Guest Author: Will Steffen

The Garnaut Review has done a superb job of laying out the climate change dilemma in all its complexities as well as pointing the way forward. To those focused on finding solutions – costing climate change and its avoidance, developing an Australian emissions trading scheme, working towards global agreement and enhancing global collaboration, transforming energy systems, and much more – there is complexity enough. But the climate science itself, which provides an underpinning knowledge base on the nature of climate change, is also providing complexities of a rapidly changing nature.

Although the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) provides an excellent scientific base for the climate change issue, the scientific landscape is changing more rapidly than we thought possible. One of my colleagues has stated that “…the Earth is moving faster than the science…”, and I could add that the science is now moving faster than policy development. The most recent research on the stability of the large polar ice sheets and on the dynamics of the natural carbon cycle illustrates this phenomenon. Read the rest of this entry »