Garnaut is wrong, say scientists

• Adam Morton
• The Age, September 9, 2008
• http://www.theage.com.au/national/garnaut-is-wrong-say-scientists-20080908-4c9l.html?page=-1

AUSTRALIA'S most respected climate scientists have condemned the advice of greenhouse adviser Ross Garnaut and urged the Federal Government to take a more aggressive position at global climate change negotiations.

- Climate scientists condemn Garnaut advice

- Government urged to take more aggressive position at negotiations

- Scientists push for emission cuts of 25-40% by 2020

Three authors with the UN's climate change panel told The Age Professor Garnaut had made a mistake by advising the Government to accept a deal that would all but guarantee environmental and social disaster.

Speaking separately, Dr Bill Hare, Professor David Karoly and Professor Amanda Lynch - all authors with the Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - criticised Professor Garnaut's recommendations, variously describing it as inconsistent, disappointing and wrong.

All believe Australia, as the developed country expected to be worst hit by climate change, should be aiming for a cut in greenhouse emissions of 25% to 40% by 2020.

Professor Garnaut last week recommended the Government set a target of cutting emissions by 10% below 2000 levels by 2020 as part of a modest but achievable global deal.

The veteran economist said Australia should make a proportionate commitment within a global framework based on per capita pollution levels.

He believed Australia should be willing to argue for and commit to a more ambitious global deal, under which Australia would make a 25% cut, but said it could not be achieved in the short term.

Dr Hare, based at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said adopting Professor Garnaut's recommendation would devastate ecosystems across the planet, dry up Asia's water supply as glaciers melted and trigger massive sea level rises.

He said Professor Garnaut had taken the wrong approach: he should have made a case for a strong global deal, not give a political assessment.

Professor Garnaut has acknowledged under his best short-term target - an atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 550 parts per million - the "odds are not great" for the Great Barrier Reef or communities on the Murray River.

But Dr Hare said a stronger global treaty might still be possible in Copenhagen late next year, when a new agreement was due. Global negotiations were still at bargaining stage and yet to get to realistic discussions of what was achievable, he said.

"Ross Garnaut's report is effectively putting off the cost of climate change to another generation, who will have to deal with a three-degree rise in temperature as well as sucking carbon dioxide out of the air," he said.

"It has failed to face up to this risk issue - in some ways it has dodged the bullet. As a highly vulnerable country, I would have thought it would have been better for Australia to be going forward with a more aggressive position."

Professor Lynch, a federation fellow at Monash University, said the latest Garnaut report would confirm perceptions that Australia's rhetoric about tackling climate change was not backed by action. "I think they will take it as another piece of evidence that Australia is not really interested in walking the walk," Professor Lynch said.

There were technical problems with Professor Garnaut's modelling. For example, it failed to recognise that Australia's per capita emissions would fall as its population grew through immigration, enabling it to take on a more ambitious target.

She said Australia needed a strong carbon price to encourage it to move away from dirty coal-fired power.

"How much is it worth to us to have a Great Barrier Reef? How much is it worth to us to be self-sufficient in food? These are the sort of things where setting a value on it are quite challenging, and he largely skirted those issues," she said.

Professor Karoly, federation fellow at Melbourne University, head of the Premier's climate change advisory group and a UN panel lead author, said Australia would abandon any claim to international leadership if it adopted the Garnaut position.

"I thought Australia wanted to be a leader on the international scene," he said.

He said Australia's minimum 2020 target should be a 20% cut. "It should be done to try and encourage the other countries around the world to join in. Within Europe, that's what the emissions reductions are aiming at," he said.

"I would anticipate the Government would take an even weaker approach than Garnaut, which is going to essentially be no change whatsoever."

The Government is due to set its targets for 2020 before the end of the year.