In just one year, the number of Australians considering climate change when they buy doubled. Nearly half (47 percent) of people surveyed in the Ipsos-Eureka 2009 Climate Change reportnominate purchasing decisions as a main behaviour undertaken to reduce emissions.
This trend is supported by some hard statistics. An Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) survey finds from 2007 to 2008 the number of Australian households buying green/renewable electricity increased – significantly!
The ABS records a 51 percent jump in the quantity of green power sold. The latest national figures show greenpower customers are approaching a million households in Australia.
2009 is Australia's second warmest year ever since 1910.
That's the finding from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology who say that 2009 will be remembered for extreme bushfires, dust-storms, lingering rainfall deficiencies, areas of flooding and record-breaking heatwaves.
The graph shows temperature change, averaged over 10 years, the grey bars. It's a consistent picture worldwide - watch the world warm in these NASA animations from 1880 to 2006.
Having trouble with lots of carbon numbers and Copenhagen claims? A solution is the World Bank's Data Visualizer. It does a great job in turning numbers into pictures.
It's hard to visualise greenhouse gas emissions, and more difficult still to conceptualise the numbers over time, across countries and against other important measures like economy and health. In the image, the bubble size is total emission plotted against economy (horizontal) and per person emissions (vertical).
Go to the Data Visualizer site, chose what you want to compare - from the left hand side menu - and then press play and watch the changes over time.
And a suggestion for the World Bank. Add future scenarios to this visualiser. It would be great to see the data map a path for contraction of total greenhouse emissions and, convergence to equivalent per person emissions, in the future.
The CMEPSP's report (3Mb pdf) highlights current well-being alongside the assessment of sustainability - whether this well-being can last over time. It's recommendations focus on changing our emphasis from measuring economic production to quality of life, equity and our well being over time and into the future.
Nicolas Sarkozy is encouraging a great revolution to economic and well being measurement. Others in France however see GDP here for a long time into the future. GDP criticisms include the non measurement of state expenditure, such as some public health and, the positive value it places on destructive economic activity.
Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few argues The Wisdom of the Crowds. If this is the case and, to the extent twitter is representative of the Australian population, Joe Hockey should pay attention to the twitter results on his climate change question. He twittered hey team re The ETS. Give me your views please... on Friday.
A random sample of responses to his climate change question finds:
51.6% say support the ETS and/or don't sell out on your previous support for these laws
43.2% say no ETS and/or delay it, it's just a tax
2.1% say become the leader, presumably implicitly saying no to the ETS as well
Joe Hockey asked this question as the opposition liberal party is pushing him to become leader. This change will overturn his previous position - and the party's decision last week - to take action on climate change by passing the Australian emissions trading legislation (ETS).
And the current leaders views? “This is not a game . . . We're talking about the future of our planet. We're talking about whether we, the Liberal Party, will want to be a credible, progressive political movement of the 21st century”27/11/09 Malcolm Turnbull quoted in The Age.
Alongside Barak Obama there's a second Noble prize surprise this year - Elinor Ostrom for the Economics Nobel Prize.*
Elinor is a groundbreaking economics win as her work covers how humans look after shared resources - we often collaborate to protect environments such as water resources and fisheries. That is humans do not inevitably act as 'economically rational' - out to maximise our profit.
It's often assumed that without outside intervention we will inevitably see a tragedy of the commons. This tragedy occurs as individuals overuse resources - e.g. the global atmosphere's ability to absorb carbon - reducing the quality of life for everyone.
In fact there are many examples where people do collaborate and can achieve far better outcomes than purely government action. The graph above is one such example. It compares the lobster catch in Maine (community driven management - red line) with fish (government management - blue line).
So what do we need for a triumph of the commons? Mark van Vugt's recipe for success is here.
Image: Comparison of landings of ground fish in Maine and lobsters. Source: The Struggle to Govern the Commons, Thomas Dietz,Elinor Ostrom and, Paul C. Stern Science | * The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009
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