I’ve just about finished reading a great new book on climate change by Australian thinker and university professor Clive Hamilton. The book, Requiem For A Species, is an interesting but disconcerting read.

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The starting point is an admission that (as many climate change activists know) our goose is well and truly cooked. Hamilton reviews the now conclusive science that we will experience up to four degrees of warming this century – on our way there we will cross several major tipping points (such as an ice-free Arctic, and loss of much of the Amazon Basin through drought and fire) that will produce positive feedback and accelerate global warming.

The main focus of the book is why our civilisation can’t accept the scientific evidence that major warming-induced changes have already occurred, and that such changes are at or above the worst case IPCC scenario from the 2007 report. He blames our consumerist society for much of the problem, and goes to some length to explain why green is the new red (from the conservative’s point of view).

He discusses what a +4 degree world could be like, and ends with some ideas about what we can still do to mitigate the most extreme manifestations of climate instability.

AUSTRALIAN farmers are sceptical about climate change and many do not believe it will affect agriculture during their lifetimes, according to a new report.

Ironically though, they are already starting to see the changes on their farms, with the intensity and duration of Australia’s last big drought linked to global warming.

The research was conducted by Australia’s CSIRO late last year using a workshopping / focus group format with farmers.

According to one newspaper’s coverage, CSIRO research team leader Steven Crimp said the need for improved climate change knowledge was paramount – “There is a lot of information about climate change and climate projections but there isn’t a lot of information on how to make changes within farm management,” he said.

The official website has a link to the report, and more importantly around 20 downloadable presentations from the workshop covering a range of aspects of this issue.

Here in Australia the population debate has been raging for decades. The crux – despite our size, much of Australia is arid or semi-arid. We are the driest inhabited continent on Earth, with most of the arable land concentrated in a strip near the coast. Most of the population is there too (90% or more). We also have fragile and increasingly-degraded ecosystems, with water access and equity a major issue.

The debate currently hinges on whether Australia should significantly increase her population (from the current 21.4 million) to  36 million souls. On one side sits the economic rationalists who look at all those extra consumers with greedy eyes while chanting “growth and GDP”. On the other, environmental and other groups who can see that we are irreversibly reducing our carrying capacity with our current population, let alone a much larger one.

I found an interesting take on it today: a short pdf from The Australia Institute. In part it reads:

Australia is a nation of migrants; the first intake sought no permission to settle here. Migration is, and is likely to remain, an important part of what makes the Australian population the diverse and dynamic society that it has become. But the benefits of migration should not be conflated with the benefits of an ever-increasing population. As the data presented above show, there is no reason for Australians to be forced to choose between being open, inclusive and rapidly growing or being closed, exclusive and stable.

The onus of proof should be on those who wish to see our population burgeon to make the case for it. Similarly, if we are to increase our population by 60 per cent in the next four decades we should invest in the infrastructure we will need before we invite new citizens, not after they arrive.

In this era of evidence-based policy, it seems strange that for all the government inquiries that have been held there is yet to be a major scientific, social and economic analysis of the impact of rapid population growth in Australia. While it might be hard to agree on exactly how many people Australia can handle, it may be much easier to agree that much of our infrastructure, natural, physical and social, is already showing signs of stress.

Image credit: Christopher Chan.

The Australian branch of WWF currently has a climate change campaign running in the lead-up to Copenhagen.

If you live in Australia you can quickly send an email to your state’s senators asking them to consider these four points:

1. Australia should be a leader, not a laggard, in a strong global climate agreement at Copenhagen and passing the emissions trading scheme now will help.
2. Climate action will create the clean energy jobs Australia needs to prosper this century, but more investment is needed.
3. Don’t cave in to the big polluter lobby. Listen to the community.
4. Extra action by individuals to reduce emissions should count towards the national target.

They also list phone numbers for all the senators and have a suggested telephone script. Click this link for more information on the four goals listed above.

Interesting resource from RMIT’s Adaptnet program (RMIT University’s Global Cities Research Institute’s Climate Change Adaptation Program network focused on urban climate change adaptation). It is produced in partnership with Nautilus Institute. This decentralized network creates a set of common knowledge and reference points for participants in the network; it offers information, analysis, and methodology to undertake urban climate change adaptive policy research and analysis. AdaptNet highlights best practice and demonstration projects.  It focuses on cities in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, but acknowledges the global network of cities.

They produce a free weekly e-bulletin that includes 5 recent reports related to urban climate change adaptation and information on one adaptation conference. It also publishes analytic papers, critiques and explanations of climate change adaptation practice to support the development of creative thinking in relation to urban climate change adaptation challenges and to facilitate an open exchange of views and ideas.:

A paper in their November 3rd 2009 issue caught my eye – it is about adapting Australian healthcare facilities to the challenge of climate change. The blurb says that the paper outlines the status of current knowledge regarding the likely impact of climate change-related extreme weather events on the Australian healthcare infrastructure. It identifies a range of strategies to effectively manage these challenges, and maximize the opportunities for health-care continuity and quality during an extreme weather event.

Adapting Australian Health Facilities to Cope with Climate-Related Extreme Weather Events, Jane Carthey, Venny Chandra, and Martin Loosemore, Journal of Facilities Management, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 36-51, 2009 [752 KB, PDF] .

As I explored the site I felt  like a child in a candy shop (or more truthfully, man in a hardware store) because there were SO MANY excellent resources. Sections that I particularly liked were the ones on scenario analysis (including links to scenario planning articles, tools, and specific climate change scenarios) and the mind-mapping and visualisation tools (including Truthmapping and an excellent summary diagram of web-based mind-mapping tools including several free ones).

The TOC of the most recent Adaptnet update (November 10 2009) :

Adaptation at the Local Government Level: Great Barrier Reef; Urban Planning and Urban Responses to Climate Change – Australia; Current Rainfall Conditions and El Nino Teleconnections 2009; Adaptation Finance under a Copenhagen Agreed Outcome; Climate Change, Conflict and Security: International Law Challenges; Malaysia-Thailand Conference on Southeast Asian Studies 2010.