So you’ve worked hard with solar passive design concepts to achieve an 8 or 9 star rated house and you feel comfortable you won’t be needing any air-conditioning. You’ve got layers of insulation, double glazed windows, they are in the right spots to keep the sun out in summer and let it in during winter, you can make use of the lovely cooling breeze, and it’s so air tight you could take it to Mars and be comfortable. You’ve also dropped a massive polished concrete slab on the ground for thermal mass, keeping things nice and warm in winter. You’ve then complemented the lovely house with a lovely solar hot water system (perhaps Australian made) and maybe even some solar photovoltaic power panels.

Pretty happy you’ve ticked the box for reducing carbon emissions, and comfortable in the knowledge that while living in it you wont be responsible for any carbon pollution?

Well, what about all the energy and carbon that went into producing the materials for your house, transporting them to site, assembling them, and then maintaining them over its design life? This is generally referred to as “Embodied Energy” and in most cases is responsible for more carbon than the average house will emit through the use of air conditioners over its entire life.

Building the average 4×2 Australian home and then maintaining it (material repairs and replacement) for 40 years results in about 110 tonne of CO2e being produced (Embodied Energy).

To keep this building comfortable with an air conditioner over that same 40 year period, assuming it has now been built to a “Six Star” rating, will produce about 78 tonnes of CO2e. As you can see, the importance considering “Embodied Energy” in the built form sits alongside that of Solar Passive design and Thermal Performance.

The true carbon footprint of a building is determined through quantifying this “Embodied Energy” adding it to the “Operational Energy” (the air conditioner, hot water system, fridges etc) and dividing it by the design life of the building. This process is often referred to as “Life Cycle Assessment” (LCA) and it allows us to truly identify how “sustainable” a product or process is by quantifying its impacts past, present and future.

LCA is an accounting method that assesses each and every impact associated with all stages of a product or process over its life span. It is not a new approach to determining a product’s environmental impacts, but one that has been gaining a lot of momentum recently as people start to ask the tougher questions on the true sustainability of the products they are consuming.

The approach is sometimes referred to as a “Cradle to Cradle” assessment if it accounts for full recycling at the end of the design life of the product, or just “Cradle to Grave” if it takes the product through to disposal only.

As mentioned before, in regards to the built form, LCA requires quantifying the “Embodied Energy”, “Operational Energy” and the “Design Life” or expected lifespan of the building.

Embodied Energy in the built form can be broken down into the following components:

• Materials – Energy and Carbon used to extract the raw material and process them to a useable building product at the gate of the factory (Cradle to Gate). 
• Transport – Energy and Carbon used to transport the building material from the factory gate to the building site
• Assembly – Energy and Carbon used to construct and create the building
• Recurring – Energy and Carbon used to maintain and replace certain building elements (such as paint) over the entire life span over the building
• Demolition and Recycling – Energy and Carbon used to demolish and recycle the building and feed these materials back into useable elements

Fortunately for us we have a large data base of materials and their associated “Cradle to Gate” carbon co-efficients given in either kgCO2e/m³ or kgCO2e/kg. To calculate the total “Cradle to Grave” Embodied Energy of your design we need to know the type and volume of materials used, where from and how they were transported from factory to building site, the assembly energy and then how often various components will need to be patched up or replaced over the design life of the building. 

Operational Energy is something that everyone is already pretty familiar with and is dealt with in solar passive design, solar hot water, high-efficiency appliances, and that can be offset using distributed renewable energy (such as a solar PV system).

Design life is ultimately required to amortize the embodied and operational energy over the expected life span of the building. For instance, a house made of recycled cardboard might have a really low initial embodied energy but if it needs to be replaced every two years, then over its life span it is going to look pretty bad.

It is interesting to note that buildings in Australia very rarely get to the end of their design life due to the materials’ durability limit. In other words, Australian homes do not fall over but they get knocked over for redevelopment. According to a 2009 study conducted by Forest & Wood Products Australia, 9 out of 10 buildings in Australia will see this fate.

The average Australian house is lucky to make it past its 40^th birthday.

Design life is therefore dictated by design quality, correct density (building high density in high density suburbs) and things such as having adjoining walls so a developer will need to purchase multiple dwellings before they can knock down a set of town houses. If we can design buildings that double in life span (only need to get them to age 80) then we can halve the embodied energy impact.

The key is being able to tie all of the components of “Embodied Energy”, “Operational Energy” and “Design Life” together to ensure you are not compromising one aspect while trying to improve another.

If carbon reduction is your aim you need to complement your energy-efficient solar passive design with a LCA or you might be compromising your environmental objectives.

Fortunately, conducting LCA of the built form using suitable software is now pretty easy. Indeed, many designers are already producing designs that not only remove any carbon from the operational energy but also offset emissions associated with the embodied energy. Better yet, designers are finding that these houses are not only cheaper to run but are often also cheaper to build.

When considering both the embodied energy and the operational energy, the built form is responsible for about 35% of Australia’s carbon footprint. It follows that intelligent design using LCA philosophy can have a substantial impact on reducing Australia’s contribution to climate change.

Australia’s sum total of historical emissions places us near the top of the world’s polluters. Despite our small population and the relatively small size of our economy, across history, we have emitted more CO2 from burning of fossil fuels than 94% of all other countries.

This fact provides some much-needed context for the present debate surrounding a price on carbon.

There is however, plenty of further context that needs to be provided for our emissions. For example, we should examine how our use of renewables has been evolving over time. The figure below, taken from a report for Environment Victoria shows how the share of renewables—such as wind or solar—in generating electricity in Australia has actually declined since 1960.

Yes, whereas we generated 19% of our power from renewables in 1960, we are now down around the 7% mark. Lest one think that this is inevitable, the next figure shows our share (from 2008; thin red line) against the trend for Denmark (the solid data points).

This graph leaves little doubt that it is possible to increasingly rely on sources other than fossil fuels to power an economy. Just in case you are wondering, during the period shown in the graph above, Denmark’s economy grew by around 44% altogether. So “green” energy and economic growth are fully compatible, although one will be forgiven for not realizing this by relying on the Australian media alone.

There is one more interesting context that we should consider for Australian greenhouse gas emissions during power generation. And that is the amount of CO2 emitted during the production of a kWH (a kilowatt hour, worth between 20c – 40c at current power prices). This is an important statistic because it goes beyond simply stating the share of renewables by also considering how “dirty” the non-renewables are. Coal is never “clean”, but it can be more or less dirty, depending on its quality, and the relative share of coal vs. gas also determines how much CO2 is emitted during power production even if the share of renewables is constant. So how much CO2 do we emit per unit of power generated?

The answer is shown as a large red data point in the figure below, based on data from the International Energy Agency.

What this figure shows is the approximately 140 countries in this data set rank ordered from worst emitters to least, based on grams of CO2 per kWh generated. There are three countries that emit more CO2 than us; they are Botswana, Cambodia, and India. The remainder use less—sometimes considerably less.

Yes, we beat Botswana, Cambodia, and India. All other developing countries, and of course all industrialized nations, beat us, sometimes by a considerable margin.

For example,New Zealand emits nearly 5 times less than we do to generate the same power—remember, this is the same unit power; we gain absolutely nothing from polluting more.

We emit 20 times more than Sweden—and Swedes don’t live in caves, unless you consider Volvos and Saabs to be caves.

If that weren’t bad enough, we emit 128 times more than Norway.

Let’s summarize the context of our emissions:

• Our historical burden of per capita emissions places us within the top ten polluters.
• We have decreased our share of renewables during the last 20 years whereas many other industrialized countries have increased theirs (together with GDP).
• We emit 128 times more than Norway per unit power generated and 20 times more than Sweden
• But yes, we beat three developing countries.

While this may not be much reason to celebrate just yet, the good news is that unless we consider ourselves inherently inferior to Skandinavians, we have a very clear precedent to follow. Being at least as sun-drenched and wind-swept as any other country on this planet, there can be no stopping us once we decide to catch up.

EMBARGOED TILL 14 JUNE 2011

The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes. Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now. Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. The magnitude of the problem was given a chilling focus in the most recent report of the International Energy Agency, which their chief economist characterized as the “worst news on emissions.” Limiting global warming to 2C is now beginning to look like a nearly insurmountable challenge.

Like all great challenges, climate change has brought out the best and the worst in people: A vast number of scientists, engineers, and visionary businessmen are boldly designing a future that is based on low-impact energy pathways and living within safe planetary boundaries; a future in which substantial health gains can be achieved by eliminating fossil-fuel pollution; and a future in which we strive to hand over a liveable planet to posterity.

At the other extreme, understandable economic insecurity and fear of radical change have been exploited by ideologues and vested interests to  whip up ill-informed populist rage, in which 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 “skeptics” to find a captive audience while largely escaping scrutiny. As a result, Australians have been exposed to a phony public debate which is not remotely reflected in the scientific literature and community of experts.

Beginning today, The Conversation will bring much-needed and long-overdue accountability to the so-called climate “skeptics.” For the next two weeks, our series of daily analyses will show how so-called “skeptics” generally side-step the scientific literature and how they sometimes subvert normal peer review. They invariably ignore clear refutations of their arguments and continue to promote demonstrably false critiques. We will show that so-called climate “skeptics” often show little regard for truth and the critical procedures of the ethical conduct of science on which real skepticism is based.

Rather than acting as “skeptics”, the individuals who deny the balance of scientific evidence on climate change will impose a heavy future burden on Australians if their unsupported opinions are given undue credence.

Winthrop Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Australian Professorial Fellow, UWA

Dr. Matthew Hipsey, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, Centre of Excellence for Ecohydrology, UWA

Dr Julie Trotter, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, UWA Oceans Institute, UWA

Winthrop Professor Malcolm McCulloch, F.R.S.,  Premier’s Research Fellow, UWA Oceans Institute, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Professor Kevin Judd, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr Thomas Stemler, Assistant Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr. Karl-Heinz Wyrwoll, Senior Lecturer, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Dr. Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleoclimate scientist, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research School of Earth Science, Planetary Science Institute, ANU

Prof Michael Ashley, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof David Karoly, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Prof John Abraham, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, University of St. Thomas

Prof Ian Enting, ARC Centre  for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, University of Melbourne

Prof John Wiseman, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne

Associate Professor Ben Newell, School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Matthew England, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Alex Sen Gupta Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof. Mike Archer AM, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Steven Sherwood, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr. Katrin Meissner, ARC Future Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Jason Evans, ARC Australian Research Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Global Change Institute, UQ

Dr Andy Hogg, Fellow, Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU

Prof John Quiggin, School of Economics, School of Political Science & Intnl Studies, UQ

Prof Chris Turney FRSA FGS FRGS, Climate Change Research Centre and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW

Dr Gab Abramowitz, Lecturer, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW 

Prof Andy Pitman, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, University of Adelaide

Prof Mike Sandiford, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Dr Michael Box, Associate Professor, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling, The Environment Institute, The University of Adelaide

Dr Paul Dargusch, School of Agriculture & Food Science, UQ

Prof Nigel Tapper, Professor Environmental Science, School of Geography and Environmental Science Monash University

Prof Jason Beringer, Associate Professor & Deputy Dean of Research, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Neville Nicholls, Professorial Fellow, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Dave Griggs, Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University

Prof Peter Sly, Medicine Faculty, School of Paediatrics & Child Health, UQ

Dr Pauline Grierson, Senior Lecturer, School of Plant Biology, Ecosystems Research Group, Director of West Australian Biogeochemistry Centre, UWA

Prof Jurg Keller, IWA Fellow, Advanced Water Management Centre, UQ 

Prof Amanda Lynch, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

A/Prof Steve Siems, School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University

Prof Justin Brookes, Director, Water Research Centre, The University of Adelaide

Prof Glenn Albrecht, Professor of Sustainability, Director: Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy (ISTP), Murdoch University

Winthrop Professor Steven Smith, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, UWA

Dr Kerrie Unsworth, School of Business, UWA

Dr Pieter Poot, Assistant Professor in Plant Conservation Biology, School of Plant Biology, UWA

Adam McHugh, Lecturer, School of Engineering and Energy, Murdoch University

Dr Louise Bruce, Research Associate, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

It has often been claimed that Australian annual CO2 emissions are such a tiny fraction of the world’s total, around 1.5%, that there is no need for us to take action. If we are only responsible for such a small proportion, why should we bother with a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme?

This argument may seem plausible at first glance, especially because it seems to let us off the hook so readily.

However, even after limited analysis this argument turns out to be deeply flawed and misleading at many levels. The argument is flawed and misleading because it is ignoring the full context.

To provide context, we must first remember that there are about 200 countries in the world. If they shared emissions equally, no single country would emit more than ½ a percent of the total. So without going any further, our 1.5% is already three times more than would be expected if we had an equal share in the world’s total—clearly we do not. This reinforces the fact that looking at a single number, whether it’s 1.5% or 8% or 4.39875% is often meaningless; we must look at the full context. And this begins with a comparison of any given country’s emissions against those of other countries.

There is an additional context we must consider in the case of CO2 emissions: We must recognize the importance of the sum total of emissions across the last two or three centuries. Why? Because CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, and hence what matters to a country’s responsibility for climate change are its historical emissions—in the same way that if 5 housemates run up a debt, each person’s responsibility extends to their entire expenditures, not just last week’s excessive bar tab. Unfortunately, people’s cognitive apparatus is not well equipped to deal with quantities that accumulate, and so it is worth expanding on this point.

Historical emissions data are provided by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), which we link to from this website. These data go back as far as 1750 (for some countries) and they are the best available record of global annual emissions over time. (These particular data extend to 2007 and they are from burning of fossil fuels.) When emissions are summed across the available record, the top 25 all-time emitters are as follows:

(*For this analysis, the Russian Federation and the Czech Republic inherited all the emissions of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, respectively. This should be apportioned differently, e.g., based on the share of historical emissions by that part of the former, bigger, country. For simplicity I omitted that step here because it makes little difference for present purposes.)

You will note that Australia is 14^th—out of 200—in terms of cumulative emissions. This should clarify how misleading it is to talk about “only 1.5% of emissions are ours”. In fact, over history, we are responsible for a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. This can be clarified further by plotting the (logarithm of) historical emissions of all countries against the rank position of each country (in other words, we order the countries from most-emitting on the left to least-emitting on the right). This is shown in the figure below:

(In these data, some administrative entities such as the Falkland Islands are considered independent “countries”, which inflates the total number of observations but that has no bearing on the rank position of Australia).

The figure clarifies that Australia has more historical responsibility for CO2 in the atmosphere than 228 other countries. In other words, we are more responsible for climate change than about 94% of all countries in the world.

There is one additional important point to be made: The data presented thus far are total cumulative emissions, not adjusted for population. The figure above and the earlier table are not per capita but they are the sum total of emissions. Despite that, we are ahead of Brazil, for example, which has roughly 10 times the population of Australia.

Australia has 1/3 of a percent (or .0031) of the world’s population—and yet we are number 14 on the list of total emitters and have more responsibility for global warming than about 94% of all other countries.

To provide full context, let’s examine what happens when we convert total historical emissions to per capita emissions. How much of a responsibility does each one of us in Australia have for the carbon emitted during the last 100-200 years? Like it or not, Australians have emitted 3,638,504,000 tons of carbon to date, and as you can see in the table below, each and every one of us carries a share of this historical burden that’s equivalent to roughly 172 tons.

Let’s place that burden into further context:

(Countries with a population below 2 million were omitted from this analysis because their per capita emissions often fluctuate considerably across time, suggesting that those estimates may not be terribly stable. For example, Luxembourg’s population is less than ½ million but their per capita emissions are very high. At least in part, this turns out to be due to the fact that German and French drivers fill up their cars in Luxembourg because petrol is less heavily taxed there, and the emissions then count towards Luxembourg’s. This is one of the reasons why per-capita statistics from small countries are easily distorted. *The Czech Republic and Russian Federation are again inheriting all historical emissions of their former countries for simplicity.)

We are within the top 10 emitters if we account for the size of our relatively small population relative to that of some other countries—for example China, which is in position 61 on this list. In other words, the country that is the favourite bugaboo of those who want to forestall climate action in Australia, is way down the list when it comes to the historical responsibility of each of its citizens.

Australians, by contrast are among the top 10.

There is no shirking that responsibility.

Sooner or later we must cut emissions. And of course we will, because the laws of physics do not negotiate. The only question is when we will finally begin climate action.

In the next post, we will explore that “when” and place it into its proper context, by considering what other countries have been doing already.

About a month ago, we unveiled Shaping Tomorrows World, a website dedicated to exploring solutions to the multiple crises and challenges that are currently facing our societies.

Since then, we have had more than 10,000 visitors and 20,000 page views. We have posted articles written by well-known Australian intellectuals, such as Clive Hamilton and Carmen Lawrence, and we have had input from overseas scientists such as Dana Nuccitelli, who also frequently appears on Skeptical Science. We have also welcomed aboard Murdoch University, in particular their Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy, who have made a financial contribution that will enable us to add more features to this website.

We are on Facebook and we have a growing number of followers in the Twitterverse (@STWorg).

So what is our “brand”, what are we seeking to accomplish and how will we get there?

After only a month, some of those questions remain to be resolved, but there are several things we know already.

First, our “brand” is defined by:

• Quality. Our posts are either written by academic domain experts or have survived academic scrutiny. All our posts are reviewed by our editorial board before publication.
• Civility. We do not censor opinions, but we insist on strict civility in the comments.
• A broad church: Our editorial policy emphasizes diversity in addition to quality. We have no predetermined agenda, other than intelligent exploration of solutions.
• Eclectic content. Quite unexpectedly, our content has been eclectic and has uncovered some unexpected—and hence intriguing—linkages, such as between obesity and carbon footprint.

We will build our blog incrementally but based on these principal attributes. One of the most exciting aspects of blogging is its dynamic nature, and this dynamism must necessarily translate into a certain amount of entropy and chaotic random walks—nonetheless, there is no harm in a strategic direction, and part of the purpose of this post is to propose and refine our strategy.

We seek to expand on the following broad issues in the future:

• Navigable archival data base. The ultimate goal of Shaping Tomorrow’s World is to create an up-to-date and at-your-fingertips data base of solutions and facts pertaining to a number of critical issues. This data base is slowly being built, but the left-hand menu on our home page provides an idea of what is to come.
• Health. Climate change is a health issue. Peak oil will be a health issue, as is peak soil, food insecurity, …. the list goes on. We have several medical practitioners among our team who will explore those issues in depth in the future.
• Energy. Transitioning away from fossil fuel is an imperative for the future—but what are the alternatives? The answer is intriguing and complex, and we expect several posts in the very near future on some of the alternatives.
• Cognition. Whatever we do in the future, it requires new thinking. Cognitive science knows plenty about how people think, how we succeed and how we fail, and this knowledge can assist policy planners in moving forward.
• Ethics. Many of the issues facing us have an ethical dimension: With poor countries striving to become wealthier by emitting CO2, and some wealthy countries refusing to cut emissions, serious moral dilemmas have to be resolved.

Our first specific goal is to examine the reasons why a country such as Australia, which often claims to contribute very little to the global emissions, must nonetheless cut emissions. We will commence a series of posts on this in the very near future.

Suggestions for other strategic projects are always welcome.

Let’s face it. The 1960’s were a time of radical change. And what we need today, like it or not, is another substantial transformation of our societies—from our current fossil-fuel based economies to an alternative means of economic productivity that is based on other sources of energy.

So what made the 1960’s happen and what can make the transition that we need during the next 10-20 years happen? This question has no easy answer. It may not even have a definitive answer at all.

Nonetheless, I would wager a guess, not as a scientist but as a curious observer of human nature and history.

And my guess is that non-violent transitions require one key ingredient that I have already mentioned elsewhere: Optimism. And optimism, in turn, is tightly linked to the perception that there is more fun to be had changing things than leaving them as they are.

The 1960’s arguably were powered by Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll.

One or two of those can be legitimately called fun.

Here now is the difficulty: All three of these drivers of the 1960’s have not only been explored in depth, but their personal and societal costs have been starkly brought into focus as well.

Moreover, however one might feel about Sex, Drugs, and what passes for Music these days, we can probably agree that there is no shortage of any of the above in today’s society.

So if it’s not Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n Roll that can motivate people to tackle the momentous transformation of society that we must embark on, what might it be?

How can it be “cool” or fun to stop driving a hot car, to switch off lights at home, and to put avocado skins in the compost while the plastic has to be recycled and leftover salad goes into the worm farm? Is “doing the right thing” enough to motivate millions of young people to act?

How does one turn cutting emissions into Woodstock?

How would Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix tackle global warming?

I would suggest that far from being trivial, those are some important questions for social scientists to muse over.

I would also suggest that whatever the solution may be, it will likely involve creativity and humour. Just to illustrate what this might involve, consider this idea, developed by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition:

We’re turning Murray St Mall (downtown Perth, W.A.) into a giant film set!

World Environment Day is on the 5th June and this year we’re producing a film of epic proportions! Picture it now: A mob of left-wing looking cyclists, environmentalists and alternatives, and a mob of business people advancing towards each other from opposite ends of Murray St Mall, meeting in the middle for one final showdown. What will happen? This film will highlight that climate change affects everyone, from all walks of life, and that a price on pollution benefits all of us, crossing the divide between the right and left.

A professional film production group led by highly acclaimed Richard Berney will be carrying out the film production work.

You too can contribute as an extra!

Choose Your Costume

Cyclists, Environmentalists, Alternatives: Come dressed as a colourful environmentalist, cyclist, or alternative. Meet at the EAST end of Murray St Mall, next to Barrack St, by no later than 10am for registration.

Business People: Come dressed in black and white as a white collar business person. Meet at the WEST end of Murray St Mall, next to William St, by no later than 10am for registration.

The Plot

Picture Murray St Mall, the long pedestrian strip running a few hundred metres between William St and Barrack St in Perth, with the central town square Forrest Chase in the middle of its length. At the East end of the pedestrian strip hundreds of left-wing looking cyclists, environmentalists and alternatives have gathered. It is obvious they’re all in support of action on climate change.

But just a few hundred metres away, at the West end of the pedestrian mall, an equally large crowd of a couple hundred people all wearing business suits, white collar workers, have gathered and they look ready to loudly voice their opinions.

What are they doing here? Is there going to be some sort of clash between these two groups?

These two crowds advance towards each other along Murray St, walking with determination and purpose. Their paces quicken as they approach each other. Ten metres apart they suddenly stop. Silence and sternness. A Braveheart battle scene with two armies facing-off against each other. The tension is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. You’re nervous with anticipation just watching. It lingers.

Some people in the opposing crowds start to raise their placards, or hold them forward at the front of the line, revealing their stance . Placard phrases like “Green Jobs!”, “Our Kids Are Worth It!” “Unlock clean energy!” and “YES to a price on pollution” start to emerge amongst both crowds. Wait, what? There is a murmur amongst all the people in the crowds and a moment of realisation that both sides are actually agreeing with each other! People from both crowds start stepping forward, and then everyone is cascading forward. Just like in the Braveheart scene where the Scottish are charging against the Irish, the two sides meet with smiles and outstretched hands, greeting each other amiably and merging together. People realise this is an issue that crosses the divide between the right and the left, that climate change affects all of us, and that we all have so much to gain from an effective price on pollution policy.

This may not be Woodstock but it sure beats putting salad in the worm farm.

So I’ll be there.

Quick, consider the following: All polar bears are animals. Some animals are white. Therefore, some polar bears are white. Is this conclusion logically implied or not? There is a 75% chance that you might endorse this conclusion despite it being logically false. This instantly becomes apparent if you replace “white” in the foregoing with “brown”.

You just witnessed a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Our logical reasoning is often compromised by irrelevant features such as the familiarity of white (but not brown) polar bears. This frailty is routinely exploited by those who are trying to confuse the public about the well-established scientific fact that the Earth is warming due to human CO2 emissions.

There is an upside to this frailty, however: Whether due to mere ignorance or ideologically-driven mendacity, denier illogic can be revealed for the nonsense that it is by translating it into an everyday equivalent. Consider the famous denialist two-step, often uttered in the same breath: “it’s not warming … but it’s natural variation.” This is logically equivalent to the claim: “decaying teeth don’t exist … but they fall out naturally.” No one would place much faith in that dental opinion and no one should place any trust into equivalent illogic when it comes to climate.

In other instances, compromised reasoning can be more subtle, especially when couched in calm and civil terms, as in a recent article in these pages. At first glance, Emeritus Professor Paltridge makes very reasonable points, for example by noting that some skeptics just like being a nuisance and that some of their scientific arguments are “hairy”.

Alas, the pernicious illogic that is lurking beneath the veneer can be revealed in its stark menace by translating the argument made about climate change into the context of HIV and AIDS. In translation, the principal premises of the article are as follows: (1) The medical community is polarised about whether or not HIV causes AIDS. (2) On the one hand there is the establishment that endorses this link, on the other hand there are some sceptical but reputable scientists, and the scientists in the middle say little. (3) Some vocal medical researchers insist that true science can only be found in peer-reviewed medical journals. (4) A situation has developed that is reminiscent of religion in the Middle Ages, in which only establishment theologians can do medical science. (5) The establishment should be expected to bridge the divide between the two sides, because it must be remembered that (6) most new ideas in research come from the outside. (7) The first step is for establishment medical scientists to acknowledge the material that is emerging on reputable homeopathic blogs, which after all (8) have access to a store of enthusiastic labour. (9) Medical researchers need to be positive and helpful when identifying errors in some of the more extreme homeopathic ideas.

This chillingly surreal narrative is far from hypothetical. Precisely this form of AIDS denial—for denial is what it is—was embraced by the former government of President Mbeki in South Africa. Although the U.S. National Academy of Sciences expressed the scientific consensus in 1988 succinctly as “…the evidence that HIV causes AIDS is scientifically conclusive,” Mbeki’s government rejected that consensus, called Western medicine “racist”, and instead treated AIDS with garlic and beetroot rather than anti-retroviral drugs.

A recent peer-reviewed Harvard study estimated that this denialism caused more than 330,000 fatalities. For that, Mbeki and his ilk are now held in richly deserved contempt around the world.

Let us return to climate change. In 2010, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences expressed the scientific consensus on climate change succinctly by calling it a “settled fact” that the Earth is warming due to human activity. It is not surprising, therefore, that 97% of domain experts accept that fact, which is supported by an almost unimaginably overwhelming body of evidence in the peer-reviewed literature.

In light of those facts, Professor Paltridge’s view of a “polarization” in the scientific community, in which there are scientists in the “middle” who “say little” and skeptics outside the “establishment” who are “reputable” appears misguided. Worse—it is tantamount to celebrating as heroes the few seemingly-credentialed individuals in the medical community who abused their academic privileges by feeding AIDS denial through bizarre publications or by side-stepping peer review altogether.

No, the handful of AIDS denialists within the medical community are not heroes. On the contrary, they have blood on their hands. In light of current WHO estimates of 150,000 annual fatalities from climate change, any appeal to those chimerical “reputable” skeptics runs a similarly grave moral risk. Posterity is likely to judge that stance at least as harshly as AIDS denial.

Finally, what about those “reputable” skeptic blogs, such as WattsUpWithThat, recommended by Professor Paltridge? What about their enthusiastic followers?

The plethora of content provided by WattsUpWithThat defies summary in a few words, although it is nicely illustrated by the considerable effort this blog expended on a photograph of Professor Ray Bradley taken in a hallway at the University of Massachusetts. The backdrop to this picture happened to be a large graph of ice-core data affixed to the building’s wall. The “reputable” blog thereupon spent several frantic days on the alleged shortcoming of this incidental backdrop to a photo: In the end, enthusiastic followers sought to strip Professor Bradley of all scientific credibility based on the presumed graphical impropriety of … a wall in a university building.

It is difficult to see any merit in such verbiage other than to reveal the obsessions of the originator. And this may explain why pre-emeritus scientists do not see fit to devote part of their 80-hour work weeks to patiently defending their university’s hallways against assault by a crowd that almost defies parody.

Sometimes, building bridges in times of conflict is a valiant and commendable endeavour. But there are other times, readily evoked by the name Neville Chamberlain, where the attempt to seek reconciliation is inadvisable because it misjudges the situation.

Peer-review and blog frenzy over irrelevant photographic backdrops cannot be bridged or reconciled. This realization must now be dawning on the proprietor of WattsUpWithThat, who has just published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal in collaboration with various academics. It will come as no surprise that this paper has largely reaffirmed the work of NASA, NOAA, and countless scientists by concluding that there is a robust warming trend in the U.S. temperature record. This conclusion is the precise opposite of the many years of incessant caterwauling by WattsUpWithThat, which built its enthusiastic audience—but no scientific reputation—on claims that warming is merely an artifact of bad thermometers.

So where do we go from here?

The answer is simple.

In South Africa, a new President was elected in 2008. On her first day in office, the new Health Minister, Barbara Hogan, expressed shame at her predecessor’s denial of science and declared: “The era of denialism is over completely.” On that day, health officials in South Africa jettisoned the garlic and beetroot and the denialist blogs. On that day, South Africans embraced the Western medical “establishment” and its life-saving antiretroviral drugs developed by research that subjected itself to peer review rather than to the noise of the blogosphere.

All we have to do is catch up with South Africa.

The difficulty and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale industrial restructuring and defeat of the most powerful industry coalition ever assembled.

Yet in the face of this challenge, I think it is true to say that environmentalism in Australia has lost its way. I have put forward three reasons for the failure of environmentalism.

First, like most Australians, some environmentalists find it hard to accept what the climate scientists are really saying. They do not believe, in their hearts, that things can be as bad as the science indicates. Like all of us, they are prone to engage in wishful thinking and cling to false hopes.

Secondly, some environment groups have opted for incrementalism, the belief that small step-by-step changes are the only way forward because the political system and the public are unwilling to accept major changes.

Thirdly, over the last two decades environmental activism has been professionalised. The professionalisation of politics has seen a sharp decline in membership of the mainstream parties and the rise of a “political class” of career politicians, staffers, spin doctors and apparatchiks.

Some environmental NGOs have simply adapted to this new landscape. The “political class” have become the new targets of their activities, so NGOs have abandoned activism for the techniques of lobbying and media management and are now dominated by people with lobbying and media skills.

In other words, they have become insiders. As insiders they are subject to all of the pressures and inducements the powerful can mobilise—access to ministers, consultations, the attention of journalists and so on.

In the face of the failure of mainstream environmentalism to achieve significant progress on the biggest issue it will ever face, we need a new environmental radicalism. Many in the environment movement are fearful of radicalism because they believe it will turn off voters. Yet given the cavernous gap between the far-reaching actions demanded by the science and the tokenistic actions the public is willing to support, Australians need to be thoroughly shaken up.

I was watching an episode of the TV serial Mad Men, set in New York’s Maddison Avenue in the early 1960s. Betty Draper is the beautiful and self-absorbed wife of the show’s main character, advertising executive Don Draper. Betty arrives home to find her black housekeeper Carla listening to the radio from which the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. can be heard giving a moving speech. Carla quickly turns the radio off.

“Who was that?” asks Betty.

“That was Dr King speaking at the funeral of the little girls”.

In 1963 four black girls were killed in Birmingham, Alabama when their church was bombed by white supremacists.

“It’s a terrible thing”, says Betty. “I am not sure America is ready for civil rights just yet.”

After a strategy in the first half of the 20^th  century emphasising public education, litigation and lobbying politicians, in the 1950s the civil rights movement embarked on a campaign of mass civil disobedience—marches, boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and nonviolent resistance. They directly confronted racism in all its manifestations.

Their activities alienated large segments of the white population, who felt threatened and enraged. Their protests and actions created crisis situations that the authorities didn’t know how to handle, but which often played to their advantage. Like Betty Draper, most white Americans may not have been ready for civil rights, but that did not diminish the urgency or rightness of the cause and the strategy. Americans had to be made ready for civil rights.

The same pattern defined the early women’s movement. In Britain, after women’s suffrage bills were defeated by the main parties in 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, many activists became frustrated with moderation and reasonableness, of working within a system controlled by men.

Some moderate women’s groups, accepting that many people believed married women already had the vote because “their husbands voted for them”, decided to be pragmatic, to take one step at a time, and advocate voting rights for single women only.

Declaring a commitment to “deeds, not words”, Emily Pankhurst and the suffragettes engaged in direct confrontation with oppressive institutions at every turn. They attacked the major political parties, and refused to become the lap-dogs of powerful men.

For their militancy, they were reviled by the defenders of the old order, denounced by the press, and criticised by many who said they supported women’s rights. Members of the Liberal Party assaulted Pankhurst and her supporters, blaming their radicalism for a Conservative win in a by-election.

So there were plenty of timid people telling the leaders of the civil rights movement and the suffragettes that they must not push too hard or demand too much because society was not ready for change. But it was only by pushing hard that the civil rights radicals and the suffragettes made society ready for change.

Naming Emily Pankhurst one of the 100 most important people of the 20^th century, Time magazine wrote: “She shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back”.

That must be our strategy. In the case of climate change, gradualism is fatal. For women’s suffrage and civil rights the price of gradualism was perhaps two, three or four more decades of discrimination. In the case of climate change the price of gradualism is the battle lost, because a delay to doing what we must for another one or two decades will lock in our fate for a thousand years.

The women’s movement and the civil rights movement had history on their side and were always going to succeed sooner or later. The environment movement also has history on its side; and something more tangible, the relentless force of scientific facts.

Yet incrementalism reinforces a political system that acts above all else to maintain the structure of power—a system dominated by parties that always put the interests of the economy, economic growth, and corporations first, parties that have shown themselves to be dragging the chain at best, or actually taking us backwards.

When Carla turned off the radio after her mistress arrived home unexpectedly, Betty Draper said “It’s OK. You can listen to your program”. I was reminded of this by an astonishing headline in the business pages of the Sydney Morning Herald:

“In a blow to environmentalists, the International Energy Agency forecasts world energy consumption will continue to rise sharply and CO2 emissions will jump …” (11 November 2010).

As long as newspapers think accelerating carbon emissions are “a blow to environmentalists” we know we are losing. One thing is now very clear; in the case of climate change the public has adopted a range of strategies to avoid the truth. They don’t want real action on climate change; they only want symbolic actions that require nothing of them.

Sometimes coaxing the public to your point of view reaches an immovable barrier. Sometimes people must be jolted out of their complacency by militancy, even if that means a period of rancour, turmoil and danger. The task of environmental campaigners is not to pander to public evasions but to make those evasions untenable, to blast away the pretences people use to blind themselves to the science, to make them see what is coming down the road.

A wave of environmental radicalism, of uncivil disobedience, will have succeeded when the conservative press begin praising Bob Brown and Christine Milne as voices of reason and moderation, as indeed they are.

The most committed defenders of the status quo are those who most fear environmentalism— the mining corporations, the defenders of the establishment in the Liberal Party and the ALP, and their boosters and apologists in the media. These conservatives see environmentalism as a profound threat to their world.

Unfortunately, the threat posed by environmentalism is not nearly as great as they imagine, and is diminished by the actions of pale greens everywhere who believe that working within the system and massaging the public can save us from climate catastrophe.

In the 1990s and early 2000 there was some justification for an incrementalist strategy. But climate science now shows that the situation has become so urgent, and the forecasts so dire, that only radical social and economic transformation will give us a chance of avoiding dramatic and irreversible changes to the global climate.

So let me leave you with a final thought. The historic responsibility of environmentalism cannot be overstated. Beyond women’s suffrage, beyond civil rights, its mission is nothing less than saving humanity as a whole. Today’s environment movement is no place for the faint-hearted.

(This is the transcript of a talk presented by videolink to the National Climate Action Summit, University of Melbourne, 9 April 2011.)

Note: This post was authored by Professor Clive Hamilton.

The difficulty and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale industrial restructuring and defeat of the most powerful industry coalition ever assembled.

Yet in the face of this challenge, I think it is true to say that environmentalism in Australia has lost its way. I have put forward three reasons for the failure of environmentalism.

First, like most Australians, some environmentalists find it hard to accept what the climate scientists are really saying. They do not believe, in their hearts, that things can be as bad as the science indicates. Like all of us, they are prone to engage in wishful thinking and cling to false hopes.

Secondly, some environment groups have opted for incrementalism, the belief that small step-by-step changes are the only way forward because the political system and the public are unwilling to accept major changes.

Thirdly, over the last two decades environmental activism has been professionalised. The professionalisation of politics has seen a sharp decline in membership of the mainstream parties and the rise of a “political class” of career politicians, staffers, spin doctors and apparatchiks.

Some environmental NGOs have simply adapted to this new landscape. The “political class” have become the new targets of their activities, so NGOs have abandoned activism for the techniques of lobbying and media management and are now dominated by people with lobbying and media skills.

In other words, they have become insiders. As insiders they are subject to all of the pressures and inducements the powerful can mobilise—access to ministers, consultations, the attention of journalists and so on.

In the face of the failure of mainstream environmentalism to achieve significant progress on the biggest issue it will ever face, we need a new environmental radicalism. Many in the environment movement are fearful of radicalism because they believe it will turn off voters. Yet given the cavernous gap between the far-reaching actions demanded by the science and the tokenistic actions the public is willing to support, Australians need to be thoroughly shaken up.

I was watching an episode of the TV serial Mad Men, set in New York’s Maddison Avenue in the early 1960s. Betty Draper is the beautiful and self-absorbed wife of the show’s main character, advertising executive Don Draper. Betty arrives home to find her black housekeeper Carla listening to the radio from which the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. can be heard giving a moving speech. Carla quickly turns the radio off.

“Who was that?” asks Betty.

“That was Dr King speaking at the funeral of the little girls”.

In 1963 four black girls were killed in Birmingham, Alabama when their church was bombed by white supremacists.

“It’s a terrible thing”, says Betty. “I am not sure America is ready for civil rights just yet.”

After a strategy in the first half of the 20^th  century emphasising public education, litigation and lobbying politicians, in the 1950s the civil rights movement embarked on a campaign of mass civil disobedience—marches, boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and nonviolent resistance. They directly confronted racism in all its manifestations.

Their activities alienated large segments of the white population, who felt threatened and enraged. Their protests and actions created crisis situations that the authorities didn’t know how to handle, but which often played to their advantage. Like Betty Draper, most white Americans may not have been ready for civil rights, but that did not diminish the urgency or rightness of the cause and the strategy. Americans had to be made ready for civil rights.

The same pattern defined the early women’s movement. In Britain, after women’s suffrage bills were defeated by the main parties in 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, many activists became frustrated with moderation and reasonableness, of working within a system controlled by men.

Some moderate women’s groups, accepting that many people believed married women already had the vote because “their husbands voted for them”, decided to be pragmatic, to take one step at a time, and advocate voting rights for single women only.

Declaring a commitment to “deeds, not words”, Emily Pankhurst and the suffragettes engaged in direct confrontation with oppressive institutions at every turn. They attacked the major political parties, and refused to become the lap-dogs of powerful men.

For their militancy, they were reviled by the defenders of the old order, denounced by the press, and criticised by many who said they supported women’s rights. Members of the Liberal Party assaulted Pankhurst and her supporters, blaming their radicalism for a Conservative win in a by-election.

So there were plenty of timid people telling the leaders of the civil rights movement and the suffragettes that they must not push too hard or demand too much because society was not ready for change. But it was only by pushing hard that the civil rights radicals and the suffragettes made society ready for change.

Naming Emily Pankhurst one of the 100 most important people of the 20^th century, Time magazine wrote: “She shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back”.

That must be our strategy. In the case of climate change, gradualism is fatal. For women’s suffrage and civil rights the price of gradualism was perhaps two, three or four more decades of discrimination. In the case of climate change the price of gradualism is the battle lost, because a delay to doing what we must for another one or two decades will lock in our fate for a thousand years.

The women’s movement and the civil rights movement had history on their side and were always going to succeed sooner or later. The environment movement also has history on its side; and something more tangible, the relentless force of scientific facts.

Yet incrementalism reinforces a political system that acts above all else to maintain the structure of power—a system dominated by parties that always put the interests of the economy, economic growth, and corporations first, parties that have shown themselves to be dragging the chain at best, or actually taking us backwards.

When Carla turned off the radio after her mistress arrived home unexpectedly, Betty Draper said “It’s OK. You can listen to your program”. I was reminded of this by an astonishing headline in the business pages of the Sydney Morning Herald:

“In a blow to environmentalists, the International Energy Agency forecasts world energy consumption will continue to rise sharply and CO2 emissions will jump …”

As long as newspapers think accelerating carbon emissions are “a blow to environmentalists” we know we are losing. One thing is now very clear; in the case of climate change the public has adopted a range of strategies to avoid the truth. They don’t want real action on climate change; they only want symbolic actions that require nothing of them.

Sometimes coaxing the public to your point of view reaches an immovable barrier. Sometimes people must be jolted out of their complacency by militancy, even if that means a period of rancour, turmoil and danger. The task of environmental campaigners is not to pander to public evasions but to make those evasions untenable, to blast away the pretences people use to blind themselves to the science, to make them see what is coming down the road.

A wave of environmental radicalism, of uncivil disobedience, will have succeeded when the conservative press begin praising Bob Brown and Christine Milne as voices of reason and moderation, as indeed they are.

The most committed defenders of the status quo are those who most fear environmentalism— the mining corporations, the defenders of the establishment in the Liberal Party and the ALP, and their boosters and apologists in the media. These conservatives see environmentalism as a profound threat to their world.

Unfortunately, the threat posed by environmentalism is not nearly as great as they imagine, and is diminished by the actions of pale greens everywhere who believe that working within the system and massaging the public can save us from climate catastrophe.

In the 1990s and early 2000 there was some justification for an incrementalist strategy. But climate science now shows that the situation has become so urgent, and the forecasts so dire, that only radical social and economic transformation will give us a chance of avoiding dramatic and irreversible changes to the global climate.

So let me leave you with a final thought. The historic responsibility of environmentalism cannot be overstated. Beyond women’s suffrage, beyond civil rights, its mission is nothing less than saving humanity as a whole. Today’s environment movement is no place for the faint-hearted.

There are four cards on the desk in front of you: they are labeled A, 4, K, and 5. Your teacher tells you that any card with a vowel on one side will have an even number on the other side. You are supposed to test that rule. Which cards would you turn over to determine whether the rule is true?

If you are like most people, you’d turn over the A and the 4. Would this tell you whether the rule holds?

No, because it doesn’t matter what’s on the other side of the 4; whether that’s a vowel or consonant is immaterial to the rule. For a proper test, you need to turn over the 5—because if you had found a vowel on the obverse, then that would have falsified the rule.

People are notoriously bad at solving this type of logical problem, which goes by rather tortuous names such as “modus tollens” or “denying the consequent”.  I prefer to call it the Most Frightfully Boring Task, or MFBT.

Now for something completely different.

Imagine you are a liquor inspector tasked to enforce the legal age of 18. Suppose you walk into a pub and discover four fellows around a table. One is drinking coke, the second beer. The remaining two are sucking some unknown beverage out of two paper bags, but they very helpfully wear their IDs around their necks. One is 22, the other 16.

How would you enforce the law?

Easy—you ask the beer drinker for an ID and you look inside the 16 year-old’s bag.

Dead easy, anybody can do it.

Amazingly, the liquor-law enforcement is logically identical to the MFBT! Even though people struggle with the vowels and numbers, they have no problem being logical when the task is couched in everyday terms.

This is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. We reason badly in the abstract but we are quite smart within the context of everyday life.

This human frailty is routinely exploited by those who are trying to confuse the public about the well-established scientific fact that the Earth is warming, largely due to human CO2 emissions.

Their ignorance or ideologically-driven mendacity is easily revealed by translating denier illogic into an everyday equivalent—where all of us can instantly recognize some of the nonsense for what it is.

For starters, suppose that while you check his paper bag, the 16-year old suddenly says: “Apples don’t exist.” While your eyebrows are still rising, he adds, “but they grow naturally on trees!”

What? “Apples don’t exist but they grow naturally on trees?”

Needless to say, no one would trust that individual with the lives of their children if their future depended on logical coherence. Instead, we’d all wonder what had been inside his paper bag.

Now suppose the beer drinker says while handing over his ID: “The price of sheep is unknown, but I’d buy some now because they are cheap.”

What? “The price of sheep is unknown but they are cheap?”

One more reason maybe to raise the drinking age to post-primary-school logical literacy.  And no point trusting that fellow with your kids’ lives either, if their future depended on logical coherence.

Now here is the problem: Your kids’ future, and the future of their kids, very much depends on logical coherence—or more precisely, it very much hinges on protecting them and their future from the incoherent illogical mutterings just presented. This is because the sum total of the arguments made by so-called climate “skeptics” is an incoherent muddle of contradictions.

On a Monday morning your resident “skeptic” might tell you that global warming does not exist. On the Monday afternoon, she may tell you that the warming is all natural, just the same way that non-existent apples grow naturally on trees.

Nothing this incoherent can be right.

And on Tuesday, a so-called “skeptic” may drift into town and make claims about the temperature record not being accurate by showing you a picture book of thermometers. He might also assure you that there is nothing to worry about because it hasn’t been warming in the last 23 days anyhow. So the sheep are cheap but no one knows their price.

Nothing this incoherent can be right.

By Wednesday morning, your excited “skeptic” may have invented the possibility that the sun is causing global warming, and by afternoon tea time it might be cosmic rays, or El Niño, or Inspector Clouseau or whatever.

Nothing this incoherent can be right.

And nothing this incoherent is “skepticism”—instead, it reflects either ignorance, denial, or mendacious propaganda that can gain traction only by hiding its incoherence under the cloak of an abstract MFBT that people are known to find challenging.

As a final illustration, suppose you go to hospital after returning from the jungles of New Guinea with a temperature. You are stunned to hear the young intern opine that you couldn’t possibly have a tropical disease, because when you last visited the emergency room with a fever in 1976, you had the measles.

I bet you’d call your lawyer and file a malpractice suit the next day.

And yet, exactly the same malpractice is perpetuated by those who claim that the present warming also happened 800 years ago (or 8000 or 80000 or whatever comes in handy) and that we therefore have nothing to worry about.

Ignoring the fact that present temperatures are likely the highest observed for nearly a millennium, this logic is like saying that your childhood measles prevent you from having a tropical disease now.

It’s like saying that because bush fires were caused by lightning strikes before people came to Australia, arsonists now don’t exist.

Nothing this illogical can be right.

It may strain credulity that anyone could be so muddled; but in fact, it takes little effort to go to a “skeptic” website and dig out dozens if not hundreds of incoherent mutterings and egregious flaws in elementary logic.

If you don’t like to infect your computer with links from the web’s netherworld, then even the ABC Drum occasionally offers up eruptions of illogical and involuntary hilarity. An individual who calls himself a “research fellow” at the “Institute for Public Analysis” recently offered up the medieval warm period as evidence against anthropogenic warming: Because there were vineyards in Greenland in the middle ages, the Arctic isn’t melting today because … who knows … but somehow it’s not CO2 that causes the Arctic to melt because the Vikings drank beer out of beaver skulls. Or something like that.

The medieval warm period is as relevant to current warming as ancient lighting-caused bush fires are to today’s arsonists.

The medieval warm period is as relevant to current warming as your childhood measles are to today’s tropical disease.

The same symptom can have multiple causes: Today’s fever may be a virus whereas your childhood fever was related to the measles. Today’s warming is caused by CO2 whereas previous warming episodes were caused by other factors such as variation in insolation.

The medieval warm period, if anything, tells us that the climate is sensitive to forcings such as greenhouse gas emissions, which is something that real research fellows at actual universities know very well. It is only “research fellows” at the “Institute for Public Analysis” who, securely anchored in their well-funded ignorance, cite the medieval warm period to indulge in muddled logical travesties.

The Institute for Public Analysis, it will be recalled, is known to be funded by mining, resource and tobacco companies. Although large expenditures for propaganda are standard corporate wastage, in this instance $20 worth of vermouth in a paper bag would have been sufficient to elicit the same logic.