Dr Alistair Paterson is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Western Australia and in 2009 is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Copenhagen….Over the next few months as the world counts down to a crtical international climate change conference Real Dirt is hoping to run occasional news from Alistair.
The latest conference on Climate Change ended last week in Copenhagen, Denmark, with one message: act now. The meeting aimed to survey the
latest information about the realities and challenges of climate change.
The 57 sessions and 2500 participants combined researchers from the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities. This conference was
part of the countdown to COP15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009. In December the UN Climate Change Panel
will be in part responding to the 2007 climate change report and many countries will make their national carbon emission committments known.
This week’s conference was able to take the pulse of the scenarios described in the UN report. It appears the worst case scenario for
climate change hypothesised in the UN report exists. Measures of increases in temperature, sea levels and atmospheric carbon are all at
the upper levels (or higher) of those anticipated in the UN’s models.
Professor Katherine Richardson (Copenhagen University) provided a summation of conference findings. These will be delivered in a 30 page
report in June 2009 as part of the lead up to COP15. Last night a 6 point summary was presented to the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen. He seems to have got the blunt message stating “If we fail to act, we fall”.
The preliminary points are at the conference website. Theseinclude the worst case scenario description and the anticipation of great disruption to societies around the world, particularly the poor.
Notably only one developed nation was singled out in Professor Richardson’s summary as being particularly impacted upon by climate
change in the near future: Australia. The conference called for immediate action, placing pressure on countries leading up to COP15 in a
year of great economic concerns.
I have little faith in the Australian Government reponding to these dire predictions in the appropriate and timely manner. The Government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme is a joke which will have little impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Government has been convinced by the big polluters that a CPRS with stronger targets for greenhouse gas reductions will lead to job losses. We need a scheme which has genuine and binding greenhouse gas reduction targets of 25 to 40% by 2020, which provides justice and compensation to communities which will be adversely affected by reducing the use of fossil fuels, which forces industry and commerce to reduce energy use, and which provides financial incentives for the commercial development of low and renewable energy technologies. The latter could provide a whole new era of sustainable industry based on supplying the needs of humanity rather than lining the pockets of big industrialists.
I doubt the gov. needed much convincing to wimp out on CPRS. They know on which side their donations are buttered.
It’s reassuring that the public in general is still concerned and it behoves all of us not mainling fossil fuels to emphasise, over & over & over that a green economy CREATES jobs, local jobs that the local redundant mechanic, sparkie, chippie can readily do. And take on real apprentices, in the old sense of learning on the job, not stuck in classrooms learning the old dead/dying ways of doing dumb things.