Runaway climate change

The Age Business Day reports: WE ARE adults here. We know that there will be some very tough trade-offs that will be needed to tackle climate change. But the oil and gas industry is asking too much if it wants Australians to incur the costs of a coal seam gas (CSG) boom, without clearly pointing out the benefits.

Until lately it was widely assumed that gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal, with lower greenhouse gas emissions. The rise of unconventional gas extraction - whether from shale, coal seam or tight sand gas fields - has called that assumption into question, and guess what? The answer is frightfully unclear.

It would be fair to say most of the data is old or industry-funded or based on different practices used for extraction overseas. Or hidden.

The ''We Want CSG'' ads sponsored by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association say coal seam gas burned to produce baseload electricity produces ''up to'' 70 per cent fewer emissions than coal.

There are practical and effective ways for Australia to tackle the cause of climate change and its effects.

Many native-born Australians, and those born overseas who migrated to Australia in search of a better life, did not anticipate that our expectations might be prematurely curtailed by population growth, peak oil or climate change. A decade ago, when we celebrated the new millennium, such ideas were hardly on the radar.

Not on our radar, perhaps, but not entirely unexpected. A little thought would have told us that exponential growth in our use of natural resources is bound to end when those resources run out, or if damaging by-products compromise our environment.

In 1972 the Club of Rome's report, The Limits to Growth, warned of just such a scenario, and from 1990 onwards the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change drew attention to the risks of climate change.

Governments and corporations were well aware of these assessments. Some, including the Europeans, took notice. But successive Australian governments, under Hawke, Keating and Howard, took no heed: ''She'll be right''.

Climate change is a wicked problem. It will take an unparalleled amount of human effort to address.

While it’s important for the public to be aware of the risks of runaway climate change, focusing narrowly on threats and evoking apocalyptic rhetoric, as Melbourne writer Doug Hendrie did yesterday, is not helpful. It might be good for scaring the general public senseless, but does not create the conditions needed to deliver action on climate change. For that we need a positive vision of our future.

With the world's oceans absorbing six million tonnes of carbon a day, a leading oceanographer warns of eco disaster

Carbon-dioxide emissions are turning the waters of the Arctic Ocean into acid at an unprecedented rate, scientists have discovered. Research carried out in the archipelago of Svalbard has shown in many regions around the north pole seawater is likely to reach corrosive levels within 10 years. The water will then start to dissolve the shells of mussels and other shellfish and cause major disruption to the food chain. By the end of the century, the entire Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic.