Original story by Graham Lloyd, The Australian
TONY Abbott has been likened to South African leaders who once claimed HIV did not cause AIDS.
The comparison, by British process engineer Nilay Shah, was reported in The Times of London and reflects the strong interest internationally in the decision to scrap the carbon tax.
Professor Shah, who specialises in modelling low-carbon technologies, made the comparison when launching a report that said the world needed to spend $2 trillion a year by 2050, or 1 per cent of GDP, to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels.
The Times report said politicians such as the newly sworn-in Prime Minister would be judged as harshly by future generations as those who questioned the medical evidence on AIDS.
“There’s an interesting parallel with South Africa in the 90s, where political capital was being made out of HIV denial,” Professor Shah said. “Those people must now regret what they did. I suspect that some of the politicians (now arguing against rapid cuts in emissions) will still be around in the mid-2030s and will reflect that they didn’t do enough on climate change.”
Mr Abbott has said the Coalition government will scrap the carbon tax and spend billions of dollars on direct measures.
He has said he accepts that “climate change is real, and I accept that mankind is making a difference, and I absolutely accept that we need a strong and effective policy to deal with it”.
Australia’s decision to scrap the carbon tax has come at an inconvenient time for climate-change campaigners, ahead of the release this month of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change updated report.
There is robust international debate about why climate-change models have overestimated actual temperatures.
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