John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to start by congratulating the member for Bonner for her invaluable and lasting contribution to the debate on this very important legislation. Tonight, I too rise to support the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Amendment Bill 2008. I commend the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator the Hon. Penny Wong, for the proposed amendments. The basis of the amendments lies in the need to clarify the requirements and regulations of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007. One particular amendment, the mandatory public disclosure of direct and indirect gas emissions, aims to improve the quality and reliability of data collected to assess the situation of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. Further, the amendments enhance the transparency of information on the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by registered corporations.

While members of the opposition have spoken today on the scare campaign of misinformation regarding the true effect of carbon emissions on climate change, I want to take the opportunity here tonight to provide the counterpoint to some of that misinformation. The proposition that climate change is being driven by global warming caused by emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels from agricultural methane emissions, from land clearing and from other smaller sources is now well established beyond any reasonable doubt.

Recent evidence for the apparent acceleration of global warming, such as the rapid melting of the Arctic icecap, now appears to indicate the manipulation of previous reports by sceptics such as the former Howard government and the Bush administration in the United States. There is no question that, to avoid taking action, both governments distorted evidence and suppressed unfavourable data while forcing organisations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce sanitised reports that greatly overestimated the time frames and underestimated the effects of global warming. The consequences have been that the more realistic predictions of climate scientists have been ignored, measures that could have reduced greenhouse gas emissions have not been implemented and we now find ourselves exposed to climatic changes that were, according to the Howard government, not supposed to happen for 50 years or more.

Australia is proving to be very vulnerable to the effects of global warming, particularly with rainfall. Records now show that large parts of eastern Australia have become much drier during the past decade, and it is highly probable that these changes have been brought about by global warming. It is the view of the great majority of the world’s scientists that significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions have to be made within 10 years if dangerous consequences are to be avoided. Of great concern are recent figures that show that world emissions have actually grown by 3.3 per cent per annum since 2000 and are 25 per cent above the 1990 levels, while natural sinks for carbon dioxide, such as the oceans, are exhausting their capacity to absorb the growing volumes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.

A target level of a 60 per cent reduction in Australia’s emissions by 2050 requires average cuts of the order of eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum starting this year. Reductions of 90 per cent by 2050, which may be necessary, will require average annual cuts of around 12 million tonnes of carbon dioxide starting this year. At the very least, an end to the growth in emissions must be brought about as rapidly as possible. Technologies that can quickly reduce carbon dioxide emissions by improvements in energy efficiency and by large-scale replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy sources are well developed and in many cases have been available for decades. New technologies will also be important for future reductions in emissions, but the changes that need to be made to our energy infrastructure can be largely accomplished with what exists today. The necessary response to global warming is a matter of rapid mobilisation of existing resources.

The residual climate change sceptics, including the present Leader of the Opposition and his pretenders, in arguing for a policy of inaction falsely claim that there is a large amount of uncertainty in the science. While it is true that there are margins of error in the measurements and the predictions of the effects of global warming, as there are with any measurements, the magnitudes of these errors are relatively small. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that the average global air temperature near the earth’s surface increased by 0.74 of a degree, plus or minus 0.18 of a degree, during the 100 years ending in 2005. These data are regarded as highly reliable because they are the product of a large and statistically significant number of measurements made with highly accurate instruments. Consequently, the margin of error in these figures is far from sufficient to support the level of doubt promoted by the opposition.

The desiccating conditions being experienced by Murray-Darling Basin farmers are strongly correlated with widely accepted climate change models, yet the opposition—in a policy development process best described as disorganised dithering—continues to deny any significant connection with global warming. The professional sceptics have attempted to discredit the evidence for global warming by offering alternative possibilities, including a remarkable claim that the earth is actually entering a cooling phase. While most sceptics are not willing to go that far in denying reality, some ill-informed individuals are attempting to argue, without understanding the evidence, that there are other reasons for global warming apart from human activity. These include: (1) that the sun’s output of heat is increasing, (2) that cosmic rays are responsible for heating the atmosphere and (3) that natural sources emit more carbon dioxide than humans.

I submit that highly reliable evidence based upon measurements, as opposed to supposition, clearly shows that there is no substance to any of these and other claims. Firstly, a fuss has been made of recent measurements based on short-term weather variability over little more than a year that appeared to show that the average global temperature has suddenly started to fall.

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