Challenge for our generation
BY DAVID TEATHER (Emeritus Professor worked in universities in Australia, Britain, China and New Zealand)
Many native-born Australians, and those born overseas who migrated to Australia in search of a better life, did not anticipate that our expectations might be prematurely curtailed by population growth, peak oil or climate change. A decade ago, when we celebrated the new millennium, such ideas were hardly on the radar.
Not on our radar, perhaps, but not entirely unexpected.
A little thought would have told us that exponential growth in our use of natural resources is bound to end when those resources run out, or if damaging by-products compromise our environment.In 1972 the Club of Rome's report, The Limits to Growth, warned of just such a scenario, and from 1990 onwards the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change drew attention to the risks of climate change.Governments and corporations were well aware of these assessments. Some, including the Europeans, took notice. But successive
Australian governments, under Hawke, Keating and Howard, took no heed: ''She'll be right''.In the middle ages, natural catastrophes, plagues and pestilence were acts of God. Now we turn to science to explain the natural world. Scientists continue to unravel the complexities of climate change, and have revealed grave risks.
There's no time to lose in responding to what we already know.Johan Rockstrom and 25 other scientists from around the world have begun to define what they call planetary boundaries, or limits within which humanity can operate safely. Transgressing, or going beyond, one or more of these limits may be damaging or even catastrophic due to the risk of triggering worldwide, abrupt environmental change.
These limits for human activity relate not only to the climate, but also to the acidification of the world's oceans, levels of ozone in the upper atmosphere, the biogeochemical nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, the use of global freshwater, change of land use, loss of biological diversity, chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosols.The increasing scale of human activity, which makes it necessary to identify limits beyond which it would be unsafe to go, results from the burgeoning human population (up from three to seven billion since 1960), and the increasing per capita use of natural resources.
Kevin Rudd was spot on when he called climate change ''the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation''.
China and the US are the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, but China's new Five Year Plan (2011-15) makes ''low carbon development'' a national priority for the first time.
China will reduce the carbon intensity of its economy (emissions per unit of output) by 16per cent by 2015.To our shame,
Australia has slipped to 55 out of the 57 countries included in the Index, in front of only Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.Among OECD countries, Australia, Canada and the United States stand out with the largest per capita emissions of greenhouse gases. By contrast, the European Union and Japan emit at only half their rate.
What of Australia?
Since ratifying the Kyoto protocol in 2007 and commissioning the Garnaut Report,
the Commonwealth Government has achieved little to mitigate climate change. Many federal parliamentarians seriously underestimate the importance and urgency of climate change, and both Labor and Coalition parties are engulfed by vested interests.
The steps taken and proposed by the Commonwealth Government to mitigate climate change are lamentably inadequate. They bear no relation either to Australia's responsibility for contributing to the problem, or to our capacity to help solve it. We have the scientific, technological, financial and logistical capacity to do far more.
Faced with a problem that appears to be serious but insurmountable, a natural human reaction is to put it to the back of the mind. Many Australians react to climate change like this.We need to make it very clear to our parliamentarians that we are willing to play our part, and will accept nothing less from them. No spin. No excuses.
Link -
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/challenge-for-our...==========================================
Clearly Climate Change is a Problem & it will become a greater problem, over coming decades!
Part of the problem is that the scope of what is happening is on such on massive scale and the issues involved are so complex, it makes it difficult for many to comprehend, what the future will hold.
Kevin Rudd said, Climate Change was ''the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation''.
He was correct, but then he, the Labor Party, the Liberals & other Politicians consigned Climate Change mitigation to the Politically too hard basket, just like Politicians in most other parts of the world.
As the author of this article said, it is up to us (the Public) to push thru the SPIN & EXCUSES.
It's up to us, to force the Politicians not to follow those vested interests of The Powers That Be, it's up to us to push the Politicians (all of them) to ACT IN OUR BEST LONG TERM INTERESTS.
The reality is, we have fought wars, for much less than is at stake here!
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