I’ve uploaded my presentation on climate change and the precautionary principle, which I gave at City Hall on Monday night. It’s here in
Powerpoint (4.9Mb)
or
PDF (1.9MB)
formats.

Finally, here’s a version Zipped Mac Keynote (4.8Mb).

Thanks to everyone who’s given helpful suggestions for the upload, and noted problems with the download.

Sorry for the accidental temporary disappearance of this post. I somehow set it to “private”, which meant that it appeared for me, but for no-one else

Arguments about DDT have been going on for a long time in the blogosphere and similar circles. These debates typically involve a confusion between two unrelated issues
* The bogus story, popular in rightwing circles, in which the US ban on agricultural use of DDT, inspired by Rachel Carson, is morphed into a global ban on DDT, bringing to an end a previously successful compaign to eradicate malaria
* The real disputes, among malaria experts, about the relative merits of insecticide-treated bednets and spraying of house walls, and of DDT and alternative insecticides.

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I’ll be back at City Hall on Monday for a combined BrisScience and UQ Research Week event entitled “Planning for Climate Change: From urban design to complex systems”. I’ll be talking on “Complexity, Climate Change and the Precautionary Principle ” while Ed Blakely will talk about “Climate change: Planning for it and not just worrying about it. ”

Date: Monday, 18 September 2006
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Room: Ithaca Room
Location: City Hall, St Georges Square, Brisbane City

More info here

Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth is set for Australian release on 14 Septembe. I’ve already missed a couple of opportunities to see it, first at the Australian Leadership Retreat on Hayman Island a couple of weeks ago (I went on the sunset cruise instead) and then today at RiverSymposium in Brisbane (it clashed with my presentation).

In addition to the commercial release, ACF is putting on special screenings around the country, and the Brisbane event is on Friday September 15th, 7pm sharp, film starts 7.20pm, Palace Centro, 39 James St, Fortitude Valley. For all enquires email acf@acfonline.org.au or call toll-free on 1800 332 510.

And even the Howard government is getting in on the act. Andrew Bartlett reports a screening in Parliament House put on by Greg Hunt, who is the government’s Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment.

With the denialist position in tatters, the deplorable performance of our alleged national newspaper is in sharper relief than ever, and the Oz finally seems to be copping the criticism it deserves. Andrew Bartlett mentions it, as do Ben Oquist, Grant Young , Tim Lambert and Tim Dunlop (who focuses more on the coverage of Iraq, which is also poor).

The Oz has even attracted international attention. As Crikey reports, the Scientific American has slammed it, while the reliably silly Arts and Letters Daily gives a favorable link, as does Matt Drudge. For a comprehensive demolition, you can’t go past Real Climate.

If the Australian wants to salvage any credibility as a newspaper, it needs to correct its errors on this topic fast, and acknowledge the lapse in journalistic standards represented by its reporting and editorial comment.

The Australian continues its deplorable coverage of global warming, in this editorial which contains more errors and misleading claims than it is possible to count, following on from an equally bad news story at the weekend.

The factual basis of the story is that the IPCC has confirmed the reality of anthropogenic global warming, tightening the error bounds around its earlier estimate of a 3 degree warming by 2100. Obviously, when you tighten error bounds, you raise the minimum estimate, but the Australian manages to mention this once in passing in its news story and not at all in its editorial.

The rest of the editorial contains allusions to all the denialist claptrap the Oz has been pushing for years now: claims that climate change is really natural (the IPCC confirms that the change we are observing is anthropogenic), suggestions that the report refutes the ‘hockey stick’ (it confirms it, even more strongly than the 2001) report, misleading references to the Medieval Warm period and so on.

At least, having publicly relied on the IPCC, the Oz might stop publishing the conspiracy-theory opinion pieces suggesting that the whole thing is a hoax.

The Australian’s coverage of this issue has been a disgrace. As a paper, it cannot be taken seriously on any scientific issue.

The remaining shareholders of Earth Sanctuaries Limited, among whom I’m one, have been advised that the company is to be wound up, having been delisted. ESL, which was floated with high hopes (a little too late to catch the dotcom boom, unfortunately) was Australia’s most substantial attempt at private-sector biodiversity conservation. I suspect though, that most of the investors knew that, in all probability, they were making a donation rather than an investment (at least there’s a capital loss to offset against any more succcesful investments!). Still, there were some interesting ideas that could be useful if governments ever get around to creating price incentives for biodiversity preservation (this could include allowing the sale of animals, or at least offering to purchase them).

The big selling point of ESL for me was its founder John Wamsley and his idea of fencing reserves then eradicating all the feral pests before reintroducing native species. Wamsley is definitely one of the awkward squad, but often you have to make yourself awkward to get things done.

More from Harry Clarke at Kalimna, Jason Soon at Catallaxy and Nicholas Gruen at Troppo

There’s been a lot of discussion about claims that world oil output is going to reach a peak some time soon. If you look at the recent numbers, there’s a pretty good case to be made that world all output has already reached its peak at about 73 million barrels a day, a level reached in mid-2004, and sustained for the past two years.

Now there are lots of local factors that explain weak output in particular countries. Still, if the claims made by those who think oil output can keep on growing were correct, I would have expected the massive increase in prices (from a brief low of $10/barrel and a medium-term price of $20/barrel in the late 1990s to $75/barrel today) to produce a substantial expansion in supply.

This argument is pretty robust to whether oil producers believe that there is plenty of oil (implying that prices will come down again) or not. If prices are going to come down, then there’s a strong incentive to pump more in the short term, use secondary recovery from depleted wells and so on. If prices are going to stay high, there’s a strong incentive to bring large new fields online, even if they are in high cost locations. As far as I can see, neither of these things is happening.

Supposing that oil output has peaked, the obvious point to be made is that Peak Oil isn’t so bad. Sales of Hummers are plummeting, apparently, and lots more people are using buses (at least in Brisbane). And of course, the less oil there is to burn, the easier it will be to stabilise CO2 emissions (though we can’t just rely on Peak Oil – apart from anything else, there’s almost unlimited coal in the ground, far more than we can burn without frying the planet in the process).

Even if supplies have peaked (or, more plausibly, flattened out at the top of the curve), I doubt that prices will go much higher than this, though $100/barrel is certainly possible. If current prices are sustained, a lot of alternatives will become cost-competitive, as already seems to be happening with biofuels in the US. More importantly, demand is bound to respond more than it already has.
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