TV Schedule

Australian climate change report "reads like a disaster novel"

  2. phillyharper
  3. related topics
After years of farmers struggling in drought like conditions, the Australian government commissioned an investigation by top scientists as to how climate change would continue to affect the region.

Australia's agriculture minister, Tony Burke, described the report saying: "Parts of these high-level projections read more like a disaster novel than a scientific report."

The report said that Australia can expect to see the decline of rainfall to continue going on to say that 50% of the decrease in rainfall since the 1950's was down to climate change. It went on to say that droughts may increase 10 fold, the area of the country affected by extremely hot weather would increase from 5% to 95% and that areas such as the Great Barrier Reef, the wetlands of Kakadu and the nation's food bowl, the Murray-Darling Basin were all under real threat of disappearing.

Now in its 6th year of drought, the public in Australia seem very tuned into the green issue, and by the sounds of this report, it's a good job.
phillyharper

10 responses // Australian climate change report "reads like a disaster novel"

  • Reminds me of 'The Day After Tomorrow'.
    son_of_fire
    1 response to this
  • http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/3/global_disruption_...
    Well worth checking out -

    Leading scientist John Holdren says “global warming” is not the correct term to use; he prefers “global disruption.” “‘Global warming’ [is] misleading. It implies something that’s mainly about temperature, that’s gradual, and that’s uniform across the planet,” says Holdren. “In fact, temperature is only one of the things that’s changing. It’s a sort of an index of the state of the climate. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snow packs, snowmelt, flooding, droughts. Temperature is just a bit of it.”

    John Holdren, professor of environmental policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the director of the Woods Hole Research Center and just completed a term as board chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
    dearmat23
  • im moving there in to years.. when i was here last the citizens seemed concerned about conservation so i guess thats a good sign...
    Dut
    • Dut
    • 2 months ago
  • Why don't countries conduct an annual investigation on climate changes and environmental effect? I just feel that it has taken the world much too long to finally realize conservation is important!
    AbbyandChristina
    1 response to this
  • yeah well .... you know.. could have... would have... should havee..... just because it "might" doesnt meant it "will"
    kewal91
  • Just to give you an idea of how bad the drought has been in my homeland, there are plenty of large rural towns that have run out of water ... completely ... for years ... and now have to get it trucked in.

    The recently elected federal government has created a new department to develop policy around the issue, the Ministry for Climate Change and Water, as a separate office to the Ministry for the Environment.

    This report was commissioned to make recommendations around a carbon emissions trading scheme, which the government has said it wants to introduce by 2010. From 1 July, all businesses (with some exceptions in the agricultural sector) are now obliged to keep records of their emissions in preparation for the implementation of the scheme.

    If you do some surfing of Australian media websites you'll find it's completely dominating the news and has been for several weeks.
    Paul_Flynn
  • i love australia so much! when i was there in 2000 I toured a number of ranches and you could tell things weren't going well then, so i could only imagine how things have progressed - and to think that the great barrier reef is going to be severely affected makes me really sad
    jarratt
  • For some reason, this report does not sound so shocking...because we already know that our earth is suffering from global warming.

    The real question is: What are we going to do about it?
    TyMarshal

Add your response

Login/Registration is required to add a response.