Australia pressured to step up climate action during G7 talks
Sydney Morning Herald
May 7, 2021


Australia was again called upon to commit to a 2050 net zero target and increase its near-term emissions reduction goals during a meeting of the Group of Seven wealthy nations attended by Foreign Minister Marise Payne this week.

A UK government official with direct knowledge of the talks in London said one of the reasons Australia was included in the so-called G7 Plus meeting was so climate could be addressed, and that pressure was brought to bear on Australia to increase its climate action.



It was made clear to Australia during the meeting that the UK, as host of the COP26 United Nations climate talks in Glasgow in November, expected to see all OECD nations commit to achieving net zero emissions targets by 2050, said the official, who could not be named as they were not authorised to speak publicly.

The UK also wanted to see Australia improve on its current 2030 target of reducing emissions by between 26 and 28 per cent and assist in the global effort to raise financial assistance for developing nations to respond to climate change.


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The meeting included representatives from G7 members Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as other major democracies Australia, India, Korea and South Africa.

The UK currently holds the G7 presidency and is expected to use the G7 leaders’ summit in June, to which Australia has also been invited, to again push for more climate action in the lead-up to COP26.

Asked by a reporter after the meeting whether Australia would make new commitments ahead of the Glasgow conference, Senator Payne reiterated the government would release its long-term emissions strategy before COP26 but said she would not speculate on what it would contain.

The UK official said its cabinet was unified in its support for the ambitious 78 per cent reduction by 2035 target recently announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which has won opposition and public support.


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The official said treasury officials present at the UK cabinet committee meeting in March at which the 78 per cent target was first proposed by Alok Sharma, the cabinet-level official who is to be the formal host of COP26, said the target was achievable but warned it would be difficult to meet and would require determined action from all departments.

“It’s a big number, are you up for this?” Mr Johnson asked the meeting. All the ministers present voiced their support for the target, the official said.

According to the official, the UK government was aware that in Brexit it had recently been through a painful political process to assert its national interest. It therefore understood Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s stated determination that his government’s climate policy would be set in Australia rather than international forums, and in the national interest.

But the official said the UK hoped to convince Australia it was in its national interest not only to help ameliorate the impacts of climate change but to reap the economic benefits of joining the race to decarbonise advanced economies.

Australia was not invited to address the UK’s climate ambitions summit in December because it did not have a new, more ambitious 2030 commitment to announce. Last month, Mr Morrison addressed and defended Australia’s “technology not taxes” approach to climate change at a climate summit hosted by US President Joe Biden.

Senator Payne told a reporter after the G7 meeting there had been interest from Japan, Germany and Korea in Australia’s view that low cost, low emissions technologies would be a key driver in the world’s efforts to hit net zero.

The minister was contacted for further comment.

So the Foreign Minister has been called to the office like a naughty schoolgirl and told by countrys with far greater emissions than us that we must do more.... ::)

whiteknight wrote on May 7^th, 2021 at 3:06pm:

Australia pressured to step up climate action during G7 talks

You mean like Germany who have failed their 2020 commitments? ::)

"The European Commission’s latest country assessment, published earlier this month, found that Germany is at “considerable risk” of missing its national energy efficiency target of 20 percent by 2020. For now, it is still expected to meet its 2020 renewable energy target of 18 percent, although Germany's renewable energy lobby warns the country might miss that goal too.

Germany is also set to fall short of its national climate target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020. "

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-climate-change-green-energy-shift-is-more-fizzle-than-sizzle/

Is climate hysteria the storm before the calm?



For well over half the population, to question the urgency of “action on climate change” is to question science itself, to wish a dystopian climate carnage on mankind. “It’s the existential crisis of our times,” the President said. “The signs are unmistakeable. The science is undeniable. But the cost of inaction keeps mounting.”

Yet for New York University scientist Steven Koonin, Barack Obama’s former chief scientist, it’s anything but. The gap between rhetoric and facts has never been greater. His new book, Unsettled, released digitally this week, hasn’t lobbed a grenade so much as fired a bazooka at the climate “consensus”.

“Leaders talk about existential threat, climate emergency, disaster, crisis, but in fact when you actually read the literature, there is no support for that kind of hysteria at all,” he says. “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change in coming decades, much less what effect humans will have on it.”

Koonin, “increasingly dismayed” by climate alarmism, will be hard to “cancel”. He’s still alive, a self-declared Democrat, with impeccable academic and career credentials: a Caltech-trained physicist who became chief scientist at BP in 2005 and then Barack Obama’s undersecretary for science in 2009.

Yes, the planet has warmed, he concedes, and the burning of fossil fuels is partly to blame, but the impact is tiny, complex and uncertain, and occurs against a backdrop of natural climate change over thousands of years that dwarfs the recent increase in temperature.

At least half the warming since 1950 — about 0.7 degrees — is due to human influence, but it could just as easily be a quarter, climate science says.

“We are trying to understand a chaotic, multiscale system with incomplete observations, so it’s no surprise the science isn’t settled,” Koonin says. Humans affect only around 1 per cent of the world’s natural energy flows.

“We have this big system and we’re tickling it a bit,” he adds.

Since 1880, as far back as modern measurements go, global average temperature has risen haphazardly by about one degree centigrade. But it rose as rapidly between 1910 and 1940 — when emissions and the Earth’s population were tiny fractions of today’s levels — as the average temperature did over the past 30 years.

“Variations in the temperature are not at all unusual; what’s of interest is to what extent the changes are driven by humans or part of natural variation,” Koonin says, pointing out that the world’s temperature has been much higher, and much lower, in the distant past

The 1600s saw a little ice age, while the dinosaurs put up with much warmer weather.

In short, zoom in, and it looks scary; zoom out, and it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about.

Conveying the findings of climate science to the public has been akin to Chinese whispers, where the final message has been misinterpreted, exaggerated, and cherrypicked by bureaucrats, politicians and journalists, to the point it’s barely recognisable.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/is-climate-hysteria-the-storm-before-the-calm/news-story/90ff5bf6f8b9c4d4977404023af21dd5