Earth Equity News

New Book Warns of Australian Government's Inadequate Climate Plan. By Adam Morton, The Age (Melbourne), July 17, 2008. "Climate watchers yesterday warned that the [Australian] government's carbon pollution reduction plan had so many exemptions it was unlikely to lead to a cut in greenhouse emissions before 2020. A book launched in Melbourne last night, 'Climate Code Red,' [Scribe Publications, 320 pp, $27.95] argues that the climate change challenge is far worse than officially acknowledged by the government or modelling undertaken by government adviser Professor Ross Garnaut. By economist David Spratt and Philip Sutton, the book warns that glaciologists are convinced the summer Arctic ice will disappear within five years, returning only as a thin layer during winter. It says the question is not whether this can be stopped, but whether it can be reversed over coming decades to avoid sea level rises much worse than predicted by the comparatively conservative Nobel-Prize-winning IPCC -- probably between two and five metres. 'The problem is not that the sea ice is melting now, though that's bad enough. It's that Greenland will melt over a hundred years or two,' Spratt said. 'If within 20, or 30, or 40 years, we can start to get the Arctic back a bit, that will actually stop the really catastrophic sea rises that will happen in the second half of the century.' The bottom line, Spratt said, is that the government's emissions trading green paper does not address the problem."