Leading climate change scientists pleaded with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday to override his top adviser on the issue of global warming and drastically slash emissions.
Professor Ross Garnaut, commissioned by the government to review Australia’s response to the global problem of climate change caused by mounting carbon gases, has recommended a 10 percent drop from 1990 levels by 2020.
But 16 scientists, including Roger Jones, coordinating lead author of a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, said emissions must decrease by 25 percent.
Garnaut, an economist and former diplomat, is due to bring his final report to the government today.
In an open letter to Rudd, the scientists said unless the rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was halted soon, many millions of people would be at risk of heat waves, drought, fire and floods.
As the world’s driest inhabited continent, Australia was especially vulnerable to these changes, they said.
“Failure of the world to act now will leave Australians with a legacy of economic, environmental, social and health costs that will dwarf the scale of national investment required to address this fundamental problem,” they said.
“Other nations have taken action and have committed to further action. We urge you to act decisively to maintain global momentum and to protect Australia’s future,” they said.
One of the signatories to the letter, professor Tony McMichael from the Australian National University, said unless Australia made cuts of at least 25 percent by 2020, it risked moving into dangerous climate change.
“We really must adopt bold and far-sighted targets to cut emissions as soon as possible,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “We mustn’t go soft on this one or we are all going to be in trouble, nationally and globally.”
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs