John Howard, Australia's prime minister has just announced that they will be spending $627 million to combat climate change. He hopes to reduce Australia's emissions of greenhouse gases:
Mr Howard said today Australian action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 will prevent about 87 million tonnes of climate-changing carbon a year entering the atmosphere by 2010.
He said the $627 million would bring total government spending to tackle global warming since 1996 to about $3.4 billion.
So lets do the sums once again. If we assume that 100% of all recent warming is completely and only due to greenhouse gases (unlikely but hey), and Australia's greenhouse emissions is equal to 1.5% of the worlds, and that Australia produce on average 350 million tonnes a year, should Howard's goal come true, Australia will reduce its emissions by a quarter. Good stuff.
Hence their world wide contribution to limiting greenhouse gases would be at 0.375% (about 1/3rd of 1%). Therefore Australia will reduce the world wide temperature by 0.00225 degrees over 100 years or by about 0.000025 degrees per year.
So that means $3.4billion will be spend by the Australian government to reduce the temperature by 0.000025 degrees per year. Considering how cold it is in Melbourne at the moment and the fact that we had our coldest winter in half a century, perhaps we should be looking at increasing the temperature.
Or we could spend $3.4billion on the disadvantaged of the world, like starving Africans for example. For $516 a year one can sponsor a child providing them health care, education, clean water food an income. In other words we could sponsor 6.5million children or 650,000 children each year for 10 years.
Hmm... reduce the temperature by 0.000025 degrees per year or sponsor 650,000 children for their whole childhood.
Tough decision this one, what do you chose?
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