David Spratt (leading Australian climate change activist and Ian Dunlop (leading Australian business man and 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 ).
David Spratt (leading Australian climate change activist) and Ian Dunlop (leading Australian business man and 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.
Prof. Kevin Anderson considers that “a 4°C future [relative to pre-industrial levels] is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable” (Anderson 2011). He says: “If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4°C, 5°C or 6°C, you might have half a billion people surviving” (Fyall 2009).
Asked at a 2011 conference in Melbourne about the difference between a 2°C world and a 4°C world, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber replied in two words: “Human civilisation”. The World Bank reports: “There is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible” (World Bank 2012). Amongst other impacts, a 4°C warming would trigger the loss of both polar ice caps, eventually resulting, at equilibrium, ina 70-metre rise in sea level.
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 ).
David Spratt (leading Australian advocate of climate emergency action) on expert global reactions to the 2018 IPCC Report “Global warming of 1.5 °C”(2018): “Quite suddenly, in the wake of the recent IPCC report, it’s become commonplace to talk about a global climate emergency… In many ways, the recent IPCC report on 1.5°C was too conservative, overestimating the length time till we hit 1.5°C, and failing to account for crucial feedbacks in the climate system. Yet the report’s evidence was that 2°C of warming would be catastrophic in so many ways, including for sea-level rise, for coral systems, and for food and water security of hundreds of millions of people, if not more. The current Paris commitments are a path to 3.4°C of warming, and closer to 5°C when the full range of feedbacks are included… We have reached crunch time. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the speed and scale of transformative action needed to keep warming to 1.5°C, said the new IPCC report” (David Spratt, “World wakes up to scale of climate challenge, so what should a Labor government do?”, Renew Economy, 24 October 2018: https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-wakes-up-to-scale-of-climate-challenge-so-what-should-a-labor-government-do-19670/ ).
David Spratt (leading Australian analyst and climate activist) (2018): “At 4oC of warming, would a billion people survive? In a way it’s an obscene question: if the planet warms by 4 degrees Celsius (°C), would only a billion people survive and many billions perish? Obscene in the sense of the obscenity of arguing about the exact body count from a genocide. In the end it’s about the immorality, the crime, the responsibility, not the precise numbers. But it’s a relevant question, in that Earth is heading towards 4°C of warming, based on emission reduction commitments so far. The Paris commitments are a path of warming of around 3.3°C, but that does not include some carbon cycle feedbacks that have already become active (e.g. permafrost, Amazon, other declines in carbon store efficiency) which would push that warming towards 5°C. So saying we are presently on a 4°C path is about right… On the present path, we may well exceed 4°C this century. At the moment Earth appears to be heading towards 1.5°C by 2030 and 2°C before 2050, and if the feedbacks kick in, 4°C some 30-50 years after that. … So did Roger Hallam “go too far” [1 billion people left, 6 billion killed by 2090]? Not at all, there is serious research and eminent voices in support of his statements. The gross error in all of this are all those who cannot countenance this conversation” (David Spratt, “At 4oC of warming, would a billion people survive?”, Climate Code Red, 18 August 2018: https://www.climatecodered.org/2019/08/at-4c-of-warming-would-billion-people.html?m=1 ).