Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Through you, Mr Acting Deputy President, the interjections are so tantalising, I can scarcely ignore them. Mr Jensen, who is obviously one of the few on the coalition benches with scientific credentials, is a climate change denier. What on earth are we to make of that? This is not just the case with the federal Liberal Party room. Our present Treasurer in Western Australia, the former executive director of the IPA, Minister Mike Nahan, said:

Not only is the fact of global warming unclear, but a fully honoured Kyoto Agreement would have had only a trivial effect on temperatures.

There it is in a nutshell. For a remarkably condensed way of thoroughly misreading the science and the geopolitics of global warming, I am not sure that I could do that any better myself.

Senator Ian Macdonald interjecting—

Hello, Senator Macka! Lovely that you could join us. There was a book launched last year, edited by Peter Christoff, that scoped out what a four-degree warming world would look like. Four degrees does not sound like a great deal when the temperature in this town can fluctuate by a matter of 20 or 30 degrees in a day, but an increase of global mean surface temperature of four degrees puts an absolute blowtorch on the North and South poles. The book, which is titled Four degrees of global warming: Australia in a hot world, effectively maps to the greatest degree of precision possible, obviously with wide ranges of interpretation, what Australia will look like under those kinds of conditions—under the conditions that are set in train by policies of this coalition government and by your Tea Party allies in other parts of the world, where effectively we just say: 'Let it rip. Just burn everything.' It is not the world that I believe that we are heading for and it is not something that I think any of us would want to pass on to the next generation and the ones after that. But, nonetheless, there is some precision in the estimates available on exactly how dangerous that world would be.

Australia in a four-degree warming world will have a quarter of a million coastal properties inundated by rising sea levels at an approximate cost $63 billion. There are not a lot of global warming deniers in the insurance community, funnily enough. There are a lot of sceptics or very hard headed people trained in actuarial science in the insurance industry, and they estimate a cost of up to $63 billion. They are already refusing to insure people in particularly vulnerable parts of the country. There will be 17,200 heat related deaths a year, up from just under 6,000 today. Snow will disappear from all but the highest alpine peaks, which will lead to a cascade of regional extinctions in those ecosystem. A quarter of a billion people in the Asia-Pacific region will be displaced. These communities will somehow have to try and choose between defence and evacuation of their coastal settlements, their fishing grounds—places where people have lived for millennia. This is a quarter of a billion people. With the shrieking that we hear from the government benches about the tiny fraction of people who have managed to escape to our region from the horrors perpetrated by the Sri Lankan government, the Iranian secret police or the Taliban, can you imagine—