Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You were very cute with your language there, Minister: 'path to meeting the Paris Agreement'. My colleague Mehreen Faruqi said publicly that your target failed the Paris Agreement. That was fact checked by AAP, who found that she was indeed correct, that your 43 per cent target is consistent with two degrees of warming, which is above the 1½ to well below two degrees of warming that is the Paris target. I'm going to assume that the two degrees is uncontroversial.

Minister, my second question to you is: do you also agree with the IPCC forecasts first released in November 2018? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change differentiated between 1½ degrees and two degrees in their impact on the ocean. It said that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees would likely be the difference between the survival of the Great Barrier Reef coral and its complete decline, according to the United Nations assessment of the climate science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report basically said that if global warming reaches two degrees, which is consistent with your target, more than 99 per cent of coral reefs were projected to decline this century, and indeed an annual bleaching event was expected on the Great Barrier Reef and the world's coral reefs. Minister, do you agree with the science and that characterisation by the IPCC?