The stupefying heat of New Years Day capped off the hottest year on record in Australia, and one of the four warmest years globally since records began in 1861.

The world's climate is changing, and the consequences will be devastating. Yet, even while we're all baking, the Howard government still can't bring itself to take real action about this grave problem.

This week in Sydney, the Government is hosting a sham summit on climate change with five of the world's biggest polluting countries. Now is an important moment to tell our government and its polluting friends to get serious about climate change. Click here to send a letter to your local newspaper now:

 http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/StopTheEndlessSummer

The meeting in Sydney this week is for the "Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate", a US-led initiative that is supposed to "complement" the Kyoto Protocol. The US and Australia, of course, are the only developed countries that still refuse to sign Kyoto - the international agreement that commits the nations of the world to binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the "Vision Statement" of the partnership, signed by Australia, the U.S, China, India and Japan, partners "will collaborate to promote and create an enabling environment for the development, diffusion, deployment and transfer of existing and emerging cost effective, cleaner technologies and practices."

This verbose nonsense shows up the partnership for what it is - a way of evading the serious efforts already underway in the international community to address climate change. It is the public policy equivalent of cowering in an air-conditioned room on a hot day waiting for the sun to go down.

We cannot let the Australian and U.S. Governments shirk their responsibility for tackling climate change. Click here to write to your newspaper, help expose this week's talks for what they are, and urge the Government to take real action:

 http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/StopTheEndlessSummer

By clicking the links in this email we've made it easy for you to write your own letter to the editor of the major papers in your state or territory. Our politicians closely monitor the letters pages of papers around the country, and right now they need to know that we think it's high time they got serious about climate change.

Thanks for being part of this.

The GetUp Team