Pressing ahead with his situation normal view of climate change Australia’s conservative Liberal-National Prime Minister Tony Abbott has all but dismissed the report by the United Nations leading scientists on climate change.
Commenting on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report Mr Abbott proffered the view that Australia would “always” be a land of drought and rain.
This was his response to the major warning in the UN report that the region was at risk of more extreme weather.
The IPCC report said Australia was at increasing risk of extreme weather conditions, such as low rainfall, worse bushfires and more intense cyclones.
The landmark report, released in Japan yesterday, warned most nations were “ill-prepared” for the risks of a changing climate, which would likely worsen if global warming continued unabated.
Mr Abbott said the IPCC message had been calling for greater action on climate change for years, and that’s why his government was pushing ahead with its plan for reducing emissions.
However, he said Australia had always been a nation of temperamental weather.
“The CSIRO, amongst many other reputable scientific organisations, has cautioned against attributing any particularly weather event to man-made climate change,’ he told AAP Newsagency in the West Australian capital, Perth.
“Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains, always have been, always will be.”
Mr Abbott’s conservative government is currently attempting to repeal the carbon price laws put in place by the previous Labor government and replace them with a plan called Direct Action, which will pay polluters to reduce their emissions.
He has previously dismissed any links between extreme weather events and climate change.
Attributing climate change to extreme weather, particularly bushfires, has proved controversial in Australia, with some on both sides of politics reluctant at times to link the two.
This is despite Australia’s leading science and research organisation the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology this year warning Australia’s climate will continue to warm, bringing more extreme heat and longer fire seasons across the country.
The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology’s latest State of the Climate report, a snapshot of how Australia’s weather has changed over the last two years, showed Australia was getting wetter despite drought across much of the country.
BoM Chief Executive Dr Rob Vertessy said temperatures across Australia were, on average, almost 1.0°C warmer than they were a century ago, with most of the warming having occurred since 1950.
Underpinning these extremes, according to the report, was the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was likely to have reached its highest level in two million years, and in the past two years had reached some of the highest levels ever observed the report said.