I have absolutely no idea whether an emissions trading system, here in Australia or all around the world, will save our climate. From my experience with politicians and with experts I doubt it. If it has the effect of reducing world pollution, reducing the massive overconsumption of goods, and encouraging people to find more sustainable energy, I'm all for it on that ground alone, even if far from convinced that it will be a significant effect on world weather patterns.
I don't doubt that the world is going through one of its warming phases. I don't doubt that human agency has quite a bit to do with it. But I do doubt that the experts know anything very much about the mechanisms causing it all, or what can stop it, or that they will prove any better than me (or for that matter my one-year-old grandson and a ouija board) in forecasting what will happen next year, let alone in 2020 or 2050.
And I utterly dismiss the more apocalyptic visions of a steaming planet of deserts surrounded by water. These are fostered by modern-day manicheans, who are essentially anti-human and not noticeably scientific. The more I hear, the more earnest of such people, indeed, the more I am reminded of the Millerites (now Seventh Day Adventists) who gathered expectantly (having abandoned their possessions) waiting for the end of the earth on the day of what is now called the Great Disappointment. It is in the nature of such moral and mental delusions that the Disappointment actually strengthened the faith of the disappointed. In just the same way the regular failure of confident greenhouse predictions (the sea rising to engulf us, the evaporation of Uluru and the refusal of petrol to reach $5000 a litre) tends not to daunt the doomsayers but to actually spur them on to more fresh and fantastic claims, not least the attribution of absolutely everything, particularly normal phenomena such as droughts and cyclones, to inexorable and dramatic changes in world weather.
The drought, and its intensity and duration, is indeed the greatest friend of the apocalyptics because it has played the major role in persuading the broader Australian community that we Australians, and perhaps we earthlings, are in an environmental crisis. One calling for urgent action, and not mere urgent gestures. It was the increasing desperation of the drought, which led to an almost overnight realisation in the broad communuity that John Howard simply did not get environmental issues and that he was past his time.
There are people, sincerely convinced that climate change is real and that serious national action is urgently required, who secretly hope that the drought will not break. They fear that heavy general rain, perhaps with extensive flooding in the Murray and Darling systems, might create a perception that the crisis is over. It might even blunt the drastic need - climate change or no climate change - for better national management of our water supplies and riverine environment. It is easier to move water allocations around the draughts board when the allocations are fairly notional, because there has been little rain and hence is no water.
I expect that it will rain, probably sooner rather than later. If we are moving into a hotter cycle, one can expect that 20-year rainfall averages will be lower than normal for a while, with consequent effects on the productivity of some of our agricultural land. That could mean that our agricultural output falls from being able to feed 150 million people to, say, 120 million. Significant shifts in long-term rainfall averages are fairly common in our history, even over the past 100 years. But it is highly doubtful that long-term drastic local change is already underway and that our Murrays have become Finkes overnight.
If we are moving into a hotter cycle, and if this is an effect of global warming, and if we take steps to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, and these steps have some success, we might brake warming until other feedback mechanisms cause a reverse. There's a few ifs there, surrounded by a lot of speculative science and intrinsically dodgy modelling, and people are entitled to wonder whether all will happen as we are confidently told. They should be particularly skeptical of those, including Ross Garnault, who use forecasts about earth temperature or sea level changes over particular periods. The forecasts may come from experts, but those experts are the same ones unable to predict weather patterns 21 days from now.
With such scepticism, why should I support emissions trading regimes or other efforts to reduce pollution and waste?
Much more than the precautionary principle is involved. I think it obscene how much we consume and how much we waste, the more so when we are only a small proportion of the world. The food thrown out by the average Australian household each week would feed several African families; the energy used to make the containers a typical Canberra suburb discards each week could power a city hospital in the Third World; the cost of producing 10 trendy ''energy-efficient'' cars could vaccinate Tanzania against its No.1 killer - measles.
I'm not convinced that I live at a greatly higher standard of living these days than I did as a child (even if my mother did not have paid work and we lacked mobile telephones and televisions). But I do know that we used then a tiny fraction of the energy we consume today. It would not break my heart, or much affect my standard of living, if we toned down the consumption, whether absolutely, or by way of sharing it with a few other citizens of the world. If doing that makes it rain more, or cooler so much the better.