Global warming threatens our future

South East Climate Action Coalition’s Dr Nina Hall says the time for decisive action on climate change is right now.

“Climate change has demonstrated itself recently through the fact that
we have just experienced the hottest decade for a long time, as well as
the massive Victorian bushfires and the North Coast floods this year,”
Dr Hall said. “Unfortunately, scientific predictions for the future
only suggest more extreme weather events.”

Dr Hall said the Federal Government’s proposed carbon pollution
reduction scheme was a step in the right direction, as it put a price
on pollution. But she said it was deeply flawed, “as it gave away free
polluting rights to the companies and activities that have contributed
to this exact problem”.

Pointing to the seriousness of the sitution, Professor Matthew
England, of the University of NSW, said the Great Barrier Reef could be
lost and the Murray-Darling Basin could become unviable for agriculture
if a serious global effort to reduce greenhouse emissions was not made.

Prof England was one of the authors of The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a
document that was presented to the COP15 UN Climate Change Conference
on December 15.

“The temperature in any given year does not prove or disprove global warming,” Prof England said.

“The most important thing to consider is the decade-to-decade trend,
which over the past century shows clear warming and in fact an
acceleration in warming.”

He said global temperatures had risen 0.6C since 1975, whereas they
rose by only 0.2C from the time direct measurements of temperature
began in the 1850s until 1975.

He said if global warming reached 2C, it would almost certainly mean
a significant reduction in Australia’s agricultural output and more
severe bushfire seasons for NSW and Victoria in particular.

“Without an emissions reduction of any sort, we will certainly break
2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century and likely much more. If I
was a betting man, I would say temperatures will rise by about 4
degrees Celsius by the end of the century, based on the slow progress
made so far in tackling emissions reductions.”

The Federal Government’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will be reintroduced to Parliament next month.

(From the Southern Courier, January 11 2010: http://southern-courier.whereilive.com.au/news/story/warming-threatens-o...)