By Mick Le Mon
I’m always reassured to learn from the entertaining Letters to the Editor in this fine newspaper that reports of the extinction of dinosaurs have been exaggerated.
The few remaining dinosaurs who deny climate change, believing humans can burn fossil fuels or release greenhouse gases with impunity, often express their outlandish views to our long-suffering Editor, who publishes them for the bemusement of his readers.
Worldwide, over 99% of all scientists and rational beings understand that the rapid, catastrophic cooking of our planet is all too real and we are responsible for it. Our world is overheating and it is happening on our watch: it is up to us to do whatever we can to limit and repair the damage to our environment and the whole ecosystem.
The dinosaurs are like passengers on the Titanic, about to submerge, protesting that when they bought their tickets, they were promised the ship was unsinkable. Of course, it’s not only dinosaurs: ostriches and Donald Trump have a similar ability to turn a blind eye to the truth.
A number of recently retired Australian politicians could perform the same political party trick: remember the PM who brandished a lump of coal in Parliament? He’ll be remembered for that, old whatshisname. Fortunately, the current government are grown-ups and they are trying to make up for their predecessors’ corrupt toadying to the fossil fuel lobby.
Australia’s latest State of the Climate report, updated every two years by the respected national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Bureau of Meteorology, was published last week. Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek described it as ‘sobering reading’. Science and Industry Minister Ed Husic said it ‘reinforces the urgent need for action on climate change’.
The facts are undeniable. The Australian continent is now 1.47°C warmer than it was in 1910. Sea levels are rising faster than ever before. CSIRO and BOM find these changes are due to increased amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the principal cause of which is burning fossil fuels.
Through the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty adopted in 2015 by 196 Parties at COP21 in Paris, most nations agreed to try to limit global heating since 2000 to 1.5°C, to prevent the worst potential environmental damage. Australia has little leeway left to achieve this aim.
Indeed, earlier this year, the think tank, Climate Economics, calculated that the government’s commitment to cut emissions by 43% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 would result in two degrees of warming – which most analysts believe would cause irreversible damage to life on Earth as we know it.
Australia has always lived on a cyclical roller-coaster of extreme weather events. Years of excoriating drought are followed by colossal bushfires which consume the tinder-dry fuel. Then, what we now know as the dry ‘El Niño’ pattern is replaced by ‘La Niña’: tropical cyclones form, torrential rain falls and all the low-lying land is flooded. This sparks new growth, then drought and fire return and the cycle repeats.
There is no better evocation of this process than the masterwork of Australia’s only Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Patrick White, The Tree of Man, which tells the nation’s story from 1900 to 1950 through the life of one family. If you only read one book about Australia, make it this one.
This year, the floods in country NSW and Victoria have exceeded all previous records, as did the 2019 bushfires. The CSIRO/BOM report proves this is just the tip of the iceberg: our rural communities are not as unsinkable as we once believed.
It warns that climate change will cause ‘an increase in the risk of natural disasters from extreme weather, including “compound extremes”, where multiple extreme events occur together or in sequence, thus compounding their impacts’.
Droughts and heatwaves will be more frequent. There will be more days of extreme heat and fire seasons will be fiercer and longer. Tropical cyclones will be fewer but more intense. Marine heatwaves will destroy most of Australia’s coral reefs. More carbon dioxide is causing oceans to acidify ten times faster than ever in the past 300 million years.
Dr Jaci Brown, the research director of CSIRO’s Climate Science Centre, said that, while the past decade was warmer than any in the previous century, it would be the coolest of this century.
At the same time, weather patterns will become more erratic. Average rainfall over south-eastern Australia will continue to decline, as over the past 30 years, but huge cloudbursts and the kind of heavy, unremitting rain we have experienced this year will cause more flash flooding, taking a terrible toll on lives and livelihoods, homes and businesses.
The cause is clear: the atmosphere can hold 7% more water for each degree of increase in the air temperature. Right now, the once-productive farms and pastures of inland NSW and Victoria are like a giant sponge. They cannot absorb any more water. When rain falls, it stays on the surface, fills the dams to overflowing and makes rivers burst their banks. Hundreds of miles from the sea, it has nowhere to go: so the land becomes a vast lake.
The same is happening to Australia’s neighbours on low-lying islands in the Pacific. As sea levels rise, their homes go under water. Last year, I wrote about Torres Strait islanders suing the Australian government before the UN Human Rights Committee. Amazingly, the islanders won their case – but reparation may be beyond the government’s powers.
Yes, this is an emergency – the greatest our species has ever faced. Different countries experience climate changes at different rates. Jersey’s weather is largely benign, but it, too, has moments of rage. Pacific islanders and Australians are on the front line.
Every human being, wherever we live, has an inescapable duty to do whatever we can to counter and limit the effects of climate change. Everybody. Even dinosaurs.
