Carbon Footprints

Melbourne’s The Age is running a story that speak more plainly than most when it says “The economy won’t matter if the Earth dies“.

Even if we cut emissions by 15 per cent (equal to a 34 per cent per capita reduction) and the rest of the world stood still, our per capita emissions would still be almost twice as high as Europe’s mature industrial economies.

The science of climate change now tells us that if global temperatures are allowed to rise by 3 degrees — which is compatible with widespread adoption by developed countries of the Rudd Government 2020 emission targets — irreversible changes will be set in place that will drive the global temperature increase to 6 degrees above the pre-industrial level.

If this is allowed to happen, it will have catastrophic consequences for the environment and human civilisation.

Those consequences were laid out very clearly in Professor Ross Garnaut’s review of the economic impacts of climate change.

A 3°C mean rise above pre-industrial levels would mean losing a mind-blowing number of species of animals and plants, make the melting of Greenland more probable than not, and bleach off most of the world’s coral, just to name a few impacts. The IPCC reports, Lord Stern’s review, Garnaut, they all agree on these points, and by and large they also all agree that they have most likely underestimated the scale of the consequences. The Australian Government is quick to argue that, because Australia is so carbon inefficient, even a small overall target translates to a big drop in ‘carbon intensity’. These arguments come across as so much creative accounting in the face of this very real threat to the very web of life itself. Human beings are just one of the species on Earth and our survival, let along our comfortable lifestyles, are at risk.

Despite this, it’s hard to see how the rest of the world can be expected to come to a global agreement on this issue when supposedly responsible players like Australia simply refuse to do their fair share. — DS

Technorati Tags: 5% is too little, Australia, Climate Change, global warming, politics

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 5:11 PM and is filed under Climate Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.