The daily news cycle has served up grim warnings this year: the intensity and scale of wildfires from the Amazon to the Arctic, prolonged drought, hurricanes and storms of ever greater impact, the retreat of glaciers, and evidence of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and destabilisation of the West Antarctic ice sheet, happening now decades earlier than the predictions made 10 to 15 years ago. "Dangerous impacts from climate change are with us in real time": Climate scientist Michael E. Mann. Credit:Getty Images “We don’t have to use our imaginations anymore,” Mann says. “Dangerous impacts from climate change are with us in real time.” Mann, who is professor of atmospheric sciences at Pennsylvania State University, believes the world has 10 years in which to make the profound systemic changes and cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that might limit warming to around 1.5 degrees centigrade. Left to business as usual the world will warm 4 to 5 degrees, leaving the generations who follow with a “fundamentally different planet” - one where sea-level rise will wreak havoc on coastal cities and communities, while climate extremes devastate terrestrial and marine environments. The impacts, he says, would be irreversible, even if a way could be found to “magically” cool the planet again.

Mann found himself thrust into the midst of the climate wars after publication of his now-famous “hockey stick” graph of 1999, which depicted a sharp rise in global temperature as CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increased. The graph featured heavily in an early report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), making Mann a prime target for attack by climate change deniers. “Politics came to us – we didn’t come to politics,” he says of the scientific struggle of the past two decades. While in many ways he’d love a return to his old life of research and number-crunching, necessity has forced him to embrace the role of what he calls “scientist advocate”. That’s the mission that brought him to a roomful of hard-headed finance types in Sydney this week, at a conference organised by the Investor Group on Climate Change. That Mann should be invited to address such a meeting makes perfect sense to the IGCC’s chief executive, Emma Herd. Financiers and investors are now becoming ever more alert to the risks posed by climate change, she says. The dollars are starting to follow, even without the policy leadership which business has looked for in vain from the federal government. Collectively the group’s 74 members, based in Australia and New Zealand, have more than two trillion dollars’ worth of assets under management and they want assurances from companies that those investments have a long-term future.

“What I’m increasingly seeing - and investors are a big part of the reason for this - is that the private sector in Australia recognises that climate change is going to cause major economic shifts and are trying to manage it,” she says. “Government is still fighting the political fight. The private sector is getting on with it and doing the best they can. That doesn’t mean you are not going to get different views from different sectors … but what you are not seeing is fighting the need to do anything about it at all.” She says the “energy and momentum” at this week’s meeting was “palpable … It really feels like in the last 12 to 18 months investors are stepping up their engagement with companies and pushing companies to have a much better response”. Icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland. Scientists are trying to understand the alarmingly rapid melting of the ice. Credit:AP Geoffrey Summerhayes, an executive board member of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum, also sees investors becoming increasingly focused on climate change risk. “As I heard someone say recently, you can’t do business on a dead planet. These organisations understand the link between environmental sustainability and economic sustainability.”

“What is underway is a transition to a low-carbon future. That direction is irreversible and the smart money has worked that out and can see globally the trillions of dollars of infrastructure required to transition the world over the decades to come.” The shift in the energy system is already playing out much faster than many predicted, Summerhayes adds. “The world went from no smart phones to saturation in 10 years. The economics will drive the shift to renewables in a similar way.” As I heard someone say recently, you can’t do business on a dead planet. Geoffrey Summerhayes, chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum London-based Georg Kell, chair of influential Anglo-German asset management firm Arabesque Partners, was another panellist at the conference who, like Summerhayes, flags technological change as a key driver of change. But he also takes heart from the growing impact of the case for intergenerational fairness, now being made more powerfully than ever by young activists like Sweden’s Greta Thunberg. (Mann joked this week that OPEC had zeroed in on her like the malevolent “Eye of Sauron” in fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings).

“We have to ask ourselves, honestly, when we pass away, are our children in a position to enjoy the world as we have done?” Kell says. “Will they be able to go camping, scuba diving, will they have the same beauties, or will they live in a different world that will be far more confronting?” Loading Climate change, he says, is not about “red, or blue, or green” politics. “In Europe, new alliances are coming into being … CEOs of leading companies are now teaming up with green parties, unheard of years ago, teaming up to win over mainstream parties and help re-shape the political landscape.” Any business leader that played the denial card was guilty of “stupidity at best, and gross negligence, I would argue, almost criminal behaviour, at worst,” he says. “The evidence has been compelling for years already.” A striking theme at the investor conference was frustration over the inability of Australia’s political parties to resolve the climate wars after a decade of bickering and stalemate. Government actions were seen as piecemeal and sometimes a direct obstacle to private sector investment. “If electric vehicles had been cast as a cost-of-living issue we would have them by now … instead it was cast as a climate-change initiative so it became a political football,” one speaker pointed out.

The Australian Industry Group’s Innes Willox complained that the energy wars had become “Australia’s Brexit”. Loading “Industry finds it increasingly difficult to make reasoned, calculated investment in the energy space … so it is going its own way,” he told the conference. Others worried that various state governments – including NSW and Victoria – have declared goals of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but with no clarity for business about how to get there. (The Morrison government’s insistence that it is on track to meet its modest Kyoto and Paris carbon emission reduction targets were dealt a blow by the International Monetary Fund earlier this month, which said Australia on current trajectories would fail to meet those targets even with a steep carbon tax). Tony Maher of the CFMEU, representing mine workers, appealed to investors to prioritise the social and political dimensions of tackling climate change as well as the financial risks. “So far Germany is the only country that can say there has been a just transition [out of coal],” he told the conference. “Workers always get screwed, communities get broken … we have to prove to them that [that won’t happen].”