Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne, speaking from Copenhagen, said:

"Tony Abbott's misunderstanding of basic climate policy is astonishing, but the Government's response has showed up once again the nonsense of their refusal to lift their sights to science-based emissions reduction targets.

"Tuvalu has belled the cat in Copenhagen on the refusal of rich countries like Australia to follow the science and accept strong binding targets. It's a matter of survival, for them in the short term and for us, too, in the slightly longer term.

This piece first appeared on the official "Climate Thinkers" blog

As the Copenhagen Conference swiftly approaches, government leaders from around the world are working hard to convince their constituents that they understand we face a climate crisis. However, to date, the scale of their commitments utterly fails to match the scale of their rhetoric.

Top climate scientist, Professor Kevin Anderson from the UK's Tyndall Centre, has delivered a wake-up call to all those attending the Copenhagen climate conference, including Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne.

Professor Anderson, writing in The Independent, called existing offers of emissions cuts "token gestures" and said that, to give the planet "a 50:50 chance of not exceeding 2C":

NASA's James Hansen, often known as the Godfather of climate science, has backed the position taken by the Greens - that it is better to have no deal in the short term than to lock in a deal which locks in failure.

Hansen has told The Guardian newspaper in London that:

"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it's a disaster track... The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation."

CPRS debate on financing for developing nations