KEY POINTS:
Australia under John Howard was almost an international pariah on climate change. But since Kevin Rudd's Labor Party came to power late last year, our cousins across the Tasman have been busy making amends.
Rudd appointed a climate change minister and quickly ratified the Kyoto Protocol that
commits countries to greenhouse gas emission targets, which Howard had refused to do. Last month, he announced the creation of the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, a A$100 million ($1.122 million) initiative.
And this month, as world financial markets were reeling, he declared that dealing with climate change had to remain a priority.
Howard seemed reluctant to acknowledge that Australia is particularly vulnerable to climate change, not just environmentally but also economically.
The country's farmers have endured years of drought, which has had a big enough impact on people's lives and the economy. But its reliance on coal - Australia's biggest export earner, at a projected A$43 billion in 2008-9, and the source of 80 per cent of its electricity - poses an equally big challenge.
The carbon capture and storage initiative comes on top of an earlier A$500 million effort to develop technologies to allow coal to be burned more cleanly. An academic at Canberra's Australian National University (ANU) says there has been a sea change in the politics of climate change.
Now ANU, Australia's top university and 16th in the world in the London Times' 2008 international university league table, is getting in on the act. On Wednesday it launched a Climate Change Institute and from next year is offering a master's degree in climate change.
The institute's creation follows calls for an interdisciplinary response to climate change, says director Will Steffen, so the work of its 200 or so researchers will span the environmental and economics fields. It's not a case of creating a new research facility from scratch - the institute was previously known as the ANU Institute for the Environment.
"We're doing similar sorts of things but now we're focusing more directly and strongly on the climate issue, compared to broader issues of sustainability and the environment," Steffen says.
The institute's role isn't advocacy - for example, it wouldn't urge the setting of emissions targets - but it would try to answer questions about the environmental and economic effects of different emissions levels. Its research has five strands, spanning mitigation, adaptation, the fundamental science and human dimensions of climate change and - tying in with ANU's strength in Asia-Pacific studies - the implications of climate change for this region. "I would anticipate many opportunities to collaborate with colleagues in New Zealand and, indeed, elsewhere," Steffen says.
Luca Tacconi, an economist and co-convenor of the master of climate change degree, says climate change sceptics won't be turned away from the A$25,000 course. While he is convinced climate change is human-induced, students have "the freedom to doubt".
Tacconi will teach a research methods paper which, with climate science, economics and policy papers, is one of the degree's three core subjects.
Students can choose other ANU papers to suit the part they intend playing in the burgeoning Australian climate change consulting and policy development fields.
If new job opportunities are one silver lining of climate change, another is that it makes life interesting for climate scientists such as Janette Lindesay, the degree's other convenor.
The weather has gone from being a conversation you have over the fence with your neighbour to the subject of concerted scientific study, using powerful new data-gathering and crunching tools.
Buoys moored in the Pacific, for instance, relay water temperature readings to a satellite that sends them to a website where Lindesay can access the data almost in real time.
Compared with a decade ago, she says today's computer hardware and software provide about 40 times the weather information processing power.
"It's very exciting." But it's also alarming. Lindesay says Australia's climate record of the past two decades is consistent with the predictions that flow from global warming - specifically, the intensification and southern drift of high-pressure systems, resulting in the drier conditions of the past several years.
While there has been winter rain in many drought areas, soil moisture is low. "There are large parts of Australia that are still drought-affected," Lindesay says. The summer outlook is for above-average temperatures and lower-than-normal rainfall, except in northern Queensland.
Communities will have learn to live with accelerating changes in the weather, Lindesay says, and helping them adapt will be a key role for ANU's masters of climate change.
BUSINESS HERALD / IDC TECH POLL
Our previous poll asked: How does the current economic climate affect IT spending in your business?
I expect it will increase - 29%
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It will not be impacted - 36%
This week's question: In the current economic climate, what impact do you foresee on your personal spending on technology items (including gadgets)?
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