John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Nowhere are the harmful consequences of the denial of global warming by the Liberal and National parties more apparent than in the new sea level rise guidelines promulgated by the New South Wales coalition government. Local councils in affected areas have condemned what has been termed an 'ad hoc policy' that will lead to the desperate but futile construction of walls of sandbags. The people of my electorate of Reid, who live close to sea level, will be unimpressed by this proposal, which leaves property owners to their own devices. Yet, as far as I am aware, the federal opposition has no concerns. I have no doubt, considering the well-known disdain of the Leader of the Opposition for the findings of scientists, that the destructive policies of the present New South Wales government would be reflected in an even more extreme form by an Abbott government.

Justifying the overturning of the rational managed retreat policy of the previous state Labor government, the Liberal New South Wales Special Minister of State, Chris Hartcher, claimed that the rate of sea level rise predicted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contained too much uncertainty for the government to give general advice to local governments. Just as the senate in North Carolina showed its contempt for the findings of scientists when it tried to enact a law that would have prohibited their state agencies from taking measures to respond to the warnings of an exponential increase in sea levels, so the New South Wales government has invited international ridicule with its own idiotic policies, informed by the same climate change deniers that infest the ranks of the federal opposition.

That the New South Wales Special Minister of State claims his government cannot make specific warnings because the IPCC estimates of sea level rise are issued within a range presently centred on 90 centimetres by 2100 simply shows that he has no comprehension of the manner in which such estimates are normally reported. What the New South Wales minister fails to understand is that measurements or predictions, be they sea level rise, increasing global temperatures or diminishing rainfall, are normally reported as a mean value bracketed by a range of greater and lesser values, usually stated as standard deviations from the mean. Put simply, the standard deviation of a series of measurements gives the spread in values from the mean or average, and statistics give us a reliable means of determining the chance that measurements will fall within that spread. So, when we see a report that states that estimates of sea-level rise are within one standard deviation, we can say that there is a 68 per cent chance that the seas will actually rise by one standard deviation and a 95 per cent chance that the seas will rise by two standard deviations.

According to the CSIRO, the projected sea level increase from the global mean along the New South Wales coast will be 150 millimetres by 2030, with a standard deviation of about 50 millimetres. This means that there is approximately a two-thirds chance that sea levels will increase by between 100 and 200 millimetres by that time. How many punters would be willing to bet their house if they had a two-thirds chance of losing everything?

If opposition members here do not like these predictions they can, as in New South Wales, simply ignore or deny them, but, since the measured rise in sea levels is actually tracking at the upper extreme of the predictions, we can say that, even if the rate of increase is linear, then the expected increase in sea levels will be 400 millimetres by 2100, or, if the increase is exponential, which seems a better fit for the measurements, then the increase will be as much as 1.2 metres. It is clear that the interests of people who own property exposed to the risk of rising sea levels are being ignored by the deniers, who control the policy development of the Liberal-National coalition.