You can catch up on the Universities Australia Climate forum held at Parliament House, Canberra on 18 March 2010 through the following links:

• read an overview of the forum
• follow the full presentation (audio + powerpoints) via AusSMC’s webex webinar (follow the instructions on their site)
• listen to the session audio through the following mp3 files:
  • Session 1: Climate change in Australia today – the evidence
  • Session 2: Australian research that reveals the future of climate change – certainties and uncertainties
  • Session 3: Responding to climate change: the social and economic impact
• read the powerpoint slides: session 1 (.pdf, 2MB), session 2 (.pdf, 5MB), session 3 (.pdf, 3MB)
• review brief profiles on the speakers
• read Universities Australia’s response to the CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology climate statement.

Universities Australia forum reveals how we are responding

Australia’s peanut farmers are on the move—some are relocating nearly 2400 kilometres from Kingaroy to Katherine for better access to water; last year 88 people in Victoria died in the way to hospital directly as a result of the heatwave that preceded the disastrous bushfires of early February; the average temperature across the Australian continent has risen by more than 0.8 °C in the past 60 years; the Great Barrier Reef is degrading; and more than 40 per cent of the nation’s farmers are seriously worried about the viability of their businesses in the face of climate change, according to a recent nationwide survey for the Bureau of Rural Sciences.

Those are just some of the facts that formed part of the snapshot of climate change unveiled by 16 scientists, social scientists and public servants from universities, research institutes and government agencies at a Universities Australia National Policy Forum in Parliament House, Canberra on Thursday 18 March. The contributors provided unequivocal evidence that climate change is occurring across Australia right now, that it is accelerating, and that its impact on society and the national economy is already apparent.

Speakers at the forum backed the detailed measurements of climate change presented earlier in the week by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology—temperature increases, changes in rainfall, increasing acidification of the ocean, sea level rises. But they went further. They linked those measures directly to consequences for Australians now and in the near future.

“Climate change is actually dangerous, it kills people,” said Keith Dear of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at ANU—and not just in Victoria’s record-breaking heat. Nearly 15,000 people had died in France directly as a result of a heatwave in August 2003, for instance, and more than 35,000 across Europe. It’s figures like these that have inspired the New South Wales Government to start planning future refuges where the elderly can gain respite in extreme weather.

But that’s not all, Dear said. High temperatures also can kill indirectly—by increasing the risk of bushfires, for example. His data showing that the number of days of extreme fire weather is increasing annually was backed by Blair Trewin of the Bureau of Meteorology and the CEO of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, Gary Morgan. “The information is out on the web,” Morgan said. “The fire fighting industry is quite fearful about the future and looking at ways to adapt to it,” he said

Dear discussed predicted rises in infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. The increase in average temperature had allowed the range of the mosquito which carries the dengue virus to extend a further 800 km south-east down the coast of Australia from Townsville, he said. And he also mentioned the negative impact of climate change on air pollution, food poisoning and mental health.

In fact, the mental wellbeing of the farming community is already deteriorating measurably, said Anthony Hogan also of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at ANU. His figures show that the breakdown of social structures and the mental insecurity induced by an increasingly unpredictable environment is creating serious anxiety in the farming community. “Sixteen per cent of our farmers are saying they can no longer cope with any more change. Another third are saying, ‘We are wobbling in the balance as to whether we can cope with any more change’.” And the people worst hit are the youngest farmers, including the greatest number of women, he says.

It’s not surprising. Farmers are among the first to feel the impact of climate change. Already the peanut industry has assessed its future and a part of it has decided to move, say Graham Baker and Roger Stone from the University of Southern Queensland. The cotton industry is undergoing a consultation process about where it is headed, and the rice crop in the Riverina has dropped from a million tonnes a year to less than 50,000.

The harvest date for wine growers has been moving a day earlier each year since 1980, according to data accumulated by Snow Barlow of the University of Melbourne, and dryland crops are being sown later and harvested earlier. That fits with evidence of changes in the timing of the life cycles of flowering plants and birds, according to his colleague Marie Keatley of the University’s department of Forest and Ecosystems.

In many places in Australia—grain-cropping in the Mallee in northern Victoria, for instance— we are getting to the limits of adaptive management where farmers can change what they are doing within their existing system, Barlow said. We are now getting to where farmers are adapting their systems and trying new crops and new ways of doing things. And, given the climate data from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, it won’t be too long before we have to consider changing our agriculture systems entirely, he said.

But not all the news is bad, says Amanda Lynch from the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Monash University. “By an accident of our geography, Australia is a country that is subjected to very large changes over decadal time scale because of the El Niño phenomenon. So we already have an agricultural sector and a water management sector that is used to large swings over long time scales. We are used to pragmatic, messy, contingent approaches.”

That is why, she said, programs such as the Victorian Government’s response to the long dry spell in that state had been relatively successful. Rather than being dependent on one particular thrust, it was robust and flexible, involving more than 100 different individual policy actions based on current science and technology.

Having accepted the peer-reviewed scientific conclusion that climate change is happening, the New South Wales Government was also pursuing many different policies, according to that state’s Director, Climate Change, Air and Noise, Jennifer McAllister. In addition to the development of heat stress sanctuaries, she spoke of assisting local authorities to plan for a 90-centimetre sea level rise by the end of the century, providing regional climate change scenarios for use by local decision makers, and encouraging energy efficiency and the generation and use of renewable energy.

But the problem is immense. Some idea of the scale was provided by Mike Raupach of the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research when he showed that the impact of the decline in economic activity brought about by the Global Financial Crisis—the largest impediment to growth since the Depression—was a halt of about six weeks in the rise of the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

At a regional level, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg from the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland discussed the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef which injects 63,000  jobs and activity worth $6.5 billion each year into the Australian economy. The Reef was sensitive to increases in temperature and acidity, he said, “The combination of these factors that we are seeing right now is fundamentally different to any other point in the past 700,000 years at least. This has driven recurrent mass coral bleaching and mortality since 1979, and a 15 per cent drop in the ability of reefs to grow and calcify since 1990.”

Hoegh-Guldberg reported simulation work from Stanford University in the US on how increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would affect coral reefs. The present level is about 386 parts per million (ppm) and rising at a rate of about 2 ppm a year. “By 450 ppm, we are already getting to marginal conditions for coral reefs, conditions that may not have been seen for 20 to 40 million years,” he said “Between 450 and 500 ppm, corals are no longer able to compete against other organisms like seaweed, and we would end up with the Great Weedy Reef.

“If we keep on going down that track, we get conditions where calcification is not occurring, conditions which are dissolving the reef, and storms and biological erosion start to take away the reef structure. If we like the Reef and the benefits it brings, there’s no question that we have to stabilise and bring the level of carbon dioxide down eventually. We should not spend much time above 450 ppm if we can avoid it.”

And this can be done at a reasonable cost, says John Quiggin, an economist from the University of Queensland. While it is regularly suggested that greenhouse gas mitigation would have catastrophic impacts on our standard of living, he said, the best estimates were that the cost of stabilising the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would amount to about 2 per cent of gross domestic product, or about one year’s economic growth. Such action would also have a small positive impact on employment, he said. “The GFC had a larger impact in Australia than what we are talking about.”

Getting that message across has not been helped by concerted attacks on climate science. The main story of climate change has been well established for decades, Kevin Judd from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Western Australia told the forum. “Unfortunately the uncertainty of the detail as to how this will play out is being exploited by contrary voices, as is the natural variability of weather. But we should not get bogged down in arguments about the details.”

Such attacks on the credibility of the scientific process in unravelling climate change had ramifications for the credibility of science in general, added Ken Baldwin of the ANU Climate Change Institute. It highlighted a set of obligations—on the scientific community, to use the peer review process properly to maintain trust and confidence in science; on journalists, to report the overwhelming scientific consensus on this issue; and on politicians, to accept the consensus point of view and begin to act upon it.

Written by Tim Thwaites for Universities Australia and Science in Public

For more information about the forum including presentations, audio files, speaker profiles and photographs visit www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au

Or contact: Niall Byrne, Science in Public, 0417 131 977, niall@scienceinpublic.com.au

Prof. Peter Coaldrake

Universities Australia

Peter Coaldrake, the Chair of Universities Australia, is Vice-Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology (QUT), a position he took up in April 2003. He had previously been Deputy Vice-Chancellor in the same institution, and prior to that served for four years as Chair (CEO) of Queensland’s Public Sector Management Commission, the body established by the Goss Government to overhaul Queensland’s public sector.

Peter Coaldrake is Chair of the Board of the Australian-American Fulbright Commission, and himself is a dual Fulbright Scholarship recipient, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the field of politics/public policy (1980 –1), and as a Senior Scholar in the field of higher education policy and management (2001–2).

Professor Coaldrake is the author or editor of a number of books and monographs, including Working the System, Government in Queensland (University of Queensland Press, 1989), and co-author (with Lawrence Stedman) of both On the Brink. Australia’s Universities Confronting their Future (University of Queensland Press, 1998), and Academic Work in the Twenty-First Century (DETYA, Occasional Paper Series 99-4).

Contact: p.coaldrake@qut.edu.au, (07) 3138-8086

Dr Blair Trewin

National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology

Blair Trewin is a senior climatologist with the National Climate Centre, a section of the Bureau of Meteorology, where he has worked since 1998.

His main areas of research are long-term trends in climate extremes, and the development of data sets suitable for studying them. He was responsible for developing the long-term data set used for monitoring daily temperatures in Australia, and more recently has been working on improving Australia’s long-term records of tropical cyclones.

He is a member of the international Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices, which is co-sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization. He is also editor of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal.

Contact: b.trewin@bom.gov.au, (03) 96694623

Prof. Roger Jones

Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University

Professor Roger Jones is recognised internationally for his work on climate risk.

He has recently joined the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University, after thirteen years at CSIRO, to work on the integration of climate and policy risks for decision-making.

He has trained as an earth scientist and has worked in restoration ecology; as a museum exhibition curator and technical writer; and as a researcher on past climates, hydrology and the risks of future climate change. He was a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

Contact: roger.jones@vu.edu.au, (03) 9919 1992

Dr Marie Keatley

Department of Forest and Ecosystem, University of Melbourne

Research interests:

• The reproductive phenology of plants in an effort to understand ecosystem function as well as the impacts of climate change.

• Development and application of statistical methods in flowering and budding phenology, synchronicity and periodicity.

• The history of, and drivers for, undertaking phenological observations in the Australian context.

Recent projects:

National database for documenting ecological impacts of climate change in collaboration with the Dr Lynda Chambers, Bureau of Meteorology and Dr. Leslie Hughes, Macquarie University supported with funding from the Australian Greenhouse Office

Contact: mrk@unimelb.edu.au, (03) 5321 4152

Prof. Snow Barlow

Melbourne School of Land and Environment, The University of Melbourne

Snow is Professor of Horticulture and Viticulture at the University of Melbourne and Convener of the NCCARF Primary Industries Adaptation Research Network is an environmental plant physiologist and agricultural scientist who specialises on the impacts of climate change including elevated CO2 on agriculture and natural resource management.

Currently his research group focuses on the adaptation of the Australian Wine Industry and, more generally, Southern Australia’s irrigation industries to a hotter and drier climate.

He also chairs of the DAFF Climate Change Research Program expert assessment panel that guides research investment in climate change of Australia’s primary industries .

As a vigneron in North Eastern Victoria he lives with the challenges of climate change induced heat and water scarcity on his own vineyard.

Contac: s.barlow@unimelb.edu.au, (03) 8344 5008

Mr Niall Byrne

Science in Public

Niall is a science writer and publicist based in Melbourne. The focus of his work is helping scientists bring their work into the public space through the media, events and festivals. He also guides science organisations in the development of communication strategies to reach their stakeholders, customers and the public.

Contact: niall@scienceinpublic.com.au, (03) 9398 1416

Prof. Nathan Bindoff

Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies, University of Tasmania

Nathan Bindoff is Professor of Physical Oceanography at the University of Tasmania, and CSIRO Marine Research Laboratories, Director of the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing, and Project Leader of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre’s Modelling Program.

He specialises in ocean climate and the earth’s climate system. He was a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, and chair of the Data Products Committee for the World Ocean Circulation Experiment and the International Polar Year.

Contact: N.Bindoff@utas.edu.au, (03) 6226 2986

Prof. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

Global Change Institute, University of Queensland

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is Professor of Marine Studies and is Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He specialises in the impact of climate change on biological systems, and is particularly well-known for his work on the impacts of ocean warming and acidification on coral reefs.

His work on coral bleaching was recognised in 1999 with the Eureka prize for Research. He is currently a Queensland Smart State Premier’s Fellow, and holds positions as reviewing editor at Science Magazine and Deputy Director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Coral reef Studies.

Contact: oveh@uq.edu.au, (07) 3346 7417

Assoc. Prof. Keith Dear

National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University

Keith Dear is a biostatistician and epidemiologist researching the health effects of air quality, especially the direct effects of heat. He led the modelling of this topic for the Garnaut Review. He currently coordinates research projects on heatwave definition in Australia, on mathematical modelling of adaptive strategies, and on death rates from heat and air pollution in Thailand.

Dr Dear is a member of Australia’s Adaptation Research Network for Human Health, and of the CSIRO climate adaptation flagship partnership cluster in “Urbanism, Climate Adaptation and Health”

Contact: Keith.Dear@anu.edu.au, (02) 6125 4865

Dr Michael Raupach

CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research

Michael Raupach is a research scientist in CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and the American Geophysical Union. From 2000 to 2008 he was an inaugural co-chair of the Global Carbon Project of the Earth System Science Partnership. He contributed to the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment. His research encompasses global and continental carbon and water cycles, carbon-climate-human interactions, land-air interactions, fluid mechanics and particle transport. He is a frequent contributor to the policy and public debate on climate change.

Contact: Michael.Raupach@csiro.au, (02) 6246 5573

Prof. Kevin Judd

University of Western Australia

Kevin Judd is a Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Western Australia. His research includes the problem of forecasting with imperfect models.

Contact: kevin@maths.uwa.edu.au, (08) 6488 1357

Prof. Ken Baldwin

ANU Climate Change Institute

Professor Ken Baldwin is Deputy Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute, and represents the Energy Change Institute. His field of research is laser physics, and he is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics. In 2007, Professor Baldwin was awarded the W.H. Beattie Steele Medal, the highest honour of the Australian Optical Society, for research in laser science. He was President of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS) from 2008-2009. In 2004 he won the Australian Government Eureka Prize for Promoting Understanding of Science, for his role in initiating and championing “Science meets Parliament”.

Contact: kenneth.baldwin@anu.edu.au, (02) 6125 4702

Ms Anna-Maria Arabia

Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS)

Anna-Maria Arabia is the Executive Director of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, Australia’s peak body in science and technology.

Prior to this appointment Anna-Maria was a senior policy advisor to Minister Albanese, Federal Infrastructure Minister, and has been a policy advisor to former Labor Leader, the Hon Kim Beazley. She has also worked as a policy adviser in the Federal Department of Health and Ageing and collaborated with the Italian Government to foster cooperation in science and technology between Australia and Italy.

Anna-Maria completed a Bachelor of Science at the University of Melbourne and undertook doctoral research at the Baker Medical Research Institute, and the Mario Negri Pharmacological Research Institute in Milan, Italy.

Contact: annamaria.arabia@fasts.org, (02) 6257-2891

Dr Anthony Hogan

National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University

Dr Hogan is a sociologist and epidemiologist working on social and health aspects of climate change.

Anthony coordinates work on Drought, Drying and Rural Impacts for the Human Health Adaptation Research Network. Anthony is Deputy Director of the National Institute for Rural and Regional Australia which was established in the University to highlight and promote Australian rural and regional research, teaching and the academic contribution to policy and debate. He is also a research associate offering expert public health social science advice to the University’s Centre for Water Economics, Environment and Policy.

Dr Hogan is presently conducting a number of studies on the wellbeing of farmers in the face of climate change including a study of the social and economic impacts of the Murray Darling Basin Water Plan and a study on climate risk and adaptation among 4,000 Australian farmers. He also provided quantitative inputs into the Kenny Report which examined social aspects of drought and drying in Australia

Contact: anthony.hogan@anu.edu.au, (02) 6125 5621

Prof. Graham Baker

University of Southern Queensland

Graham Baker held academic posts at Heriot Watt University Edinburgh and then the University of Queensland until 1998. At that point he was appointed professor and Head of Civil Engineering at Warwick University in the UK, expressly to assist in the elevation of the group’s research performance under the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). He returned to Australia as Dean of Engineering at the University of Southern Queensland, and was promoted to Deputy Vice Chancellor (Scholarship) at USQ, a post he has held since 2005.

Graham Baker is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia (FIEAust), a chartered professional Engineer, and the Australian representative for the International Association for Computational Mechanics. He is a Director of the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, and an executive member of the Universities Australia research Committee. His research interests lie in structural engineering, and computational mechanics of materials and structures.

Contact: bakerg@usq.edu.au, (07) 4631 1658

Prof. Amanda Lynch

School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Monash University

Amanda Lynch, FTSE, is a Federation Fellow and Professor in the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Monash University. Previously she was a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado.

Her research focuses on the application of climate and meteorological research to concrete problems of policy relevance. She holds numerous leadership positions in Australia and internationally, including chair of a climate reference group for the Office of the Chief Scientist.

Contact: Amanda.Lynch@arts.monash.edu.au, (03) 9905 8291

Ms Jennifer McAllister

Climate Change, Air and Noise, NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water

Jennifer McAllister is the Director of Climate Change, Air and Noise at the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water, and was previously the Director of Environmental Innovation in the same department.

Prior to joining the NSW Public Service, Jennifer worked as a policy advisor to NSW Minister for the Environment for 4 years – focussing on water policy, particularly in the Murray Darling Basin. She has an Honours degree in Politics from the University of Sydney.

Contact: Jenny.Mcallister@environment.nsw.gov.au

Prof. John Quiggin

University of Queensland

Professor Quiggin is prominent both as a research economist and as a commentator on Australian economic policy.

He has published over 700 research articles, books and reports in fields including risk analysis, production economics, and environmental economics. He has also written on policy topics including unemployment policy, micro-economic reform, privatisation, competitive tendering, and sustainable management of the Murray–Darling system.

He was awarded the Thomson ISI Australian Citation Laureate for Economics in 2004. He is a Fellow of the Australian Social Science Academy, the American Agricultural Economics Association, and the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.

Contact: j.quiggin@uq.edu.au, (07) 3346 9646

Senator the Hon. Kim Carr

Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research

Senator Kim Carr was educated at New South Wales and Victorian state schools and at the University of Melbourne, where he completed a B.A. (Hons), M.A. and Dip. Ed.

Before entering parliament he worked as a school teacher and policy adviser.

He was elected to the Senate in 1993 and to Labor’s front bench in 1996, serving first as a Parliamentary Secretary and Opposition spokesman on education in the Senate (1996-01), and then as a Shadow Minister (2001-07). Between 1993 and 2007 he also worked on more than twenty Senate committees.

His first shadow portfolio was science and research (2001-04), which was soon joined by industry and innovation (2003-04). After gaining valuable experience in several other portfolios, he returned to his original responsibilities in 2006.

Following Labor’s election victory in 2007, he was sworn in as Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research on 3 December that year.

This was the culmination of a thirty-year interest in these policy areas. The design of the portfolio reflects his longstanding belief that it is critical – as he said in his first speech to the Senate (5 May 1993) – “to maintain a strong, innovative and diverse industrial base” in Australia.

Climate Change: bridging scientific knowledge and public policy

Universities Australia National Policy Forum

Mural Hall, Australian Parliament House, Thursday 18 March 2010

8.45 am: Opening comments

Chair: Prof. Peter Coaldrake, Chair, Universities Australia and VC, Queensland University of Technology

9 am, Session 1: Climate change in Australia today – the evidence

Chair: Prof. Peter Coaldrake, Chair, Universities Australia and VC, Queensland University of Technology

Australia’s climate has changed – the climate record

Dr Blair Trewin: Climatologist, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology

Climate in SE Australia – hotter, drier with increased risks?

Prof Roger Jones: Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University

Plants and animals reveal climate change

Dr Marie Keatley: Department of Forest and Ecosystem, University of Melbourne

The climate change adaptation in Australian Agriculture

Prof Snow Barlow: Melbourne School of Land and Environment and Primary Industries Adaptation Research Network NCCARF, The University of Melbourne

9.45 am, Session 2: Revealing the future of climate change

Chair: Niall Byrne, Creative Director at Science in Public

Climate change – the global picture

Prof Nathan Bindoff: ACE CRC and Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania

Climate change in Australia’s tropical waters and the threat to the Reef

Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg: Global Change Institute, University of Queensland

Climate change is dangerous to our health

Assoc Prof Keith Dear: National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University

Climate change and the carbon cycle

Dr Mike Raupach, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research

Can we trust climate science?

Prof Kevin Judd, School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Western Australia

Obligations for scientific credibility

Prof Ken Baldwin, ANU Climate Change Institute

10.30 am, Morning Coffee

11 am, Session 3: Responding to climate change: the social and economic impact

Chair: Ms Anna-Maria Arabia, Executive Director, Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies

The social impacts of climate change in rural Australia.

Dr Anthony Hogan, National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University

How climate models are helping farmers adapt

Prof Graham Baker for Prof Roger Stone, University of Southern Queensland

The scope for action

Prof Amanda Lynch: School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Monash University

A low carbon future –capturing the opportunity

Ms Jenny McAllister: Director, Climate Change, Air and Noise, NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water

Emerging energy sources

Prof Ken Baldwin: ANU Climate Change Institute

The economics of climate change

Prof John Quiggin: School of Economics, University of Queensland

12 pm to 1 pm, Lunch in Private Dinning Rooms – all invited

12.30 pm, closing comments from Senator the Hon Kim Carr Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research

Universities Australia today welcomed the release of the State of the Climate Snapshot co-authored by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.

“This important statement from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology confirms the clear view of top Australian scientists, expert in the field, that Australia’s climate is changing,” said Professor Peter Coaldrake, Chair of Universities Australia and Vice-Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology.

The snapshot has been produced to update Australians about how their climate has changed and what this means using data that both organisations have been collecting for 60-100 years.

“Science has been under unprecedented attack over the last few months and climate science has borne the brunt of the attack. Now is the time to stand up for the quality of Australian science and research and to emphasise the need for evidence-based policy outcomes that recognise the lessons from science,” Professor Coaldrake said.

On Thursday of this week (March 18) Universities Australia, the peak body of Australia’s universities, will host a forum on climate change and the role of scientific knowledge in public debate at Parliament House in Canberra.

“A panel of leading researchers will present the evidence of change, and the projections for the future. The Forum will also consider the challenges of communicating complex science and of bridging scientific knowledge and public policy,” Professor Coaldrake said.

- ends -

Reposted by Science in Public for Universities Australia

For media inquiries contact:
Professor Peter Coaldrake
Universities Australia Chair
Ph: 07 3138 8086 • Mob: 0418 642 375

Rebecca Harris
Universities Australia Director of Communication & Government Relations
Ph: 02 6285 8106 • Mob: 0400 166 691

— — —

Comments from other experts can be found in the rapid round up provided by the Australian Science Media Centre:  http://www.aussmc.org/CSIROandBoMstatementonclimate.php

CSIRO and BOM’s State of the Climate snapshot is here: http://www.csiro.au/resources/State-of-the-climate.html

Climate Change: bridging scientific knowledge and public policy

Thursday 18 March 2010

The Mural Hall, Parliament House, Canberra, 8.30am – 12.30pm

Universities Australia is the peak body of all Australia’s universities and is committed to engaging with Parliament on issues of great national significance, and to informing social, political and commercial responses to those issues.

The UA Forum on Climate Change will focus both on the scientific evidence, and the certainties and uncertainties of that evidence, as well as the challenges of communicating the science and of bridging scientific knowledge and public policy.

The program will comprise three sessions each with a series of brief presentations covering:

Session 1:   Climate change in Australia today – the evidence

Session 2:   Australian research that reveals the future of climate change – certainties and uncertainties

Session 3:   Responding to climate change: the social and economic impact

The speakers will include research leaders in climate science and the impacts of climate change including: Nathan Bindoff, Roger Jones, Amanda Lynch, Roger Stone, Snow Barlow, Marie Keatley, Janette Lindesay, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, and John Quiggin

Some of the issues that will be covered are:

• What are the signs of climate change in Australia today? What are the predictions?
• How are cities, agriculture and the environment responding?
• How well placed are we to adapt to our changing climate.
• What are the jobs and opportunities in responding effectively to climate change?

For more information visit www.scienceinpublic.com.au/blog/ua

For more information and to register please contact Niall Byrne, Science in Public Ph: 03 9398 1416, Mobile: 0417 131 977
Email: niall@scienceinpublic.com.au