INTERNATIONAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. M. Parnell:

1. That this council notes—

(a) the release this week of the final part of the Fourth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change; and

(b) that a 2°Celsius (median value) increase in global average surface temperatures above pre-industrial levels is accepted by the European Union as the limit beyond which there will be sufficient adverse impacts on the earth's biogeophysical systems, animals and plants to constitute 'dangerous' climate change;

2. And agrees that the imperative of constraining global temperature increase to no more than 2°above pre-industrial levels should underpin government policy responses to global warming.

(Continued from 13 February 2008. Page 1674.)

The Hon. SANDRA KANCK (20:39): I move:

That after 1(a) insert—

(b) the interim report by Professor Ross Garnaut released on 21 February 2008;

Scientific information about climate change is gathering pace. Given the release of the interim report commissioned by federal, state and territory governments from Professor Ross Garnaut, it is important to add this new information into the consideration of this motion. First, I want to look a little at the IPCC report to which this motion refers. The IPCC (as a body) does not predict; it provides scenarios and asks what the result would be under different scenarios.

In this fourth report, the scenarios suggest that sea level rise this century will be between nine centimetres and 88 centimetres. One has to consider the nature of the IPCC. For a start, they are scientists: they are not spin doctors and they are not politicians. The information received from this body of scientists always represents a conservative position because they return to their countries and obtain approval from their governments before signing off. When they represent countries such as the US and Japan, and at least until last November, Australia, we can be certain that they will not have produced a radical position paper. In fact, other climate scientists have criticised the conservatism of the IPCC report.

Dr Andrew Ash, Acting Director of CSIRO's climate adaption flagship, is one of those. James Hansen of NASA is another. Hansen says the IPCC made a mistake in assuming that icesheet melting will continue at a slow and linear rate. To the contrary, he says that we are facing what he calls 'tipping points'. He is correct. I want members to consider a physical fact, that is, a fact of physics. Consider that one tonne of ice at 0º Celsius melting to one tonne of water still at 0º Celsius releases so much energy that this, in turn, allows another 80 tonnes of water to be heated so that more ice, in turn, is melted. We are talking about just one tonne of ice.

If members start to think about how many tonnes are melting, consider that the Greenland icesheet has lost up to 70 metres depth of ice over the past five years, they then have some sense of the drama of what is happening. Putting it in simple terms: the more it warms, the more it warms; and the more the oceans warm, the more they acidify; and the more they acidify, the more they release the carbon dioxide which they naturally contain which, in turn, adds even more greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, which means more heating, which means more melting. It is clear that it is not a linear process. I say it not as a criticism of anyone in this place, but it is an observation that most politicians—just like the rest of the population—do not have training in mathematics, which allows us to be easily fooled into thinking that these changes do occur in a linear fashion.

The amendment that I have moved to the motion asks us also to consider the interim report by Professor Ross Garnaut. I include this because members who will respond to this motion, in effect, will be forced not only to look at the IPCC report but also at what Professor Ross Garnaut has said. It is instructive to look at what he says because what he is showing is that, every time we receive new information about climate change, the picture becomes worse. Whereas, for instance, I said that the IPCC's fourth report had indicated sea level rises between nine centimetres at the minimum and 88 centimetres at the maximum by the end of the century, what Ross Garnaut and his team is finding is that this is conservative. In his report he says:

The reality of observed climate change in recent years has surprised mainstream scientific opinion, exceeding expectations from the increase in emissions concentrations that have accumulated to date...Comparisons between observed data and model predictions suggest that the climate system may be responding more quickly than climate models indicate.

Of course, if the change is not linear, in a way that is not surprising.

This motion asks this chamber to agree to the proposition that government policy responses to global warming should be underpinned by an acceptance of global temperature increase to no more than 2º above pre-industrial levels. This is commonsense when one considers what geological records show. The last time the world's global temperature increased by around 2º to 3º above the current temperature, the melting of ice resulted in a sea level rise of 25 metres in a relatively brief time.

The Garnaut report, released on 21 February, points out that economic growth is going at a much higher rate than anticipated under the IPCC's emission scenarios and that this suggests 'the likelihood, under business as usual, of continued growth of emissions in excess of the highest IPCC scenarios.' Garnaut says that they will continue to research energy and emission trends under the business as usual, ad hoc and partial mitigation, and comprehensive mitigation scenarios but says:

These more realistic growth trajectories bring forward in time the critical points for high risk of dangerous climate change. Only urgent, large and effective global policy change leaves any hope of holding atmospheric concentrations at the 450 parts per million, or even the 550 parts per million levels.

In response to arguments that are sometimes advanced against taking arguments—that is, the information is uncertain, therefore our approach to this issue could be conservative—Garnaut asks:

But what is conservative in a context where the possible outcomes include some that most humans today would consider catastrophic? Conservatism may, in fact, require erring on the side of ambitious mitigation.

According to his media release last week, he says that Australia needs to go considerably further than the 60 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions to which Australia has already committed and, in reading the interim report, it appears that this figure could be somewhere between 70 per cent and 90 per cent. It is interesting to consider that the amendments that some of us proposed last year to the climate change bill in this place were more consistent with these figures and, quite clearly, a lot of people are not going to be comfortable with such deep cuts.

Accepting this motion would be consistent with what Professor Garnaut has recommended. He says that strong action is in Australia's interests and that 'developed countries need to show unilateral and regional leadership.' He says:

Whether the world will be able to progress to the degree required is unclear, but it is in Australia's interests to do as much as it can to support acceleration. Australia would be a big loser, possibly the biggest loser, amongst developed countries, from unmitigated climate change.

After the Bali conference in December last year I read some angry reactions on the Guardian website relating to the Bali conference decision to not set targets but merely to meet again to discuss them. One correspondent made a telling comment that, ultimately, what those on the list were discussing was just how many people we were willing to let die. Despite Australia having now belatedly signed the Kyoto agreement, the reality is that there are no new government policies capable of avoiding a greenhouse gas target overshoot of six million tonnes of CO₂ by 2012. We must take timely and responsible action, and recognising the facts of this motion is a small but sensible beginning which might result in that necessary action.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. J. Gazzola.