Sun's rays alone can power Aust 'by 2030'

Canberra Times
Thursday 12/6/2008 Page: 3

Australia could be totally reliant on solar energy by 2030 if the current obstacles of technical inertia, lack of political will and entrenched interests can be overcome, a leading CSIRO scientist says. "Australia should be building a solar backbone,'' atmospheric physicist Mike Raupach told a national climate change conference at the Australian National University yesterday. Pursuing large-scale geosequestration projects to reduce Australia's rising greenhouse emissions was not the answer and "is fighting against the way the Earth's systems want its to go", he said.

Dr Raupach, a contributing author to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, said Australia's greenhouse emissions were growing faster than in any other developed nation in the world, driven by increasing per capita wealth and the "aggressive consumption" of the average urban lifestyle.

"We need a cap on total emissions at around 500 billion tonnes of carbon, which means an 80 per cent reduction in emissions for developed countries, and perhaps a 90 per cent reduction for Australia." The climate-change threat was "somewhere between severe and extreme." A gap was emerging between "what the economists tells its is possible" and what scientists insisted was necessary to tackle the problem, Dr Rattpach said.

Significant reductions in Australia's greenhouse emissions were "technically achievable and affordable", with low-cost mitigation measures including improved refrigeration, lighting, heating and car fuel efficiencies, better building insulation and reduced travel, with carbon offsets invested in renewable energy rather than biosequestration or tree planting projects, he said. The director of the University of Adelaide's climate research institute, Professor Barry Brook, told the conference that "to have a reasonable chance" of avoiding a future increase of 2 degrees of global warming, developed nations must achieve "at least an 80 per cent reduction in emissions" by 2050 and begin levelling off emissions "by no later than 2015."

Professor Brook said a 2-degree increase in temperature would "wipe out" most of the world's coral reefs. Sea levels could rise by tip to 30m in some areas, Australia would experience more frequent, intensive droughts and between 20 and 30 per cent of global biodiversity "will be consigned to extinction." At 3 degrees the world would experience a "freshwater supply crisis" as the Himalayan glaciers and other snow-pack environments disappeared.

The Amazon basin would collapse from drought and desertification, tropical weather systems would expand polewards and widespread permafrost melt would exacerbate global warming by releasing tonnes of methane into the atmosphere. At 4 degrees, agriculture would collapse across Australia's midlatitudes.

"It is a damning indictment of our collective vacillation, inaction and deliberate stalling to date, that in facing tip to this problem - with Australia and the United States being two prominent curmudgeons - we are facing the stark choice between a bad situation, a catastrophic situation and a civilisation terminating situation," Professor Brook said.

Former Labor science minister Barry Jones told the conference that the Hawke government knew about the risks of climate change 25 years ago but ignored the issue. He claimed to have been the first Australian politician to raise the alarm, in 1984.