Fed: Avalanche of reports ensure climate change stays hot

AAP General News (Australia)
02-01-2007
Fed: Avalanche of reports ensure climate change stays hot

By Denis Peters

CANBERRA, Feb 1 AAP - Climate change took off as a looming giant of a political issue
last year. A bushfire-ravaged holiday season gave it a short media break but it's now
back as a red-hot, election year topic.

Ahead of next week's return of federal parliament, the past few days has produced its
own firestorm of reports, debate and promises of solutions to this intangible but, as
the scientists would have it, very real threat to life on earth.

The immediate concern is drought and water supply.

Prime Minister John Howard set the ball rolling on his return from holidays with a
$10 billion package of measures to ensure water security, and installed Malcolm Turnbull
into a beefed up environment and water resources portfolio.

Significantly, the pragmatic, conservative Mr Howard did not create a special portfolio
for climate change, as many had hoped.

But report after report this week has indicated that climate change and its ramifications
for policy will be on everybody's topic this year.

First, left wing think tank the Australia Institute focused on the political issue
the Howard government does not want to talk about - where the supposedly clean and green
nuclear reactors might be sited in Australia.

The Energy Supply Association of Australia brought down its findings saying coal, supported
by expensive new technology, along with nuclear, were the only viable means by which the
country could cut greenhouse gas emissions and still meet expanded energy demands by 2030.

The NSW government resurrected a CSIRO report predicting maximum temperatures for Australia's
largest city, Sydney, would inevitably rise 1.6 degrees by 2030 and 4.8 degrees by 2070.

A confidential draft of a report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) predicted global warming will cause billions of dollars of damage to coastal areas,
key ecosystems and the farming sector without massive greenhouse gas emission cuts.

That report is expected to table a sober warning late in the week by 2,500 environmental
scientists of potentially dramatic impacts from global warming.

Quite aside from debate over Mr Howard's policy response, the prime minister has the
responsibility to bring the dimension of the problem into balance, and to avoid panicking
the population over the more dire predictions.

Some of these predictions are indeed disturbing.

The controversial author and environmentalist James Lovelock wrote in the Independent
newspaper last year that the world is entering a "morbid fever" that will last 100,000
years as a result of man-made climate change.

"As the century progresses, the temperature will rise eight degrees centigrade in temperate
regions and five degrees in the tropics," he wrote.

"Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve
for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to
feed ourselves."

Science is telling us that global warming, and hence climate change, has been created
by around two trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases accumulating
in the upper atmosphere, creating the so-called greenhouse effect - deflecting back to
the Earth the Sun's heat which would otherwise have escaped into space.

This accumulation has happened chiefly in concert with the industrial revolution which
got underway in the late 18th century - perhaps 250 years.

Mainstream scientists say that man-made climate change is a fact, and debate must now
focus on how, and how quickly, the world tackles it.

Professor Mike Archer, the dean of science at the University of NSW, wrote in The Sydney
Morning Herald this week of where this issue is now.

"Naysayers and sceptics can argue all they like about how much of this change is "natural"

and how much is the result of human activity," he wrote.

"The bottom line, in terms of treating the patient, is that the hotter she gets the
less time we have to fix her up.

"Likewise, our options become more and more limited the longer we stand around like
stunned mullets. We need to take action, now."

With elections looming in NSW and in the federal sphere, some worry that the gravity
of the situation is at risk of being lost in short-term politicking.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma conceded the data used in the disturbing CSIRO report into
Sydney's future weather was compiled in 2004, and originally related to the entire state,
not just Sydney.

Climate change response is an issue that cries out for a national, government and non-government
summit at least.

The UN Environment Program this week became the second UN body to urge new Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon to call a paramount meeting on global warming, predicting that by 2100 global
warming will unleash bouts of extreme heat, dryness and rainfall and make cyclones more
violent.

The political left and right in Australia are as divided as ever on how to respond.

The federal government liked what it heard from the ESAA report.

The report concluded that using clean coal technologies along with nuclear power provided
the only hope of Australia cutting greenhouse emissions while managing an expected large
increase in energy demand - two per cent a year - by 2030.

It said although renewable technologies can expect to be increasingly part of the future
energy mix, those technologies, particularly wind power, will not be able to provide anywhere
near enough power to meet the country's demands.

Green bodies, which support renewable energy, recommend getting out of coal altogether
and, along with Labor, say nuclear is dangerous, entails an intractable problem with its
waste, and is at best a stop-gap measure.

The problem for Australia is its great reliance on fossil fuels.

Black coal alone covers 60 per cent of Australia's electricity needs. Black coal exports
total $25 billion a year, the biggest component of Australia's total export of goods and
services, which was $196 billion in 2005-06.

Last year's seminal report by former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern
and former US Vice President Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, undoubtedly focused
many Australians' minds on climate change.

But the seemingly never-ending problems of drought and water shortage are raising more
obvious questions in people's minds.

An independent assessment of these issues has come from the State of the Environment 2006 report:

"Australia's current difficulties may well be because the nation is entering a dry
period similar to that experienced in the first half of the last century, and planning
has not made adequate provision for this," it said.

"Further, the dryness may also be influenced by the hotter and more extreme climate
that is predicted to result from climate change."

If good rains finally arrive this year, will the issue be swept under the carpet yet again?

Our politicians will be on notice as they lock horns in debate starting next week.

AAP dep/sb/cjh/bwl

KEYWORD: CLIMATE AUST (ANALYSIS)

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