Page 854 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013
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distant future. Climate change is real. It is happening now and its effects are likely to amplify over the coming decades with serious risks to the world’s natural systems and the societies around the world, including our own community, that our delicate planet supports.
We know that this problem is being driven by the rapidly increasing release of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. The accumulation of these gases is the only viable explanation for the observed warming over recent decades—not sun spots or volcanic activity, as some of the friends of the Liberal Party would have you believe, but greenhouse gas emissions from our homes and our cars, from our offices, from power generation and from heavy industries. And there certainly have been plenty of emissions coming from across the chamber this morning, Mr Assistant Speaker.
In 2010, with the passage of the greenhouse gas reduction act, this government showed that we are informed of the latest evidence about global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is charged by the nations to critically examine and report on the scientific evidence on climate change, presented a range of possible warming scenarios linked to global emissions trajectories.
The world, we were informed, was warming and, unabated, global average temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and four degrees by the end of this century. The IPCC’s advice was that in order to stabilise global warming and avoid the most severe and possibly irreversible climate impacts forecast by the international scientific community, industrialised countries needed to target a 40 per cent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2020, and zero net emissions by 2060, if we are to remain within a two degree warming scenario.
In November 2010, the then Labor government enshrined these targets in legislation. They were, after all, a level of effort no more or less than that advised by the science. The need to achieve these targets has underpinned subsequent policy analysis, leading to the publication of the climate change action plan 2 late last year.
First, however, I need to update the Assembly on the scientific evidence that has emerged since those legislated targets were set, which reinforces the government’s commitment to act on these issues. Reports published in the prestigious international science journal Nature, and in a report by the World Bank, bring to light advice and further evidence that the challenge we face with respect to climate change is not hypothetical but one that must be acted on as a matter of urgency.
The World Bank’s report Turn down the heat—why a 4°C warmer world must be avoided states that the projected impacts from a four degree warmer world could lead to large-scale displacement and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems. The report reaffirms that a warming beyond two degrees risks crossing tipping points in the earth’s system, increasing the chance of abrupt climate change impacts and unprecedented high temperatures, drastically impacting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production and livelihoods, and potentially exacerbating 21st century global warming.
The scenario of a four degree warmer world is one of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought and bushfires, and major floods in many regions. Climate change and
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