Climate research funds need doubling

The Australian: Funding for the Australian climate science research effort needs doubling, according to Australian Research Council federation fellow Matthew England. The oceanographer and climate scientist - among the signatories to today's 2007 Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists - said the UK, Europe and the US were urgently developing climate prediction models to scope local impacts on their societies and natural systems.

While Australia has also been developing climate prediction models, the number of research staff and amount of computational power was magnitudes less than that allocated by Northern Hemisphere economies. Only Australia is modelling climate in the Southern Hemisphere, he said.

Professor England told The Australian that federal and state governments needed to rethink their approach to climate science research funding. The focus has been recently skewed to adaptation, "but they need also need to remember to resource the science that informs climate adaptation policies, such as the next generation climate models.'' Fortunately this would probably only amount to tens of millions of dollars, he said.

Professor England's comments are in line with last year's influential Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change for the British Government which recommended that global public energy research and development should double to around $20 billion to fast-track diverse low greenhouse gas emitting technologies.

Professor England is an oceanographer and climate scientist at UNSW who has been examining global-scale ocean circulation and its influence on regional climate in time-scales of seasons to centuries. Much of the current work of the elite researcher focuses on how Australia's climate is affected by the Southern and Indian oceans.

More than 200 leading climate scientists yesterday warned the United Nations Climate Conference of the need to act immediately to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since there was a window of only 10 to 15 years for global emissions to peak and decline. Professor England told The Australian from Bali on Wednesday that most discussion at the conference - which is aimed at road-mapping a Kyoto Protocol Mk 11 agreement - was centred upon cuts of 25 to 30 per cent of global greenhouse emissions by 2020.

Professor England said this "mapped nicely" onto the target advised by the 200 scientists of a goal of at least a 50 per cent, up to a possible 75 per cent, reduction by 2050. "People shouldn't be talking about anything less than a 50 per cent reduction by 2050. Because the science tells us we will almost certainly warm the planet over the two degrees Celsius that equates to dangerous climate change," he said.

Professor England said there was a sense of urgency among scientists at the conference since they recognised that the globe had already warmed by 0.8 per cent degrees Celsius, and the time-lag effect of carbon in the atmosphere meant a further 0.8 degrees was already committed.