Prof John Chappell, FAA, Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU.
john.chappell@anu.edu.au
Prof John Chappell, FAA, Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU.
john.chappell@anu.edu.au
John's interests include global sea level and climatic changes, and prehistoric inter-actions between climate, the biota and humans. Recent results from his sea level studies include discovery of sea level fluctuations that are linked to millennial-scale changes of global climate; determination of ice-age temperature changes in the deep oceans from combined sea level and marine isotope data, and studies of the Holocene evolution of coral reefs, coastal lowlands and wetlands.
Recoiling from global warming and from the prospect of diminishing rainfall in our wheat-belts, we are drawn to ask whether anything like this has happened previously. Climatic changes pepper the geologic past, notably in the Pleistocene (roughly the last 2 million years) when continental ice sheets advanced and retreated across the northern continents. More dramatically, recent evidence shows that each ice age was repeatedly punctuated by rapid climatic shifts, including warming events larger and more rapid than are forecast for the future under global greenhouse, at least in some regions. From oceans to the mountains, the world's biota appears to have made its way almost unscathed through a long, hazard-strewn past. In the light of this history, can present global changes be regarded with equanimity - at least as regards the future of the remaining natural preserves? A close comparison with the geologic past indicates that the answer, rather emphatically, is no.
Bob Foster, Lavoisier Group. fosbob@bigpond.com
Bob was General Manager Marketing with BHP Petroleum before he retired in 1992. Prior to joining BHP in 1966, he spent 10 years with Shell in Europe, Africa, North America, the Middle East and the Far East. He is a Councillor of the Royal Society of Victoria; his scientific interests are palaeontology and palaeoclimatology; and he consults on energy industry issues, with particular emphasis on economics and the environment. Bob is a director of the Lavoisier Group which is putting a contrarian view on climate change to that of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Several of his earlier papers and submissions are available on the Lavoisier Group website (http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/lav-papers.html).
Sun and climate march in lockstep. There is a 300-year warming trend from Maunder Minimum quiet Sun, to unusually-active Sun after 1940; and departures from this trend reflect variable Pacific up welling that is momentum-driven and solar-related. The Sun's torque-cycle can be calculated, and climate predicted – but not using IPCC's emissions-yes/Sun-no methodology. CO2 is plant food not 'pollution'. Instead of decarbonising the world for no environmental benefit, spend money instead preventing irreversible harm - like clearing natural habitat in Sumatra, Borneo, Melanesia and Queensland.
Dr Graeme Pearman, AM, FAA, Chief Scientist and Interim Director,
CSIRO Atmospheric Research, Aspendale, Vic. Graeme.Pearman@csiro.au
Graeme joined CSIRO, in 1971. He was Chief of its Division of Atmospheric Research for 10 years to 2002. He established an active research team looking at the biogeochemical cycles of climatically active trace gases with 100 scientific papers primarily on aspects of the global carbon budget. Graeme was awarded a United Nation's Environment Program Global 500 Award in 1989 and in 1999 he was awarded the Australian Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to atmospheric science and promotion of the science of climate change to the public. In 2002 he was a finalist in Prime Minister's Environmentalist of the Year, and was awarded a Federation Medal in 2003.
The climate of the earth has always varied. Our understanding of this variation and the impacts that this had on global bio-geophysical systems, underpins considerations of the potential for human activities to bring about additional large and relatively rapid variations. There are risks associated with both natural and human-induced climate variations and change. Climate science has advanced very significantly in the past decade or so. This science (observations, process understanding and integration) now allows us to be confident of certain issues related to the climate system such as, how and why some gaseous constituents of the atmosphere are changing, how planetary temperature has changed, and why this is in part due to the gaseous changes. This paper will summarise some of this evidence. Some components of the system remain less certain or unknown. Thus the choice of options to deal with climate change is not based on the assumption of perfect/complete knowledge. Rather it involves complex risk assessments that incorporate data and knowledge and attempt to rigorously assess the probability of particular future climates and their impacts. Such assessments in turn drive significant changes to the community which needs to keep options open so as to maintain resilience and lessen the dangers that might otherwise result from the application of no knowledge, indecision, or ideologically-based positions.
Prof Graham Farquhar, FAA, FRS, Environmental Biology, Research School of Biological Sciences, ANU. farqhar@rsbs.anu.edu.au
Graham has taken an active role in the debates concerning the carbon cycle and its interrelationship with biological processes, and has contributed to the IPCC processes with respect to these issues. Amongst other positions he was chairman of the Australian Committee for the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme from 1994 to 1996. He was Science adviser on Land Use Change and Forestry and Australian delegate to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Conference of Parties, Kyoto (the Kyoto Protocol). His current interests are integration of photosynthesis and growth with nitrogen and water use of plants, stomatal physiology, isotopic composition of plants, and global biology including changes in potential evaporation rate.
The rate at which water in a small standard pan sitting on the ground is lost may readily be measured. Such pan evaporation rates have been recorded for many years in the Northern Hemisphere and many have shown a significant decrease over 50 years. A similar decrease has been observed on average in Australia over the past 30 years. This is a period in which rainfall has been variable, but without any significant trend. If there was no change in rainfall then the decrease in evaporative demand indicates that the land surface will have become less arid. These observations are at variance with IPCC predictions that, as surface temperatures rise, so would evaporative demand. The marked increase in the water vapour pressure, resulting in near-constant air relative humidity near the ground, helps explain why the predicted increase in evaporative demand has not occurred. The moister terrestrial surface may be one unexpected consequence of the greenhouse effect. The ecological and hydrological impacts of climate change may need to be reassessed.
Barney Foran, Senior Analyst, and Dr Mark Howden, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Gungahlin, ACT. barney.foran@csiro.au, mark.howden@csiro.au
The CSIRO Resource Futures Group is researching ways to manage human and natural impacts on Australia's 'physical systems' (e.g. people, resources, infrastructure, environment, energy). The Group does this by developing and testing long-term population-development-environment scenarios, and using the results to influence decision-making in natural resource management and planning. Barney and Mark are interested in modelling the impact of climate and population changes on energy and water needs, and on biodiversity and various Australian ecosystems.
In time scales of human lives (7-10 decades) the growth and development process underway now will take Australia's renewable and non-renewable resources into unchartered territory. Not all will be bad news! However we already have many signals from the future with us now: salinised land, depleted fisheries, clunky urban infrastructure, poor river quality, and looming constraints on cheap oil availability. Anticipated global change appears likely to impact on Australia's regions in many ways: carbon dioxide fertilisation, more rainfall in some regions, much less in others, and a general warming across the whole continent. The key issue is the interaction between the 'economic development' process and the 'global change' process. The interaction is likely to be complex, and in general gives more challenging outcomes than either the economic development or global change
Prof Warwick McKibbin, FAASS, Executive Director, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, ANU and Professorial Fellow, Lowy Institute for International Policy. Warwick.McKibbin@anu.edu.au
Warwick spent 16 years at the Reserve Bank of Australia and is a member of its Board. His interests include global economic modelling and capital flows, environmental and trade policies and impacts of demographic change; macroeconomic consequences of changes in risk perception; globalisation and disease. He has been a consultant for international agencies including the UN, The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, IPCC, and governments of Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, UK and USA on issues of macroeconomic policy, international trade and finance and greenhouse policy issues. Before moving to the ANU in September 1993, Warwick was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University.
This presentation will focus on how to design climate policy taking into account the great deal of uncertainty about whether or not climate change is a serious problem. Basing policy design on either of the two extreme views that climate change is either a conspiracy or that it is the greatest danger facing the earth is unlikely to be sensible. What if both views are wrong? A flexible policy based on clear property rights and markets in long and short term claims to emissions that can adapt as we learn more about climate change is likely to be the best risk management strategy. This talk will argue that the Kyoto Protocol is the wrong approach to addressing climate change and that there are better alternatives available despite the usual claim that "Kyoto is the only game in town".