NATIONALS Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce has labelled a major government report into climate change a "gesture" that will "make people's lives more miserable".
The first report by the Government's newly created Climate Commission warns people are to blame for rising temperatures, with the last decade the hottest on record."The biological world is changing in response to a warming world," The Critical Decade: Climate Science Risks and Responses report says. "Human activities - the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation - are triggering the changes we are witnessing in the global climate."Scientist say in the report climate change cannot be denied, and carbon offsetting is not enough to stop it."The atmosphere is warming, the ocean is warming, ice is being lost from glaciers and ice caps, and sea levels are rising."The problems
are so critical, the report says, Australia must "decarbonise our economy" and move to clean energy sources by 2050, and if steps aren't launched soon, "we will struggle to maintain our present way of life".The report also is highly critical of climate change sceptics, whom it claimed were intimidating climate scientists and confusing the public.But Nationals Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce said today Australia alone cannot affect climate change."We are not going to change the climate from this building," Senator Joyce said."We can make people poorer. We can definitely do that."We can make people's lives more difficult, but we are not going to change the temperature of the globe."Senator Joyce said the report is just a gesture."If you get yourself tangled up in gestures that have no effect but make people's lives more miserable ... then I think there's something not quite right about that," he said.He said a high carbon price will reduce emissions "because it will shut everything down."A Federal Parliament forum on climate change will be held tomorrow against a backdrop of Opposition Leader and climate change sceptic Tony Abbott's commitment to a carbon offsetting policy.
Coalition policy would see polluters and government investing in ways of storing greenhouse gases - in forests, biofuels or the earth - rather than being penalised for not reducing emissions.
But report author Professor Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute, said yesterday offsetting simply could not substitute for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. "We have to reduce fossil fuel use and while locking away CO2 can be a good thing, it can't work alone. It must be accompanied by fossil fuel use and emissions reductions," he said."Putting CO2 into, say, soil, doesn't actually remove it from the ecosystem and it can be vulnerable to changes in land use. And if we get temperatures in the future higher than expected, offsetting might make warming worse because that carbon, that CO2, you paid people to put back into the earth can go back up into the air."Poorly constructed offsetting could lock in more severe climate change for the future."Prof Steffen said the next decade was critical with Australia already suffering social, environmental and economic consequences of warming. Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the Director of the Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, said the report should guide politicians and compel them into action."It is vitally important that responsible governments everywhere face up to the urgency of the situation that we face with respect to climate change, and to act on the recommendations of their experts," he said."They must listen to the experts, devise meaningful responses and act immediately on this important issue."Greens Senator Christine Milne said the message from the report is clear, that this is the critical decade on climate change."What we now need to do is be having the conversation about how to decarbonise the Australian economy as quickly as possible," Senator Milne said.She said the report will hopefully be a driver for a package which will see a consistent, whole of government approach to climate change."So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about landscape, whether you're talking about cars, whether you're talking about factories we will all be going in the same direction. I hope."Senator Milne called for an end to the debate over whether climate change is real."What this report will do is actually help the Australian population see that what we've been having is a phoney debate in Australia that's been run by the sceptics, financed by big business, by coal, by oil around the world," she said.
-herald
