Climate change becomes urgent security issue in Australia

By Tim Johnston

SYDNEY: As the first bush fires of the year rage through Australia's national forests, concern over climate change is intensifying among Australians.

A telephone survey of more than 1,000 people released Wednesday showed that 40 percent of Australians thought that global warming was a greater threat to security than Islamic fundamentalism. Only 20 percent thought it was less serious. The survey, by the U.S. Studies Center, based at the University of Sydney, came a day after the government's top scientific body said that rising temperatures and reduced rainfall were inevitable in Australia.

The report brought calls for more resources to be focused on mitigating the effects of future climate change rather than the current policy of trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Extreme weather, including a drought that has persisted in some places for six years, has focused the Australian public on climate change, and it is shaping up as a major issue in general elections expected to be called in the next few weeks.

On Tuesday, Australia's most influential scientific research body, the government-funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, released a report that said an average temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) was likely by 2030, along with many more days with temperatures of more than 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) and reduced rainfall over much of southern Australia, already the driest part of the driest inhabited continent on earth. "The message is that global warming is real, humans are very likely to be causing it and that it is very likely that there will be changes in the global climate system in the centuries to come larger than those seen in the recent past," the report said.

Recent events have made the subject even more urgent for many Australians. In the spring season, about 50 separate bush fires, fanned by unseasonably hot weather and strong winds, have already burned about 30,000 hectares, or 74,000 acres, of bush and national forest and destroyed a house. Large areas of the state of New South Wales, including Sydney, had a total fire ban in force Wednesday.

"It is very interesting to see how climate change has moved from the environmental field to the security sphere," said Alan Dupont, who heads the U.S. Studies Center, referring to the report released Wednesday. "Most of the government response has been about reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than trying to manage the effects of the change."

The survey's results echo comments last week by the head of the Australian police, Commissioner Mick Keelty, that climate was a growing security concern. "We could see a catastrophic decline in the availability of fresh water," Keelty said. "Crops could fail, disease could be rampant and flooding might be so frequent that people, en masse, would be on the move. "Even if only some and not all of this occurs, climate change is going to be the security issue of the 21st century."

His comments provoked a sharp response from Prime Minister John Howard, who said terrorism was a more immediate threat to security than climate change. Howard was until recently a skeptic on climate change, and the opposition Labor Party has said that his recent attention on climate is driven more by polls than conviction. Australia has one of the world's highest per capita emissions of greenhouse gases. The government has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, saying it is meaningless because it does not impose restrictions on the two greatest emerging emitters, India and China.

Environmentalists say that the time to tackle climate change is running out and that the major global economies need to commit themselves to radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Both the United States and Australia have resisted efforts to set hard emissions targets and have encouraged the development of technologies like nuclear and "clean coal" in an effort to improve the efficiency of carbon-based fuel sources. The U.S. Studies Center survey relied on 1,213 phone interviews from July 13 to 29. It had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Jumat 22 February 2008)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)

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