Australia’s State of the Environment Report 2021 - Climate

Just to add a couple of pennies worth to the chorus of SoE commentary. I haven't read the entire SoE tome but that which I have is sobering – as pretty much all the commentary indicates. The Climate section throws up a point of concern in terms of the way we seem to discuss and understand climate change time scales. This sentence is interesting: “The climate will continue to warm, and associated changes in the broader climate system will continue to occur, over the next 20–30 years, largely irrespective of our emissions trajectory.” (Climate – Outlook). The concept of policy settings, markets, public/private programs being considered and built around the notion of 20 to 30 years (or indeed 100 years) is curious within the context of papers from the atmospheric science community.

In papers published in 2009 and 2010 Susan Solomon et al set out a cautionary note that climate change (at the point we hit zero emissions) may run for up to another thousand years (1), (2). I don’t want to come across as Chicken Little here – although ‘the sky is falling’ isn’t a bad analogy – but if we take the observations from global leaders in atmospheric science seriously, questions around current policy settings arise. Once we hit zero emissions targets the one and only, and financially practical action left to us to mitigate climate change is carbon biosequestration. But at the moment we are allocating large areas of land to biosequestration as one component of the race to zero. Carbon offsetting is the common label. And is there a slowing in activity to achieve emissions reductions at source as an unintended consequence of carbon offsetting – the phenomenon of ‘we don’t need to stop spilling the milk now because we can mop it up (offset it) later’. Acknowledging that in the short-term carbon offsetting will remain an important tool for the harder-to-adapt industries – airlines etc.

If we bear in mind the Solomon et al long game of climate change mitigation should the focus be strengthened on emissions reduction/eradication at source (zeroing carbon outputs) and protect land for the long game of negative carbon or carbon draw down? I don’t pretend to have all the answers or that it is easy, but it occurs to me that if we fail to get policy and investments settings right around climate change time scales then future societies may look back fondly at the current SoE report as a description of the good old days!

(1) S. Solomon, G-K. Platter, R. Knutti, and P. Friedlingstein, (2009) Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 106 https://lnkd.in/gk3Bwdjs

(2) S. Solomon, J.S. Daniel, T.J. Sanford, et al, (2010) Persistence of climate changes due to a range of greenhouse gases, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 107 https://lnkd.in/gNXHm3gZ