John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I grieve for the future of the environment and, indeed, the future of Mother Earth. With each new report of extreme weather events—be it intense heat and bushfires or disastrous floods in Australia, record-breaking storms in the Middle East never previously experienced, elevated temperatures in Russia or exceptionally frigid conditions in Europe—the credibility of the Leader of the Opposition, who notoriously claimed that climate change is 'crap', is further eroded. Of course, not every weather-driven disaster can be directly linked to the effects of global warming, but what is clear and should be understood by someone like the Leader of the Opposition, who has a degree in economics that would have included a study of statistics, is that the likelihood of a connection between the increasing severity of weather extremes and global warming is ever strengthened.

I have previously discussed the use of statistics to understand how it is possible to predict the chance of, for instance, a particular volume of rainfall or the maximum temperature in a place for which there are reasonable records. What I said was that the occurrence of random events such as rainfall or maximum temperatures is what statisticians describe as normally distributed and, when plotted on a graph, these measurements produce a bell-shaped curve. Perhaps such things would be easier to understand with the help of a blackboard, but what it means in practice is that the most common values fall under the centre of the curve while the least common values, either smaller or larger, fall under the edges. The width of the bell curve is determined by the spread in the measurements. In general, so long as there are at least a few years of data, the chance of a particular weather event can be predicted with a reasonable degree of accuracy and the possibility of extremes can also be quantified.

Despite the relentless campaign of disinformation and denial by the opposition, the evidence for global climate change is now irrefutable, with measurements from around the world showing that extreme weather events that were previously unlikely are becoming more frequent as the bell curve flattens and the extremities start to become the norm. In Australia, as we know, recent temperatures have exceeded all previous records. Whilst the deniers continue to claim that these and other events have no significance, a survey conducted in mid-2011 by Griffith University shows that just 4.2 per cent of the 4,347 respondents selected the option 'There is no such thing as climate change' and just 8.5 per cent could be considered strong climate change sceptics. Even then it was obvious that few people believed the claims of the Leader of the Opposition and his fellow deniers, and that was well before the most recent extremes of temperatures.

The vested interests in the mining industry and the media that support the opposition's relentless negativity should realise that they are on the losing side in this debate and are living under the delusion that the market for fossil fuels will continue to expand even as many countries, Australia included, introduce measures to introduce reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Of course there are those like Mr Clive Palmer who insist that Australian coal is needed to fuel power stations in countries like India and China, where the growth in demand for electricity is relentless and new thermal power stations are springing up like proverbial mushrooms.

Fortunately for the planet, if not for the coalminers and gas producers, technology developed in our country using concentrated solar energy to provide heat to existing power stations makes it possible to replace most, if not all, of the coal and gas burnt in these power stations. Between 2003 and 2006 scientists from the University of Sydney developed a prototype high temperature solar collector at Liddell Power Station in the Hunter Valley to replace some of the coal burned in the boilers. I was privileged to see this development for myself before the developers, discouraged by the Howard government, took their technology to the United States, from where it is now being sold back to Australia in the form of a collector that provides emissions-free heat to the Kogan Creek coal fired power station in Queensland. It is clear that proven solar thermal collectors rather than untested carbon capture and storage equipment can and very likely will be used in countries like India and China as well as Australia to reduce coal and gas consumption and the resulting carbon dioxide emissions from existing and soon to be built thermal power stations. After all, the sun's heat costs nothing and produces no emissions. To those like the opposition and their supporters who say that these changes will never happen and that Australia can simply ride to riches in a mining shuttle, I say that the development of solar technology shows that a brighter future lies in the hands of our scientists and engineers and that we need to recognise that the age of fossil fuels is rapidly drawing to a close as the world takes serious steps to reduce emissions.

I wish to make some remarks about the exploitation of public ignorance by political opportunists on matters of policy that have a significant component of scientific understanding. This issue has an unfortunate history and the current campaign being conducted by the Leader of the Opposition has strong similarities to the situation that developed in the former Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time the charlatan Trofim D Lysenko, strongly supported by Joseph Stalin, exercised centralised political control over genetics and agriculture and promoted unfounded theories and practices that led to the death by starvation of millions of people. Although he was a scientific fraud, Lysenko as a politician was no fool. He exploited public ignorance of genetics as he compared his opponents in biology with the peasants who still resisted the Soviet government's collectivisation strategy, saying that by opposing his theories the traditional geneticists were setting themselves against Marxism.

In a similar manner, the Leader of the Opposition appeals to individuals who are unwilling to accept the evidence of experts, and condemns his critics as economic saboteurs as he supports the statements of discredited individuals such as IPA adviser Bob Carter and the mining industry's Ian Plimer, who promote claims with no factual basis and deny the link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. To quote Wikipedia:

Lysenkoism is used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.

In concluding, there could be no better description of the climate change statements of the Leader of the Opposition and, as we know, the opposition continues to deny the reality of climate change as it promotes direct action, a policy that has been widely condemned as unscientific, un workable and a ridiculous waste of taxpayers' money. I am sure that the people of Australia, when they cast their vote on 14 September this year, will vote for the future of our environment, indeed the future of Mother Earth.