tonnes in 2050, plus an additional 11 million tonnes if imported coal-fired power is included. Electricity demand is expected to double by 2050.

As the report points out, with most of its electrical energy derived from renewable sources (hydro and wind), Tasmania is unique among Australian states. But with less than five per cent of carbon emissions coming from electricity generation, the task of finding savings is that much harder.

Caution was the watchword of Walter Gerardi, a director of the consulting company, at the release event last week. To meet its target, he said, Tasmania would need to explore every possible abatement avenue.

Ms Singh said a federal CPRS was an important factor in the Tasmanian plan, without which “it will be much more difficult and much more expensive for Tasmania to reduce emissions”. As we know, there’s no guarantee that we will ever get such a scheme.

The report provides other reasons for caution. It factors in availability of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. There’s been a well-resourced CCS research effort for many years now, with nothing to indicate that it will become cost-effective or widely applicable any time soon.

The report offers the prospect of agricultural land being given over to forest for purposes of sequestering carbon, an already-controversial idea which presupposes that the trees will remain unharvested and which seems somewhat counter to David Bartlett’s “foodbowl” plans.

These are big questions that entitle us to be doubtful about prospects for reducing emissions in Tasmania. We need somehow to avoid that forecast doubling of energy demand by 2050. There is a proven solution, but governments will never countenance it — a good old economic downturn.

My biggest concern about last week’s event was the absence of the Premier. Lisa Singh’s portfolio is called “minister assisting the premier on climate change”, implying that climate change is primarily David Bartlett’s responsibility (though it doesn’t get a mention in his portfolio list).

This report ought to be the foundation of his 2010 policy for re-election. His continued absence from this discussion — along with that of his opposite number, Will Hodgman — speaks volumes.

Signposts to a better future

MMA’s report recommends that to facilitate the shift to a low-carbon economy, the government needs to:

• Foster development of  renewable energy resources, notably geothermal, marine (tide and wave) and biomass.

• Help people and organisations become more energy-efficient.

• Create planning frameworks for building design and location to maximise energy and transport efficiency and accommodate low-carbon transport.

• Foster research and development into adapting abatement technologies for the Tasmanian environment, such as algal carbon capture and agricultural mitigation measures.

• Investigate emissions reduction benefits from increasing forest harvesting rotation periods.

• Improve public transport facilities, including walking and cycling tracks.

• Support development of networks for electric vehicle battery recharge and replacement.

• Develop education programs for farmers on new emission reduction practices.

“Climategate” scandals make no difference to the mounting evidence that our planet is warming.

[Peter Boyer: posted 2 February 2010]

TOP: The graph lines, taken from satellite gravity measurements, show that hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice have been lost from the Antarctic ice sheet since 2002—and that the rate of loss is increasing. BOTTOM: The summer melt at Cape Denison, on the edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet.

“Good grief, after climategate and the email scandal we are still talking about carbon and man made climate change?” asked a Mercury website reader last week.

Incredible though it may seem, yes, we are. I’d take great pleasure in abandoning this climate caper if only someone showed conclusively that it was all a bad dream. Getting one’s head around the science and politics can be a real grind. But that hasn’t happened, so I’m still here.

The “email scandal” of last December showed that some scientists, alas, are not above petty manoeuvring and putting down others to advance their own cause. But it produced no evidence of fraud, nor anything else to justify abandoning the generally-held view that human activities are changing climate.

A second “scandal” has blown up: the revelation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made an error over the rate of depletion of the Himalayan glaciers. This is more serious, because it suggests that the IPCC’s standards may not be up to scratch.

It all comes down to a statement in the IPCC Fourth Assessment report of 2007 saying that there’s a very high likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner” if the current rate of warming continues. In November 2009 a scientific report questioned the statement, but the story didn’t reach global proportions until last month.

The evidence doesn’t support this. Himalayan glaciers are generally receding, but at an average rate no more than that of mountain glaciers elsewhere in the world. The 2035 date apparently came from a typographical error in summarising a much earlier scientific finding that all non-polar glaciers may be gone by 2350, more than 300 years later!

The mistake poses legitimate questions about how the IPCC goes about reviewing scientific papers. The IPCC has already admitted that “clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly”, and is under pressure to review its procedures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

But we need to put this into context. This is a single error (there may well be others, but none have yet hit the headlines) in a complex, multi-volume report involving input from several thousand scientists and an equal number of representatives from the world’s governments.

What’s more, while the 2035 melting scenario is implausible, there is strong physical evidence that it may not be as far out as the original mistake suggested. Himalayan glacial retreat appears to be accelerating, and Chinese research has revealed a severe loss of ice on the Tibetan plateau, along with a rising snow-line.

The Himalayan glaciers are important because they contribute to the flow of major rivers in China, south-east Asia, India and Pakistan. But in terms of their potential contribution to sea level rise they pale into insignificance against the vast icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica.

Here, the picture is suddenly getting clearer. In 2002, a joint US-German venture put two satellites into orbit that would begin a revolution in the measurement of changes to the Earth’s crust and, crucially, to the Antarctic and Greenland icecaps.

The Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) measures variations in Earth’s gravity field to register minute changes in Earth’s mass — including changes to the polar icecaps. It is astonishingly precise, detecting shifts over 200 km away as small as a tenth the width of a human hair.

Melting of the big polar ice sheets can have a massive impact on sea levels. GRACE has for some years provided evidence that Greenland’s ice is diminishing at a rate of around 200 billion tonnes a year. It has now produced clear evidence that Antarctica’s much larger ice sheet, containing 90 per cent of the world’s ice, is also losing mass to the surrounding ocean.

In a paper published in a US geophysics journal, Isabella Velicogna of the University of California used monthly gravity measurements from GRACE to determine the ice mass-loss for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from 2002 to early 2009.

The result showed not just that Antarctica as well as Greenland is losing ice, but that loss from both ice sheets is accelerating, and therefore causing the rate of sea level rise to accelerate. The annual loss of Greenland ice more than doubled between 2002 and 2009, from 137 billion tonnes to 286 billion tonnes.

Until recently Antarctica’s ice sheet was thought to be increasing in size, with a net loss in West Antarctica more than made up for by a net gain in the much larger East Antarctica, south of Australia.

The GRACE measurements have shown that to be wrong. Antarctica was losing an average of 104 billion tonnes of ice a year from 2002 to 2006. Over the next three years, it lost 246 billion tonnes a year, contributing almost as much as Greenland to sea level rise.

The acceleration of ice loss in Antarctica is of crucial significance. With about 10 times the ice of Greenland, Antarctica has a much greater long-term capacity to influence sea level.

So yes, we’re still talking about global warming. It would be great if we could wish it all away, but we can’t. Neither the East Anglia email furore nor the IPCC mistake will make the faintest bit of difference to the mounting pile of physical evidence.

Tasmania stands to benefit from preserving its carbon-rich old forests, but Forestry Tasmania doesn’t seem to want to know.

[Peter Boyer: posted 26 January 2010]

Mature forest in Tasmania’s Weld Valley. Photo Rob Blakers

In July last year I heard about a Wilderness Society project to assess the amount of carbon held in native forest areas scheduled to be logged. Thinking I might write about this, I contacted Forestry Tasmania to get its reaction, and therein lies a tale.

At first I thought this would be a story about facts and science. Forests capture and store prodigious amounts of carbon, and scientists have been vigorously trying to quantify carbon stocks and flows to establish how we should manage these resources under a new international climate regime.

Everyone accepts that this is a good thing. But my attempts to make sense of the science have highlighted something else entirely: how science can be rendered ineffective and almost irrelevant by entrenched cultural mindsets and the animosities that can arise when they’re questioned.

The Wilderness Society project seeks to measure how much carbon is being stored in forest coupes scheduled for logging in different parts of the state. A low-cost project using volunteers, the methodology was developed and the project is being broadly overseen by plant scientists from the Australian National University, where data from the project is being deposited.

This project was always going to be used politically in the forest debate, with one side playing up its credentials and the other its flaws. My main interest was in how good carbon accounting might help Tasmanian forestry benefit from carbon management as well as wood production, especially in the crucial near-term when global emissions must begin to fall sharply.

My meeting with Dr Hans Drielsma, Forestry Tasmania’s Executive General Manager, and Ken Jeffreys, General Manager Corporate Relations, didn’t get off to a good start. I got a heated 15-minute lecture on why I should stop questioning official information about Tasmanian forestry management, before we finally got to the issue of assessing forest carbon.

Dr Drielsma told me that in contrast to the Wilderness Society’s “amateurish” project involving a handful of sites, “we have been doing this work for years, and we have a mountain of data from over 3000 sites”. He commended Australian government statistics and a 2007 consultant’s report as the best sources for information on carbon emissions from forestry.

I have seen government forestry emissions figures and have read and re-read the 2007 MBAC Consulting report. Such official sources assert the carbon-friendliness of Australian forestry in replacing harvested trees with new ones. Contrast that with those unfriendly tropical practices where forests simply disappear.

Forestry Tasmania rightly draws attention to the environmental cost of wood alternatives such as steel, aluminium or cement. There’s no disputing the value of wood and our continuing need for it. The question isn’t whether we should go on harvesting, but whether we should continue clearfelling in the large carbon reservoir that is our natural forests, or focus entirely on plantation timber.

There are two kinds of forest science: that which serves the industry in getting the most out of our wood resource, and that which looks at how natural ecosystems work. They are both valuable, except when they are at loggerheads. As Churchill observed, the first casualty of war is truth.

Take, for instance, the conclusion by an ANU-based team headed by Prof Brendan Mackey that Australia’s oldest tall eucalypt forests are the most carbon-dense in the world, containing several times the official carbon estimate.

A CSIRO forest industry scientist told me of “problems” with Mackey’s research, but I could not get him to identify what they were. I was similarly left up in the air by an exchange of emails with Forestry Tasmania’s Ken Jeffreys and Dr Martin Moroni, its new forest carbon scientist.

Among other things I wanted to know why the Mackey team’s findings, and the resulting proposition that in the present high-risk global emission scenario we should not be logging mature natural forest, should be discounted. All I got were general referrals to the same official reports (which don’t address the Mackey findings) and questions about my own sources.

The other main object of my questions was to find out more about those 3000 sites and years of professional carbon assessment which Dr Drielsma had contrasted with the Wilderness Society’s effort. To compare the two projects I needed to know how and where Forestry Tasmania had undertaken this work and what data had emerged from it.

There, too, I drew a blank. Dr Moroni told me that “an enormous amount of resources have been used to develop the permanent and temporary sample plots and to take measurements and re-measurements, so the full dataset is unlikely to be released without good need and an agreement being in place”. In other words, details about this work are commercial-in-confidence.

So this publicly-owned agency, wearing its “business enterprise” hat, is refusing to release its mountain of data on the carbon content of Tasmanian forests. What does David Bartlett, whose government is responsible for the charter of Forestry Tasmania, have to say about this?

Meanwhile, the world forestry debate is shifting. An agreement which would have covered natural forest logging everywhere, including Tasmania, was concluded and would have come into effect had Copenhagen produced an over-arching protocol. With the agreement remaining on the table, Tasmanian forest authorities need to prepare for externally-imposed controls.

The forest war in Tasmania is stifling essential action to understand, preserve and benefit from our forests’ carbon-carrying capacity. Forestry Tasmania management sees me as an agent of the forest preservation movement (definitely not true); it also finds me annoying (probably true), a sentiment made clear both in meetings and in correspondence, which they have now terminated.

I regret this, because I’d like to think that addressing the climate challenge can bring people together. But I find myself increasingly drawn toward the Irish cynicism of Claud Cockburn’s advice about government and bureaucracy: “Never believe anything until it is officially denied”.