David Spratt, Author at Pearls and Irritations

Are we failing to see the wood for the trees on climate risks?

Extreme climate impacts are exploding in this year’s Northern Hemisphere summer. We urgently need to understand how climate disruption will affect Australians: their safety and well-being in the face of ever-more-extreme climate events, the viability of public and private infrastructure, communications and logistical systems, challenges to food security, and much more. (more…)

Aug 7, 2023

Are Australia’s climate–security risks too hot to handle?

The Australian government is keen to talk about defence, big submarines, China and national security. And renewable energy, big batteries, electric cars and big hydrogen. But put the two together — security and climate — and an odd thing happens. (more…)

May 4, 2023

IPCC: a gamble on earth system failure

The fact that the IPCC incorporates in its core business risks of failure to the Earth system and to human civilisation that we would not accept in our own lives raises fundamental questions about the efficacy of the whole IPCC project. If low risks of failure are taken as a starting point, “net zero 2050” becomes not a soundly based policy aim, but an appalling gamble with existential risk. (more…)

Mar 30, 2023

The Dominoes are falling fast. We face a climate emergency

The belated release of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s “Reef snapshot: summer 2021-22” has exposed the Federal government’s insistence that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is not endangered as the lie it has always been. (more…)

May 20, 2022

Climate Change: will the financial system survive?

One of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal global response to the escalating climate crisis has been the preparedness of financial market regulators to force their regulated institutions to face up to the implications of climate risk.

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Aug 17, 2021

The net zero emission illusion

With Covid, the government has shown itself manifestly incapable of leading or managing its core responsibilities, beset by corruption and secrecy. The climate challenge is far greater than Covid, and there are no vaccinations or quarantine against climate impacts, which from now on will increase inexorably in the absence of decisive leadership. (more…)

Aug 8, 2021

Net-zero emissions by 2050: leadership or climate colonialism? (Canberra Times Nov 2, 2020)

Nov 5, 2020

What must climate and energy policy really achieve?

The Australian Government is dangerously out-of-touch as climate change accelerates and a cascade of tipping points risks unstoppable global warming.

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Oct 13, 2020

When climate risks are so high, short term actions matter most

Many carbon budgets are based on an under-estimation of warming to date, and the path of future warming. And all such budgets either ignore, or underplay, the loss of carbon from long-term stores — such as the melting of permafrost — which are already active processes.

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Sep 28, 2020

As warming approaches 1.5°C, a carbon budget for the Paris targets is delusional

There’s a lot of talk about how much “carbon budget” (new emissions) are allowable to keep global heating to the Paris target of 1.5°C. The reality is that over the last year, global average warming was already close to 1.5°C, based on a true, pre-industrial baseline.

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Jul 13, 2020