Anna Rose and the WWF Australia Panda © WWF-Aus/Laurent Desarnaud
Late last year I found myself traveling around the world with one of Australia’s last remaining high-profile climate sceptics, former finance Minister Nick Minchin.
I never expected to go on a journey with a politician who’s spent his career arguing that industries can pollute our air, soil and water without limits. But it was a journey worth doing, and you can see the results both in a documentary that airs on the ABC next Thursday 26th April at 8.30pm (I Can Change Your Mind on Climate Change) and in a book released the following day (Madlands: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic).
As I took Nick to meet scientists and experts, and he took me to meet professional climate ‘contrarians’ (also called climate deniers and climate sceptics) I learnt a lot about the way these groups are organised and funded.
In February this year, leaked documents from the US-based Heartland Institute exposed a coordinated international campaign of disinformation about climate science, including monthly payments to scientists who reject climate change. The Institute’s 2012 budget alone is expected to be $7.7 million.
This money is donated by a group of American corporations with vested interests – including the tobacco industry, car manufacturing industry, and fossil fuel industry, as well as a large anonymous donor who gave $14 million over the past several years.
The Heartland Institute holds U.S. charity status, which means the donations were tax deductible and supposed to be used for charitable purposes. Despite this, the documents reveal that at least some of these funds are used for political campaigning against anti-carbon pollution legislation in other countries, including Australia.
The paper trail shows that a group funded by the Heartland Institute provided virtually all of the cash for the ‘Australian Climate Science Coalition’, a so-called ‘home grown’ anti-carbon price lobby group in 2009 and 2010. The Chief Scientific Advisor to the group was Australian scientist Bob Carter, who receives monthly payments of $US 1667 from the Heartland Institute.
What was been exposed is this: the people you see in the media rejecting climate science are, for the most part, not isolated individuals who are working separately and coming to their own independent conclusions.
Instead, they are part of a coordinated disinformation campaign run out of a handful of conservative American think tanks. And the tendrils from this campaign reach into the very heart of Australia’s political rehtoric.
The journey with Nick Minchin reminded me that many Australians have been targeted by this misinformation. And as people who care about leaving clean air, clean water and clean soil for the future, it’s up to us to help set the facts straight.
We can remind people that science is about evidence. And there are three very clear and simple pieces of evidence showing that humans cause climate change.
Firstly, evidence from basic principles of physics tell us greenhouse gases trap heat. Secondly, historical evidence shows humans have emitted greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution. Thirdly, we have clear observational evidence that shows surface, air and ocean temperatures warming after humans started emitting these heat-trapping gases in large quantities.
As humans, we’ll never know everything there is to know about every single aspect of our climate system. But humans act in the face of uncertainty all the time – that’s why people take out insurance policies.
Ultimately, we need to make decisions with the best available information we have. And we’re lucky to be able to access huge amounts of knowledge about the climate– a body of knowledge that has been refined and improved by expert scientists for centuries.
We’re now at the point where we have organisations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who can share data and test each other’s theories. These scientists use both powerful computer models combined with real world evidence from ice cores about how our climate system responds to increases in carbon dioxide.
Every Academy of Science in the world now agrees that climate change is happening and that it is caused by humans. And most Australians now understand that there are consequences to pumping carbon pollution into the atmosphere each year. We are starting to see some of these consequences today in sea level rise and more extreme weather events – but as today’s young people grow older the impacts of climate change will cost Australia even more.
As we’ve seen with the debate over the price on carbon pollution, acting on climate change by cutting carbon pollution might be controversial in the short-term politics of the 24 hours news cycle. But it’s time politicians started prioritising the next generation over the next election.
I Can Change Your Mind on Climate Change airs on the ABC next Thursday 26th April at 8.30pm, followed by a special episode of Q&A moderated by Tony Jones featuring Anna Rose, Nick Minchin, mining magnate Clive Palmer and pollster Rebecca Huntely. Fill out the survey about your views on climate change here. Anna’s book ‘Madlands: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic’ will be released the following day.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 at 4:21 pm and is filed under All, Climate change, Global conservation, Sustainable living, Take Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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