Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:The need for the Government’s negotiating position at Cancun to be informed by an understanding of both the latest climate science and what constitutes an equitable contribution by Australia to the global challenge of decarbonisation.

Today in the House of Representatives, there was a debate about whether climate change is real and human-induced. Frankly it is embarrassing that in the Australian parliament in 2010 we are still having this debate which is long gone in all other developed countries, who are now getting on with determining the policy framework necessary to address the climate crisis.

I am glad to say that a few minutes ago a motion of mine was passed—the coalition said they would not call a division on it and they did not say they opposed it. The motion stated that not only is climate change real and human-induced but also that urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is required to achieve the goal to which Australia committed under the Copenhagen accord—namely, constraining global warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels.

The point is that the debate we should be having here today is about the latest climate science, about what Australia is going to do about it and about what our fair share is. What is an equitable burden for Australia in a global negotiation? Our minister will be representing this country in Cancun next week, and the parliament really ought to know what the government is taking to those negotiations.

The first thing that this parliament—politicians—need to actually respond to is: how much warming do we think is safe for the planet? We have never had that discussion in this parliament and we need to have it. You have to know exactly what you are aiming for and with what degree of certainty you are going to reach that goal before you can set in place what you need to do.

The second thing we need to do is determine how much the world can emit and stay below that threshold. That is the global carbon budget, which will determine the constraint on warming you are aiming for and the degree of certainty that you have about it.

Finally, we need to determine Australia’s fair share. The scientists have already given us the answers we need. The science is not the problem—we have it. Overnight, the scientists said that 2010 is the hottest year on record. From January to October, terrestrial and marine temperatures combined to make it the hottest year on record. The scientists also told us overnight that in 2009 emissions of fossil fuel gases have edged back less than had been hoped. We were told that the global financial crisis would bring us some respite, and the scientists had modelled an expectation that greenhouse gases would retreat marginally, but they actually retreated by only half of what these scientists and others expected. Emissions of fossil fuel gases in 2009 fell by 11.8 per cent in Japan, 6.9 per cent in the US, 8.6 per cent in Britain, seven per cent in Germany and 8.4 per cent in Russia but—in contrast—rose by eight per cent in China, 6.2 per cent in India and 1.4 per cent in South Korea. As a result of all that, there is still a trajectory of incredible increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

In Copenhagen last year, Australia signed the Copenhagen Accord, which said that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius on the basis of equity and in the context of sustainable development and that, further, that would enhance our long-term cooperative action to combat climate change. But is two degrees safe? The scientists would argue that in fact it is not safe by any means and that allowing 450 parts of atmospheric CO2 per million only gives us a 50 per cent chance of constraining global warming to less than two degrees. I would hope that we would be aiming for better than a 50 per cent chance of achieving something as serious as survival on this planet. If 450 parts of atmospheric CO2 per million is only going to give us a 50 per cent chance of survival—and in fact the science says that 450 parts of atmospheric CO2 per million is probably only going to give us a 35 per cent chance—shouldn’t we be saying, ‘Actually, that is too much; we need to rein this in’? The developing countries around the world say that they would like global warming to be constrained to 1.5 degrees.

Let us put this into a real-world context: we have only had 0.6 per cent of one degree Celsius of warming so far, and look at what we have already experienced. We have experienced extreme weather events, glaciers melting, sea levels rising and storms that have devastated so many parts of the world. We have seen extreme flooding. We have seen all sorts of problems, not to mention the extreme drought in the Murray-Darling for so long and the fires all over Australia, particularly in Victoria where we saw extreme bushfires. We know that with global warming there is going to be an increasing number of days of extreme weather conducive to the outbreak of bushfires around Australia. We know that, by allowing two degrees of warming to occur, we virtually guarantee the loss of the Great Barrier Reef. I am going to say that again, because most Australian parliamentarians do not get it: by allowing two degrees of warming to occur we will lose the Great Barrier Reef.