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

I rise to take us back to some serious discussion of the targets. I would point out to Senator McGauran that just two days ago new research was released showing that the Antarctic’s eastern ice sheet, long thought to be unaffected by climate change, is melting 10 per cent faster than it can produce ice. The water coming in under the west Antarctic is actually warmer by about one degree, so it is actually melting the base of the ice shelf. It is very clear that what scientists first thought is wrong, and this is completely consistent with what I was saying earlier about the science showing that global warming is proceeding at a far greater rate than the scientists or the IPCC predicted.

It is a tragedy that we are actually in the midst of a global emergency, yet the carry-on in here is as if this is some sort of joke and we are in an amusement centre. We are actually debating the policy that will be a matter of life or death for people right around the world not in 10 years time but right now. It may interest Senator McGauran to know that in the Carteret Islands there are already islands that have disappeared. People have had to move already. The leader of the Tuvalu delegation to the United Nations COP meeting in Nairobi in 2006 asked, ‘Who will take my people?’ We have just had a mention of the Maldives, which has exactly the same problem. In Tuvalu it is frightening. If you were to look at a photograph of that island, you would realise how terrifying it would be to live there. Imagine what a rise in the sea level is going to do. Those countries already have salt water incursion into their fresh water lenses. They no longer have fresh water and they can no longer grow crops because of that salt water incursion. In Bangladesh we have people living in fear that when the tide comes in every night they will be unable to withstand it, they will lose everything they have, including their lives. As I indicated earlier, there are a billion people in the four great river valleys of Asia. The ice in the glaciers is melting so rapidly that there is a fear they will have no fresh water for six months of the year.

Senator McGauran asked about the tipping points and I have asked the scientists about those. They say that the first tipping point we are likely to breach is the Arctic sea ice. There are predictions that the Arctic will be free of summer ice by 2013 to 2025. Nobody knows the impact that is going to have on thermohaline circulation, the ocean’s conveyor belt, because the last time the Arctic was ice free, the continents were not in the same position they are in now, so we simply do not know what that means. That is not to mention the impact on thermal expansions of the ocean due to the loss of summer Arctic sea ice.

So the first tipping point is the Arctic sea ice. The second tipping point is ocean acidification. Four hundred and fifty parts per million is the tipping point for ocean acidification. The CRC in Hobart has made it perfectly clear that at 450 parts per million you are going to see acidification, and it will be worse at higher latitudes where the carbon dioxide is absorbed faster. What you are going to find is that 10 per cent of the Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic by 2018. We are already seeing that the shells of microscopic creatures are thinner now than they were in pre-industrial times. We will reach a point at which they can no longer form those shells and that means the collapse of the marine food chain, which in turn means the collapse of the oceans and the coral reefs that millions of people around the world depend on for their protein.

Let me come to the coral reefs. In this very building only a week ago we had Australia’s leading scientists on the Great Barrier Reef saying that acidification is the enemy of the reefs and that they are already under threat from regular occurrences of bleaching. If you add acidification to that, you are going to lose the great coral reefs of the world, including the Great Barrier Reef. Many coral reef scientists will tell you off the record that they already think it is too late for the world’s coral reefs. They say at the very least you need a global reduction of 25 per cent in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to give the reefs a 50 per cent chance.

I want to make the point to the minister that it is patently untrue to say that the Greens do not want to do anything. She has accused other people in the chamber of misrepresentation, but I have to say that is a gross misrepresentation. I cannot tell you how many times we have moved in here to save the great carbon stores, Australia’s primary forests, and that has been rejected by both the government and the coalition.