Better prospects now for action on climate change
The prospects for action on climate have never been better, Canberra Times, John Quiggan June 24, 2015 Climate change has been called the greatest challenge facing the world, and it has certainly been one of the most intractable. So much so, in fact, that many observers have concluded that we are past the point of no return and that dangerous climate change is now inevitable. Others have concluded that only a drastic fix will solve the problem. Their various, and incompatible, suggestions include large-scale geo-engineering, a crash program of building nuclear power plants, and the abandonment of industrial civilisation.
Positions of this kind, once taken, are hard to shift. So it’s not surprising that hardly anyone has recalibrated their views in response to recent developments that have greatly improved our prospects of avoiding dangerous climate change. But such a recalibration is certainly necessary if we’re to make progress.
The first of these developments is the effective end of the debate over climate science. The debate hasn’t been resolved, but it has been clarified, with the positions of the two sides now established and unlikely to shift. On one side is a vast body of scientific analysis summarised in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. There is no longer any scientific debate on the key issues, or any serious perception of one…….
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