Professor Roger Kitching reminds us of the real and present threats and that the diversity of Australian wildlife will be the first to suffer.

A biodiverse Australia is under threat. Image:greghardwick.com.au

Biodiversity! – kangaroos, kookaburras, possums, willie wagtails, bluetongues – perhaps even birdwing butterflies and funnel-web spiders – all things we might associate with this (relatively) new word.

But what about a couple of other lists -  ‘Aberdeen Angus, Ayrshire, Santa Gertrudis,  Friesian, Jersey and Charolais’ – or  ‘rainforests, grasslands, deserts, tundra, coral reefs and eucalypt woodlands’ – these, too capture something essential about this thing we call ‘biodiversity’.

Biodiversity is nothing more nor less than the entire diversity of life – within a species, species themselves, and sets of species.  Let’s put this another way, the essential diversity of life on Earth includes genetic diversity within species – all those and many other races of cattle, for instance; species themselves – the familiar original list and many million more; and, ecosystem diversity – the list of ecosystems  mentioned and many more made up of repeatable sets of species on the landscape.

The modern conservation movement was triggered in the late 1960s by Rachel Carson’s epic book ‘Silent Spring’.

Carson focused popular attention on a trend which biologists had been aware of over century – first, in fact, given voice by Darwin’s prescient, polymath co-worker, Alfred Russell Wallace – that the number of species on Earth was gradually diminishing – not by the slow inexorable processes of extinction on a geological time-scale, but through the landscape changes imposed by human ‘development’ – by clearing, agricultural chemicals and housing developments as well as the more direct impacts of hunting and gathering to satisfy an exponentially growing human population.

Rachel Carson’s agenda focussed on the species and the consequences of the outcry that followed publication of her book took the form of ‘red lists’ of threatened and endangered species around the world and tentative legislation to prevent their slide into oblivion.

At the time of publication of Carson’s book the global estimate of species diversity on Earth was about 3 to 3.5 million.  This tally was confidently made up of about 10,000 species of birds and 5000 species of mammals (mostly rats, mice and very small bats).
The remaining 3 million or so were principally insects and their relatives.  So I was taught as a university student in the early sixties.  In 1982 Terry Erwin from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington introduced rainforests, canopies and the tropics into the equation.

Based on some rather preliminary estimates of the number of different beetle species in the canopies of one species of tree in Panama he made the outrageous extrapolation that there were probably 30 million species of insects and their relatives in the tropical rainforests of the world.

We now know that this was indeed an overestimate – the ‘true’ figure may be nearer 7 to 10 million – although the jury is still out on the actual number.  Nevertheless Erwin’s huge estimate, its association with rainforests and the observation that rainforest were being cleared faster than ever before, led to the biodiversity crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.

Indeed it was in that welter of concern that the organiser of a 1988 symposium on diversity and conservation coined the term ‘biodiversity’ – contrary to popular belief this was not the famous American biologist E. O. Wilson, although he edited the book in which the term first saw the light of day.

Indeed, Wilson assured me he opposed the coining of such a gauche neologism – but subsequently regretted not having coined the term, which subsequently took off in the public and political imagination.

Bringing the many, many species of invertebrates (which includes the insects) into the picture gave the whole biodiversity ‘movement’ a huge boost – its promoters were able to talk loosely but portentously of how many species were being lost in a day, a week, a year and so on – usually estimated in terms of the number of ‘football fields’ of rainforest being cleared.  But this boost contained the seeds of its own demise.  Very soon sceptics began to ask, for example, why some tiny, recently discovered soil mite was to be given the same weight as the mighty tiger, rhinoceros or giant panda – legally if not in the wider public mind.  Lists of threatened and endangered insects have been drawn up and given legal protection.  Do you know for example, that in Western Australia a whole raft of tiny Crustacea found nowhere else but in water-filled crevices deep in the Earth are not only protected under legislation but have caused vast mining projects to be relocated or delayed at costs which make the proposed resource tax seem like peanuts?

The real value of the invertebrates and indeed the even smaller and less well-understood micro-organisms, is not as ikons of the magnificent or the soon to be lost – these are not thylacines or paradise parrots – but as tiny cogs in the maintenance of the life-support systems on which they, and us, depend totally.  In the late 1990’s the biodiversity emphasis rightly changed to a focus not on each individual species but onto the idea of ecosystems and ‘ecosystem services’.  In a nutshell these are the many benefits we get from functioning ecosystems which, were they not there, we might have to pay for (or try to pay for, assuming there was an appropriate service provider).  These services include nutrient storage and movement, soil building, water purifying, the maintenance of local climate, the natural control of potential pests, pollination, waste recycling, pharmaceutical products, even the fine forests, reefs and rivers that feed our tourism industry.  It is hard to estimate the dollar value of these ‘services’ simply because we are not accustomed to having to pay for them but such estimates as have been attempted fall consistently into the many billions or even trillions of dollars.  The problem with these estimates, as I said before, is that they carry the implicit assumption that were these ecosystem services to be destroyed then we, somehow, could buy replacements – this is not the case!  Humanity at large depends intimately on being surrounded by functional ecosystems.

Professor Roger Kitching from the Griffith School of the Environment, Griffith University.

You could be forgiven for thinking that these are simply the burblings of academics or other stirrers who have been out of the ‘real world’ for too long.  Yet contemplate the slow death of the River Murray that we are currently watching.  Think about the dieback affecting our Tablelands and its consequences on local soil conservation, fertility and micro-climate.  Observe the gradual encroachment of agricultural lands by desert.  Peer in horror at the leprous landscape of ex-irrigation lands scarred probably for ever by salting.  Watch the bleaching of coral reefs to unattractive ghosts of their past glories.  These are not intellectual maunderings but real disasters – human made and not readily ‘fixable’.  

So much of human history has taken place in a world where there was always more – more lands to conquer, more forest to clear, more seas to fish.  Our increasingly sophisticated technology allowed us to do this.  Once the forests of Western Europe were cleared we could send our fleets to find forests elsewhere – and there always was an elsewhere – from the point of view of tropical hardwoods this is currently Papua New Guinea.  But there are almost no frontiers left: we have not learnt the lesson of sustainability – all political rhetoric notwithstanding.  Why are we in Australia having a debate about whether or not to control our population size, on the one hand, while advocating ‘sustainabilty’ on the other.  Population growth and sustainability are oxymoronic concepts.

So in this Year of Biodiversity 2010 what are the greatest threats to the biodiversity on which our future depends.   In Australia three pervasive inter-related threats promise to wipe out great chunks of the very special biodiversity with which this once-isolated continent is endowed: land clearing, invasive species and climate change.  Mixed up with these three are drivers such as inappropriate fire regimes, pervasive agricultural chemicals and lack of connectivity across the landscape.  Anyone of these ideas deserves a whole book not just a short article.  Let me dwell finally then on the most all-pervasive of them, climate change.  

All the predictions of climate models show Australia as a whole becoming warmer and drier with a shift in patterns of rainfall away from the south-east, and an increase in the number of extreme events such as cyclones and droughts.  Predictions of how serious these changes will be vary from model to model.  One thing is certain though, without prompt urgent mitigation we are heading for the worst of any range of modelled scenarios.  Recent global data collected since the famous set of IPCC Predictions were made, show us tracking at or above the most extreme of the predictions whether we are talking about temperature or sea-level.  Some of the first impacts we will see – indeed are seeing already – will be upon biodiversity.  Mountaintop ecosystems will be the first to go – in Australia the unique faunas of our subtropical Antarctic Beech forests and the endemic marsupials and birds of our tropical mountains will likely not withstand the most mild of heating trends.  And all this will impact on us through an undermining of the ecosystem services provided by this biodiversity.  

The recently published book on Australia’s biodiversity and climate change of which I was one of eight authors (Steffen et al. ‘Australia’s Biodiversity and Climate Change’, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, 2009) makes many suggestions as how we might cope with these predicted changes.  I close with just two of these.  First we need to start thinking about and managing biodiversity as whole inter-connected sets of species driving complex ecosystem-level processes – retaining our species-centricity for the ikonic symbols of conservation – the striped bandicoots, hairy-nosed wombats and bilbies. Second, we know that ecosystems and the organisms that comprise them have some capability of adapting – not without change and loss of species – but possibly sufficiently to keep the essential services going.  For this ‘resilience’ to be maximised we need to minimise other stressors imposed on biodiversity.  We need to keep our National Reserve System in good order, indeed keep expanding it – it will be more vital than ever under climate change.  We must restore our landscape to put connectivity back into the environment so that natural species have some hope of re-sorting themselves into new ecosystems as the climate vice tightens.  The control of environmental pests and the strict quarantine that minimises their occurrence must be maintained – even in the face of probably unwinnable wars against, for example, invasive ants.  Precious water must be partitioned to allow due amounts to the natural environment itself – this is not water ‘wasted’ but water expended on our own well-being through the services provided by healthy ecosystems.  The list goes on.  Most important of all we need to keep educating people to realise this threat is real and action is essential.

The science is incontrovertible and the few highly vocal nay-sayers deserve no more than pity.  Every month delayed through the playground fights in Canberra or the bully-boy tactics of special interest groups, makes the task of recovery that much harder.

But, why has our response to the situation not matched the scientific and economic evidence? Do we need a greater emphasis on morals and ethics, asks Tessa Toumborou.

Illustration by: Alex Mankiewicz

On his recent sceptic-funded tour of Australia, Lord Monckton, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, argued that we shouldn’t act on climate change, as doing so will increase the amount of farmland converted to grow biofuels and subsequently increase food prices.

Anyone interested in real action on climate change agrees that converting land to biofuels is not a solution, and is resulting in increases in the release of stored carbon. His moot point does not challenge the reality that the increasing presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is already manifesting in unprecedented events such as the increasing melt rate of Arctic sea ice.

Despite recent controversy to distract from the issue, scientific evidence indicates that there is incontrovertible evidence of the causal relationship between humans and climate change. We humans caused it, are still causing it, and, if nothing changes in the next few years, we will be hugely regretting it.

Economics modelling has taken up these findings to identify that the cost of dealing with climate change far outweighs inaction. Public opinion polls show that, even with the recent wane in public interest, the majority of Australians still want to see action on climate change, rather than waiting for the world’s largest emitters to act first. So, climate sceptics aside, why has our response to the gravity of the situation not matched the scientific and economic evidence?

The trouble with climate change, writes University of Colorado’s Dale Jamieson in his article ‘Ethics, public policy and global warming’, is that it sits outside our current value systems sphere of responsibility. Our conventional understandings of morality “presupposes that harms and their causes are individual, that they can be readily identifiable and that they are local in space and time”.

That is, we are used to being concerned about individual and easily identified localised problems — concerns that are immediate, close to our own experiences and, in this way, emotionally tangible. We are programmed to react when we visually experience someone in distress, as according to James Garvey , from the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London, it “moves us in a way that just knowing about distant distress, even on the evening news, might not”.

This is because ‘proximity matters’ — due to the nature of greenhouse gases, we are removed from the devastating consequences our lifestyle choices may have for others, both now and in the future. This is because our values are founded on norms established long before twenty-first century problems like climate change became an issue of global concern.

Jamieson indicates three important ways in which climate change alters our morality conventions.

“Apparently innocent harms can have devastating consequences, causes and harms may be diffuse, and causes and harms may be remote in space and time”.

Climate change requires that we alter the localised immediacy of our register for compassion. This takes a leap of faith to connect the cause of climate change – all people’s greenhouse gas emissions – and the ethereal reality of its impact on the global climate. We have not yet adjusted our moral register to respond.

In this time of climate change our moral response needs to consider the nature of carbon emissions – invisible, occurring locally, yet once released into the atmosphere they may last up to a century and result in any number of unknown impacts. The complex nature of climate change challenges not only our value systems, but also many of our traditional understandings of the natural world, such as the notion that every cause has a direct effect.

As David Spratt and Philip Sutton wrote in ‘Climate Code Red’:”We live in a world of chaotic, non-linear transitions where a small increase in the level of greenhouse gases, or in the energy imbalance of the climate system, can make a huge difference. An element of the climate system can flip from one state to the other quickly and unpredictably”.

The nature and urgency of climate change demands of us a completely new approach to morality – it is up to us to respond creatively, responsibly and in time. These new ethics are a cosmopolitan ethics, where we identify all people across the globe as equally as valuable. According to a cosmopolitan ethics, the Rudd government’s policy of adopting a 25 per cent target below 2000 levels only if other countries — the US, China and India — act first, is based on short-sighted self interest. It doesn’t match the science on the issue, and sends a negative message to all the countries that are going to efforts to act.

Taking a ‘wait until others act’ approach, as Garvey argues, ignores the moral demands on us — Australia being one of the world’s largest per capita emitters — while simultaneously placing moral demands on others. It is based on an assumption that our Australian lives are more valuable than the lives of others, as not acting on climate change poses a risk to other lives. It fits within our linear, localised norm of caring about what’s directly occurring in front of us, but not with the reality of climate change that occurs across the globe in any number of ways.

The simple reason Australia should act without waiting for other nations to go first is because we can. We are well placed to do something about our emissions — a high percentage of which are luxury, and so are easily avoidable. We have the knowledge, capacity, economic positioning and resources to reduce our emissions levels significantly. Even the Australian government’s own Department of Climate Change website points out that “the longer we wait to act on climate change, the more it will cost and the worse its effects will be”. The more greenhouse gases that are released, the harder it will be to reverse the processes set in motion by climate change.

Ethical arguments aside, the Stern Review identified that on a global scale doing nothing, or very little, to reduce greenhouse gases would cost the world at least 5 per cent of gross domestic product each year, and if worst case scenarios are realised, could cost as much as 20 per cent of global GDP. Action to cut emissions could be limited to as little as one per cent of global GDP per year. The Stern Review concludes that “the benefits of strong, early action on climate change outweigh the costs considerably”.

How we act in the next ten years will decide the next hundred. By it’s very nature climate change is everyone’s moral burden. Broadening our moral horizons is crucial to addressing climate change. According to a climate change ethics, we must consider the long term and protracted harms caused by the lifestyle choices we make. It demands that we consider equally all those implicated by our decisions. The absence of ethical debate around how to act on climate change in Australia has allowed approaches like a ‘wait until others act’, and a heavy reliance on market-based solutions that placate big business but provide no actual environmental benefits to take precedence.

While there is no prescriptive framework or ethical model that will suit all people, consideration of climate ethics is needed at all levels of society — on an individual, community and governance level. The ethics of how we are to act needs a public forum equal to the one that climate science and economics has received.

Tessa Toumbourou is a researcher and writer. She has written for various publications and recently graduated with first class Honours in Political Science from the University of Melbourne, where she studied the role of the clean development mechanism (CDM) in Indonesia.

image: greghardwick.com.au

Anyone who has attended meetings will know — the greater the number of people, the less chance there is of obtaining an outcome.

Therefore the outcome of Copenhagen should come as no surprise. Governments from wealthy countries know that voters are easily swayed by economic arguments. Poorer countries want more for their people. While we all argue about money, man-made climate change will worsen.

As our planet’s human population increases we face a growing problem. The wealthier we all become, the more we want and the more we consume. More people consuming more of the earth’s finite ‘resources’ leads to only one outcome – less for everyone.

The science of climate change has taught us two things. Firstly, we need to be smarter, be prepared for change and focus upon cleaner, renewable energy sources. Our very short love affair with fossil fuels is over and is not worth one tear.

Secondly — many people do not like change, they use denial to avoid serious problems and know that many of us are swayed by fear. Radical politicians will seize on this and increasingly make promises they cannot deliver on.

The way forward is not something we are going to be given by our politicians. We are going to have to show our politicians what we are capable of. Great social changes have always been peaceful and well supported by the population. However, we will need to constantly remind our governments, and those seeking to be in government, that they serve us, and deceitful behaviour for the sake of claiming or clinging to power, will not be tolerated.

Now is not the time for blaming others for our woes or arguing whose way is best. It’s all too easy to point out the wrongs of someone from a distant nation or from a group who you do not associate with. Throwing stones over the fence is easy when you don’t see your victim, but stand face to face and it becomes so much harder.

In 2010 we need to stand face to face and unite everyone who wants a fairer, cleaner future. It is possible, if only we dare to try.

***

Do yourself a favour this Christmas. Turn the air conditioner off, put the mobile phone away and get outside and talk to someone new. See you at the Woodford Folk Festival!

Wishing you all the best over the Christmas break and we look forward to bringing you more eco news in 2010. Eco online will take a short break, before returning in mid-January.

Keep safe and look after one another.

By now it would seem beyond doubt that global warming is a reality and a serious problem. Precisely how much of it can be attributed to human activity and how much to natural causes may be open to debate. There is also mass starvation and violent aggression, manifesting in our part of the world as increasing road rage, glassing incidents and drunken parties that deteriorate into public brawls, and one can also think of various reasons and remedies for these.

But we are refusing to see the obvious — that six billion human beings cannot continue to foul, decimate and exploit the planet the way we are doing without causing dramatic and disastrous consequences for it and ourselves. Precisely what those consequences might be is also open to speculation and debate, but keeping in mind that the six billion is expected to be nine billion by 2050 and twelve billion soon after, the real problem should be obvious.

Global warming, and so many of our other problems are but symptoms of the HUMAN POPULATION EXPLOSION, which is beyond any doubt or debate, and until we face up to and tackle that, we are wasting our time and effort by treating symptoms and not the cause.

Dmitri Perno
Buderim

Excitement and nervous energy turned to frustration and angst as thousands waited outside the Bella Centre, with NGOs, IGOs, media and official party delegates all swarming around the centre to get to work. With the heads of state of 192 countries arriving this week, security has been tightened and any forms of unrest are quickly suppressed.

Over 100,000 protesters fill the streets of Copenhagen with life, colour and noise. “A large, colourful and beautiful showing of humanity, of people’s desire for climate justice,” says Brianna Cotter spokesperson for the AVAAZ Action Factory.

After a weekend of cultural activities galore including the Flood Copenhagen march of over 100,000 people through the city’s heart, climate concerts, film festivals and flash actions filling the city with a new energy. Snow began to fall across the city yesterday, but just as the temperature drops, things are just starting to heat up inside the Bella Centre.

Inside the centre, the Australian Youth Delegation met with Penny Wong in Australia’s head office, with a warm and encouraging reception by the Climate Change Minister. They asked how the government planned to protect vulnerable communities against climate catastrophe, and whether Australia would be ready to take a leading role — the Minister answered carefully while giving little away. The Minister took a more realistic line, “these are negotiations, not a supermarket”, and indicating compromises were inevitable.

Minister Wong did recognise the time had come for “more actions than words”, and said the government was conscious of viewing climate change “through the prism of disadvantage”, inflicted on the most vulnerable Australians and Pacific Islanders.

The Australian Youth Delegation tell leaders to “wake up”, in their bed-in action outside the plenary hall on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death singing, “all we are saying is cut greenhouse gas, all we are saying is give youth a chance”.

The youth presence has been reduced this week however, with numbers being restricted to 15,000 for “security reasons”. While last week saw hundreds of spot actions including a Sleep-In, Candle Vigil with Desmond Tutu, Freeze Protest, songs and chants and other creative actions, the Bella Centre this week has been flooded again with suits, laptops and rich foreign  accents.

Outside the centre, ‘climateers’ are continuing their fight and raising their voice louder. With anti-riot powers under new Danish legislation in full force, police say they will not make unnecessary arrests but warn protesters to engage in peaceful activities as much as possible.

The vibe in Copenhagen changes constantly. From hopeful optimism in the lead-up to unyielding resilience in the days following, to gradual disenchantment — people are now hoping the arrival of the heads of state this week will see some serious moving and shaking in the negotiation chambers. The intensified security levels certainly suggest something big is coming.

The AVAAZ Action Factory is looking at increasing the level of large, colourful and vibrant actions to keep leaders on their toes.

“This week we are focusing on drawing attention to vulnerable communities and developing countries, by way of rapid-response creative actions,” says Brianna Cotter, media spokesperson.

“We want to provide some translation between policy and humanity”, she said, by focusing on the humanitarian aspects of the crisis, of the stakes if a fair, ambitious and binding agreement is not reached this week.

So what should we expect to see this week? Well, we can await the media frenzy that will come with the arrival of political celebrities including Kevin Rudd, and Barack Obama. The most important meeting of humanity this century? Quite possibly.

All seem to recognise a need to prevent or correct an irreversible climate crises. An effective meeting of the minds by humanity’s leaders? Only time will tell. As Penny Wong says, we must await for this exchange of words to be followed by concrete actions by states.

I overheard a quote in passing yesterday, “nature cannot negotiate, we must negotiate on its behalf”.  And today (Dec14), the games officially begin. Let us hope that amid the power-play and media frenzy of it all, it is nature who wins at the end of the day.

Other Copenhagen related news

Local action starts as Copenhagen talks continue

Copenhagen: delegates urged to be visionary, courageous

What Rudd and Wong should take to Copenhagen

Climate change deniers have their heads in the sand. Illustration: Julie Fiedler www.studiojdesign.com.au

When faced with tragedy, atrocities or grief we humans, it appears, have a wonderful way of dealing with it. Denial.

In his book States of Denial, Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, sociologist Stanley Cohen writes: “One common thread runs through many different stories of denial: people, organisations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing … the information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or misinterpreted”.

The information, including its implications, is totally avoided in a kind of self preservation tactic as we “bury our head in the sand”.  However the only legitimate use of the term denial, writes Cohen, is when someone is firstly aware of something, and then deliberately ignores it. To know and at the same time, not to know. Or, as he goes on to state: “information is selected to fit existing perceptual frames and information which is too threatening is shut out altogether”.

George Marshall, founder and director of projects at the UK’s Climate Outreach and Information Network believes Cohen’s research can be applied directly to climate change. As far back as 2001 Marshall wrote of our knowledge and awareness of climate change and “yet, at another level, we clearly refuse to recognise the implications of that knowledge”.

According to Marshall there are many valuable lessons to be learnt from psychoanalytical theory. Such as the way we can angrily deny there is a problem at all. Scan the online comments section of any article on climate change and you will certainly see the level of aggressive denial. Be that an outright denial of man-made climate change, or denial of particular facts and trends.

Another reaction is to blame others, to cast the responsibility onto someone else. An example might be the comments from the new British high commissioner to Australia, Baroness Valerie Amos. She expressed surprise about there being a debate on man-made climate change in Australia. “In the UK there is a degree of political consensus about what in broad terms needs to be done,” she said. In a sense, she is telling us that all is well in the UK and the problem only exists ‘over here’.

As Clive Hamilton and Tim Kasser stated in their paper, Psychological Adaptation to the Threats and Stresses of a Four Degree World, which they presented to the Four Degrees and Beyond conference, held at Oxford University in September this year, this behaviour is a “maladaptive coping strategy”.

“Blame-shifting is a form of moral disengagement whereby people disavow their responsibility for the problem or the solution. Denial of guilt is the first step to shifting blame onto others and is reflected in narratives such as ‘it’s not my fault because my country is small’ and my carbon footprint is smaller than others”.

But the reality is very different. As was reported in Issue 13 of Eco news a Cardiff University survey found 20 per cent of Britons are “hardline sceptics” while 40 per cent believe there are serious questions about the evidence. Growing levels of scepticism and denial it seems, are a global problem not confined to any one country.

So what about examples of denial closer to home?

The Rudd government calls it “the great moral issue of our time”, yet baulks at making the changes suggested by the scientists and encourages the continuation of coal. This, at a time when even big business believes those changes could be viewed as a form of risk management.

Even on an economic level the government appears to be following Cohen’s suggested patterns of denial.

Referring to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, Dr Richard Denniss from the Australia Institute wrote: “There is no economic case for the billions of taxpayers’ dollars that are to be given to the polluters and arguments about the need to protect our polluters are inconsistent with our longstanding strategy of lowering our trade protection to encourage other countries to follow suit”.

Family First Senator, Steve Fielding, recently called for a Royal Commission into whether climate change is man-made. This is known as a “denial of our agency” according to Marshall (a type of ‘I didn’t do it … did I?).

Yet, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus — about 97 percent of climate scientists, worldwide.  Recent reports such as The Copenhagen Diagnosis, written by 26 scientists, have warned that the 2007 IPCC predictions may be grossly understating the problem. Without significant mitigation, according to the report, global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.

John Cook, a former physicist majoring in solar physics at the University of Queensland believes the reasons for denying the problem exists, or the unwillingness to make adequate changes, are varied.

“Some people don’t like the “big government” solution of cap and trade. Some are worried a global agreement to regulate carbon dioxide will lead to a one-world government,” he said.

“Basically, people don’t want to change their lifestyles. And as we get closer to actual laws regulating carbon dioxide, the opposition is intensifying.”

This is a trend we have witnessed before according to David McWilliams, an Irish economist, journalist, and presenter of the recent ABC TV documentary series, Addicted To Money.

Speaking with Phillip Adams on his long-running ABC radio program Late Night Live, McWilliams believes there are parallels with the financial crisis. Despite the warnings, we tend to wait for the crisis to appear. We appear “pathologically, almost terminally, unable to act until there is a crisis,” he said.  All this at a time “when the insatiable demands of six billion people are going to crash into the limits of our natural resources. When we have not just peak oil, but peak everything.”

He believes we travel through a general set of three stages when faced with immense problems. The first is ridicule and denial of the problem. Those who ring alarm bells are often ridiculed and dismissed. ‘Extreme greens’, ‘climate fanatics’, the ‘new religion of environmentalism’ and ‘climate fraud’ are terms constantly appearing in writings from those who deny the science of climate change.

The second is a violent or aggressive opposition, such as the East Anglia email theft, or “climategate” as many would call it. Criminals stealing personal information and publishing it, in what appeared to be a somewhat desperate attempt to expose climate change as a ‘fraud’ prior to Copenhagen. A similar form of desperate opposition appeared two years ago when the Bush administration used pressure to limit the use of the words “global warming” or “climate change” according to a 2007 Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project report.

Thirdly, said McWilliams, we have universal acceptance, often after the crisis has arrived, such as when the financial crisis finally hit. Governments around the world, instead of implementing preventative actions before a crisis, are forced into reactionary responses.

So do we have a way forward through the fog of denial before it’s too late?

Speaking on the same program, Tony Kevin, visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and author of the book Crunch Time, which argues that a renewable energy based economy is the urgent and only option we now have, believes we need to move beyond the question of economic and market-based solutions.

Basically, we need to view the issue of climate change through the prism of morality. It was morality, he said, that drove William Wilberforce to help end the horrendous transatlantic slave trade — known at the time as “black gold”. By the late 18th century, 80 per cent of Britain’s foreign income was related to the slave trade. Two decades later, after years of ridicule and claims that its abolition would lead to economic collapse, the British slave trade was finally ended.

According to Tony Kevin we need to work “within the resource and waste disposal limitations of the planet”. We don’t need a single “Wilberforce’ type figure to emerge to champion climate change mitigation. Instead, those who understand and trust the science must unite and not argue about which form of renewable energy is best or whether taxes are better than cap-and-trade schemes, and so on. While we argue, he said, “the coal lobby smiles smugly above the fray”.

“Doing what we are is poisoning the atmosphere of our planet and it is therefore morally wrong for the future,” he said.  “We cannot base our prosperity on cheating our children and grandchildren”.

Associate Professor Peter Waterman from the University of the Sunshine Coast

The climate was on everybody’s mind as low clouds created hot and humid conditions on the Sunshine Coast today. But it wasn’t only local weather patterns being discussed. As the Copenhagen climate conference enters its second week, thousands of Australians took to the streets around the country for the 5th annual walk against warming.

On the Sunshine Coast almost 200 residents not only demanded government action at Copenhagen, they also showed the value of local businesses and environment groups coming together.

The Sunshine Coast Environment Council, solar business, Ingenero and Maleny Credit Union used the day to launch the Sunshine Coast 10,000 Solar Roofs Project. Injecting an estimated $20 million into the local economy, as well as creating over 100 jobs, the project will install 10,000 solar-power systems without any upfront costs.

Sunshine Coast Regional Council environment portfolio chair, Cr Keryn Jones said the Sunshine Coast ranks as one of the most popular areas in Australia for solar-power installation.

“The Sunshine Coast now has one of the highest per capita installation areas for solar power in Australia and the new 10,000 Solar Roofs Project will keep us in the forefront,” she said.

Associate Professor Peter Waterman, who teaches climate-change adaptation at the University of the Sunshine Coast believes we need to keep focused on locally-based action.

“It is great to be aware of the bigger picture but we have to do things in our region, our homes, our workplaces and our lives. We have to think about adapting — we have to climate proof,” he said.