A previously unreleased briefing on global warming to the Howard government issued a stark climate change warning two decades ago, but even this frank advice failed to anticipate the extreme heat and catastrophic bushfire conditions that swept the eastern seaboard during the week. The briefing, prepared by the federal public service and experts at the Bureau of Meteorology, was largely ignored by the Howard government, despite telling ministers that the global average temperature rise was “unprecedented in human history”.
Australian National University professor of climate science Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick commended the briefing for incorporating contemporary scientific advice from the Bureau of Meteorology, but said even this undercooked the alarming rise of Australian heatwaves in the past 20 years. The briefing said global warming would spur increasing heatwaves, droughts, fires and sea-level rise, which was a result of rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that were “in part attributable to human activities”.
Perkins-Kirkpatrick said, "There is a very close link between increasing global temperature, the increasing regional temperature and the rise in the intensity, frequency, and duration of heat waves. It’s happened at a faster speed than what climate scientists would have thought originally. Each decade has been significantly warmer than the decade prior."
The briefing was issued a decade before 195 nations signed up to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. It noted that the United States and developing nations were “unwilling to commit” to emissions reduction targets. Former chief climate diplomat Professor Howard Bamsey, who led Australia’s negotiations over a global emissions reduction treaty for two years in the lead-up to the Paris deal, said the briefing identified the key sticking point that was ultimately subverted by multilateral co-operation.
The State of the Climate report by the CSIRO in 2024 found that Australia’s warmest year on record was 2019, and eight of the nine warmest years on record have occurred since 2013. University of NSW climate scientist Professor Matthew England was critical of the Howard government’s lack of response to the briefing, with no new policies put in place to drive down greenhouse emissions. Australia signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 but ultimately chose not to ratify it under the coalition government led by John Howard, citing potential economic disadvantage compared with major emitters such as the United States and China. It was ratified on December 3, 2007, the day the Rudd government was sworn in to succeed Howard.
