Ian Dunlop (a member of the Club of Rome and formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chairman of the Australian Coal Association and chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors): “Nowhere in the debate is the critical issue even raised: the existential risk of climate change, which such development now implies. Existential means a risk posing large negative consequences to humanity that can never be undone. One where an adverse outcome would either annihilate life, or permanently and drastically curtail its potential. This is the risk to which we are now exposed unless we rapidly reduce global carbon emissions… Dangerous climate change, which the Paris agreement and its forerunners seek to avoid, is happening at the 1.2-degree increase already experienced as extreme weather events, and their economic costs, escalate. A 1.6-degree increase is already locked in as the full effect of our historic emissions unfolds. Our current path commits us to a 4 to 5-degree temperature increase. This would create a totally disorganised world with a substantial reduction in population, possibly to less than one billion people from 7.5 billion today. The voluntary emission reduction commitments made in Paris, if implemented, would still result in a 3-degree increase, accelerating social chaos in many parts of the world with rising levels of deprivation, displacement and conflict. It is already impossible to stay below the 1.5-degree Paris aspiration. To have a realistic chance of staying below even 2 degrees means that no new fossil-fuel projects can be built globally – coal, oil or gas – and that existing operations, particularly coal, must be rapidly replaced with low-carbon alternatives. Further, carbon-capture technologies that do not currently exist must be rapidly deployed at scale” (Ian Dunlop, “This is not rhetoric: approving the Adani mine will kill people”, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May 2017: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/this-is-not-rhetoric-approving-the-adani-coal-mine-will-kill-people-20170518-gw7nv9.html ).
Ian Dunlop (leading Australian business man and climate change activist) and David Spratt (leading Australian climate change activist (2017): “The first responsibility of a government is to safeguard the people and their future well-being. The ability to do this is threatened by climate change, whose accelerating impacts will also drive political instability and conflict, posing large negative consequences to human society which may never be undone. This report looks at climate change and conflict issues through the lens of sensible risk management to draw new conclusions about the challenge we now face.
• From tropical coral reefs to the polar ice sheets, global warming is already dangerous. The world is perilously close to, or passed, tipping points which will create major changes in global climate systems.
• The world now faces existential climate-change risks which may result in “outright chaos” and an end to human civilisation as we know it.
• These risks are either not understood or wilfully ignored across the public and private sectors, with very few exceptions.
•Global warming will drive increasingly severe humanitarian crises, forced migration, political instability and conflict. The Asia Pacific region, including Australia, is considered to be “Disaster Alley” where some of the worst impacts will be experienced.
• Building more resilient communities in the most vulnerable nations by high level financial commitments and development assistance can help protect peoples in climate hotspots and zones of potential instability and conflict.
• Australia’s political, bureaucratic and corporate leaders are abrogating their fiduciary responsibilities to safeguard the people and their future well-being. They are ill-prepared for the real risks
of climate change at home and in the region.
•The Australian government must ensure Australian Defence Force and emergency services preparedness, mission and operational resilience, and capacity for humanitarian aid and disaster relief, across the full range of projected climate change scenarios.
• It is essential to now strongly advocate a global climate emergency response, and to build a national leadership group outside conventional politics to design and implement emergency decarbonisation of the Australian economy. This would adopt all available safe solutions using sound, existential risk-management practices” (Ian Dunlop and David Spratt, “Disaster Alley climate change conflict & risk”, Breakthrough, 2017: https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2017/06/20/ACFrOgDkCYAvFeJ9d4YxhOlZiOHNkTOnWbkhlY_dX8kl_O3ChbGcEmWsbUNrOnJUwE4SNWFvzB7RM6w4GsF0pDwdnREIip-k5J-03TQc0Op4FWrsNcZpjXAuy7NNJ_Y=.pdf ).
Ian Dunlop (leading Australian business man and climate change activist) and David Spratt (leading Australian climate change activist on planetary existential risk (2017): “An existential risk is an adverse outcome that would either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential (Bostrom 2013). For example, a big meteor impact or large-scale nuclear war. Existential risks are not amenable to the reactive (learn from failure) approach of conventional risk management, and we cannot necessarily rely on the institutions, moral norms, or social attitudes developed from our experience with managing other sorts of risks. Because the consequences are so severe – perhaps the end of human global civilisation as we know it – “even for an honest, truth seeking, and well-intentioned investigator it is difficult to think and act rationally in regard to... existential risks” (Bostrom and Cirkovic 2008).Yet the evidence is clear that climate change already poses an existential risk to global stability and to human civilisation that requires an emergency response. Temperature rises that are now in prospect could reduce the global human population by 80% or 90%. But this conversation is taboo, and the few who speak out are admonished as being overly alarmist…
The present path of greenhouse gas emissions commits us to a 4–5°C temperature increase relative to pre-industrial levels. Even at 3°C of warming we could face “outright chaos” and “nuclear war is possible”, according to the 2007 Age of Consequences report by two US think tanks (see page 10). Yet this is the world we are now entering. The Paris climate agreement voluntary emission reduction commitments, if implemented, would result in the planet warming by 3°C, with a 50% chance of exceeding that amount. This does not take into account “longer-term” carbon-cycle feedbacks – such as permafrost thaw and declining efficiency of ocean and terrestrial carbon sinks, which are now becoming relevant. If these are considered, the Paris emissions path has more than a 50% chance of exceeding 4°C warming. (Technically, accounting for these feedbacks means using a higher figure for the system’s “climate sensitivity” – which is a measure of the temperature increase resulting from a doubling of the level of greenhouse gases – to calculate the warming. A median figure often used for climate sensitivity is ~3°C, but research from MIT shows that with a higher climate sensitivity figure of 4.5°C, which would account for feedbacks, the Paris path would lead to around 5°C of warming (Reilly et al. 2015).)
So we are looking at a greater than one-in-two chance of either annihilating intelligent life, or permanently and drastically curtailing its potential development. Clearly these end-of-civilisation scenarios are not being considered even by risk-conscious leaders in politics and business, which is an epic failure of imagination…
The scale of the challenge is reflected in a recent “carbon law” articulated by a group of leading scientists (Rockström et al. 2017). They demonstrated that for a 66% chance of holding warming to 2°C and a 50% chance of holding warming to 1.5°C (with overshoot), their “carbon law” requires:
• Halving of global emissions every decade from 2020 to 2050 [to 5 Gt CO2/year by 2050];
• Reducing carbon dioxide emissions from land use to zero by 2050; and
• Establishing carbon drawdown capacity of 5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2050.
Lead author Johan Rockström says: ”It’s way more than adding solar or wind... It’s rapid decarbonization, plus a revolution in food production, plus a sustainability revolution, plus a massive engineering scale-up [for carbon removal].” In other words, an emergency-scale effort” (Ian Dunlop and David Spratt, “Disaster Alley climate change conflict & risk”, Breakthrough, 2017: https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2017/06/20/ACFrOgDkCYAvFeJ9d4YxhOlZiOHNkTOnWbkhlY_dX8kl_O3ChbGcEmWsbUNrOnJUwE4SNWFvzB7RM6w4GsF0pDwdnREIip-k5J-03TQc0Op4FWrsNcZpjXAuy7NNJ_Y=.pdf ; see also Reilly, J., S. Paltsev, E. Monier, H. Chen, A. Sokolov, J. Huang, Q. Ejaz, J, Scott , J. Morris and A. Schlosser (2015) Energy and Climate Outlook: Perspectives from 2015, MIT Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Cambridge MA ).