Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is using a new report about global warming as a tick of approval for the Coalition's direct action policy on climate change.
But the head of the federal government's Climate Commission, which released the report on Monday, said the Coalition's approach won't drive the economy-wide change that's needed.
The report, The Critical Decade, argues that "the evidence that the earth's surface is warming rapidly, is now exceptionally strong and beyond doubt". Mr Abbott said he was far from unhappy with the findings of the report.
"What we have seen from the Climate Commission is actually a tick of approval for direct action as a rapid way of getting our emissions down," he told reporters in the southern NSW city of Queanbeyan.
But commission chief Tim Flannery argued that storing carbon in land ecosystems - which is the focus of the opposition's policy - won't help prepare the Australian economy as a whole for the challenge ahead. "We need to use whatever means we can to sequester carbon but also start reducing emissions from industry," he told reporters in Canberra.
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"(To do that) we need some sort of price on carbon. A price is unavoidable." Greens climate change spokeswoman Christine Milne said it was outrageous for Mr Abbott to say the commission backed direct action.
"This report today blows Tony Abbott's climate program out of the water absolutely," she told reporters in Canberra.
"The report says you cannot just have offsets in the landscape. You have to reduce fossil fuel emissions plus restore carbon to the landscape and maintain it." Some 60 per cent of the opposition's abatement effort would come from storing carbon in soil and vegetation.
Mr Abbott, who was visiting structural steel fabrication firm Weldcraft Engineering, took aim at Labor's plan for a price on carbon from July 2012.
"This is a toxic tax, toxic for jobs, toxic for small business," he said, citing the adverse impact higher electricity prices would have on Weldcraft.
"It's also going to be hit in the transport it needs to get materials to the workshop and out of the workshop."
Opposition climate action spokesman Greg Hunt said the coalition recognised the world was warming and humans were having an impact.
"There is bipartisan support in Australia in support of the science of climate change, as presented in this report," he said. But Labor backbencher Dennis Jensen remains a global warming sceptic, telling reporters in Canberra that all the evidence pointed to global temperatures stabilising.
A carbon tax would not achieve anything, he said.
