Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is 2016 and we should not be devoting an hour of time in this chamber to debating whether climate change is real. We actually should be devoting a month to exploring ways we can address it. Instead, here we are. I want to say that I believe in climate change and so do my Labor colleagues. We believe in it because tens of thousands of qualified scientists over dozens and dozens of years have measured it, experimented and modelled it. Climate change is real.

I know that Senator Roberts keeps on asking people in this chamber to provide empirical evidence. In the words of Mulder and Scully, it is out there—mountains of it. The evidence does not stop being empirical just because you disagree with it.

A 2013 survey of scientific papers found that, of the 4,000 recent papers that expressed a view on climate change, 97 per cent thought that it was real and caused by humans. I know that 4,000 is a lot and I do not expect that anyone here is going to read all of those, but I thought what I could do is help people to start a reading list. Here are the 20 most cited peer-reviewed papers about climate change and its effects, compiled by Thomson Reuters, so that people can get started: 'Ecological responses to recent climate change' by Walther, Post and others in Naturein 2002; 'A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems' by Parmesan and Yohe in Naturein 2003; 'Extinction risk from climate change' by Thomas, Cameron et al in Naturein 2004; 'Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants' by Root and others in Naturein 2003; 'Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model' by Cox and others in Naturein 2000; 'Climate change, coral bleaching and the future of the world's coral reefs' from an Australian researcher who is very well known, Hoegh-Guldberg, in Marine And Freshwater Researchin 1999; 'Causes of climate change over the past 1000 years' by Crowley in Sciencein 2000; 'Climate change, human impacts, and the resilience of coral reefs' by Hughes and others in Sciencein 2003; 'Global response of terrestrial ecosystem structure and function to CO2 and climate change: results from six dynamic global vegetation models' by Cramer et al in Global Change Biologyin 2001; 'Biological consequences of global warming: is the signal already apparent?' by Hughes in Trends Of Ecological Evolutionin 2000; 'Timing of millennial-scale climate change in Antarctica and Greenland during the last glacial period' by Blunier and Brook in Sciencein 2001; 'Predicting the impacts of climate change on the distribution of species: are bioclimate envelope models useful?' by Pearson and Dawson in Global Ecology And Biogeographyin 2003; 'Interpretation of recent Southern Hemisphere climate change' by Thompson and Solomon in Science in 2002; 'Biological response to climate change on a tropical mountain' by Pounds, Fogden and Campbell in Nature,back in 1999; 'Transient climate change simulations with a coupled atmosphere-ocean GCM including the tropospheric sulfur cycle' by Roeckner and others in Journal Of Climate, back,again, in 1999; 'Range shifts and adaptive responses to quaternary climate change' by Davis and Shaw in Sciencein 2001; 'Ecological and evolutionary responses to recent climate change' by Parmesan, again, in Annual Review Of Ecological Evolution Studies in 2006; 'Global water resources: vulnerability from climate change acid population growth' by Vorosmarty, Green, Salisbury and Lammers in Sciencein 2000; 'Signature of recent climate change in frequencies of natural atmospheric circulation regimes' by Corti, Molteni and Palmer, back in 1999, in Nature; and 'Tropical origins for recent North Atlantic climate change' by Hoerling and Hurrell in Science in 2001.

That is the top 20 that Thomson Reuters identified, but you could read other things. You could read the IPCC reports—and there are quite a few of those—or, if you are worried that it is all a conspiracy by China, the UN, or a 'cabal of international bankers', I have some earlier papers. You can go back to 1896 and find a paper by Arrhenius called 'On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground'. You can go to a paper by Callendar from 1938 called 'The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature', published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can go to Phillips in 1956 and read 'The general circulation of the atmosphere: a numerical experiment' or to Manabe and Wetherald and read 'Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a given distribution of relative humidity', which was in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences in 1967. You can go to a paper from as recently as 1976 called 'Atmospheric carbon dioxide variations at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii' by Keeling, Bacastow and others.

If there is not enough empirical evidence there or in the 4,000 papers that were reviewed in the study that I mentioned earlier, the problem is not with the evidence. The thing is that there is a climate conspiracy—but it is not a conspiracy by the tens of thousands of scientists who have contributed to our current understanding of climate change; it is a conspiracy by climate denialists to muddy the waters of what is now a very clear scientific consensus. Back in 1995, a Republican strategist, Frank Luntz, was encouraging Republican members to 'challenge the science' by 'recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view'. Ten years later, he was still at it, with a 2001 memo that said: 'The scientific debate is closing against us but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science. You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.' That was the strategy. Well, he was not the only one to adopt that strategy, and the flood of misinformation has not abated. International organisations like the Heartland Institute actively sow uncertainty about climate change.

We should not allow the debate about climate change in this country to be derailed by misinformation the way that it has been in the United States and elsewhere. We are lucky in this country to have the leaders of both major parties in agreement that climate change is real. The difference, of course, is that the Prime Minister seems unwilling to actually do anything about it. But, for Labor, it is a critical issue and one that we are proud to take a stand on. The policies we took to the last election constitute a real response to climate change. We committed to 50 per cent renewables by 2030 and to funding agencies like ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to get there. We committed to having a plan—a real plan—to support workers, businesses and communities who will bear the brunt of change. There is no doubt that change has costs. Our responsibility is to make sure that those people who bear those costs are not left unsupported and that there is a real plan for their communities and their jobs. We committed to bringing in a domestic emissions trading scheme that will bring Australia in line with our international obligations and drive the long-term transition that our economy needs, because there are opportunities—huge economic opportunities—for a country that makes this transition.

Those opportunities lie in building the technical expertise and the manufacturing capability to build the technologies of the future that will assist not just Australia to decarbonise but in fact the globe. Sadly, that is an opportunity that we seem unable to grasp under this government, because we know that through the hostility to renewables and through the vacillation around climate change policy we have seen a fall in investment in renewable energy in this country. We have seen this country decline in the international rankings as a place that is attractive for people who are seeking to invest in renewable technologies. And it is a great shame, because our researchers, our excellent technologists, have actually led the debate, led the research, yet so many of them have been forced offshore, forced overseas, because they have found that their skills, their knowledge and their vision are not welcome here and are not supported by conservative governments.

This is a huge opportunity for Australia to build an economy that is resilient and sustainable for us. It is an opportunity to build an energy system that is resilient and sustainable. But most of all it is an opportunity to leave an environment for our children that matches the one we have enjoyed, and other senators have spoken about this. But I want my kids to be able to play outside in summer, and should I ever have grandchildren I would like them to be able to do that. I would like to take them to the reef. I would like them to see the wetlands of Kakadu. I would like to take them to the alpine areas to see the animals and plants that live there now because of the unique climate that is there but will not be there under a warming scenario. These are all legacies I would like to leave for my children, and we have the opportunity to leave them. But it takes Australian political leadership to do so. (Time expired)