Central Victorian Greenhouse Alliance

"Developments in mainstream scientific opinion ... and the Review's own work on future 'business as usual' global emissions, suggest that the world is moving towards high risks of dangerous climate change more rapidly than has generally been understood. This makes mitigation more urgent and more costly"    

    - Ross Garnaut in his interim Climate Change Review, 2007.

Climate change is having a growing impact across all continents, with cyclones, floods, fires and droughts in Australia and overseas featuring almost daily in our news bulletins.

Glaciers are shrinking, Arctic sea-ice is declining, frost-free seasons are lengthening and extreme rainfall events are becoming more frequent.

In September 2007, 22 per cent of the summer Arctic sea ice mass had melted since its previous record low in September 2005. It is now predicted that the summer ice will disappear by 2013 - 100 years ahead of the IPCC's prediction in early 2007.

In its most recent report, the IPCC - a collective of the world's pre-eminent climate change scientists - found that warming of the global climate system is now unequivocal.  The report warned that unless we change our behaviour, global temperatures could rise on average between 1.1 C and 6.4 C by 2100.

Unless communities world-wide reduce fossil fuel burning and vegetation clearing, a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels to an unprecedented 550ppm by 2050 seems almost certain.

If we continue on this path, earth will no longer support the population, civilization or diversity of life as we know it.

In his 2006 Review of the Economics of Climate Change, Sir Nicholas Stern said that the benefits of strong and early action far outweighed the economic costs of not acting, with a 10-year window of opportunity to position the global economy for this shift.