I don’t think the recommendations are that drastic, but that’s because I’m a technological optimist – at least over forty years. The other service Garnaut is doing us is to call people on the basic maths early on. He’s saying that if this science is right, things are getting very urgent, very quickly. That’s a pretty useful message – a tonic against the kind of inflation of words to which those on the international circuit of diplomacy are used.

I’ve just seen that I’ve unfairly attributed to you a quote from a story by Christine Milne. This is my error. There were no quotes in your story and I lost track of the seque between your words and those in Milne’s article.

More careful reading shows that your own views are likely to be more nuanced.

Again, my apologies (although I don’t take back my questions about the Garnaut report, even so).

Peter

“Garnaut began as a conservative economist, but it seems that he is now coming to understand the science…”

Nick, did you read the same interim report that I did? If so, how did you read the statement on page 8 of the Interim Report:

The Review takes as a starting point, on the balance of probabilities and not as a matter of belief, the majority opinion of the Australian and international scientific communities.

I take this as a classic nolo contestere, not as a statement about Garnaut’s understanding of the science. I don’t find, as you seem to, any specific endorsement of the IPCC theses or any other statement by scientists.

I view this as a major fault in the interim report. I understand the Review’s reluctance to revisit the science and the policy implications in the IPCC report. It is technically difficult to do so and the chain of IPCC reasoning is full of controversy — in part because of cascading uncertainties that Garnaut illustrates pretty well in his report.

But it seems to me that it would be irresponsible finally to recommend such drastic public policy solutions as Garnaut contemplates (up to 90% reductions in carbon-equivalent emissions) without a very strong, explicit and urgent confirmation of the IPCC theses. There has to be a reasonable co-relative for this extraordinary recommendation. He’s not proposing to do that, it seems.

I don’t for a minute think Ross is irresponsible. But nor do I think there is an objective basis in this report (or the IPCC report that forms his unexamined premiss) for the scale of social and economic experiment he has in mind.

It’s a massive change, as I’m sure you appreciate. You could throw out all of Ken Henry’s ‘intergenerational’ estimates; all of the Productivity Commission’s careful examination of the impacts of demographic change in Australia; you could (and would probably have to) pour the ‘Future Fund’ down a carbon-sequestration demonstration bore-hole for starters.

Before we do that, I want to see hard evidence, not accepted wisdom. This isn’t ‘climate skepticism’ (although I’m becoming a skeptic), it’s just a demand for proportionality in public policy.

Incidentally, I don’t think your assertion about the Arctic ice cover is currently correct (I realize it’s not your fundamental point). If you look here at the official data you’ll see that the extent of the Arctic cover is back close to the 1979-2000 average and that Antarctic sea ice is thirty percent above the mean for the same period.

Best wishes,

Peter

‘Otherwise intelligent’? Moi?

As far as I understand it Garnaut has wildly overstepped his terms of reference and the government ought to not pay Garnaut for the report or ask for their money back.

Garnaut was asked/ tasked to prepare an economic report based on the government’s objectives for 2020 and 2050. Essentially he was asked to do a CA as well as present an economic road map on how to get there.

Garnaut proceeded to prepare a report on what he thinks the science indicates. Garnaut is not a scientist, he is an economist and as such he has no core competence to tell the government what he thinks the lay of the land looks like in 2020 and 2050 as far as the science is concerned.

If the government needed advice in that area it would have tasked a climate scientist to prepare a science report, which they could then have passed to an economist to figure out.

No wonder Rudd seems pissed off over this report. As I said, they should not pay one red cent or ask for their money back.