climate sceptics & liberals & bad faith

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/climate-sceptics-and-the-liberals-negotiating-in-bad-faith-20091203-k8pr.html

A history of betrayal means any assurances offered are worthless.

A friend of mine was waiting outside the Liberal Party meeting room when Tony Abbott was elected. As politicians trooped out, one quipped something like this: ''It was the right decision. Even Tim Flannery is a climate sceptic now.'' I can only hope that this outrageous claim had no influence on the vote. But how it originated and spread tell us a lot about the difficulty of communicating climate science, and way the climate sceptics work.

Its origin lay in an interview with Tony Jones on the ABC's Lateline program, during which I explained that 1998 had indeed been the hottest year since record-keeping began in the 1830s, and that several record-breaking years followed, though the past two or three years had been somewhat cooler. Overall, however, the temperature was still rising.

Earth's climate system responds to several factors, which means that the increase in temperature is never smooth from year to year. El Nino is a big factor. It produced the incredibly hot conditions of 1998, and the recent relatively cool years may have been caused by its opposite - la Nina.

Just because some years, or a run of a few years, are cooler than others does not mean that the Earth is cooling.

To see the overall trend, you need to look at temperature records over a century or so, and when that is done, it becomes evident that the average temperature of our planet has risen by a 10th of a degree a decade, on average, over the past century, the past 10 years being no exception.

The big worry is that the warming trend will accelerate in coming years, leading to a rise in average temperature of four or five degrees.

While seemingly small, such an increase actually represents an overall increase since the industrial revolution of 25 per cent - from 15 to 20 degrees - and it would inevitably lead to an ice-free Earth.

Earth has not been ice-free for many millions of years, and the abrupt disruption that the shift would cause is bound to be unfavourable to all life adapted to present conditions.

Andrew Bolt twisted this complex story into what was, for the sceptics, a very convenient untruth - that I believed Earth was cooling. Even The Age reported that I believed there had been a recent cooling.

Then, in the heat of the Liberal leadership challenge, others ''improved'' on the lie - hence the outrageous and utterly implausible claim that I was a climate sceptic.

Should I have simplified the science? I don't believe so, for to do so would betray my scientific principles. Unfortunately, climate science is complex, and while that opens many opportunities for social commentators without scientific credentials to misrepresent climate scientists and their views, that is a reality we must live with.

The trouble is that in the heat of a great political moment, common sense is - after truth - the first casualty.

Trust, of course, has now become a political matter. The Liberal Party has now twice betrayed trust on the issue of climate change. Does anyone remember senator Robert Hill returning from the Kyoto negotiations to a standing ovation from the Howard ministry? The reason was that he had won significant concessions for Australia under the treaty, which had been negotiated in good faith. And yet the Howard government subsequently changed tack, refusing to ratify and so betraying the expectations of the world.

And now the Liberal Party has negotiated a deal in good faith with the Rudd Government on the emissions trading scheme, only to betray our trust once again.

In politics, as in business, entering into a negotiation and accepting a deal represents a profound obligation. A business person who acted as the Liberal Party has in these two instances would never get another deal - nobody would trust them again.

As a voter, I've learnt that I cannot trust anything the Liberal Party says on climate change. Sure, there are many good people in the party who care passionately about the issue, but any assurances the Liberal Party or its individual members offer voters are now utterly worthless, because the very currency of politics - trust - has been debased.

Tim Flannery chairs the Copenhagen Climate Council and was the 2007 Australian of the Year.