Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank senators for their contribution to this debate. I welcome the support of the Australian Labor Party and the Democrats for this reference for the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts to investigate the implications of sea level rise in Australia as a result of climate change. It would have particularly looked at the recent science relating to projections of sea level rise; the ecological, social and economic impacts; adaptation and mitigation strategies; knowledge gaps in research; and options to communicate risks and vulnerabilities to the Australian community. It is appalling that the government is using its numbers to block a Senate inquiry into this absolutely vital issue.

We heard from Senator Eggleston that the reason that the government is opposing this is because there is a government agency at work looking into it. There are government agencies at work looking into lots of things. That is not a reason for the Senate not to investigate this. In fact, as James Hansen, the climate scientist, said—regarding the US, but it is equally applicable here—government science agencies have public affairs offices which are now staffed with political appointees and those political appointees have a big impact on what science gets reported and how it is reported. I am very disturbed about that. Public affairs officials should be helping scientists speak in a language that the public can understand; they should not be massaging the information. But that is exactly what has gone on after 11 years of this government. There has been suppression of information and massaging of information. Government agencies look into what governments tell them to look into and report accordingly. What we want is an inquiry without fear or favour.

Let us assume for a moment that the work that is currently being done by the Greenhouse Office and Geoscience Australia into coastal vulnerability in Australia is completely open-ended and reasonable. The point that I made earlier which Senator Eggleston failed to appreciate is that the assumption underlying the work that is currently being done is the IPCC projection. As I indicated, the IPCC has said that it expects sea level rise to be between 18 centimetres and 59 centimetres this century. That is the assumption that is being fed into all the work that is currently being done in Australia.

My point is that those assumptions are wrong or are very likely to be wrong. That is why I have said we need to look at the recent science relating to projections of sea level rise, because when the IPCC report came out the work of those scientists who are working particularly in the area of icecaps and the melting of glaciers, on Greenland and on the west Antarctic iceshelf, was not adequately included in that report. If you take on board what they are saying, that in addition to the thermal expansion of the oceans and storm surges you have to take into account that ice melt, then the predictions will be of a sea level rise of between 50 centimetres and 1.4 metres this century. If you extrapolate that out taking account of what Barrie Pittock has said, that for every metre of sea level rise the coast will retreat or go inland by 100 metres, we are talking about large parts of the world, Australia included, that are going to be significantly impacted by sea level rise.

Senator Eggleston, on behalf of the government, says: ‘It’s all under control. We’re looking into it. We’re going to have a map.’ Well, the Insurance Council has been asking for a map for a long time. Everybody wants a digital elevation map of Australia’s coastline. Everyone who buys a house should be able to go online and look at that digital elevation map and see where the property they are going to buy sits on that map so that they know about the vulnerability of that property to sea level rises, storm surges and flooding, whether the property is on an estuary or on the coast or on a river. We need to know that. Instead of that, we have a government agency looking into it, and by the end of 2008 it will only have the first cut of areas in Australia which have vulnerability to sea level rise. We will not have the digital elevation maps. We still do not have the maps of the result of the recent Newcastle and Hobart floods. We do not have the capacity at this stage to inform the community of what they need to know and of how to adapt.

It is interesting that Senator Eggleston talks about ports. In 1993 the Japanese did this very study of their own ports. Why has it has taken Australia until 2007 to start the first cut? What the Japanese found was that the costs of protecting port facilities and coastal structures in the Japanese coastal zones against a one-metre rise in sea level were massive: with a one-metre sea level rise, the total costs for protection were estimated at $US115 billion. That was in 1993. Japan then said, ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’ and then started looking at a process involving three strategies. They looked at whether they should go into adaptation and whether, as part of their adaptation strategy, they should go into managed retreat. They also looked at a range of engineering solutions, as I indicated before, such as building seawalls, changing facilities and so on. Other things are being done in other places in the world. In the Netherlands, for example, they are considering putting out to tender the building of a whole new coastline because they realise that their current strategies are not going to work. They are also moving people from low-lying areas and vulnerable floodplains to other areas. So they are virtually saying they are going to let some areas go because they recognise they can no longer protect them.

Those are the kinds of strategies that are already underway in other countries where this work was done more than a decade, even 15 years, ago. But in Australia we have sat here listening to a government say it is not happening. I am appalled to hear Senator Eggleston continue with the absolute climate sceptic behaviour that is so entrenched in the government, saying time and time again that he is still not persuaded that the current rate of global warming is human induced. He said, ‘There is a reasonable view that greenhouse gas emissions have a role in climate change.’ No. There is a scientific view held by the world’s leading scientists, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that says they are more than 90 per cent certain it is human induced global warming. That report came out on 2 February this year, and the government is still clinging to the nonsense and scepticism being put out through the Great Global Warming Swindle program, which obviously government members have all watched and decided to cling to. When is the government going to get beyond climate scepticism? When is it going to realise that not only is climate change real but it is urgent?

There is another point I want to make about the claim that there is ‘a government agency looking into it’. The IPCC has said that global emissions must peak by 2015. We are in 2007. That does not give us very much time. Talking about nuclear reactors that are 20 or 30 years away and about energy intensity reduction by 2030 is just pie in the sky. We have got less than a decade to take radical action here in Australia to significantly reduce our emissions and to assist our Pacific neighbours to do so as well. Next week we are going to have here in the parliament a delegation of people from the Carteret Islands, off Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea. I hope some of the government members are going to come and listen to those people, who will tell them that they are in danger of losing their land and their culture because their islands are disappearing under the sea. What are we going to do about that? We still have a government that says it will not accept a definition of environmental refugee. Why? Because Australia does not want to take people from the Pacific island nations or from Papua New Guinea or anywhere else when they are driven from their communities because of climate change. We are in danger of losing not only the places where those communities live but the cultures and languages that go with those communities. New Zealand has opened its arms to many of its Pacific island neighbours and has entered into some transition strategies in some of those communities, but not Australia. Is it any wonder those neighbouring countries are increasingly sceptical about Australia’s role in global geopolitics?

I return to the issue of sea level rise and Senator Eggleston’s view. He says that, yes, they have started the mapping. Show me the maps. I cannot go now—neither can the insurance industry nor any person in the community—and get an elevation map of the area I live in which tells me, if the IPCC is right and there is an 18- to 59-centimetre sea level rise in the next 100 years, what it means for my property. If they are wrong and the other scientists are correct and it is going to be more like a 1.4-metre rise, I cannot find out what that means for me, and that is a disgrace.

What the government is currently doing will not provide that information either, because it is based on the most conservative assumptions. That is why this Senate inquiry is important. We need to hear from scientists like Dr John Church who can come and tell us whether the assumptions behind the mapping, behind the assessments that are currently going on, are adequate. I do not believe those assumptions are adequate. In fact, as I said a while ago, Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, in his latest work, is making very serious warnings.

We know that the United Nations estimates that 150 million people live less than one metre above the high tide level and 250 million live within five metres of it. We are talking about massive global dislocation. Even with the most conservative measurements, we know that 700,000 people are already vulnerable to sea level rise in coastal communities around Australia right now. They do not even know it. That is why the final point of this reference to a Senate committee for inquiry is so important—because it is looking at options to communicate risks and vulnerability to the Australian community.

I thought it was very telling that Senator Eggleston said at the end of his speech that all such an inquiry will do will ‘draw attention to the risk and potential adverse impact’. We would not want people to know what risks they were facing, would we? We would not want to tell the people of Cairns that they are extremely vulnerable to cyclone induced sea level rise because of the changes to global temperature and because of the low-lying nature of the area around Cairns. We would not want to tell that to the people in south-east Queensland or south-west Western Australia, an area which Senator Eggleston acknowledged. There are areas right around Australia which today are extremely vulnerable to these risks. Also, people who live there probably have not checked their insurance policies to find that they are not covered for any damage as a result of storm surge and flooding, because insurance policies do not recognise the risks from the sea in many cases.

We are dealing with a crisis situation here, and we are told that we do not need to look into it because a government agency is looking into it. I would like to read some words from James Hansen. As I said, he is the father of climate change science globally. He is sending out a very strong warning to scientists around the world about their reticence to speak out. He is calling for plain communication with people so that they know how serious climate change is.

We know that neither the government nor the opposition is going to really level with Australians about the urgency of the risk, because if you have an urgent risk it means you have to take drastic action and take it quickly. Neither the government nor the opposition is prepared to do that. I say that because, again, we have heard from the Labor opposition that in government it will do an assessment of how much it costs to deal with climate change and will make decisions accordingly. At the same time it is saying that there will be ongoing coalmining, ongoing coal-fired power stations and ongoing logging of carbon sinks. So, again, my question to the Labor Party is: how are you going to meet emissions reduction targets if you are going to continue to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the logging of forests and through coalmining and coal-fired power stations? Where are your wedges to get serious reductions? The Greens have said we need a 30 per cent reduction in 1990 levels by 2020. How is Labor going to get anywhere near that?

I would like to read to the Senate what James Hansen has said about the melting of the ice sheets. It is something which has not been taken into account yet, and it is horrific. You only have to see, as Senator Bob Brown said, the television pictures of those huge chunks, kilometres wide, coming off the glaciers of Greenland and west Antarctica to start realising how serious this issue is. James Hansen says:

Under [business as usual] forcing in the 21st century, sea level rise undoubtedly will be dominated by a third term ... ice sheet disintegration. This third term was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade and is now close to 1 mm/year, based on gravity satellite measurements ... As a quantitative example, let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005-2015 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century. Of course I can not prove that my choice of a 10 year doubling time for non-linear response is accurate, but I am confident that it provides a far better estimate than a linear response for the ice sheet component of sea level rise.

There is one of the world’s leading scientists saying that that is what is happening and that is the level of sea level rise we can expect. He goes on to talk about the legacy of scientists in this regard. He says:

The broader picture gives strong indication that ice sheets will, and are already beginning to, respond in a nonlinear fashion to global warming. There is enough information now, in my opinion, to make it a near certainty that IPCC [business as usual] climate forcing scenarios would lead to disastrous multi-meter sea level rise on the century time scale.

There is, in my opinion, a huge gap between what is understood about human-made global warming and its consequences, and what is known by the people who most need to know, the public and policy makers. IPCC is doing a commendable job, but we need something more. Given the reticence that IPCC necessarily exhibits, there need to be supplementary mechanisms. The onus, it seems to me, falls on us scientists as a community.

Important decisions are being made now and in the near future. An example is the large number of new efforts to make liquid fuels from coal, and a resurgence of plans for energy intensive “cooking” of tar-shale mountains to squeeze out liquid hydrocarbon fuels. These are just the sort of actions needed to preserve a [business as usual] greenhouse gas path indefinitely. We know enough about the carbon cycle to say that at least of the order of a quarter of the CO2 emitted in burning fossil fuels under a [business as usual] scenario will stay in the air “forever”, the latter defined practically as more than 500 years. Readily available conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 to a level of the order of 450 ppm.

He goes on to say that he thinks that, unfortunately, that will be achieved. So the world’s leading scientists are now saying it is almost over. We are going to get to that critical limit of 450 parts per million. We are going to go over the two degrees and, once we go over, there is no going back, because of the self-fulfilling loops that we know about climate. He goes on to say:

In this circumstance it seems vital that we provide the best information we can about the threat to the great ice sheets posed by human-made climate change. This information, and necessary caveats, should be provided publicly, and in plain language.

He goes on to say that the National Academy of Sciences should report on that. He poses a question. He says:

Reticence is fine for the IPCC. And individual scientists can choose to stay within a comfort zone, not needing to worry that they say something that proves to be slightly wrong. But perhaps we should also consider our legacy from a broader perspective. Do we not know enough to say more?

And that is the opportunity I want to give scientists and the community through this Senate inquiry. I want them to be able to come and tell the Australian people exactly how much at risk this coastal community is and how vulnerable we are to climate change.

I think it is disgraceful that the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister in waiting do not want Australians to know and will not address climate change seriously. If you do not address climate change seriously, you have no future agenda. There is no more important future agenda than addressing climate change and the vulnerability of Australians, our Pacific neighbours and the world generally, and farmers, fishermen and community people will tell the government that at this election because people out there in the community know, as I do, just how critical this issue is.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Milne’s) be agreed to.