Page 1856 - Week 05 - Thursday, 16 May 2019
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Cay melomys to be extinct. Climate change had shrunk the little mouse’s habitat and brought destructive flooding that, combined, wiped it from the planet forever. In April last year the last known Yangtze giant softshell turtle died in China.
Unique species are becoming extinct by the month, and climate change is one of the primary reasons. How do we in the Assembly feel about this? As we sit here today, climate change is erasing unique species from the face of the earth, and they will never return. It is not only tragic but also intolerable. The UN report names the culprits. It says that climate change is now a direct driver of these extinctions and is increasingly exacerbating the impact of other drivers. Its effects are accelerating.
For example, approximately half the world’s coral cover is gone. Perhaps members have heard about a recent report about how climate change is affecting Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Not only is the reef an incredible and unique natural wonder but also it is a wonder that contributes $6.4 billion to the Australian economy annually and helps employ more than 64,000 people. The report states that marine heatwaves caused by global warming are cooking the reef and killing its ecosystems. The 2016 marine heatwave caused the most severe and catastrophic coral bleaching event the reef has ever experienced. It lost 30 percent of the corals between March and November 2016. The coral had no chance to recover, because after 2016 the heatwaves continued. The lead author of the study, the coordinator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s coral reef watch, said that half of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef have been killed by climate change in just two years. I had a chance to visit the reef in 2017 and to survey the coral with some Australian ocean scientists. I can tell you that it is a devastating and depressing scene to see the fields of bleached coral that were once vibrant with life.
If members did not see the various reports I refer to, they will at least have noticed that here in Canberra we have just experienced the hottest January on record. Canberra airport’s mean temperature was 34.5 degrees Celsius. It was 6.3 degrees above the long-term average. The temperature exceeded 35 degrees Celsius on 19 days, more than six times the January average. We had a new record of four consecutive days above 40 degrees. January played its part in what was also the overall hottest summer on record for Canberra. The pattern continues. The March that just passed was the hottest March on record. It may not be as noticeable as the weather cools, but the past April was the fourth hottest April on record.
That is all part of a broader trend. Globally the 20 hottest years on record have occurred in the last 22 years. If you are aged under 20, you have not even been alive in a year when global temperatures were at or below the 20th century average. No wonder the schoolkids are in the streets demanding change.
We are in the midst of a climate and ecological breakdown. In the ACT the length of our bushfire season is increasing in line with the greater bushfire threat we now face. The most recent bushfire season commenced in September, a month early. It extended to May, a month late. A Climate Council report in 2016 found that the direct effects of a three to four-degree Celsius temperature increase in the ACT—and we are currently on track for that—could more than double fire frequency and increase fire intensity by 20 per cent. The report found that the economic cost of bushfires in New South Wales
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