Tim Flannery- The Weather Makers

The 5th of June was World Environment day and Advance (an association for professional Australians) held a free event where Tim Flannery gave a presentation. He is Australian of the Year and has a new book out called 'The Weather Makers'.

I took a few notes at his presentation and thought I would share them with you as it's such an important topic.

• A 19th century scientist, Wallace, said that the atmosphere was a 'great aerial ocean', because we are as dependent on the atmosphere as a fish is to the sea


• if you shrunk the atmosphere into a liquid, it would be 1/500th the size of the ocean


• since in the industrial revolution, 80 parts per million (ppm) of CO (carbon monoxide) has been added.


• since 1997, and the general dithering of governments at Kyoto, 20 ppm of CO has been added


• it is generally accepted that we need to keep below 2 degrees of warming to stop very extreme climate changes from occuring. This is is 450 ppm and we are already at 420 -430 ppm


• key message: climate change is a fast-moving threat


• an inter-governmental panel on climate change set a conservative projection that there would be a 3% rise in temperature over the century... this is proving too conservative considering that they predicted that there would be a 8% melt of ice caps over decade and in 2006 there was a 5-fold increase in melting. The ice-caps could be gone completely in 30 years.


• the next 'Kyoto' type summit will be held in 2009, in Copenhagen


• things that Tim Flannery would like to see agreed for the sake of humanity are 1) agree a threshold that greenhouse gases cannot go past, 2) agree on a carbon price, 3) forestry price


• The top two things we can do to help to reduce greenhouse gases are 1) introduce a regulatory environment that recognises the true cost of energy, and make businesses/people pay on a user-pays basis, and 2) make use of technology


• He believes that efficiency gains of 50% are possible in houses


• Someone asked if population control should be addressed as strategy to manage, and his response was that there was not enough time for this to make an impact. Any population initiatives would take decades to come into effect, and this is too late


• Another person asked about people's high level of consumption patterns, and pointed out the need to change this. Again he agreed, but said that change would take too long.


• One more question about developing countries and that as they become more industrialised, are contributing large amounts of greenhouse gases. He said that in his view he saw that we have an 'historic debt': since the 1800's onwards, industrial countries have pumped 100ppm into the atmosphere, making us rich. Therefore we have a debt to pay


• trees have a mechanism for drawing out carbon dioxide. Growing tropical trees is a great way to reduce carbon dioxide. There could be a role here for developing countries to be paid for growing trees. Maybe people in developing countries could use of the $85 computers that are being developed at MIT to monitor logging.


• Some interesting points about Australia:


• the impacts of global warming on Australia will be catastrophic. There has been a 10-20% reduction in rainfall in the past 20 years. Streamflow has reduced 60-70% over 30 years.


• rainfall is predicted to decline by 90% due to global warming. As the soil gets hotter, it soaks up the rain faster. There is also more evapotranspiration from the plants.


• soon the Murray River in Australia will not be able to be used for commercial purposes and this will affect a major food region in Australia - olives, citrus fruit is grown here among other things. He knows people who are shooting their dairy cattle there because they think there won't be any pasture for them later this year


• Adelaide is reliant on the rivers from up North, and soon the water will be too salty to be drinkable


• Brisbane's dam is already at 20% capacity and people are on water rationing. There has been some rain lately, enough to make the country look green, but not enough to reverse the trend


• the price of electricity is set to double next year as there is not enough water to run the power stations. Every MW (mega watt) produced, consumes 2 tonnes of water

It was a good talk as he is a scientist who 'tells it like it is'. A not all a tale of woe either as he does point to some constructive things that can be done to make changes. I liked it when he said 'why is it when ever you see a cartoon and to indicate that someone has had a good idea, they show an 18century incandescent lightbulb above their head. It should be an energy saving one!'