After Garnaut, the big questions will remain unanswered

This is an extract from an opinion piece republished with permission of the author, David Spratt, and ABC online.

Read the full article here.

David Spratt is the co-author of Climate Code Red: the case for emergency action, published by Scribe in July.

The Garnaut Review's deliberations have been frustrated by an incapacity of the government's computer models to even deal with the sort of emission reductions Garnaut thinks are necessary, an indication of the bureaucratic timewarp in which climate policy in Australia is trapped. And constrained by frustratingly narrow terms of reference, the review has been asked to recommend only an appropriate market-based means of reducing emissions, but not on the broader questions of substance.

Garnaut knows that climate science is demanding emissions reduction much faster than the government appears willing to contemplate, noting "the diabolical nature of the policy challenge", and the "widespread view, based on the science, that the risks of 'dangerous' climate change and the risk of abrupt climate change, are already at unacceptably high levels at this point".

In contrast to Garnaut's acute observations that the issue may be "too hard for rational policy-making in Australia" because "the vested interests surrounding it [are] too numerous and intense, the relevant time-frames too long", the government is caught in a policy fog, unable to find its way out of a bureaucratic framework that is now out of date. The Rudd government's current policy target of a 3-degree rise would destroy the Barrier Reef, the tropical rainforests, cause widespread desertification, a mass extinction, and a sea-level rise of perhaps 25 metres, amongst many impacts. Most worrying, the government seems unaware that this would be the consequence of a 3-degree target.

There is little indication that governments understand what is now being said by the world's leading climate researchers: significant climate "tipping points" have already been crossed, and our world is already at the point of failing to cope. Sir John Holmes, the UN relief coordinator, warned that 12 of the 13 major relief operations in 2007 were climate related, and that this amounted to a climate-change "mega disaster".

Take the Arctic, for example. The north pole has until recently been covered by an area of sea-ice in summer as large as Australia. Now it is disappearing fast, likely to be gone entirely within five years. Scientists' well-founded fear is that rapid heating as a consequence of the sea-ice loss will trigger the unstoppable melting of most or all of the Greenland ice sheet, an event which would raise sea levels by five to seven metres, in as little as a century.

When he was a young man, Jay Zwally hauled coal for work. Now a NASA climate scientist, he told a gathering of fellow climate experts at the end of 2007: "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coalmine for climate warming ... and now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."