Page 5480 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 16 November 2010
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research flagship. It was a very insightful presentation and I would like to share some of it with the Assembly.
Mindful of the fact that he was speaking to an audience of politicians, Dr Howden framed these five questions about climate change. Is it real? Does it matter? Can we do anything about it or its impacts? How do we take action? And how do we know we are doing the right thing? This works quite well visually on the screen but the first three questions were directed to scientists. The third and fourth questions were directed to economists and the fourth and fifth questions he said were directed towards policy makers and politicians. I thought this was a very insightful way of breaking down what needed to be done.
He then went on to answer the questions that he said were the ones for scientists, essentially: is it real, does it matter and can we do anything about it? He gave a series of graphs and presentations and information on the science, including carbon dioxide concentrations, including the parallels between CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. This graph shows a dramatic projection for the increase of CO2 concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere and, given historical records, paints a very powerful question for the future.
He also presented graphs of annual mean surface temperature anomaly and annual sea surface temperature anomaly, including tracking a 12-year running average, and both of these graphs showed a significant increase in temperatures in recent years, particularly compared to historical figures.
At the end of this presentation, he came back to the questions that he had posed at the start and he answered them himself based on the research that his organisation has done and the research that it has analysed. These are the questions: is it real? Yes. Does it matter? Yes. Can we do anything about it or its impacts? Yes. The last two questions were: how do we take action and how do we know we are doing the right thing? He deferred those to the politicians in the audience and said, “Frankly, that’s your business.”
I think this is a very instructive presentation. I seek leave to table this presentation for the Assembly.
Leave granted.
MR RATTENBURY: Thank you, colleagues. I table the following paper:
Responses to climate change: an Australian scientist’s perspective—Copy of presentation by Mark Howden, Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship, to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Conference, Canberra, November 2010.
I particularly wanted to table this presentation speech in light of comments made by Mr Smyth during the recent debate in this place about a greenhouse gas reduction target. Mr Smyth came in and crudely tipped his hat to the climate sceptics and he did what climate sceptics do: he grabbed a few carefully selected factoids that suited his stance and alluded that in some way this mounted a credible case. He said:
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