TONY JONES: Good evening. Welcome to Q&A. I'm Tony Jones and answering your questions tonight, environmental activist, scientist, author and broadcaster, David Suzuki. Please welcome our guest.

Well, as usual, we're being simulcast on ABC News 24 and News Radio. You can go to the Twitter conversation with the hash tag on your screen. Well, David Suzuki studied fruit flies to earn his PhD in genetics but shot to international prominence as a science writer and broadcaster through his acclaimed television documentaries. Today he is just as well known as an environmental activist and he is visiting Australia to warn that what he calls the barbarians have breached the gates. He says politicians and corporate executives are sidelining science to set us on a collision course with the environment that threatens human survival. Wherever David Suzuki travels he draws a crowd of eager supporters. Tonight we've invited some of his critics to join the audience and ask some challenging questions. Well, our first question tonight comes from Bill Koutalianos. Go ahead, Bill.

CLIMATE - NO RISE SINCE '98

BILL KOUTALIANOS: Oh, hi. Since 1998 global temperatures have been relatively flat, yet many man-made global warming advocates refuse to acknowledge this simple fact. Has man-made global warming become a new religion in itself?

TONY JONES: David, go ahead.

DAVID SUZUKI: Yeah, well, I don't know why you're saying that. The ten hottest years on record, as I understand it, have been in this century. In fact, the warming continues. It may have slowed down but the warming continues and everybody is anticipating some kind of revelation in the next IPCC reports that are saying we got it wrong. As far as I understand, we haven't. So where are you getting your information? I'm not a climatologist. I wait for the climatologists to tell us what they're thinking.

TONY JONES: Do you want to respond to that, Bill?

BILL KOUTALIANOS: Sure, yeah. UAH, RSS, HadCRUT, GISS data shows a 17-year flat trend which suggests there may be something wrong with the Co2 warming theory?

DAVID SUZUKI: Sorry, yeah, what is the reference? I don't...

BILL KOUTALIANOS: Well, they're the main data sets that IPCC use: UAH, University of Alabama, Huntsville; GISS, Goddard Institute of Science; HadCRUT. I don't know what that stands for, HadCRUT; and RSS, Remote Sensing something. So those data sets suggest a 17-year flat trend, which suggests there may be a problem with the Co2.

DAVID SUZUKI: No, well, there may be a climate sceptic down in Huntsville, Alabama, who has taken the data and come to that conclusion. I say, let's wait for the IPCC report to come out and see what the vast bulk of scientists who have been involved in gathering this information will tell us. You know, we can cherry pick all kinds of stuff. Cherry pick, in fact, the scientists that we want to listen to, but let's listen to the IPCC

TONY JONES: David, this is one of the most frequently asked questions or claims made by climate sceptics: a global temperature spiked in 1998 and since then have plateaued, even though they remained at very high levels, as you said, over the 10 years.

DAVID SUZUKI: Yeah.

TONY JONES: It is a problem, isn't it, explain that, for scientists?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, what's the problem? I mean they're concluding still the warming...

TONY JONES: Well, the problem is it didn't actually get warmer when people expected it to?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, as far as I understand it is getting warmer, so I don't know what the disagreement is there.

TONY JONES: All right. Let's go to our next question, which is from Stewart Franks and, in fact, he's a professor of environmental engineering.

IPCC SCIENCE STRANGLEHOLD

Prof. STEWART FRANKS: G'day. First of all, welcome to Australia.

DAVID SUZUKI: Thank you.

STEWART FRANKS: Can I also just very briefly thank you. A little over 20 years ago I changed from a physics degree to an environmental science degree and in large measure that was because of your environmental advocacy and the effect it had had on me. That said, that was a little over 20 years ago. I've lost some of the radicalism since then. My question actually, I guess, leads on from what Bill asked. The IPCC, since 1990, has been arguably the sole voice for climate and, yet, there are thousands of dissenting scientists. You've both used the term "climate sceptic" which I don't like because that's a label. These guys are scientists. Whether you agree with them or not doesn't mean they should be called names, frankly. There has been...

TONY JONES: Well, not everyone who is a climate sceptic is a scientist. I think that's the point.

DAVID SUZUKI: But also, I mean, you talk about thousands of scientists. These are not climatologists.

STEWART FRANKS: There are many thousands of scientists...

DAVID SUZUKI: Of climatologists?

STEWART FRANKS: And climatologists.

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I thought that...

STEWART FRANKS: And that pause in warming is very real. If you build a climate model to simulate the climate and to simulate the effect of carbon dioxide on climate, then when you look at that climate model simulation, compare it to observations and you see the observations don't agree with the model, then that actually is not a very good model of climate. So my question is very simple: Is it possible that the IPCC unwittingly or, well, whatever. Is it possible, is it even conceivable that they might have exaggerated the threat of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, if anything I would say that what's going to come out will be very conservative - a deliberately conservative - underestimate of what's going on because they are under an enormous amount of pressure from people like you who are saying wait a minute now. Hold on. They're being very, very highly criticised and therefore very careful. My bet is, and I'm just betting, I'm not a climatologist, is that what's going - what reality is going to show is that they were underestimating.

STEWART FRANKS: Well.

TONY JONES: David, the IPCC's consensus-building process is problematic in some respects.

DAVID SUZUKI: This must be unbelievably boring, but...

TONY JONES: It is problematic, though, when individual scientists or groups of scientists come out and say they do not agree with the consensus?

Well, the groups of scientists are generally not climatologists. I mean if you look, it has been very, very well documented in Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Jim Hogan's, what was it, Climate Cover-Up, that when you look at the sceptics or the deniers or whatever we want to call them, the people that don't really believe the evidence is there, many of them, in fact, are being supported by the fossil fuel industry and what you have is a small number of people and we, in the media, are complicit in a lot of this. When you put out a report, if you have someone saying, look, this is the IPCC report and it says we have got to do something. Oh, but we have to balance it. We balance it by having someone on the - but that's creating an imbalance, in fact, of reality. To the public it's, "Oh, those scientists haven't made up their mind yet." I thought that's why Tim Flannery was set up to provide an arm's length source of information, and what is the situation on science?

Otherwise you cherry pick the people that are speaking this side and that side, you cherry pick the information. I thought it was a brilliant thing for Australia to set up an institution not to advocate one strategy or not, but to say what is the latest information science is providing.

TONY JONES: Okay. Well, Stewart Franks - Professor Stewart Franks - has his hand up again, so we'll go back to you. You want to respond to that?

STEWART FRANKS: All I can say is I am a scientist. I started off, I got into this, because I did believe in it and through that process of looking at the science and being objective, not emotional and certainly I'm not funded by big coal or big oil, my car is 20 years old. It cost me three grand. I am not a rich man. I'm not funded to say the things I do. It is actually a belief in science, rather than a belief in pure environmentalism and there are so many more...

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, you are running outer to the vast majority of climatologists and I'm wondering what's the source of your information? What makes you so able to see what they can't?

STEWART FRANKS: I go to conferences. I go to conferences. I talk to climate scientists. We actually do all agree that Co2 has had a role. Where we all disagree, and you only have to look at the models - the models themselves disagree, is whether it's going to be catastrophic or not into the future. That is actually a different question. So it's about objective science.

TONY JONES: Okay. I'm just going to interrupt you for a moment because we have also go in the audience the lead author of the IPCC's fifth report, which will be published later this week. Professor Steve Sherwood is the director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Do you want to respond to this, because the IPCC's method is being called into question here?

STEVE SHERWOOD: There is a lot of things to respond to here. I don't know, would you like me to respond to the slow down in warming?

TONY JONES: You can choose.

STEVE SHERWOOD: Okay. The consensus question is, I think, an important one and studies have been done showing that 97% of scientists who actually work on climate accept, roughly, the conclusions of the IPCC, that we have a warming and that it's going to probably be significant. If you look in the peer reviewed literature, which is what really matters, you see even higher percentages. So I think it's - and that doesn't prove that we're right, but I think it's an important thing that people have to know, that has been hidden by the way this issue has been presented to the public.

TONY JONES: Now, what we've seen in the past couple of weeks are what appear to be two completely different media versions of leaked copies of the IPCC's report. Presumably you've been following this. It is, of course, extremely confusing for the public to read one day that the IPCC's report, in a leaked story, is going to say they got it all wrong, and then to read a few days later that they got it all right and, in fact, they are going to confirm what they said in 2007. You are one of the authors. What are they going to tell us?

STEVE SHERWOOD: I can't speak to what the report will say, but I can say that there are inaccuracy's in The Australian's report comparing unlike numbers from their leaked draft and the previous version of the report, which may have confused people.

TONY JONES: And I'll just go back to Professor Franks on that. These two different versions of the stories, competing stories, people often get confused by things like this.

STEWART FRANKS: Yeah. I think it is only fair to wait for the IPCC report to come out. That said, I was actually an expert reviewer, so I have seen it. I haven't seen the final version, but there is this complexity in it, in that they have to acknowledge the observations and the observations are not in line with the more extreme predictions from the climate models. That said, my understanding is they will still say we actually have learnt more in that process and it is still going to be catastrophic. I would actually question the entire process. I think, actually, we don't need to have that polarised debate: you believe or you don't believe. It's far more nuanced than, that and I don't think the IPCC process actually helps to have a real dialogue about the threat and about the potentials for what climate is going to be way off into the future in 100 years' time.

TONY JONES: Well, let's go back to David Suzuki. The obvious question is, we will go back to this whole thing about how it's reported, because the media plays a huge role in all of this?

DAVID SUZUKI: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, it's a deliberate attempt to again create this confusion among the public. It's kind of like the theft or the invasion of, what, over 3,000 emails - email exchanges between climatologists and having, to me, committed a crime in getting this information, certain groups have then looked through 3,000 emails trying to find some little phrase that can be pulled out to create the sense that, oh, it was a climate-gate. You know, these scientists, they just - they're deceiving us and they're exaggerating and create a story out of basically nothing. It has been shown to be nothing. But once that story comes out with sensational headlines, it echoes in the echo chamber and is caught up in this paper gets it and repeats it and then it stays out there and it's very, very confusing. I agree this kind of situation is not very helpful.

TONY JONES: Let's go back to Steve Sherwood there. I mean, you've been watching this reporting as it's been going on. Do you not feel almost bound to come out and say, oh, no, they've got this wrong or they've got this right?

STEVE SHERWOOD: Well, it's difficult to draw a line between not talking about - I don't want to talk about a report that hasn't come out yet but if you see a report that is incorrect, in as far as it refers to what's already been published, then you have to point that out, I think.

TONY JONES: Okay. Let's go to our next question. It comes from Greg Steenbeeke. Steenbeeke, I beg your pardon.

SCIENCE CAUTION

GREG STEENBEEKE: Thank you, Tony. Dr Suzuki, thank you for the opportunity...

DAVID SUZUKI: Where are you?

TONY JONES: Oh, up there.

DAVID SUZUKI: Yeah.

GREG STEENBEEKE: Thank you for the opportunity. As a broadcaster, this question is probably quite pertinent to you, but how can we, as scientists, sell to the general public that we apply cautious language not because of the - sorry, because of the implications, not because of our reservations?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I don't know whether it's selling anything to the public but certainly, in my experience, part of the problem is that scientists aren't trained to speak in the vernacular of everyday life. You know, we use short cuts by using jargon, and it is very difficult then for us to try to create a language where we explain complex issues in understandable ways. What I find about the IPCC report and the climatology community is a remarkable unanimity within that community, but also an urgent need to speak out. Scientists generally are really chicken about getting involved in some kind of dispute. As a broadcaster, I find it very difficult to urge them, if it is a controversial subject. They don't want to have science being portrayed badly. You know, they just don't want to get into that controversy so I find it remarkable that climatologists are speaking out as much as they are and it's an indication of the urgency they feel about the situation. But I think scientists have really got to learn to speak the vernacular of everyday language and get off that jargon stuff.

TONY JONES: Let's go back to the questioner, Greg. Are you actually a climate scientist?

GREG STEENBEEKE: I'm not a climate scientist. I'm an ecologist by what I work for. I actually am employed by New South Wales Government as an ecologist. I manage threatened species for the Sydney region.

TONY JONES: So I'm just wondering, listening to this do you feel constrained in the way that you talk about the science of climate change, for example?

GREG STEENBEEKE: Yes, I do. I grew up in a scientist household. My father was a physicist, my mother a physiotherapist, so I have got a bit of a background in science as well. And certainly, in trying to discuss matters with people that don't have a science background, I can find it difficult to explain clearly how, for instance, the plateauing of the temperature is fine to look at a 10-year argument, that from 1998 until now there is no effective change in the peak temperatures, but if you look at a 30-year graph, the continual rise is quite evident in that. It's carrying that information across to people who may not actually understand why it is that we look at 30 years and that sort of thing.

TONY JONES: David, do you want to respond to that? And I guess the question is - I mean, do you sort of appoint yourself as a sort of loud spokesperson for scientists who aren't speaking?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I see my role - I have always seen my role as a populariser of science. Now, the French call it vulgarisÃ© la science, vulgarising science, and it is.

TONY JONES: Is that what it is?

DAVID SUZUKI: It is. It is making it available to the public and in the process one has to make generalisations. You know, if I say, well, the temperature range is blah, blah, blah, and some guy will come up and say, "I'm a penguin expert and I know the rectal temperature of penguins is not what you say," and we get caught up in those kind of generalisations. But, yes, but I am not speaking on behalf of scientists. I'm just trying to translate their information so the public can understand and make up its mind. The trouble is I end up being perceived as, "Oh, he must know everything. He is telling us all this stuff." I am not. I'm just the messenger.

TONY JONES: Let's go back to - well, we've got the IPCC author here, or one of them, in Steve Sherwood. I mean, do you think it's a good thing to have activists like David Suzuki making the arguments that you perhaps can't make?

STEVE SHERWOOD: Yeah. Well, we're always conflicted as scientists because we don't want to appear that we're sort off our rocker or something or that we're activists but if we're concerned we feel that we ought to say something and somebody has to say something. But, yes, I very much appreciate having people like David to help speak out on these issues.

TONY JONES: Okay. Well, our next question comes from Nell Schofield.

GOOD GUYS DON'T WIN

NELL SCHOFIELD: Yes. In most of human history's narratives, the good guys always win and I'm just wondering, because it seems like the good guys are having such trouble at the moment up against their enemy, big carbon bullies, and I'm wondering what plot twists do you think are possible at this point to capture the public imagination and turn this grim fairytale around and give us the happy ending we're all craving?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I hope there is a happy ending. I mean that's all I have left is the hope there may be a happy ending. The reality is one of your eminent people in Australia, Clive Hamilton, has written a book called Requiem for a Species and guess what species it's a requiem for? It is us. And I've read the book from cover to cover and there is nothing I disagree with. But when you come to the end of it, it is kind of pretty bleak and hopeless and what I say is thank you for the sense of urgency, Clive, but I don't think you can say it is too late. We don't know enough to say that with certainty. It is urgent and we've got to get on with it. So we're in a time when human beings have become so powerful. We are such a very abundant animal now. We've got technology that amplifies our impact on the planet, a consumptive demand, a global economy, that has made us so powerful we're altering the physical, chemical and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale. That's why scientists call this the anthropocene epoch. So, in a time when we have become so powerful, how are we going to make decisions to guide us into the future in such an uncertain future? I would have thought that the best information we have now is science. If we don't listen to what scientists are finding, then what are we going to do: listen to the Bible? Are we going to listen to the Quran or an advertising agency? I think that Australians are at a very critical time. You had a mechanism whereby science could be provided, without a commitment one way or the other - What are scientists finding? - so that you could make up your mind. By shutting that down, what does that tell us? In my country, I'm afraid, we're doing exactly that. We're shutting down all the research that looks at climate change. We are vetting. We're muzzling scientists working for government, unless they're vetted through the Prime Minister's office. We're actually determining what papers can say when they're going to be published from the government. So they have to conform to what the government policy is. I think this is a very crazy, dangerous situation. If we're going to marginalise science to political priorities, I think that's very, very dangerous.

TONY JONES: All right. Let's go to a video question. This one is from Tony Thomas in Melbourne.

GAOL POLITICIANS?

TONY THOMAS: David, you've urged, at least twice, that legal ways should be found to jail politicians for denying what you call the science of climate change. David, do you still hold that view?

DAVID SUZUKI: You bet. I think there is a category called wilful blindness. Our problem is we have no means of holding our so-called leaders - people we elect to political office to lead us into the future - we have no way to keep them accountable, except booting them out of office. But the reverberations of what they do or do not do today are rippling far beyond the coming years. There will be generational impacts. Now, if you have people who stand up to take positions of leadership and they deliberately suppress or ignore information vital to making an informed decision, I think that's wilful blindness, and wilful blindness, I understand, is a legal entity that you can sue people for.

TONY JONES: But are you seriously suggesting that politicians should be tried and possibly even jailed for exercising free speech?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I throw it out as something that ought to be brought up. I haven't really thought it through to the end but I certainly - personally I think that there is a great deal of wilful blindness and it ought to be pointed out in some way, yes.

TONY JONES: You did think it through enough to say this in your speech over the weekend and visiting academics...

DAVID SUZUKI: Oh, were you there?

TONY JONES: Visiting academics generally stay out of local politics but you described Tony Abbott's scrapping of the carbon tax and the sacking of Tim Flannery as criminal negligence.

DAVID SUZUKI: I agree.

TONY JONES: Did you go too far?

DAVID SUZUKI: No. No. I don't think so. I believe...

TONY JONES: How can you elevate it to criminal when it's actually a policy decision?

DAVID SUZUKI: I believe what is going on now is criminal, our activity, because it is a crime against future generations and there ought to be a legal position of intergenerational crime and I think there is criminal negligence.

TONY JONES: Okay. A gentleman up the back there has his hand up. Sorry, there's a gentleman up the back there who had his hand up. We'll get the microphone to you, sir. Go ahead.

FROM THE FLOOR

AUDIENCE MEMBER: With wilful blindness, it's an impossibility for ice to melt and the surrounding water to rise. Fort Dennison has shown no rise in sea level in 168 years and I've just come back from Perisher Valley. It snowed Friday and it snowed yesterday, and it's springtime. I'm just disappointed that the truth isn't coming out. The suicide level in Australia...

DAVID SUZUKI: No, but come on now. You're giving us anecdotal stories.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: ...is 2,300 and not going down. There's a lot of people have anxiety over it.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. We'll take that - sorry, I'll just interrupt you there. We'll take the first few points and let David Suzuki respond to them.

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, you know, we have this all the time in Canada. We get a snow fall in the winter in Canada and it goes down to 20-below and everybody says, "See, Suzuki, you guys are full of crap. You know, here it's cold. What's this global warming stuff?" You can't use that kind of anecdote as if it proves anything. I mean, I just don't think it's relevant to the science that you're involved in. You disagree?

TONY JONES: All right. Well, let's go back to our - well, let's go back to one of our scientists. We'll hear from both of them, actually, but Stewart Franks.

STEWART FRANKS: In an opinion piece last week you wrote that the Great Barrier Reef was threatened by the increasing frequency of cyclones. Everyone watching and listening can onto the Bureau of Meteorology's website and see that there is no increase. In fact there has been a decline over the last 40 years and no increase in the severity. Are you not, by exaggerating...

DAVID SUZUKI: That I have to admit...

STEWART FRANKS: ...or even just getting wrong, are you not actually vulnerable of actually undermining your very own aim in that, you know, the Great Barrier Reef does have environmental threat, but cyclones ain't one of them?

DAVID SUZUKI: All right. That was one, I have to admit, that that was suggested to me by an Australian, and it is true, I mean, it may be a mistake. I don't know.

STEWART FRANKS: I also admire a man that can say he made a mistake. So I thank you for that.

TONY JONES: Let's go back to the other side of our science argument. I mean what about this frequency of extreme weather and particularly cyclones issue, because it has been challenged in the media and then on the other hand we hear the IPCC's report will say there will be more extreme weather events?

STEVE SHERWOOD: Yeah, well, I would agree with Stewart that the cyclones are not threatening the reef but the warming temperatures are and the reducing pH of the world's oceans is. As for cyclone frequency, it's really hard to tell from observations whether cyclones are becoming more frequent or more intense or not. In the North Atlantic it looks like they are. But the physics tells you that they're going to get stronger sooner or later in a warmer climate and I think we're pretty confident of that.

TONY JONES: All right. Let's go to our next question. It comes from Daniel Mainville.

IDEOLOGY V SCIENCE

DANIEL MAINVILLE: David, having grown up in northern Quebec on a steady diet of The Nature of Things, I consider myself part of the Suzuki generation. I think it's your dedication and passion for the environment that inspired me to become an environmental engineer and I thank you for that. I really deeply thank you for that. Now, given the rise of right-wing conservative governments, both in Australian and in Canada, how can we best effectively shift the political debate from ideological and economic self-interest back to science and evidence-base?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, this is the number one question. You see, I think the problem is that corporations have now become so big and so powerful, the big ones are bigger than most governments on the planet and they have the capacity to fund political campaigns beyond anything individuals can do. They're not humans. Corporations are economic entities or structures and yet they're allowed to fund political candidates and when those candidates are elected, guess who gets in the door first? It's corporations. And we now have governments that seem to feel that the corporate agenda is the job of government, to keep true to that corporate agenda, and this is an issue that we have to face up to. Corporations are not people. They shouldn't be funding. They shouldn't be funding campaigns at all. They shouldn't be allowed to lobby governments. We elect governments to inform themselves and make decisions. But that's what we're up against and the media that shape a lot of people's ideas are controlled generally by either very wealthy people or corporate giants and so we're getting a very slanted world to live in, in the media, and I don't know how we get out of that dilemma.

TONY JONES: Are you saying this is what's happening in Canada or in Australia or both?

DAVID SUZUKI: In Canada. I'm afraid we're leading the way now in the world in the - we now have a government that is increasing - making a major commitment to increasing the number of prisons at a time when the rate of crime has been dropping steadily over the last 10 years. So I'm wondering - you know, I'm not a guy that thinks about conspiracies but I'm wondering whether our Prime Minister thinks he is going to be creating new categories of crime, like eco terrorism or, as he calls us, environmental radicals, radical extremists. Anyway, there is a very strong...

TONY JONES: With all due respect, that does sound like a conspiracy theory.

DAVID SUZUKI: In my moments I do kind of wonder.

TONY JONES: Okay. It's time to move onto other subject. We have got a lot of questions to get through. Our next question comes from Goronwy Price.

NUCLEAR POWER

GORONWY PRICE: Many environmentalists, like George Monbiot writing in The Guardian in Britain have now embraced nuclear power as part of the solution to human beings' greenhouse emissions. They use the example of France, which in the late 1970s went nuclear and within 20 years it had closed every single coal-fired and petroleum-driven power plant. As a result, their emissions - their greenhouse emissions - are about one quarter of Australia's and they have a similar standard of living as we do. Contrast that to Germany next door, which post-Fukushima, has moved away from nuclear power. They have opened two coal-fired power - two coal-fired power plants in the last year and they've got three more to open soon and there is coal-fired power plants being opened as far as the eye can see. Isn't it true that environmentalists such as yourself and the Green movement in Australia, the Green party which has rejected nuclear power, are perversely now part of the problem with reducing emissions rather than part of the solution? Further...

TONY JONES: I think that's probably a good place to leave that question.

GORONWY PRICE: Okay.

TONY JONES: We can come back to you.

GORONWY PRICE: My good point.

TONY JONES: David?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I just happen to think that if you're talking about a sustainable future, then how can you make a commitment to something that is simply not sustainable in the long run? You know, even nuclear energy is going to run out. But, at the same time, why would we indulge in a technology that creates problems in the end when you use it? We're left with the question of waste and we still haven't solved what we're going to do with that waste. We're left with the dilemma with coal that we create carbon dioxide and add to climate change. So I would say neither of those is a solution. That, in fact, we've got to go full tilt to what is clean and renewable.

TONY JONES: But you understand - I will come back to you in a second, Goronwy. But you understand George Monbiot, for example.

DAVID SUZUKI: I know George is absolutely desperate and feels and, you know, I think it is just crazy. What's needed now is to able to put green energy directly on the grid. You can do that with solar, geothermal or wind. Nuclear, to crank it up, will take 15 to 20 years to put those plants on stream. They're very, very expensive, as well as being unreliable. Far better to say, "Look, we've got a thousand Pearl Harbours going off at once and we can't even wait for nuclear now, we've got to go full tilt. And anybody that would argue that in Australia you've got to go nuclear to be clean, I mean, what the hell is going on? You have got something Canadians would kill for. It's called sunlight and a huge part of your country that is very, very short on people. It seems to me solar farms could be spread right across here and I don't get the argument for nuclear.

TONY JONES: Let's go back to our questioner?

GORONWY PRICE: Well, going back to your 15-year argument, I remember people making that argument 13 years ago. Here we are 13 years in and we have done nothing. You could come back as...

DAVID SUZUKI: Because we did nothing on renewable, that's why.

GORONWY PRICE: You could come back here in 15 years and you could be saying the same thing and still nothing would be done. The question of renewables - sure, we have lots of sunlight in Australia but the problem is renewable energy is diffuse. If people can think back to January 2011 or January 2010, we had the whole month when it rained just about every day. The sun didn't shine. There was very little wind for a lot of those days. We do not have the technology at the moment to store energy for weeks at a time, enough to power the great cities like Sydney and Melbourne.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. Well, that's a good place to leave that again. David, do you want to respond to that? I mean it is the argument that to create enough energy to power large cities, it's not going to be enough just to have solar power?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, that I don't know. Let's ask our experts. My understanding is there is plenty of sunlight beyond anything all of humanity needs and will need into the future. We just need a major program to harness that and assume there will be creativity in the process that will solve the issues of storage.

TONY JONES: Okay. Our next question is from Lucy Murrie

RELIGION & SCIENCE

LUCY MURRIE: Hi, Mr Suzuki. You've said religion blinds some to science...

DAVID SUZUKI: Where are we?

TONY JONES: Over here. Over here.

LUCY MURRIE: ...but not me. My education at university has been vital in understanding environmental impacts, such as that of rising sea levels in the Pacific Islands. Similarly, my faith teaches me to be a steward of the earth and assist the environment in any way I can. Is it less about religion and more about greed for overconsumption and the 'want everything now' mentality that is making us refuse to assist the environment?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, yeah, I think there is - I've never seen religion necessarily as being inimical with the idea of acting in a scientific way, other than the people who are directly wedded to the literal translation of the interpretation of the Bible, I don't necessarily see a conflict between religion and science and what its conclusions are.

TONY JONES: Incidentally, are you an atheist, agnostic?

DAVID SUZUKI: I am an atheist.

TONY JONES: Yeah.

DAVID SUZUKI: But I don't go out trying to convert everybody to my atheism. I'm a quiet atheist.

TONY JONES: Does Gaia exist for you?

DAVID SUZUKI: Sure, I think Gaia is real. It's just a description of the complex web of living things and the interconnectivity of it, yeah. I think that was a brilliant idea that James Lovelock had.

TONY JONES: All right. Our next question comes from the Dean of the Melbourne School of Land and Environment, Professor Rick Roush.

GM OK

Prof. RICK ROUSH: Hi, David. After 16 years of experience with genetically modified crops and now 10% of the world's crop land planted annually by more than six million farmers, every major scientific organisation in the world has agreed that the commercially available, genetically modified crops are safe for food and the environment. The European Commission, for example, concluded that GM crops have been adopted rapidly by farmers globally because of reduced production costs, reduced use of toxic pesticides, increases in yield and net economic benefits to farmers. Herbicide tolerant crops, for example, reduce tillage, erosion and greenhouse gas emissions. So after all of this, what scientific evidence in particular supports your concerns about GM crops and foods?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, first of all it's just based on experience. We simply don't know enough to anticipate the consequences of very power technologies like this. Something much simpler called DTT when we used it - I mean Paul MÃ¼ller won a Nobel Prize for discovering DDT kills insects. But once it was used out in open fields, guess what, we discovered, oh, my God, the open fields are very different from a controlled situation in a lab and you end up affecting fish and birds and human beings. Unintended consequences. We didn't know about biomagnification. Now we're fooling around with the very stuff of life, the genetic information, and we are really caught up in the idea while a gene is a gene, it's just a piece of DNA with a specific amount of information and we can flip one from here to here. Take a gene that will allow a cod, a fish or flounder to live below zero. It's got its own anti-freeze and stick that gene from the fish into a strawberry plant so it's now frost-free, and you can do that manipulation, but that's kind of like taking Mick Jagger out of the Rolling Stones and sticking him with the Sydney Symphony and saying, "Now, make music." Now, you will get noise coming out of it, but you can't really predict, because it is the context within which each performer is going to produce a result. The context of a gene is the genome, and we simply don't know enough now to be able to anticipate all of the consequences of these big manipulations. If it's so safe, why is it that every time a geneticist discovers or does an experiment which seem to show a negative effect - feeding genetically engineered potatoes to rats or whatever - they are pounced on by the genetics community and absolutely pounded. Rather than saying, "Hey, wait a minute now, we better find out about this." I'm ashamed of my colleagues in genetics for the fact that they're not open any longer to the possibility of harmful effects. I think it's far too early to say what the effects will be. I tell Canadians now if we want to see the health effects of GMOs, just watch Canada over the next ten years. We're already doing the experiment. We've been eating it now for over five years. We'll find out.

TONY JONES: Okay. I'll come back to you in a minutes, Jim, but we've got another question on this topic. I beg your pardon from Rick. We'll come back to you in a minute. But we've got another question on this topic. It's from Professor Jim Dale. He's the director for tropical crops and bio-communities at the Queensland University of Technology. Go ahead, Jim.

GM BANANA

Prof. JIM DALE: Thanks, Tony. David, my research group works on bananas and, in fact, what we do is develop genetically modified bananas. Our most important project and our lead project at the present time, is to develop bananas with very high levels of pro vitamin A. We're particularly targeting those towards East Africa, primarily Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Brurnie and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, in those countries bananas are the staple food. In Uganda, for instance, one kilo per person, per day. Amazing levels of consumption. The-problem is they also have very high levels of vitamin A deficiency. Around about - in Uganda, around about 30% of kids have vitamin A deficiency and that's clinical, with the worst outcome, of course, is death and blindness and night blindness. So really severe outcomes. So our project is to develop bananas, which is their staple food, to increase the amount of pro-vitamin A, beta carotene in their diets. We're already well over our target. We have field trials in Australia and in Uganda and, interestingly, the lead - the products that we're taking through is with a banana gene and we've taken that gene out of a banana that naturally has very high levels of pro-vitamin A. And they exist, they're just not cooking bananas, so rather than that being bad science...

DAVID SUZUKI: But this is, sorry - is it intra-specific, that it's a species of banana into the same species of banana?

JIM DALE: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

DAVID SUZUKI: Great.

JIM DALE: So my question is that we don't think this is bad science. We think it's good science.

DAVID SUZUKI: I'm not saying it's bad science.

JIM DALE: Yeah.

DAVID SUZUKI: I'm not saying it is bad science. The degree of sophistication and manipulation is incredible. Now, if you're doing intra-specific manipulation, that's much more like just straight breeding, except that we now do it at molecular level and I would be far less concerned about that. But I still say that when you carry out these manipulations, you know, it seemed to be straightforward when, as I, when I got my training in the Jurassic age, in my genetics in the 1950s and early '60s, we thought genes were beads on a string, right, and they were very stable. Now we know they jump all over the bloody place and they have all these effects that when I was studying genetics we didn't know anything about that. And I would suggest that we still don't know a lot of this and when we do intra-specific manipulations, we better be very, very humble about being able to predict what the consequences are. This is not bad science. It's just when one tries to get it out into nature or into people's stomachs, you've got to be pretty careful. I think ultimately genetics is going to be very, very important, I have no doubt about that. I'm just saying what's the rush? The rush is being driven, I believe, by money, not so much about improving (indistinct).

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. I will go back to Professor Rick Roush. I know you wanted to get back into that discussion before when you heard the answer.

RICK ROUSH: Well, David, let's take your example of DTT. So I got interested in entomology and genetics after reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. If you go back to Silent Spring, all the key problems with DDT were really discovered by scientists by 1957. Roughly seven to eight years after widespread use of DDT and if track what was happening in the entomologic community during that time, people, including some of my professors at Berkeley were very concerned about DDT from its very introduction. Let's contrast that to what's happening with GM Crops. Sixteen years of use, extensive studies, the European Union spent over 300 million Euros looking for problems and to paraphrase and turn around the comment you made to Stewart earlier, you are running counter to the vast majority of scientists on this one. If we were to look at the numbers of people like James Dale that are working in area, you'd find there is about 97% of people that work in this area are now convinced after 16 years of field use that this is pretty safe. And in terms of the great rush, as you may recall the very first cases when people started having some success with genetic engineering, the first insect resistant plants tested in the laboratory were actually developed in 1986. It was ten years before they got to the field. Now, it's one of these cases of given the enormous environmental advantages, the reduction in pesticide exposure for farm workers, doing nothing can still do harm. At what point do we decide that these have had enough of an advantage and have been so thoroughly examined by so many scientists that it's time to let them go?

DAVID SUZUKI: I would feel much more comfortable if I didn't see a history, you know, for people like Pusztai and people who have really been hammered because of their negative results and basically suppression by their colleagues because it threatened the vested interests of the GMO companies, and the GMO community.

RICK ROUSH: Well, I would dispute that because every one of these cases people have moved forward and said, "Look, we've got a problem with this." If they haven't reached the published literature, such as the recent ones by Seralini and so forth, they've certainly been shared widely on the Internet. So I'd dispute that there's significant suppression.

DAVID SUZUKI: No, I...

RICK ROUSH: And, actually, David, it's the people who have been the critics that have been challenged lately. I mean, Seralini prosecuted a case against French scientists for libel because the French scientists dared to challenge Seralini. So it's cutting both ways.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right.

RICK ROUSH: And even those that are critics are getting challenged as well.

TONY JONES: Can I get you to respond to that, but also this: what if that is the thing which will help us feed the coming nine billion people on the planet?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I mean, that is always the argument that's made. GMOs are very, very expensive. Now, the people that need this food are not going to be able to afford it. Are we going to just create these new crops and then give them away? I simply don't believe that's what's going to happen. I don't think it is a generosity for the rest of humanity that is driving this activity.

RICK ROUSH: Actually, we are. I mean, Bt corn technology has been given away to the Kenyan State Government research people for use for subsistence farmers. Monsanto gave away insect resistant potatoes in Mexico over 20 years ago. James is working on lots of similar cases. In cases where there is no economic return, it is, in fact, being given away and they're not so difficult to develop. When I was at Cornell, we got a gene that was a gift from Monsanto for experimental purposes. We made broccoli plants that were resistant to attacks of Dimebag Moths. A student - one of our students made about 50 transformants in about six months. The great cost of these things are no longer the actual creation of the plant. It's the regulatory challenges to take sure that you can take them to market, to do all that safety testing.

TONY JONES: Okay, Rick, well we'll get a response to that and we'll move on?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I don't have any response. It sounds great. I don't know.

TONY JONES: You think you might change your mind on this subject then?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I am certainly open...

TONY JONES: Given the scientific consensus that he's talking about.

DAVID SUZUKI: I am certainly open to be convinced. I am not saying there isn't a future in this. I believe that this is a very powerful technology and that it's got immense potential. The problem is that it is so powerful, I don't think we should be rushed into it. If the Africans don't want GMOs let the Africans say keep it out. Don't force it into them by giving them GMOs as some kind of gift and say, okay...

TONY JONES: I'm sorry, you did mention Africa and Jim threw his hand up. So a quick comment, there, Jim.

JIM DALE: I think the really important thing now, our project is funded by the Gates Foundation. Yes, the plants will be given away for free. No, they won't be forced on anybody. It will be taken up, we believe, by the farmers and particularly the female farmers because they're concerned about their children. I think just following up on what Rick says, constantly the big ag biotech companies are under incredible pressure and criticism. I believe very strongly - I believe very strongly that the big benefits of GM technology and we're talking version four and five, not version one which came out in 1996, but version four and five, when we're using plant genes, where we're developing drought-resistance, we're developing disease-resistance and the real benefit must come in Africa and Asia, and that's not where big companies are going to make their money because these are primarily subsistence farmers.

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, that's great and I think the fact that you're saying these are step, what, four or five or six says why were we so anxious to rush in with step one in the first place? It was far too early.

JIM DALE: Well, I think - but I think it's like mobile phones. You remember back in 1996 the first mobile phone was mobile but so is a grand piano if you can lift it.

DAVID SUZUKI: I don't think mobile...

TONY JONES: Okay. I tell you what, I'm going to take that as a comment. It's quite a good place to end that one. Our next question is from Peter Ward.

FARMERS & ENVIRONMENTALISTS

PETER WARD: David, over here. Given that 70% of the Australian continent is owned, managed for productive agriculture, I'd say that it's essential for a whole range of environmental outcomes to engage with agriculture, however, regulators and even people in the environmental movement have tried to make it a one-way conversation, where they've dictated to farmers what they should be doing with their land and often failed to recognise the stewardship and the areas of commonalty and alienated the people who are responsible for managing these vast areas of land, rather than - yeah, failing to recognise their stewardship. So do you see or can you propose ways of improving that conversation?

DAVID SUZUKI: Yeah, it's absolutely stupid. I don't - that kind of conflict is crazy and this is why we've got to - we've got to stop the fighting. This is what I'm saying. I've had a belly-full of fighting and I think that it's time that we all come together and work out a basis of agreement first, otherwise we're speaking from different perspectives and hitting each other and there is always going to be winners or losers or compromise and I don't think we can do that anymore. So let's come together and let's start from a fundamental platform of agreement, and this is what I've said to the fossil fuel industry that has invited environmentalists to come in and negotiate. The problem is that we have to generally begin the conversation within the context of economics, and we have to say, well, what is possible, what can we afford to do, and I'm saying: no, no, no, no. That's the wrong entry point. That we've all got to come together. If you're a farmer and I'm an environmentalist activist, let's come together and leave our vested interests out the door, okay, and let's start with a basic set of agreements. So this is what I'm appealing to everybody about. Can we all agree on what the foundation of our species is? Let me throw out the suggestion. I would start off by saying that we are biological creatures and absolutely the highest priority we have is a breath of air. If you don't have air for more than 4 or 5 minutes, you're dead. If you have to breathe contaminated or polluted air, you're sick. So is not clean air at the absolute top of our basic need? And then you can go through water and soil that gives us our food and sunlight that gives us our photosynthesis that gives us our energy and biodiversity, which is what keeps us alive as animals. And then if say those are our most fundamental needs that have to be protected, then you can begin to ask: How do we make a living? How do we farm without compromising those fundamental things? Then I think that we're all working together for the same thing.

TONY JONES: Okay. We're going to move onto another topic. Thank you. We've got a video question from Jennifer Horsburgh in Palm Beach, Queensland.

PAY TO HAVE BABIES

JENNIFER HORSBURGH: Our major political parties are committed to increasing our population by giving cash payments, such as baby bonuses, paid parental leave, et cetera. In our overpopulated world, do you think it's selfish and immoral to pay people to have babies?

DAVID SUZUKI: Selfish on whose part? The taxpayers' part who is paying for it? I don't understand. We're beyond the caring capacity of the planet for our species, but it's not just a matter of numbers, it's a matter of consumption per person, and certainly when you look at the consumptive pattern of our populations, the industrialised world is the most overpopulated part of our species. But the problem that we face in Canada - I think it must be the same in Australia - is there is a remarkable similarity between the curve of increase in population and the growth of the economy - economic growth. And so politicians often confuse that correlation of the growth curves with causation; that is its population growth that is constantly keeping that economy growing. And so in our country, where Canadians are not replacing themselves, we're having less than two children per family, we're using immigration to keep the population (indistinct).

TONY JONES: Now, you got yourself in hot water at home recently when you said Canada is full and that the immigration policy is disgusting

DAVID SUZUKI: Yes.

TONY JONES: What was your point?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, the immigration policy that is disgusting is we are allowing people to come in if they pay us a whack of money or if they are trained in medicine or some of the high professions that are desperately needed by the countries from which they come. We're just buying them. We're not willing to pay to train our own people and we're sucking them from some of the poorest countries, like India and Pakistan and South Africa, we're bringing them into Canada, and I happen to think that's disgusting. I think that we have a responsibility to those populations in other parts of the world that are far poorer than ours, because we are obscenely wealthy compared to them, and we've got to share it with those other...

TONY JONES: Can I just ask you the obvious point then? I mean the idea that Canada is full, means you close the doors, you don't let poor people in if they want to come to Canada?

DAVID SUZUKI: I think that we have an obligation with refugees. I'm proud to say that we took 50,000 Vietnamese boat people when they had the problem, but I think the reality is that we are way over the capacity of Canada to support the population we have.

TONY JONES: Okay, let's move on. We've got another video question. It's from Jennifer Carter from Tambo Upper in Victoria

FRACKING

JENNIFER CARTER: Hello, Dr Suzuki.

DAVID SUZUKI: Hi.

JENNIFER CARTER: The Gippsland region in Victoria boasts highly productive farming land and a tourism industry based, in large part, on its extensive and Ramsar-listed inland lakes system. But now we fear the imminent lifting of a moratorium on unconventional gas extraction which would industrialise large parts of this region and expose it to irreversible contamination of its water, its land and its air. So what should we do? Why should our valuable and irreplaceable assets be secondary to mining interests, particularly when communities have made it abundantly clear they do not want this fracking industry?

TONY JONES: David?

DAVID SUZUKI: Why are you asking me? I'm not an Australian, for God's sake. I don't get it. Fracking is one of the dumbest technologies there is. We have no idea what is under the ground. You know because we are an air-breathing, landlubber, living on the top skin of the planet, we think out of sight there is nothing down there. We have no idea what we're doing when we pump vast amounts of water down there, we don't know whether it will end up contaminating our drinking water, we don't know, but we're just going to go down there and try to frack as much gas as we can get out of the ground. This is just, I think, crazy, especially for a country as water-poor as Australia. But why do you ask me what to do? I mean it seems to me that's a political issue and if people in your area don't approve of it, why isn't that registering? You've got a democracy.

TONY JONES: I suppose people are asking you because you have strong opinions on the subject.

DAVID SUZUKI: Do I have strong opinions?

TONY JONES: It seems that you have. But we should also ask the obvious question. The United States has virtually become energy independent as a result of this kind of technology?

DAVID SUZUKI: Yes, and there is a massive, massive growing opposition to that fracking.

TONY JONES: All right. We've got time for one last question.

DAVID SUZUKI: Already?

TONY JONES: We're nearly out of time. This one comes from Nina Hardy.

SUSTAINABLE ADVICE

NINA HARDY: The doom and gloom around environmental and social issues can de-motivate people and make them feel like the problem is beyond their control. What lessons can you share with us, from around the world, here in Australia about how we can change that and help people achieve positive change for a more compassionate and sustainable future, despite where our governments are leading us?

DAVID SUZUKI: Yeah. Well, I agree. Back in the 70s and 80s people like me used to run around, you know, citing that slogan: 'Think globally and act locally' and for most people the minute they thought globally they went, 'Oh, my God. You know, it's so overwhelming and I'm insignificant and it really disempowered people because of the sense of inability or, yeah, powerlessness. And I think it really - I agree with Thomas Berry who says you have to think locally and act locally to have any hope of being effective globally and so when you start looking at the level of municipalities, huge things going on now. Whether or not it can come together fast enough to deal with the big issues like climate change, I don't know, but I see lots of activity at the municipal level. In Canada, one of the biggest things that I see is urban agriculture. Canada is a northern country and yet we've got used to the idea of thinking we can go to the store and get fresh fruit and vegetables 12 months a year. And people are beginning to realise, no, you know, in the winter, we go to the canned goods section if we want vegetables and fruits and that's the way it should be. So we're paying much more attention to ago tension to locally organically grown food in the city itself and it's being driven by young people. Young people are starting to find out something about the food they consume. I find that a very, very exciting thing. But there are example after example of things that can be done at the municipal level all across Australia and Canada. But I'm very excited by what's going on in South America. In Ecuador, Ecuador has enshrined Pachamama in their constitution. And what that means is Pachamama, Mother Earth, has constitutional rights to exist. Now, in the southern part of Ecuador is a river called the Vilcabamba, which is considered to have properties that allow you to live longer if you live and drink Vilcabamba water and so, of course, there are a lot of Americans that have moved down there to live there because - anyway. This American couple noticed that a road building company was dumping gravel and junk into the creek, a river, and causing it to flow faster, and a storm came and that fast-flowing river wiped out half of their farm fields. So they sued the road-building company on behalf of Vilcabamba River, because the constitution allowed them to do that. But when you're suing on behalf of a river, you can't ask for money. They river can't use money and they won their case, the first case in the world, where a part of nature actually won a battle and that company is obligated to restore the river back to its original condition.

TONY JONES: Go ahead.

DAVID SUZUKI: Okay. But everybody, I'm sure, has heard of Bhutan, this amazing country and Bhutan offers a radically different perspective in that the King said what the Bhutanese are interested in is not GNP, gross national product, but GNH, gross national happiness. Happiness and well being is the purpose of governments and the economy is there to serve those ends, not just steady growth forever and that's something, again, I think we're looking to.

TONY JONES: Yeah, but they did that pretty much by closing their doors to outsiders.

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, their doors were closed and they opened them and they discovered to their amazement that the rest of the world regards progress and development as money. Their students started to come back to the country when they opened the gates and said, "You are not going to believe what they think development is," and the King said, "No, it's about happiness."

TONY JONES: Yep. One final question before we finish and that is that you mentioned to that questioner that this municipal approach may not work for climate change. So what do you say to people who are depressed and feel unmotivated because of the global political response to climate change?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I think that you have no choice. If you don't do anything, then you assure that you're going to go the negative way. We have to get involved and I think - you know, I was always amazed at how soon your elections were. Every time I came to Australia it seemed you were having another federal election. Well, guess what, that turns out to be great. It's only two and a half years until your next election. Get off your ass and let's get something done about this.

TONY JONES: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Well, that's all we have time for tonight. Please thank our guest, David Suzuki. Thank you. Well, next Monday we will be in Perth for a special Q&A debate between Anthony Albanese and Bill Shorten, the two men vying to lead Labor. Both played leading roles in the Rudd and Gillard Governments. Now they've raised their hands to lead Federal Labor in Opposition. Under the new Labor Party rules they will need to win not only the support of MPs in caucus, but also the Labor Party members in the branches. Well, next week on Q&A, they will face their one and only televised debate to answer questions from an audience that represents the full cross-section of Australia votes: Labor, Liberal Green and everything else. Which man is best placed to capture the Australian electorate and attempt to lead Labor back into government from their current state? Join us next week for the Q&A Labor leadership debate. Coming up next, Australia's new Environment Minister Greg Hunt responds to David Suzuki live on Lateline. Until next week's Q&A, goodnight.