Prominent climate scientists criticised the Australian government's top climate adviser yesterday, saying his recommended targets for carbon emissions were too weak and would not help avoid catastrophic climate change.
Climate adviser Ross Garnaut has urged the government to cut Australian greenhouse gas emissions by 10 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020, and to set a carbon price of €12 a tonne in the first years of carbon trading in Australia from mid-2010.
"That won't be good enough if Australia is wanting to minimise the impact of climate change on Australia and on the rest of the world," Melbourne University professor of meteorology David Karoly told Australia radio yesterday.
The criticism comes as a new poll found 88 per cent of Australians support the centre-left Labour government's moves to curb carbon emissions, blamed for global warning, with 61 per cent saying Canberra should act even if other countries do nothing.
The Newspoll in the Australian newspaper also found 58 per cent would pay more for energy to help slow global warming.
Australia is the world's 16th biggest carbon polluter and produces about 1.5 per cent of global emissions. But Australia is the fourth largest per-capita emitter, with five times more carbon pollution per person than China.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who won power last November, has promised to set up carbon trading in Australia by mid-2010, covering 75 per cent of the economy, to provide a financial incentive for business to clean up their pollution.
The government has said it would consider Mr Garnaut's advice before announcing its emissions targets for 2020, or details of its carbon trading system.
But Australia has promised to cut overall emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.
Mr Karoly, a lead author for the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said Mr Garnaut had put off setting a tough emissions target.
"He appears to be putting the problem in the political too-hard basket, and taking a weak or easy option, leaving it to other countries and other generations to solve the problem," Mr Karoly told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
Fellow scientist Amanda Lynch, an IPCC author with Mr Karoly, said Mr Garnaut's targets would not encourage businesses to drop their reliance on coal-fired electricity.
"The primary problem with that kind of level is that it doesn't give sufficient signals to the market to restructure our ways of doing business in the fundamental ways we need to do right now," Mr Lynch told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
"We need to be stimulating investment in new ways of doing business. The target that Mr Garnaut set doesn't do that," she said.