22/12/2019

(AU) Australia 'Absolutely' Must Take More Action On Climate Change: Michael McCormack

The Age - Dana McCauley

Acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack has agreed Australia must increase its efforts to tackle climate change and says the bushfires gripping NSW and other parts of the country have increased community fears about global warming.
In a final press appearance while filling in for Prime Minister Scott Morrison - who is on his way home from an abridged family holiday in Hawaii - Mr McCormack agreed that "further action" was needed to contribute to global efforts to lower emissions.
"Yeah I do, absolutely - I do agree entirely," he told reporters in Wagga Wagga on Saturday.
Michael McCormack says Australia needs to do more on climate change. Credit: AAP
Asked if he accepted that "community sentiment on climate change" had shifted as a result of the catastrophic bushfires raging across NSW and South Australia - and that "the fear has increased as a result of these fires" - Mr McCormack responded: "Yes."
However, he would not be drawn on specifics of how the government would respond. "We will have those discussions, of course," he said.
"The important thing is that we put the fires out. The important thing is that we wrap our arms around people who've lost loved ones," he said.
"The important thing is that we make sure that we've got the proper resourcing and that we fully address these fires as they're occurring ... it's going to be a long, drawn-out fire season."
Mr McCormack criticised environmental activists who called for an end to coal mining, saying the sector "provides two-thirds of our energy needs" and was a $62 billion export industry that provided jobs for tens of thousands of Australians.
"For all those people running around saying we should abandon coal right now, what are they going to do with our electricity needs this summer if we stop all our coal fired power stations?" Mr McCormack asked.
"Yes, the discussion can be had [but] there's been a lot of hysteria around climate change. Climate change isn't the only factor that has caused these fires."
He named dry lightning strikes, arson and "self-combusting piles of manure" among the causes.
Firefighters responding to a flare up at a property previously impacted by a bushfire earlier in the week between Tahmoor and Bargo. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Asked why he was in his electorate and not at the RFS headquarters as acting Prime Minister, Mr McCormack said he had received a telephone briefing early on Saturday morning.
"You don't want to get in the way of these professional people doing their job," he said. "I'm doing what I can from where I am ... I've already been there this week."
Mr McCormack said Mr Morrison had expressed regret over the timing of his Hawaiian holiday and was "on his way back" and "will be back today", which was "a good thing".
"No one could have envisaged what has transpired this week ... everyone is entitled to a holiday," he said.
He said Mr Morrison had "been getting briefings every day whilst he's been on leave".
Grattan Institute energy program director Tony Wood said the government should heed public concerns and International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol's call for Australia to "take steps in line with [its] reputation" as "a responsible country" to reduce its emissions.
"A pragmatic politician will start to say,'We have to listen to all of this,' " Mr Wood said, predicting that Mr Morrison would "start to steer the ship a bit differently" in the wake of the bushfires.
When public sentiment reached a critical tipping point, he said any "sensible government" that wanted to stay in power would "have to pay heed" to the calls for change.
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd said the Morrison government was "steadily shredding Australia's international reputation as a responsible global citizen" by "actively ... slowing down global action on carbon reduction".
"Morrison is the Prime Minister. It's about time he acted like one," Mr Rudd said.
Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox said "any rational observer" would conclude that "Australia has not handled climate and energy policy for the past 15 years".
"The time has come for governments and industry, along with key sectors like transport and agriculture, to knuckle down to calmly and sensibly work towards our 2050 Paris goals."
Mr Willox said no matter what had caused the bushfires, they along with the drought "should make these objectives front of mind".
Mr McCormack said he contacted NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian on Saturday morning to discuss further federal assistance to the state's fire fighting effort.
He extended his sympathies to the families of Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O'Dwyer, the firefighters killed while battling a blaze south-west of Sydney on Thursday night.
"Our hearts go out to the Keaton and O'Dwyer families for the loss of Geoffrey and Andrew, two young men in the prime of their life - in their 30s, with young children - who have lost their lives volunteering so that others can save their properties and potentially save their lives.
"Geoffrey and Andrew were mates and their spirits will always be with us."

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(AU) 'Climate Is Changing': Historical Maps Show It's Getting Hotter And Drier

The Age - Noel Towell

As severe bushfires raged in NSW and Victorians baked under Friday's brutal sun, a new set of official maps shows in stark detail how Australia is growing dramatically hotter and drier.
The charts produced by Agriculture Victoria show a marked rise in maximum temperatures across much of the country in recent years, a trend the government agency's climate experts expect to continue.

But the charts, mapping climatic conditions for the past 109 years and intended as a planning tool for farmers, also offer hope for those suffering under drought conditions that good rainfall years will come again.
Australia has already had its hottest December day on record this week. Victoria will swelter under more record-breaking heat on Friday. Terrible bushfires are raging across NSW, with the danger set to intensify in that state on Saturday when catastrophic conditions are expected.

Agriculture Victoria climate specialist Graeme Anderson, who produced the maps with his colleague Jemma Pearl, told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald  that they'd done the work to show the difference between "good old-fashioned variability and the trends that come with climate change".

"We've got these increasing temperature trends from climate change and that's a trend that's expected to continue, predicted with high confidence from the atmospheric scientists," Mr Anderson said.
But the scientist said the separate rainfall charts show that rainfall is likely to bounce back, when the conditions in the Pacific and Indian oceans are right.
"There's a lot of variability in the system," Mr Anderson said.
The 109-year sweep shows the extremes in Australia's weather.
In 1974 much of Australia is shaded blue, reflecting the cool and very wet year. January that year was the wettest month in 70 years. Fourteen lives were lost in Brisbane floods after record summer rains.
Come 1982, above-average temperatures in south-eastern Australia combined with several years of low rainfall to create the conditions for Ash Wednesday early the following year, the bushfires that killed 47 people in Victoria and 28 in South Australia.
A lot of Australia is coloured red in 2009, when bushfires in Victoria killed 173 people in the nation's worst ever bushfires, surpassing the record set by Ash Wednesday.
A heatwave in south-eastern Australia in 2013 resulted in several bushfires in Tasmania, while a monsoon trough over parts of Queensland and New South Wales caused severe storms, flooding, and tornadoes.
Victoria's Agriculture Minister Jaclyn Symes encouraged farmers to download the maps from the Agriculture Victoria website to gain a better understanding of climate trends in their particular region.
"These maps tell us that Australia's climate is changing rapidly and the future will bring hotter temperatures and more frequent, severe drought," Ms Symes said.

"Victoria is an Australian leader when it comes to agricultural research and this information is one way we are ensuring farmers have access to quality information about weather and climate conditions.
"It's vital that we keep working with our country communities to build their resilience to increasingly difficult conditions."

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(AU) Morrison's Big Failure Is His Lack Of Leadership On Climate Change

Sydney Morning Herald - Editorial

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has admitted he showed poor judgment in trying to sneak off on holiday in the midst of catastrophic bushfires.

Saying sorry for the trip to Hawaii was the right thing to do but it is a sideshow. Mr Morrison must correct the failure in leadership on climate change policy which is the real reason this bushfire season will be damaging for him politically in the long run.
No one is saying that Mr Morrison faced an easy choice in deciding whether to go on holidays this week. This was his only chance to have a summer holiday with his children before visits to Japan and India next year.
Yet, as a politician who is obsessively focused on media messaging, he should have realised that when bushfires were polluting the skies, Australia was cooking in a record heatwave and 800 homes have been destroyed, it would look bad to leave the country and fly for 10 hours to Waikiki.
He should have known that most Australians expect him to show leadership, comforting those whose homes are under threat and supporting the heroism of fire fighters including Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O’Dwyer, the two Rural Fire Service workers who tragically died on Thursday night.
But instead of taking responsibility for the situation, Mr Morrison simply crept out the back door without telling us Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack was in charge. It was as if he hoped no one would notice.
He looked shifty and out of touch.
Whatever brain explosion explains Mr Morrison’s conduct, it is sadly consistent with his broader media strategy which has been to play down the seriousness of the bushfires.
That may be a simple misjudgment but many believe he is avoiding the issue deliberately because it raises embarrassing questions about the government’s lack of leadership on climate change.
Mr Morrison has uttered just one sentence on the link between bushfires and climate change in which he said it was “one of many factors”.
Mr Morrison should have used the bushfires as a chance to explain what he plans to do about this new world where Australia is getting hotter and drier and bushfires start earlier in the year, last longer and spread more widely.
The Bureau of Meteorology reported that Tuesday was the highest average temperature on record and it is still only mid-December.
Australia’s failure on climate change is being noticed internationally. Fatih Birol, the director of the influential International Energy Agency, told the Herald that Australia’s climate debate had gone “off track” worse than almost anywhere in the world.
Mr Birol regretted the Coalition’s decision to ditch the National Energy Guarantee which included a pathway for emissions reduction.
Mr Birol complained that an advanced country such as Australia, which can afford to do more, should be leading the way.
Instead, Australia helped sabotage a United Nations meeting in Madrid this week that was supposed to find ways to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement.
Siding with Saudi Arabia and Brazil, Environment Minister Angus Taylor blocked agreement because other countries refused to let Australia use an accounting trick to meet its emissions reduction targets rather than take real action.
This ruse, which uses credits from the earlier Kyoto treaty to meet targets until 2030, has no basis in the Paris Agreement and is clearly inconsistent with the goal of keeping the rise in global temperatures to under 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
The government likes to say that Australia is a medium-sized country that won’t make any difference to climate change but Mr Taylor made a very big difference at the Madrid talks because he provided cover for countries that are looking for an excuse to break the rules.
The Morrison government is playing games with words and numbers but the rest of the world is well aware that Australia has failed to put in place policies needed to bring emissions down. We remain one of the top-two most polluting countries on a per capita basis.
Action on climate change is of course only one part of the response to the bushfires and it will not bear fruit for many years and then only if Australia and a coalition of like-minded countries can galvanise the world to significant action.
But Mr Morrison must step up. It will require courage to admit his failure and change direction. But he should draw inspiration from the heroism of the two firefighters who died this week. He must have a story he can tell their families.

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