Aust, UN spar over bushfires and climate change

Australia’s conservative Liberal-National government has embroiled itself in a row with the United Nations climate change chief over bushfires and the impact of climate change.

In the latest move the Environment Minister Greg Hunt has contacted the UN Climate Change Secretariat to assure the organisation Australia will meet its emissions targets in the wake of a war of words about climate change’s link to Australia’s bushfires.

The move came after Australia’s prime minister Tony Abbott accused the UN’s climate change chief, Christiana Figueres, of “talking through her hat” when she drew a link between bushfires that have been raging in the most populous state of New South Wales and global warming.

Firefighters have been battling about 60 fires burning across NSW, with strong winds fanning blazes in the Blue Mountains.

Ms Figueres, head of the UN’s Bonn-based Climate Change Secretariat, told the United States news channel CNN earlier this week that there was “absolutely” a link between climate change and wildfires.

She suggested a possibility of linking the Australian fires to global warming, saying: “The World Meteorological Organisation has not established a direct link between this wildfire and climate change yet.”

Mr Abbott rejected any suggestion that the blazes in Australia were the product of rising carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, a major Australian export.

“I think the official in question is talking through her hat,” Mr Abbott said on commercial radio.

“Climate change is real and we should take strong action against it,” he said.

“But these fires are certainly not a function of climate change. They are just a function of life in Australia.”

Ms Figueres has not backed down, pointing in a statement to a UN scientific panel’s finding that decisive action was needed to avert more frequent and extreme weather events in coming decades.

“Climate change is known to alter the likelihood of increased wildfire sizes and frequencies,” she said in the statement, issued after she spoke by phone with Mr Hunt.

Combined with more stress on trees “this suggests an increasing likelihood of more prevalent fire disturbances, as has recently been observed,” she said, quoting a 2007 UN report.

Reuters Newsagency reports the dispute highlights how almost all climate experts say man-made global warming is under way but it is usually impossible to link it to individual extremes such as floods, heatwaves, droughts or the wildfires raging around Sydney.

Wildfires, many of them devastating, have happened naturally throughout history.

Global warming may, however, be loading the dice in favour of more extremes.

Ms Figueres welcomed Hunt’s assurances that Australia was on target with its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by five per cent below 2000 levels by 2020, even though the government wants to repeal laws implemented by the previous Labor market that impose a price on carbon emission.

Mr Hunt said he’d spoken to Ms Figueres and she’d indicated “very clearly and strongly” that there wasn’t evidence the fires ravaging parts of NSW were caused by climate change.

The environment minister said he “looked up what Wikipedia” says about bushfires and it was clear they were frequent events that had occurred during hotter months in Australia since before European settlement.

Mr Hunt said he accepted the science of climate change and need for action, but the Bureau of Meteorology had warned against making any direct link between global warming and natural disasters.

In April the government’s own Climate Commission, using research from CSIRO and BoM, warned climate change was already increasing the intensity and frequency of extreme weather.

The commission, abolished by the new Liberal-National government last month, said there was a high risk these extreme events would worsen in coming decades and Australia was particularly susceptible.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last month raised the probability that global warming is mainly man-made to 95 per cent from 90 per cent in 2007.

It will issue a new report about the impacts of climate change in March 2014.

A draft summary for policymakers, obtained by Reuters, predicts “increased damages to ecosystems and settlements, economic losses, and risks to human life from wildfires in most of southern Australia and parts of New Zealand, driven by drying trends and rising temperatures.”

The report is, the main guide for government action in shifting from fossil fuels.