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Professor Clive Hamilton (Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University) and Dr Andrew Glikson (Australian National University) on the science and politics surrounding the denial of climate change.

The 2nd Ideas and Society lecture, held on 2 September 2009.

Transcript

Professor Belinda Probert:

Welcome to this event around the politics and science of climate change denialism, which is the second in a series of the ideas and society program which is being convened by Professor Robert Manne.

My name is Belinda Probert, Deputy Vice-chancellor and unfortunately the Vice- Chancellor had to go and meet some politicians and when you've got an opportunity to meet politicians you don't miss it, otherwise he would have been here making these introductions but so, on behalf of the university welcome to the event and a particular welcome to our guest speakers, and my job here really is just to introduce them and to allow Robert then to take over the… the event.

The first person and I think the first speaker is going to be Professor Clive Hamilton. Now Clive's a very well known Australian author and public intellectual and many of you will have heard him speak on a wide range of subjects over recent years.

He's now, since a year ago I think, been appointed as Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics which is a joint centre of the ANU Charles Sturt and the University of Melbourne but he's probably much better known to most of you for the 14 years I think it was, that he spent, before that as Executive Director of the Australia Institute, a progressive think-tank which he founded and which of course he led during a period when it was a rather bright star on a quite dark horizon shall we say. There are more stars, I think around now and before establishing the Australia Institute, Clive taught in the graduate program in the Economics of Development at the ANU.

Our second speaker is Dr Andrew Glickson who is a climate change scientist and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. He's an Earth and Paleoclimate scientist and he's been working with Earth, climate and biology scientists on the nature of early Earth climates, abrupt climate change… changes and the origins of mass extinct… extinction of species, including the current relationships between humans and the atmosphere, so welcome to Dr Glickson. And chairing the discussion today is our very own Professor Robert Manne who is as you know, most of you will know Professor of Politics at La Trobe and a very wellknown public intellectual in Australia.

He was educated at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford and has published many books, articles, reviews, newspaper columns on public affairs, international relations, history and contemporary Australian political issues. So no one better, in fact to chair the session that we're having today. So, welcome again to our visitors from… to… to the university today and over to you Robert.

Robert Manne:

Well, thanks very much, Belinda, and thank you all very much for coming. This program is going to succeed or not succeed on the basis of the enthusiasm and the support that students and staff the university show and I'm very grateful to you all for having turned up and I hope that you'll spread the word and this program can… can continue into the future. My ambition with it is to have a university community life in the world of ideas, which has always been my sense of what the university in part at least, should be. Just to say a little bit about the… the format of today, Clive and then Andrew are going to speak for about 25 minutes each and then there should be plenty of time for, I hope, spirited discussion and questioning from you. So please, if you wish, take the opportunity to… to raise concerns and questions of the speakers.

I'm going to… I'm going to say a couple of things which will take about two minutes so don't be alarmed, I'm not going to… but I do want to say one or two things. As it happens, just by accident, this week marks the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. It seems to me that today human beings are facing a threat, I would say, an even greater moment than the one faced 70 years ago. The threat is of course, of a quite different nature, in some ways it seems to me a threat of a more difficult kind than the one faced 70 years ago and God only knows, that was sufficiently difficult. If it is true, as the overwhelming majority of qualified scientists claim, that we are facing a threat to the Earth of an altogether unprecedented kind, then it seems to me to follow that the capacity of nations to face or not face up to the nature of the threat will determine both the human future and the future of the Earth. In turn, if it is true, the phenomenon of denial… the phenom… phenomenon of denialism with regard to climate change is fundamental, then we must struggle to understand it and we must struggle… struggle I have say to combat it, of course by argument and by persuasion. In recent times the phenomenon of denialism has come to be called, in Australia at least, a phenomenon of scepticism. This change in language seems to me to be both dangerous and wrong. Scepticism is in general, as it should be, a positive word denoting scientific or humanistic curiosity and in particular, the presence of an open mind. That is not the mindset of those who are now denying the reality of climate change. Denialism, a concept that was first widely used as far as I know for those who claimed that the Holocaust is a fraud, is the concept I believe we should use and the use of denialism in the title of today's talk is at the end of thought, not instinct. It is also, I think important to realise that denialism is a complex phenomenon, more complex than is generally or readily understood. There is ideologically motivated denialism, which comes mainly in our society and in the United States and elsewhere, from the right.

There is economically motivated denialism which comes, I suppose predominantly from the business sectors that feel their interests would be harmfully affected by the real removal of reliance on fossil fuel.

But there is also, more broadly and I think much less discussed something that could be called psychological denialism. The psychological denial of a reality that seems to many of us and I think it's much more common, too big and too daunting for human beings to face up to. We seem to me to live in parallel universes, all of us to some extent, where everything goes on as normal and occasionally we, as it were, become aware of something not normal which is going to determine all our futures. Now, in my observation of politics, in Australia two of the individuals who seem to have understood the extremity of the situation that we face, Clive Hamilton and Andrew Glickson, the climate scientist, I… I think they are unusual, not only for the clarity of their ideas, but for the sense of emergency which, whenever I see an intervention from them, they are able to inject. In some ways that seems to me the most important element of all for those who know the subject and know what they're talking about. So, I am extremely grateful to them and I say it with sincerity, real sincerity. I'm grateful to them for coming to La Trobe today and I am sure that what you'll hear from them will be of interest. So, without ado, Clive, if I could ask you to talk.

Clive Hamilton:

Sorry sound people, this blocks my vision. I know they're having connections over there. Well thank you very much, Robert, for that introduction and La Trobe for the invitation to come and talk about the origins of climate denial. I'm particularly interested in this subject, I have been for a long time because it's fascinating as well as infuriating and it makes up a major part of a book I'm writing on climate change that will appear next March. And as Robert intimated, there is an extremely important phenomenon which I call sometimes casual denial, which is the for… the coping strategies or psychological devices we use to shield ourselves from the true horror of what the climate scientists are talking about. But today I want to talk about the sort of hard end of climate denial and in… in researching this topic for the book, I was particularly interested in trying to track the roots of it and if we look for the roots of climate denial it soon becomes apparent that they lie in the reaction of American conservatives to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

As the threat of the Red Menace receded, the energy conservatives had put into opposing communism sought other outlets. Islamism had for some time been building as a threat in the world, as it seemed to challenge the achievements of the west and the inevitable march of its influence but there was an internal enemy too. Since the 1970s neo-conservatism had set itself against the influence of the so-called new class of liberal intellectuals who had, in their view betrayed the western tradition with a sustained critique of its assumptions and its achievements. Feminism, multiculturalism and anti-colonialism, not only sought to correct injustices but uncovered oppressive structures very deep within the foundations of western civilisation. Environmentalism posed a particular threat because it called into question the benign nature of the system as a whole. But it did so not from the perspective of an oppressed group but from the perspective of science, the very basis according to the neoconservatives, of western civilisation.

In the emergence of the green scare, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 was a critical moment, one that brought to a head three decades of environ… of rising environmental concern around the world. It was attended by 108 heads of government or heads of state and it put environmentalism at the very centre of global action. Among other important agreements it endorsed the framework convention on climate change which to this day provides the architecture for international negotiations on global warming. The Earth Summit not only highlighted the growing body of science that identified environmental decline, but signalled a marked shift around the world in values. President George Bush senior was well aware of the political dangers of the Rio Summit and he instructed the US delegation to water down or block most diplomatic initiatives, including the framework convention. Bush and fellow conservatives recognised that… that after the Cold War, a new threat to their world view had emerged. Germany's environment minister at the time made the prescient remark, I'm afraid the conservatives in the United States are picking ecologism as their new enemy. That was back in 1992.

Among the 17,000 people attending the Rio Summit, was Dixy Lee Ray, an influential conservative activist, a marine biologist with a doctorate from Stanford on the nervous system of a type of lantern fish. In 1973, Ray was appointed by President Nixon to chair the Atomic Energy Commission and she was subsequently elected Governor of Washington state. In 1994 she co-authored a book called, Environmental Overkill, a book critical of environmentalism and she was closely associated at the time with the heads of two rightwing think-tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, both of which were to become extremely active in denying climate science. At Rio, Dixy Lee Ray expressed alarm because the Summit was sponsored by UN officials who, she said, were members of the quote, International Socialist Party. There isn't such a party but we know what she meant. She saw the Summit's agenda 21 as designed to impose quote, world government under the UN so that essentially all governments give up their sovereignty and that nations will be, as they said quite openly, frightened or coerced into doing that by threats of environmental damage and that fear of a UN world government which will rob independent nations of their sovereignty, has being reflected very strongly in some elements of climate denialism in Australia, most notably coming out of the Lavoisier Group and out of the mouth of Hugh Morgan.

Dixy Lee Ray was expressing one of the deepest fears of US conservatives but their anxiety over national sovereignty was matched by the disquiet they felt at environmentalism's destabilisation of the ideas… the fundamental ideas of progress and of mastery over nature. For conservatives, these beliefs define modernity itself.

Their refrain, that environmentalists want to take us back to living in the caves, reflects not just an inability to imagine a third path other than affluence and squalor, but their unquestioned identification of progress with unfettered growth. Any challenge to growth could only mean the end of progress of civilisation and of course the American way of life.

Yet within the collection of core ideas that defined conservative belief, a deep contradiction had emerged. Science itself seemed to be saying that continued human advancement was inconsistent with endless growth and the… and the desire to master the natural world. The easiest resolution of the cognitive dissonance that this generated, was to reject the science that causes the discomfort. For some on that side of politics, and I'm referring to the creationists, this was not difficult because a prior decision had been made to accept science conditional upon its consistency with deeper beliefs. For more sophisticated conservatives, those who led the movement and… and in general privilege science over biblical literalism, the solution was not to reject the science per se but to reinterpret some scientific practice with the claim that its objectivity had been corrupted by biases introduced by scientists themselves, those who'd become infected by the values of liberalism that spread in the '60s and '70s. These sentiments helped to explain why a handful of scientists with genuine climate science credentials broke from the bulk of their colleagues and joined the anti environment movement in the 1980s.

Marina Larsson, an academic, has studied in detail the life experiences and beliefs of three prominent physicists who've participated in the conservative backlash against climate science. In the post war decades, these three Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow and William Neronburg were physicists who, at the pinnacle of their profession, where they enjoyed the respect of society and the patronage of governments who understood or believed that scientific endeavour was the source of national power and prestige. Part of the nuclear science establishment with links to the defence effort, the influence of these three physicists reached a peak in the 1970s just as the environment and peace movements began to challenge the benefits of nuclear technology and the undue power… undue power of the military industrial complex. The social benefits of science and technology were no longer accepted uncritically and these challenges found expression in political demands for independent evaluation of science and technology. The scientific power and privilege of the elite, the scientific elite, went into decline. Larsson reports that Seats himself, who incidentally had been a president of the American Academy of Sciences, Seats wrote of his depression over the new political environment in '70s and '80s and its attacks on the modernist program and progress through technological advance. Larsson wrote, their discourses generally reveal a pre-reflective modernist ethos, characterised by strong trust in science and technology as providers of solutions to problems, an understanding of science and progress that prevailed during the first half of the 20th Century.

These scientists do not see nature as fragile and believe in the right of humans to use technology to exert mastery over nature and it's in respect to this supreme ability of humans that elite scientists such as these three consider themselves to have a unique entitlement to shape opinion. When asked why most scientists reject his sceptical views on global warming, Frederick Seats simply said, most scientists are democrats; I think it's as simple as that. In 1994, Seitz, Jastrow and Neronburg founded the George C Marshall Institute, a Washington think-tank initially devoted to defend… to defending president Ronald Reagan's so-called Star Wars initiative, the strategic defence initiative, panned by most experts at the time as unworkable and a massive waste of resources. Although still campaigning on missile defence, in the 1990s the Marshall Institute's foremost activity became attacking climate change science, the way in which conservative think-tanks in the US amplify the message of sympathetic scientists is well documented. The handful, a mere handful of qualified scientific sceptics or denialists, found a welcoming political environment during the presidency of George W Bush, 2000 to 2008 and of course the republican dominance of Congress. The so-called republican war on science in which think-tanks like the Marshall Institute played a vital role has been well documented. The way in which the White House simply doctored scientific reports that it didn't like, to change the message.

Now an analogy is sometimes drawn between those who have resisted the tide of scientific evidence on the dangers of climate change and those who once questioned the link between smoking and lung cancer in the face of overwhelming medical evidence. It turns out that the links between denialists in the climate change and smoking controversies, go much deeper than mere analogy. In response to a 1992 report on… of the US EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, which linked passive smoking with cancer, Phillip Morris, one of the world's biggest tobacco companies, hired a public relations company named APCO to develop a counter strategy. Acknowledging that the views of tobacco companies lacked credibility, APCO proposed a strategy of so-called astro-turfing, the formation and funding of apparently independent front groups, to give the impression of a popular movement opposed to, quote over-regulation and in support of individual freedom. Now foremost amongst the fake citizens group set up by APCO at the behest of Phillip Morris was a… an apparently independent group called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition or TASSC as it was known. Now according to secret documents which were uncovered only by court order, TASSC was to be quote… according to these secret documents generated by the PR company working for Phillip Morris, TASSC was to be quote, a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of quote junk science, which is what they called climate science; junk science as opposed to their sound science. Upon formation, the document went on, of the coalition, key leaders would begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles and brief… and briefing elected officials in selected states. And the strategy that they… that they… that the PR specialists working for the tobacco company worked out, was to link concerns about passive smoking with a range of other popular anxieties, including global warming, nuclear waste disposal and bio technology.

And they did so in order to suggest that these were all part of an unjustified social panic so that calls for government intervention in peoples lives were unwarranted. And this strategy set out to cast doubt on the science itself of… of… of smoke… linking smoking and lung cancer. Wanted to link the scare against smoking with other quote unfounded fears and to contrast the junk science of their opponents with the sound science promoted by those acting on behalf of the tobacco companies as one famous, or infamous tobacco company memo noted, doubt is our product, doubt is our product since it's the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public. It's also the means of establishing controversy.

Now, as the 1990s progressed and the rear-guard action against restrictions on smoking faded, it was a battle lost although a victory delayed, the advancement of sound science coalition, TASSC, the front group set up by the tobacco lobby, started receiving funds from EXON and other oil companies and its junk science website began to carry material attacking climate change science. George Mombio wrote that this website quote has been the main entrepôt for almost every kind of climate change denial that's found its way into the mainstream press. Having been set up by Phillip Morris, TASSC he wrote was the first and foremost, sorry first and most important of the corporate funded organisations, denying that climate change is taking place. It's done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.

So, the tactics, the personnel and the organisations mobilised to serve the interests of the tobacco lobby in the 1980s, was seamlessly transferred to serve the interests of the fossil fuel lobby in the 1990s. Frederick Seats himself had in the '80s served as principal scientific advisor for cigarette maker RJ Reynolds from which position he challenged the link between tobacco smoke and cancer. The task of the climate sceptics in the think-tanks and PR companies hired by fossil fuel corporations was to engage in what might be called, consciousness lowering activities. To de-problematise global warming by characterising it as a form of politically driven panic-mongering. As a result, climate denial and political conservatism have become, at least in the United States, thoroughly entwined although some evan… evangelical churches now encourage action to avert global warming because it threatens God's creation, climate scepticism has become part of the world view of some Christian fundamentalists. This stew of paranoia finds expression in figures such as republican congresswoman, Michelle Bachmann who, a few months ago attacked house speaker, Nancy Pelosi for her quote global warming fanaticism. She has said that she's just trying to save the planet, said Bachmann, we all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago (audience chuckling). And in March of this year, Bachmann called on her Minnesota constituency literally to take up arms to resist the Obama administration's energy plans. Now the effect of all this conservative activity has been very considerable because they have managed, in the minds of many people in the United States, to associate advocacy of global warming with an anti-conservative view or a world view hostile to conservative values and in doing this it has polarised the debate.

I've just got a couple of slides here to finish off my talk. In 1997, there was little difference between republicans and democrats in their views on global warming, republic and democrat voters. You can see the figures here. In 1997, 52% of democrats believed that the effects of global warming had already begun and 48% of republicans agreed, virtually no difference. Reflecting the accumulation of stronger scientific evidence since 1997, by 2008 the proportion of democrats taking that view had risen from 52% to 76% but the proportion of republicans agreeing had fallen from 48% to 42%, so a 4% gap had become a 34% gap. In an era of intense ideological division, rejection of global warming had, for some Americans, become a means of consolidating and signalling their cultural identity in a way that beliefs about nationalism, welfare or musical tastes do. A recent study used statistical techniques to divide Americans into six distinct groups according… or global warming audiences, according to the authors and you can see they divide the American public up into… using the composition analysis into… into these six groups and you can see they go from the alarmed, those most alarmed about global warming through those who are concerned but not alarmed, cautious, disengaged, doubtful down to the dismissive who are the denialists. Now these groups, quite indistinguishable by any demographic criteria, age, sex, class and so on, you can't really differentiate them strongly at all but they do differ markedly when it comes to values and political orientation and… and religious beliefs. The authors say that the segments that are most concerned about global warming, tend to be more politically liberal and hold egalitarian and environmental values. The less concerned segments, the dismissive and the doubtful and to a degree the disengaged and indeed the cautious to some extent, they are more politically conservative, hold anti-egalitarian and strongly individualistic values and are more likely to be evangelical with strongly traditional religious beliefs and in fact the authors of this study did a… an analysis of the political views of these groups which looks like this. So, to interpret this, if you take the alarmed for example on the sort of the left-hand end here, and the alarmed are defined as those most convinced warming is real and a serious threat and they worry about it a great deal or a fair amount, 48% regard themselves as politically liberal and only 14%, that small red block behind the large blue block, regard themselves as conservative. I haven't put in here the moderates, in between the liberals and the conservatives, so if you added the moderates then looking at the alarmed, the three would add to 100. You get what I mean?

So you can see very, very clearly that amongst liberals there… as you go to the right as it were and become increasingly doubtful and then dismissive about climate change, very, very few people end up in the dismissive end who are liberal by their own definition of their political orientation, whereas people… those dismissive and doubtful… that dismissive and doubtful end of the climate change belief spectrum are overwhelmingly conservative in their orientation. It's a very remarkable shift which I think is a very American phenomenon although I think this is spilt over quite a lot into Australia and that's why you see it's no accident for example that the people who set up the Lavoisier Group, the principle hard line sceptics group, or denialist group in Australia, were also the same people who set up a number of right wing organisations like the HR Nicholls society and the Samuel Griffiths society.

So, in Australia there is… it's nowhere near as strong as in the United States but there's certainly an element of it, whereas this close association between beliefs in science and political orientation, you really can't find in Europe. In fact, in Britain for instance, the conservative party under David Cameron is highly critical of the labour government for not going far enough and similarly Angela Merkel in Germany is at least as strong on this issue as her social democratic predecessor, same situation in France although not oddly enough in Italy, where Berlusconi's politics are well to the right of the more moderate right wingers in the north of Italy. Just another illustration of the odd politics of all of this, in Canada the conservative government of British Colombia, last year introduced a small carbon tax only to be attacked by the left leaning new democratic party that sought government with a so-called axe the tax campaign aimed at protecting consumers. It didn't work incidentally and the conservatives were returned. So I hope that gives you some clearer idea of where climate denial in its strongest form came from and the expressly political intent of those behind it. Thank you.

Andrew Glickson:

Okay, thank you very much. So I'd like to thank Professor Manne and La Trobe University for inviting me and I'd like to thank the audience for coming. This talk will be accompanied with PowerPoint slides. Now the Earth forms an island, a rare island of life in the universe. It's estimated by the so-called Drake equation that only one in millions of planets even within the Milky Way would be able to sustain life… advanced life such as on the Earth. To a large extent this arises from the composition of the atmosphere. By distinction for example from Venus or Mars, Earth's atmosphere has a balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide of course there is also nitrogen at the pressure which allows the presence of liquid water and liquid water means life. Now in this talk, I will have a short introduction then I'll talk about climate effect, climate realities and I'll talk about climate myths, danger zone, I'd call them lies.

If we want to think or try to understand the psychology and the ideology of the so-called climate sceptics, as Robert Manne mentioned they are not sceptics, 'cause scepticism is inherent in the scientific method. These people are not using the scientific method nor are they publishing in [unclear – mic interruption] scientific journals, they work outside science within friendly political media. If we want to understand the psychology and ideology of these people what we have to think is about the Polynesian who has cut the last tree or trees on Easter Island in order to build monuments for this Gods… such as for the Gods. What did the Polynesian think? What did he hope for… the Gods would reward him with? For cutting the life support system. And what do the so-called sceptics think when they promote the open-ended use of the Earth's atmosphere? The finely balance Earth's atmosphere in harmony… in tune with a biosphere, when they promote its use as an open-ended sewer for carbon gases? What kind of Gods do they worship?

Now since the dawn of the industrial age, human kind, homo-sapiens has emitted more than 320 billion tons of carbon, multiplied by 3.2 to get CO2, into the atmosphere. This is nearly half the original inventory of carbon of the atmosphere, 740. Consequently and for no other reason because the sun is only oscillated to a minor extent at plus 0.12 watt per square metre or so, consequently the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by about 40% from 280 to 388 parts per million but [unclear] carbon dioxide which is the important figure and which includes methane and nitric oxide has risen… has risen to 460 parts per million. Now these are only numbers, what do they mean? The Antarctic Ice Age, the present Earth's atmosphere ocean system and biosphere have developed about 34 million years ago, when carbon dioxide levels have decreased, that's [unclear] has decreased to below 500 parts per million. This is that close that the atmosphere ocean system is now to the upper reaches… upper limits of the Ice Ages and large mammals and creatures of the Ice Ages, large mammals on land depend on temperatures of Ice Age inter-glacier… glacier conditions. So what it generally fell to, is climate change is a phenomenon of human induced oxidation of carbon, but not only of carbon of the present biosphere but carbon mined from 400 million years old biospheres from deep in the earth, the coal and oil and the gas which are formed by past biospheres are now going into the atmosphere.

It's a bonfire, it's nothing less than that, the mastery of fire by humans about 200 or longer thousand years ago as epitomised by [unclear] Prometheus, has actually made our species unique in more than one way. Firstly it became able to actually master nature to a large extent, burn the forests, kept people warm, allowed them to cook but even more so allowed them to develop the imagination, the fears and the hopes around camp fires which is in one way of thinking, the source of human psychology and ideology.

A word about the world of climate scientists, the Cassandra effect. There is no more thankless task than warning people, as medical doctors know very well, whether it's the individual patients or the public. You get no thanks, in fact you get abuse and especially in the United States but even here in Australia, some climate scientists have become the subject of harassment and even threats. So, what's the Cassandra effect? When a person believes he knows the future, of happening a catastrophic event, for future happening of catastrophic event, having already seen in some way or even experienced it first hand, either the person knows there is nothing that can be done to stop the event from happening and that nobody will believe it even if he or she tries to tell them. So you have to go round the issue in some other way.

Now the role of the atmosphere with life is not always well understood, so the best way to comprehend it is by comparison. Comparison with the lungs, the human lungs or the lungs of any other animal. The atmosphere acts as the lungs of the biosphere, for example when the Antarctic vortex expands, the Earth cools, carbon dioxide is absorbed into the oceans, trees grow larger in order to be able to absorb more carbon dioxide for oxidation, for life. As the trees grow faster, bigger, they emit more oxygen, so the lung expands and organisms over the atmosphere gains in atmosphere… in oxygen, sorry. When the vortex contracts the opposite happens. The Earth warms, carbon dioxide is expelled from the oceans, the oxygen is consumed by respiration and is burnt. Very much in analogy with the lungs, the lungs expand, the lungs absorb oxygen for respiration, lungs contract, CO2 is exhaled. Well here is… I was going to use the term, perfect analogy with tobacco smoking which enriches the lungs in carbon dioxide and we know what the effect of that is above a certain level, you just die. Sceptics so-called will often say, well carbon dioxide is life. Well everything is life but when there's a level of certain chemicals rises or falls in the human body, whether it's oxygen or whether it's carbon dioxide, whether it's any metal, whether it's arsenic, whether it's a [unclear] virus, when the level rises or falls below a certain level, just don't get sick and die. Here are examples for the history of carbon dioxide and of oxygen will come in a moment, through history, through time on the Earth. What you're looking at here is a good correlation between periods of low carbon dioxide and glacial periods which are shown in blue, so you can see the Permian and the Carboniferous Permian in blue there to low latitudes with carbon dioxide getting to below 500 parts per million that the value I mentioned before. The same with some periods in the Jurassic and the same post EOC, post 34 million years ago, well it's a drop of carbon monoxide and methane and nitric oxide which has brought up the Ice Ages and vice versa. And reverse, conversely oxygen will rise up as you can see on the upper level… upper diagram during these cold periods for reasons that I have mentioned.

That bonfire that homo-sapiens, you could say Prometheus has lighted is shown in these diagrams, basically as you can see on the middle diagram we are now well on the way with carbon dioxide equivalent to 500 parts per million, which is the top limit of the Ice Age. Of course they are leg effects, it's not all happening right now but the leg effects are very difficult to quantify, they could range from anything from a few decades to a few centuries and even millennia. There has never been a period in geological history of the Earth excepting the large mass extinctions, when carbon dioxide levels have risen as fast as they are rising at the present time. Two parts per million per year, this is extreme. This has only happened when major volcanic events or major impacts by comet or asteroid have hit the earth. And here are the consequences, the curve… the temperature rise curve from 1880 to 2000, the red one shows the northern hemisphere, the blue one shows the southern hemisphere which has more oceans so it keeps a bit cooler and the diagram below shows that these parameters, these curves, these trajectories are based on both, on satellite measurement and on ground measurement. The major effect which also sometimes gets underestimated is in the poles. The poles form the thermostat of the Earth, they are for the reason that they are the source of the low temperature currents, whether it's ocean currents or wind currents which cool the high latitudes, mid latitudes and even the tropics through ocean circulation systems such as the Gulf Stream and the Humboldt Stream. And what happens in the poles is very well known, now the decrease in the Arctic sea ice has exceeded any IPCC projections like so many other IPCC projections, on the Arctic side you are looking at the collapse of western Arctic ice shelves.

So the realities have been summed up in a very recent article by Adam Sacs, he says the most expert scientific investigators have been blindsided by the velocity and extent of recent developments and the climate models have likewise proved from more conservative… to be more conservative… far more conservative than nature itself. Given that scientists have underestimated influx of even small changes in global temperatures, it is understandably difficult to illicit an appropriate public and governmental response.

Now that I have shown you some of the realities, only in summary, climate realities, I will talk about the dangerous myths and plain untruths including alteration of data. If there is any sin in science, crime, it is to actually fabricate, manufacture original data sets or introduce or produce unreal new ones. There are a number of examples that exist in the history of science, fortunately they are not very common but have become extremely common when it comes to the so-called sceptics. So, the alteration of data, the term sound science which Clive has mentioned, what does sound mean? Does it mean real or unreal? The carbon dioxide connection has been challenged as if it does not exist, as if the… if… if the fuel corporations say so, the carbon dioxide temperature does not exist. Two and two equals five if the parties say so. [Unclear] defamation, I've mentioned it already, the IPCC conspiracy, more than 2,000 scientists have colluded for the sake of getting some salaries and of course the tobacco has been mentioned already. So carbon dioxide is life, if the oil companies say so. What happens when the lungs have excess carbon dioxide? They will not answer that, that's untruth number one. Untruth number two, they've come with temperature change diagrams like the one on the top left which are derived from the tropics, from tropical islands. Of course, tropical islands do not heat as much as land masses at the higher latitudes because of the effect of the ocean and because of the effect of the mineral and [unclear] enso cycles because of volcanic effect. So there is not much change and they say, look there's not much change. But when you look at the graph on the right you will see that there has been change of 0.8 degrees since the industrial revolution, in fact it's much more because another 0.5 degrees are masked by the aerosols, sulphur aerosols emitted by industry and when you look at the diagrams at the bottom you see the maximum warming, global warming happens in the poles and that's because of the ice melt and warm water feedback effect, I will not talk in any detail here. But the sceptics, so-called never really talk about the poles, they don't exist in their part of the universe.

What they do talk is about those phases in the evolution of the Earth's climate where temperatures have gone down and of course when you get oscillations you always get both downward and upward trends, you are looking here at the upper diagram. They emphasis the red arrows but what they don't talk about is a decayed long trend. The decayed long trend has risen, as I mentioned and oscillations are partly due to solar oscillations which are plus, minus one degree or so over the 11-year sun spot cycle and partly because of the Enso cycles as well, that you can see down at the bottom diagram the Il Nino has become stronger with time, which means actually it's an indicator or global warming which I will not go into detail here.

Some so-called sceptics, a particular one in Australia will say Antarctica's not warming so when you show them the maps they say, oh but East Antarctic's not warming. Well you can see that parts of East Antarctic is slightly warming, part is stable, slightly cooling, this is because of the Baltics effect, as the Baltics contract, the wind becomes faster, it's because of the ozone depletion so Antarctic is relatively stable. That's good news, we can continue to emit another 1,000 billion tons of carbon because Antarctic's still stable and see what happens, it's very interesting (audience laughing). Maybe sea level will rise, maybe it will not rise but let's try. Unfortunately West Antarctic's ice shelves are breaking down extremely fast as you can see on the left, next to East Antarctic there are regions which are warming, which are cooling and the sea ice comes and goes. Bogus diagrams manufactured non-data, counter data called anti-data, they're not… they don't give numbers, so-called sceptics don't use numbers for a very good reason. If they used a number it could be easily shown to be incorrect. So here they have a diagram which has no Y axis and you can see on it that the medieval warm period which they keep on talking about, according to the diagram has been as warm as current global warming but in fact when you look at a plot of the IPCC below you can see that this is not… this is not the case, the medieval… the present warming is 0.5 to 0.6 higher than the medieval warming based on [unclear – proxies ?], various [unclear – proxies ?] oxygeniser tops and [unclear] and so on.

Here is a diagram from a famous… from a famous emeritus professor, highly distinguished, the most distinguished geology professor in Australia or in the world perhaps, which has adopted unreferenced diagram from the great global swindle movie. What the diagram shows it's on top, is if a temperature had risen from 1970 to 2000 by about… it will be 0.3 degrees or so. In reality when you look at the diagrams below the red and the yellow, according to Hadley and NASA, the temperature blink is 0.6 degrees. Well what's 0.3 degrees between friends? They talk about the sun all the time but they never mention the actual insulation, the value in terms of watts per square metres, here it is. It's true that early in the 20th Century, solar and greenhouse heating, or rather the temperature rise due to solar and due to greenhouse, rose parallel to each other and were difficult to distinguish. But from about 1970, which is a critical period which we are looking at, greenhouse warming has elevated by… it's 0.5 or so to 0.6 degrees but the sun kept on oscillating as it did before.

They produce fake maps, here is a map produced by Newsweek some years ago, it shows as if the effects of global warming on so under-developed countries were unfortunately for them, only black, yellow and red people live have been extreme. You see black in India, black in Africa, black in some other parts of the world. However, the good ones, the superior white races will not suffer that much, you can see North America is fine, light green, Australia is quite fine, Europe is fine. Unfortunately when you compare this with a real climate change maps from NASA, here from 2000 to 2009, compared to '51 to '80, you can see the temperature rises, they've certainly included North America, Europe and Australia. So much… if these effects don't fit the theories, too bad for the facts isn't it?

The IPCC projections have been given to a number of scenarios in terms of emission. We are now at the… what do you call, the A1 scenario which mean, maximum emission with maximum consequences and this is the bottom graph, you can see with the maximum consequences mean is that by end of the century, for some reason they always talk about the end of the century, see if there's no future, no hope, no life after that, that's only [unclear] have risen up in the poles by seven to eight degrees and as [unclear] by four, five and six. This already temperature, this is climate conditions would belong to other eras, other geological eras when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. There were no mammals on the continents at that time. And here is a recent one for us, closer to home, just recently a report by the Bureau of Meteorology showed that this August, just last month, few days ago, maximum temperatures in Central and Northern Australia in August have exceeded all previous records by eight degrees. Is there any more time left?

So it's not as if I can tell any better news in the remaining minutes (audience laughing). I must apologise, I feel heartsick, I do truly feel heartsick to communicate this type of news, especially to young people. I wish I was wrong. A paper which appeared recently by Dacus has indicated that as it happens also with human mycopial populations or with seismic effect, a period of quiet, a period of lull of many more variations will precede upheavals, will precede maximum variability. I apologise for the poor diagram but what it shows is for a number of events, here glacial events, end of glaciations and so on, their termination which was abrupt were sometimes with a change of several degrees within a few decades, has been preceded by long quiet period. Some people are worried about it, that they… we had a lull in terms of the millennium year of six or seven years, some people are worried the next Il Nino will be strong, maybe too strong as it shown up on the diagram at the bottom. And then there is the concept of tipping points, people talk about all the time. Tipping point mean at this end of the lull but it can manifest itself in many forms because it varies in time and in place… in place, it's hard to define. But it's possible that the major fire storms which we had here in Victoria which are now in California due to extreme desiccation of the bush, is one expression of tipping points. It's quite possible that the eruption of [unclear] of methane from the arctic sea which is increasing now as you can see on the diagram is another form of tipping point. The trouble with synergy, James Lablock has pointed out, all these processes are inter-related, they are the feedbacks. The feedback is the monster, the elephant in the room because while climate change drivers are moderate or large, the feedbacks can exceed what we can… what we would like to think about. And the result, another paper that appeared now by [unclear] and others now calculate that the result of carbon dioxide rise and of temperature rise can only be measured in terms of centuries or millennia and you can see the familiar curve, it goes up which means this is the inheritance that our civilisation will leave, this is the Faustian bargain.

But I don't want to finish up with such a gloomy message, I don't want to even if it's true so just… just for my own peace of mind I will invoke the force of life. Now there is no question about, at least the way I understand it based on studies of effect of climate and human evolution, there is no possibility in my view that the human race will disappear. One reason is humans have survived the most extreme glacier and inter-glacial changes through the [unclear], through the last million years plus. This…these are changes of plus, minus six degrees and but the secret for the survival was migration, they could quickly migrate from one climatic zone to the other. How quickly can six billion of us migrate? It's a very good question. There are parts of Earth, especially the tropics interestingly enough because they are already so hot, which will have minimal effect of climate change. Also some mountain islands and so on. So, humans will survive but civilisation's a different story. As to life, well this last diagram tries to convey my feelings about it, the life force is stronger than human destructive power. Thank you very much.

(Audience clapping)

Rober Manne:

Well we have plenty of time for questions. The way we'll do them is if people could come to the microphone at the front here. I'll start off by asking perhaps one question but then I'll leave it to you and we'll go on for as long as we have questions until clock strikes two. Perhaps I could ask both speakers to say something about whether you think the atmosphere in the academy among scientists and non-scientists reflects the situation? I mean do you… do you feel that there is at least a segment of the society of the academy which is alert to and is responding adequately to the crisis? Clive, do you want to ..? I'm talking about fellow academics and the world we live in.

Clive Hamilton:

Well I think that academics are as much prone to forms of distancing and refusing to recognise uncomfortable truth as anyone else. In fact some are… are masters at splitting and I think it's one thing to recognise the facts intellectually, such as those that Andrew's presented, but it's quite a different thing to allow the emotional force of what those facts mean. Carl Yung was once… once asked, which patients he found most difficult to treat? And he said, habitual liars and intellectuals.

(Audience laughing)

Rober Manne:

That's two distinct categories (audience laughing).

Clive Hamilton:

No, and in a way we intellectuals are habitual liars in some ways, I'm being very down on my fellow academics, aren't I?

Rober Manne:

Yes.

Clive Hamilton:

But I don't think there's anything special about it. But I do know that climate scientists, some of them are absolutely terrified. Those who spend their days working on this stuff are absolutely terrified but I… I think it was Elliott who said, there's only so much reality human beings can stand so there's a natural recognition, there's a sort of point at which this becomes too frightening to acknowledge.

Rober Manne:

I mean you speak about climate scientists as a group you know.

Andrew Glikson:

I'm wired to the extent now with several sets of microphones and wires that I feel I'm very worried to… to give a particular answer (audience laughing). But I will answer first with a parable. During the French nuclear testing in Polynesia, 1972, everybody was alarmed and I put on my black coat and went to the university to sign people in a partition. Every student signed, most junior lecturers signed, some senior lecturers signed but not without giving me a pep talk about you need to be careful and very, very few… very, very few of the top professors and directors signed, again sometimes giving me some lectures about having to be careful. So, partly there was a factor of age but the other part is denial is an essential mode of survival, I mean the zebra could not survive just because the lions are a few metres away. The zebra has to live on and graze as if there are no lions around partly because a zebra probably does not have a fore-shadowing of what death is, humans do. So you simply cannot live day to day and take that step if you thought the sky was falling and so denial to me, I empathise, I more than empathise. I try and deny it myself much of the time. It has to be. On the other hand, while denial is essential as individuals, denial of a collective of society is disastrous. Now you ask me about academics, apart from the age thing many of them are high up in society, secure, eek funds and tend to be careful, far too careful. Thank you.

(Audience clapping)

Panellists:

My question is directed to both Clive and Andrew, but particularly to Andrew because he is a geologist. It is my understanding, perhaps I'm wrong that geologists are much more likely to be climate sceptics or denialists and that climate scientists and atmospheric scientists of course accept the findings of the IPCC and in some cases feel that the latest IPCC report is… is on the conservative side and I was wondering if you could sort of comment on that? And perhaps picking up on Andrew's final comment, has the corporatisation of universities perhaps been a factor in making academics, including under social sciences, more and more timid?

Andrew Glikson:

Sorry, my memory span is getting shorter as I get older. Your first question was?

Panellists:

Okay the first question… yeah about the… yeah.

Andrew Glikson:

I'm with you. Well there are very good reasons for it. For one, geologists think in terms of millions and billions of years, one very well known geologist has given a talk at a convention recently about climate change and he said, it's not really such a major concern because the bacteria will survive (audience laughing). Well, well he happens to be studying early life and microbeous cultures. So when you think in terms of millions of years, well there's just a blip on the radar. The other thing geologists, field geologists tackle a lot and the expanse of the country, out in the desert is such you look at it and think it's for eternity; it will always be there whatever we do or don't do. And the third but more sinister answer is that traditionally geologists getting the funds from mining companies including oil and coal companies, so there you go.

Clive Hamilton:

We, the Australians have documented so far as we could the extraordinary inflow of funding for research and teaching into universities from fossil fuel companies, mostly in Western Australia and Queensland and of course he who pays the piper calls the tune. I'm sure the academics in question will you know insist that nothing could influence their views and they'll say whatever they think is right but they imagine themselves to be super-human. We all saw during the Howard years the way in which critical science was suppressed, not as egregiously as in… under the Bush administration but certainly a pall of censorship and fear descended over the CSRO very, very clearly. Graham Pearman, the head of the division of atmospheric research here in Melbourne was effectively sacked because he believed it was his duty to report to the public, people who pay him, what the climate science was saying. Now the alarming thing is that this pall of censorship, self-censorship which has engulfed the CSRO continues. I know of CSRO scientists whose papers have been suppressed and who have been banned from saying things in public based on their research in the last 12 months. So sadly the promises of the Labor party to lift this silencing of dissent have not been honoured.

Panellists:

Andrew actually mentioned James Lovelock who's someone who I had a very strong interest in, following in terms of his succession of books and thoughts and speeches and so on to the… to the Royal Society in Britain and other forums. I'd like to ask each of you whether you're with him in the assumption that really mitigating climate change is really too late? That's something we should have been doing 20, 30 maybe 40 years ago and that the time has come to concentrate very largely both socially as well as ecologically on adaptation with all the sociological issues that that raises, including the issue of migration?

Clive Hamilton:

Well, this is in fact the subject of this book I'm writing called Requiem for a Species so that gives the game away. It is too late. We are going to experience catastrophic climate change and there's nothing we can do to stop it. I don't think that means we should abandon mitigation attempts and focus only on adaptation because with any mitigation we can at least delay the… some of the worst impacts. I have a very ambivalent view about Lovelock, I mean politically he's sort of off the planet. I mean he's… in his latest book he… he actually says that the world didn't wake up to climate change… the seriousness of climate change until 2004 when he wrote, started to write about it. And the reason why the world didn't wake up is because and this sounds like a caricature but I can point to the page where he writes it in his latest book, the world didn't wake up because American… the American science establishment refused to accept his Gaia theory and therefore couldn't understand the dire straits in which the Earth had found itself. But I'll just finish on this point. Whilst the Gaia idea is an extremely interesting one and one… the basic one about the planet being living in some sense, although it's the sense in which it lives which is the very difficult issue, I think there's… that adopting the Gaia position as Lovelock does and others do, is itself a denial strategy because what he does, if you read between the lines of the books, he sort of adopts this position, he sort of comes back from the Earth and sort of sits out there in sort of eternal time or universal space and looks at the Earth as a sort of you know celestial body with these creatures going around on it and yes, most of them might die out and it seems to me that this is a way of not acknowledging that millions, perhaps billions of people are going to die premature and perhaps horrible deaths. It's a way of refusing to acknowledge the true human horror that is likely to unfold.

Rober Manne:

Andrew?

Andrew Glikson:

Yeah, well the Gaia theory of course say, in just in the intertwined nature of all life and off life with the Earth itself. For me in my view, and it's not an original one the further you look into Earth science, the history of the Earth and into biological science, the more connections you discover and this includes connections with what happens deep in the Earth, the volcanic activity which clearly affects life, so what happens in the solar system and outside, so effect of impacts of comets and asteroids which effect life and major mass extinctions in a major way. In fact each one of the five mass extinctions, [unclear] End Triassic and [unclear] has been triggered by either or both major volcanic activity and large asteroid, comet effect, it's been my field [unclear] for years. This is the way the Earth renews itself, we wouldn't have been here had it not been for the impact, asteroid impact 64, 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs would have still been roaming and the mammals would have… small mammals would have been still confined to sub-terrainian caves beneath the earth. We wouldn't be here. Which means that in terms of the evolution of the Earth, mass extinctions are not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a way the Earth renews itself. Whatever happens to large mammals, including humans on the Earth, now and in the future is again, in terms of the evolution of the Earth not a good thing or bad thing. It's not good for us because we live now and we want to live and we want to think that we are rational. So if you look at nature purely from point of view of the biosphere, it's connection with the depths of the Earth and with extra-terrestrial events, you can call it Gaia, you can call it any other name. The danger with the Gaia theory is that people associate it with a spiritual dimension. Well, you can attach a spiritual dimension to the Earth, you can revere the Earth as a [unclear] and as long as [unclear] is to revere the Earth, Earth was in some equilibrium, it's… it's advance into sky Gods, [unclear – monitaism ?] which regarded the Earth only as a corridor to Heaven and the corridor can be abused, which in a way perpetrated the illogical danger which brought environmental demise. But back to the question, I think the Gaia theory has a world of evidence in Earth and biological sciences and therefore what we do is very closely related to it.

Panellists:

Maybe a comment and a question. When speaking about… can you hear me well? When speaking about climate change, people very often talk about the temperature change in the trobosphere, at the same time the atmosphere balances itself, so warmer temperatures in the strobosphere mean colder temperatures in the stratosphere and right now we are in the middle of the severest stratospheric ozone depletion and warmer tropospheric temperatures make stratospheric temperatures colder and the ozone depletion becomes even worse. And Australia is already number one in the world in skin cancer, majorly because of the stratospheric ozone depletion. So, future developments in climate change increasing tropospheric temperatures mean worsening this problem. So in short term for Australia even if we don't change temperatures in the stratosphere at all, even if we do not emit any of the ozone destroying chemicals, the recovery may take longer than 100 years and we still emit the ozone destroying chemicals and this [unclear] of carbons is another variable that has never been present before in geological, historical times. So, in a way present situation with climate change is quite different from the past because of the human impact because of artificially created chemicals. So any comment on that? Maybe for Australians the time to relocate is now?

Andrew Glikson:

Well, it's a global problem, you can't isolate Australia from it but you are really talking about entirely different regions of part of the Earth. The ozone depletion occurs over the poles only and so it results… even on the poles it results in cooling of Antarctic because ozone is a greenhouse gas, its depletion at lower levels of the atmosphere causes cooling but its depletion at higher level… higher level of the stratosphere causes different effects. The ultra violet gets straight through. In the tropics there is an ozone depletion but you get a tropospheric hotspot. The tropospheric hotspot of the intensity of it reflects the… that due to the Hadley [unclear] collection, it reflects the degree to which the Earth warms. The more energy, high temperature, the stronger the tropospheric spots. Some people say there was no tropospheric spots and there is no global warming but in fact they discovered it from satellites, two types of satellite. Now the rest of what you said, if I understood it correctly is that because CFCs are involved and ozone is involved the other factors are not really important because are different from previous greenhouse effect and previous climate changes. The ozone effect relative to the greenhouse, to CO2 to nitric oxide which are very important, to methane, to [unclear] is very minor.

Panellists:

[Unclear] for climate change but this major for people's life and even global food chain because enhanced levels of UV radiation actually destroys a feet of plankton in oceans and I just want to say that when we talk about climate change it is important to consider all factors and it is a fact that the mini ozone holes are now observed in the Northern hemisphere as well and in the Southern hemisphere, the Antarctic ozone hole, it's very dynamic and it reaches Melbourne sometimes. So it's not just over Antarctica.

Andrew Glikson:

The ozone depletion is very solely studied, it was Lovelock by the way who discovered it originally, so he's not… he's not just an old fool (audience laughing). It's been studied in great detail, it's well understood, it's a part of global climate change so I… I'm not sure what your question is? Like two minus… I mean two negatives don't form a positive do they? Or maybe they do?

Panellists:

I think in this case the ozone depletion is going to get worse because of the global warming and when people model the global warming consequences this should be a part of it as well.

Andrew Glikson:

Yeah, I can… I can refer you to it in a lot of papers dealing with the ozone and its effects. There is a vast literature about it.

Rober Manne:

Next question?

Panellists:

Hi. Given the premise on the true human horror as a result of climate change, the suffering that people in the future is going to endure in global scale, do you think this is a good reason for young people to seriously consider the option of not having children? I mean of course, they consider it but not everyone is going to do that but at least if this is a serious option then some people will do it, but do you think it's a good reason to think along that line?

Rober Manne:

This is your turf.

Clive Hamilton:

Yeah, I mean I've thought a lot about this and both you know in a sort of abstract way and a very personal way, not that I plan to have any more children but my children at that point. I certainly wouldn't advise anyone one way or another but I think it's a genuine dilemma that people have to face up to. I have to say I have a sort of get out clause here and I haven't ever said this and maybe it's a ridiculous thing to say but you know my view is for young people, I can understand how and wouldn't discourage people having children now, but the next generation to come along in 30 to 40 years time, I think the whole decision making framework will be completely different and I think that the question of voluntarily restricting numbers you know is a very… is a very serious one that we won't be able to avoid.

Rober Manne:

There's I think Gideon and then my fellow.

Panellists:

I'm… I'm concerned about untruth in society and both the speakers talked about this a few weeks ago associated with the liquid natural gas [unclear]. Two ministers Ferguson and Crean both declared that liquid natural gas, ie methane is clean and it is clean energy and clean fuel and my… my question because both you guys, Andrew and Clive you come from Canberra and so you… you know… you can bump into the Acad-emissions and so on, surely at least there must be some mechanism so these guys can be brought to account for telling absolute untruth? Now my suggestion would be that surely the academies of science and humanities and social sciences can at least form a committee that can deal with this thing? Questions of this kind have been related… raised in relation to, for example holocaust denial and my view is that in terms of the need for free speech and scholarship, such offences should be prosecuted through a proper public judicial process but there's no penalty, people will just simply have to live with the ignominy of having been shown in a transparent, public process and expertly informed process that they were uttering falsehood. Anyway I'd like to hear your suggestions because it's a small step, but if we can't make that small step to stop the lying at that level, then what hope is there?

Clive Hamilton:

Well, I think it's a very good point and the first thing that should happen is for members of the public should call it at every opportunity and of course the most outrageous use of language in this is this phrase, clean coal. I mean you know as one spoof said it sort of, it mobilises the awesome power of the word, clean. And you know it is very worrying when these sort of propaganda terms which are literally dreamt up in the creative… by the creative teams of advertising agencies on behalf of fossil fuel companies, when these sorts of terms start to be mouthed by our political leaders it's… it's a matter of grave concern. I notice that some environment groups are taking advantage of the laws against corporations engaging in deceptive and misleading conduct and in fact in the UK, Shell had described it's… it's tar sands operations, and as you probably know extracting oil from tar sands is by far the worst possible way of generating energy humankind ever thought it, they described it as sustainable. And they were taken to court and were forced to desist from applying that word to their operations. Maybe in Australia we could use, or in fact I'm sure the… the environment group would use the ACCC if they felt it could be done effectively. I don't think the academies are going to do it. I actually think the academies in Australia are absolutely pathetic on climate change. The statement the Academy of Science put out a few months ago was the weakest statement on climate change any scientific body in the world, it was absolutely pathetic and when it gets to the Academy of… what's it called? The Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, I mean it's full of sceptics, I mean who are they? Why are they there? I mean they should be drummed out of their professions. So I just think it's a scandal the way some segments of the scientific community who should be committed to all of the good things about the pursuit of dispassionate truth have had seriously let down their colleagues apart from anything else. And I think about the world leading climate scientists in the CSIRO who's views are suppressed and the way in which the academies allow that to happen is really outrageous.

Rober Manne:

This… this will be the final question and then I have a couple of things to say.

Panellists:

I just want to ask about denialism in Australia and with Senator Barnaby Joyce and Steve Fielding sort of pro… proliferating I guess you could say denialist discourse to the Australian public, how much focus and energy should environmental activists put into addressing that discourse and should we be trying to reach ordinary people on the ground or writing letters to newspapers and trying to counter those arguments that are really emotional and really dangerous? And also I wanted to ask should we be focusing our attention on reaching ordinary people or should we more be doing things like demonstrating, blockading and trying to convince politicians to actually do something? And should we as students at Latrobe be protesting outside Rio Tinto, the centre on campus that we have? Should we be doing that or ..? Yeah. Thank you.

Andrew Glikson:

Just have to have a word about the previous question if I may?

Rober Manne:

Yes.

Andrew Glikson:

Where the carbon dioxide comes from now that we only 40 parts per million below the upper limit of Antarctic and the stability of Antarctic Ice Age almost doesn't matter, the carbon dioxide can come from vehicles, from buses, the bus I will be taking back to Canberra, it can come back from cattle from the methane which gets oxidised. It can come back from natural gas, it can come back from anything really, well cutting a tree will do it. Which means when you're at that level… this level is so critical and so little understood, it's in terms of the Earth's climate, it's an emergency and it's impossible to get this message… message through. The kind of measures which are required would be a combination of measures, not just a cutting the emissions but also the carbon down-drill, atmospheric carbon down-drill, [unclear], we're using fast going planes, we're using [unclear], using sodium madroxide which is another chemical and so on. So that's in response to what you said about gas, we don't want to get bogged down over any single line because it's a totality which we're looking at. Now the other question, what can students do? What can young people do? Well, people in the United States, James Huntson and even Al Gore have now called for disobedience but I don't imagine that people will move before they actually witness the results. What happens in front of them.

Clive Hamilton:

I'll just comment on that, I mean in responding to… the remarkable thing is that I mistakenly thought that with the election of the Labor government, the… you know the sceptics would fade into the background but in fact there's been a resurgence of scepticism here, less so in the United States, there's not so much of a resurgence but certainly here in Australia it's been truly remarkable and it really has been more than disheartening. Astonishing to see federal senators just mouth the most absurd unscientific views. I mean it really is… it's a commentary on humanity really and the failure of the enlightenment. I mean in a way climate change, our inability to respond to it and the debate that we have about it really shows that the enlightenment was only a surface manifestation and always there were much deeper currents running through the human heart and there are ones that are going to call this… cause us to grieve deeply. I think it's up to the scientists, the genuine scientists to respond concisely and effectively each time, Senator Joyce or Senator Fielding utters you know another foolishness but it's also important not to overdo it and not to provide too much… too much oxygen for the… for the sceptics, because that's how they have succeeded, because people have taken them too seriously. You know there's a… there's a terrific article that came out a few years ago call… about… called Balances Bias and the sceptics have very effectively traded on the desire of the media, some segments of the media always to bribe a balanced view so you know you have a genuine climate scientist putting reporting on his or her research and they say oh we need to get a balanced view and go and get the sceptics to respond. And it's absurd, I mean every time someone gives a paper on evolution, they don't say oh God, we must be balanced and go and get a Creationist you know to come and give a competing view and to tell you the truth, the Australian, of course is the… is the worst media centre of climate scepticism, it just consistently and systematically and maliciously in my view, promotes climate scepticism at every opportunity. But I have to say over the last year, I've noticed another news organisation give vastly more attention to climate sceptics and that's the ABC. I don't know what's going on there? But suddenly the sceptics are getting a much better airing on the ABC, on its website, on its radio programs and I saw one… it was actually Leigh Sales interviewing I think it was Al Gore a few months ago and she asked a whole string of questions about climate sceptics and how do you respond to this and how do you respond to that and then she said, and why do you think the climate sceptics receive so much attention? (Audience laughing) I thought, well just shut up and they won't. So this sort of weird… I mean I think the media has a lot to answer for here, not everyone of course, there've been some terrific examples of people who have consistently reported the science and the politics behind climate scepticism but it really is remarkable the way some media outlets continue to give prominence to unscientific views.

Rober Manne:

Can I say that this for me has been a great experience. I think that the depth of both knowledge and thought, but also feeling about the issue has communicated itself in many ways from both our speakers. I thank you all for coming and I thank them very much for their contributions.

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