Call for a 40% cut in Australian emissions

Thursday, September 4, 2008
Posted in Global Warming | Tagged Global Warming

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Canberra- Australia will face a disastrous rise in temperature of between 2°C and 4°C if the Government’s climate change advisor, Professor Ross Garnaut, fails to recommend a carbon emissions reduction target of at least 40 per cent by 2020 when he releases his supplementary report on Friday. A temperature rise over 2°C will doom Australia to the loss of the Great Barrier Reef and its tourism industry, a doubling of extreme bushfires and risks triggering irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheets.

“If political weakness allows these temperature rises to occur, we’ll be playing water polo at the MCG,” Greenpeace campaigns director Steve Campbell said. “Australia has a lot to lose from climate change and it is in our best interests to be ambitious with our own targets otherwise we will have no hope of convincing other nations, like China and the US, to take the required action.”

“Professor Garnaut has the opportunity to give the Federal Government a mandate for implementing the required target of more than 40 per cent and he must use it.”

At the UN climate change talks in Bali last year, an emission reduction target range of 25 to 40 per cent for developed nations was set.

“The Bali outcome was the result of political compromise and current climate science dictates that to keep climate change within safe levels, the target must be at least 40 per cent,” Greenpeace campaigns director Steve Campbell said.

If Australia reneges on the Bali target range, it will send a signal to the world that Australia is going back to Howard-era obstructionism on climate change.

“The Federal Government has talked the talk on tough action on climate change and now it is time for them to walk the walk,” Mr Campbell said.

Achieving emission reductions of more than 40 per cent on 1990 levels is not fantasy.

Earlier this year, Greenpeace released a report called Australia’s Energy [R]evolution, which contained modelling proving that emissions can be cut by 37 per cent by 2020 in the energy and transport sectors alone by rolling out large-scale renewable energy and implementing energy efficiency measures.

Professor Barry Brook, director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide, said that if the world experiences a rise in temperatures of between 3°C and 4°C, there will be a commitment to tens of metres of sea level rise, a crisis in the supply of fresh water and agricultural produce, the Amazon rainforest could abruptly collapse, and there will be widespread permafrost melt which will trigger unavoidable feedbacks that cause even greater global climate disruption.

“The latest science on climate change impacts is quite clear. A global temperature rise of 3°C or 4°C clearly poses catastrophic hazards for human civilisation and biodiversity,” Professor Brook said.

“But even a rise of 2°C is grossly unacceptable, because not only will it risk the extinction of 20 per cent of the world’s species, as well as the destruction of the Great Barrier reef and the loss of polar ice sheets, but it will also set in motion forces that will radically transform the planet, making it far less hospitable.”