Leading us down the path to ruin

Hobart Mercury
Tuesday 13/10/2009 Page: 20

IF Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are feeling the heat over the climate summit in Copenhagen in December, here's why. A big UN survey of recent scientific research has revealed the terrifying inadequacy of current national promises to cut carbon emissions. Science tells us that a 2C global temperature rise above preindustrial levels is a danger point, above which we really don't want to go. If we get to 6C we are fast approaching Armageddon, with civilisation long vanished and only polar regions able to sustain life. But Armageddon, it would seem, is where our governments are taking us.

The UN Environment Program's just-released 2009 Science Compendium has revealed the present global emissions trajectory will bring us warming of more than 8C by the end of the century. If currently promised national policies come to fruition, we will keep the rise down to about 6.3C. This is the result of the yawning gap between scientific evidence and political "realism". Our political masters - and we must include opposition politicians in this as well as governments - seen incapable of understanding that urgent and decisive action is the only option. They're not alone, of course. Some business leaders and senior bureaucrats, apparently unperturbed by the evidence, behave as if we can continue business as usual while postponing reform.

The Rudd Government's emissions scheme with its enormous subsidies to heavy-polluting big business, aims for a target that if universally adopted would put the world on a path to more than 550 parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Despite this, opposition members are arguing that business is being too harshly treated. What planet are they on? Far from allowing the level of carbon in the atmosphere to rise well above its present 390ppm, science is telling us that we've somehow got to find a way to reduce it - and quickly.

Early last year, Dr James Hansen, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute, warned that 350ppm was the absolute upper limit if we want our planet to stay the way it has been throughout our civilised existence. The paper used prehistoric evidence to show that anything above that would raise warning above the danger level of 2C. On the basis of this landmark paper, long-three US environmental activist Bill McKibben set up a group called 350.org, calling for world action to reduce carbon dioxide levels to below what Hansen's research team had found to be a safe upper limit.

This will be a tough assignment. Recent emissions have already brought melting of polar and mountain ice, rising sea levels and devastating droughts and storms. The task will demand a much speedier shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy than envisaged by government and business. But it must be done. October 24 has been designated by 350.org as the "International Day of Climate Action". Concerned people around the world have taken up its call to demonstrate to political leaders and the public at large the critical urgency of this mission. They especially want to make an impression on those attending the Copenhagen summit.

Thousands of events around the world on the day will include city rallies, mountaintop banners, island protests against seawater inundation, religious ceremonies, sporting events and numberless community-organised demonstrations. Each event will highlight the number 350, a photograph of which will be posted at 350.org as part of a "global visual petition". I don't easily take to public demonstrations, but this is a global event I'll be very glad to be part of.

pb@climatetasmania.com.au