The carbon party's over

Science journalists would 'starve' without the constant supply of carbon emission stories. Photo / NASA

Award-winning writer Chris Barton was the only NZ reporter at the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists in London. Climate change was the big issue - and it's about to get even bigger with the Government setting a greenhouse gas emissions target.

We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us. Mike Hulme's John F. Kennedy-style call to mobilise turns many of the vexed arguments about global warming on their head. From this point of view, we may not all be doomed, paradise may not be lost, governments may agree about emission reductions, and in the process other world problems - pollution, hunger, poverty - may get a leg up.

Wishful thinking? Probably. But the ideas outlined in Hulme's book Why We Disagree about Climate Change do suggest that there's more going on here than just a physical phenomenon. Ask anyone for their views on this subject and you'll rapidly learn about their personal values, beliefs and often quite wacky ideas.

At the very least it makes a refreshing change to the nostalgic hairshirt lament encapsulated in the low-budget, dramatised climate change documentary The Age of Stupid (showing at Auckland's Rialto from August 20). The movie stars Pete Postlethwaite as the last guy alive in a post-apocalyptic, climate-zapped world. Digging through a video archive of news clips and interviews from the first decade of the 21st century, he muses on how we could have been so stupid, ignoring the environmental warning signs.

The movie attracted considerable debate when it screened in Britain, says the director of London's Science Museum and former director of the British Antarctic Survey, Chris Rapley. He's not a great fan. While the movie might impress ardent environmentalists, he says it will be a turn-off for the bulk of society. "We need to start showing 'The Age of Sensible' - what the world could look like with a decarbonised energy supply."

What scientists like Rapley have belatedly figured out is that their climate change message to date, instead of being a call to action, is having the opposite effect. The more clearly scientists articulate the threat, the more likely people are driven into paralysis. "If you try to scare people, they either say we don't believe you or we can't do anything about it," says John Mitchell, director of Climate Science at the British Meteorological Office.

"We're waving the flag. We're trying to be society's warning mechanism," says Rapley. "What we're accused of is being Chicken Little and just horrifying people."

It's the start of another stinking hot day in London. Which is perhaps fitting for a gathering of journalists from 20 countries attending Reporting About Climate Change - a workshop at the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists.

Rapley begins in Chicken Little mode. He doesn't seem to mind being a killjoy. "We've had a fabulous carbon party on which everybody here completely depends. If we interrupted that supply, you and I would starve."

We know what's coming. Rapley is going to make us feel guilty. But he also wants to motivate with a more positive view of the future.

"Martin Luther King didn't get anywhere by saying, 'I have a nightmare'."

For now, he wants to tell the story of how we got here.

"Human beings discovered 150 years ago this amazing stuff oil - an absolutely a fantastic source of energy." One barrel of oil, says Rapley, has the same energy as 3500 people pedalling an exercise bike furiously for an hour. Even at US$100 ($149) a barrel, that's still cheap labour.

"The unfortunate thing is in burning it [oil], we have put 500,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - about half of which is still sitting there and will continue to sit there for about 100 years or up to 1000 years. And that has increased the greenhouse effect. And so very slowly you see the surface of the Earth warming as a result."

It's probably good for the planet that the fantastic source of energy hasn't been used for air conditioning in the Royal Geographic Society building in South Kensington. Even with the Queen Anne style doors thrown open, there is no reprieve. The city doesn't cope well with climate extremes. When it snows everything grinds to a halt. When it gets hot, a suffocating atmosphere descends. In combination with Rapley's message, the audience has little choice but to sweat.

Rapley is speaking to the converted - science journalists who know this story well. Even so, half a trillion tonnes is arresting. Nature magazine noted the milestone in its April editorial.

"The 500 billion tonnes of carbon that humans have added to the atmosphere lie heavily on the world, and the burden swells by at least 9 billion tonnes a year. If present trends continue, humankind will have emitted a trillion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere well before 2050, and that could be enough to push the planet into the danger zone. And there is no reason to think that the pressure will stop then. The coal seams and tar sands of the world hold enough carbon for humankind to emit another trillion tonnes - and the apocalyptic scenarios extend from there."

It's this sort of figure that causes Rapley and many others to say the carbon party needs to urgently tone it down. And before too long, the carbon party really needs to stop. It's not a popular message. But scientists and others, worried by the impending mess, are regularly engaging with journalists to talk about what needs to be done.

Given the scope of the problem - "the biggest one facing mankind" - many journalists who get the message are wondering what to do about it.

"Is it our job as journalists to save the planet?" asks BBC TV News science correspondent David Shukman chairing a session at the conference. He gets in the neck from both sides. Environmental activists harangue him: "You should be leading with climate change stories every day of the week." So do the naysayers: "How come you're always banging on about global warming when it isn't even true?"

Rapley is troubled by the latter group. "Please don't call the deniers sceptics. Every good scientist is a sceptic. That's the way science is different from opinion - science tests things."

It's not just the denial of basic physics - that if the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increased by adding of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, it's irrefutable that the surface temperature of the Earth is going to rise.

What really gets Rapley's goat is the way "deniers" portray "the work in progress" as proof that the science community is confused and doesn't know what it is doing.

Rapley says one of the things the "contrarians" regularly attack is climate modelling. The argument being that the models are full of errors, flawed by Donald Rumsfeld-like logic - "there are things we do not know we don't know" - and that the projections are a pack of cards.

"First of all it's not true," he says. "The evidence of warming and of increased carbon dioxide is measured and incontrovertible."

He admits that, compared to the Earth's system, the simulated climate models are a crude tool. "It gives us no comfort that they are crude - they are often wrong in a pessimistic way as well as in an optimistic way."

Rapley points to previous predictions about Arctic sea ice cover melting at a particular rate in midsummer. "What is actually happening in the Arctic is so far outside the band of possibilities the models predicted, that climate change is going faster than what was predicted."

The point was hammered home on the July cover of New Scientist - "It's worse than we thought."

The editorial was hard-hitting. "Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, the oceans will continue to swell as they warm, and as glaciers and ice sheets melt or slide into the sea. The growing consensus among climate scientists is that the 'official' estimate of sea-level rise in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - 0.2 to 0.6 metres by 2100 - is misleading. It could well be in the region of one to two metres, with a small risk of even greater rise."

But just when many were beginning to digest the bad news, another study released a couple of weeks ago predicted a seven to 82 centimetre rise, which is similar to the last IPCC projection. Though scientists argue that this is how science works - the constant refining of what we do know - it's not surprising that the public is confused.

What's a journalist to do? Simplify the science?

"There are uncertainties in the science. The IPCC recognises uncertainties all the way through," says Shukman.

"The danger is whether we ride roughshod over some of those uncertainties in our effort to simplify a story and just say scientists have found X or Y when in fact there are probabilities and all kinds of questions and qualifiers attached to that."

Rapley says when looking at the climate system it's important to see the big picture, to look at the pattern not just the individual results - the pattern of ocean and land warming change over the last 50 years and the behaviour of the glaciers the sea ice.

But seeing the big picture and coping with uncertainties aren't the only problems. The climate change story can also be very dull.

"One of the editors said to me recently, 'I've never read a story with the word emissions in it - it looks too boring'," says Damian Carrington, head of the environment section of the Guardian.

His section has taken on board the idea of making the future seem less forbidding and what a cleaner, low carbon world might be. But it's mindful, too, that positive spin can easily become green propaganda. The reason climate change is not central to the news agenda is obvious, says Carrington. "The effects are some way away."

Looking some way away, many of the journalists ask what it will be like living in a de-carbonised world.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri points out many positives in a such a future - "less air pollution and therefore commensurate health benefits, higher levels of energy security and higher levels of food security". The latter is particularly relevant for some countries in Africa where increased extremes in weather as a result of climate change are expected to mean a 15 per cent decline in yields of certain crops as early as 2020.

"It's not about saving the planet, which is rather nebulous concept," says Carrington. What will ultimately change priorities is self-interest. He's referring to things like energy security for America, and food and energy security in China and other developing nations.

"These things will bite. They already are."