In 2006, climate scientist Dr Joelle Gergis was pulling weeds under Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge on the work-for-the-dole scheme. Centrelink advised removing her PhD from her resume, saying: “It’s not going to help you find a job.”
She refused, and instead enrolled in a professional writing course.
This year Gergis is one of Australia’s lead authors on the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nation’s IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2014, her inter-disciplinary team SEARCH – South Eastern Australian Recent Climate History – won the Eureka science prize, informally known as the Oscars of Australian science.
But the story is not all pretty. Since 2012, Gergis has had to face attacks from trolls and climate change sceptics. But 2018 has seen her climate scholarship vindicated and the story of her work published to acclaim.
Back in those Centrelink days, I met Gergis in a writing class at RMIT. She was a couple of years shy of 30. During class introductions she said: “I’m doing this course because I want to write about climate science in a way ordinary people can understand.”
You knew she meant it. Gergis was straight-shouldered and direct and had recently finished a PhD examining El Nino events using ancient climate records.
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| Dr Joelle Gergis speaks at the Melbourne University launch of her book Sunburnt Country in April.Credit:Les O'Rourke |
In 2008, Gergis was introduced to eminent climate scientist Professor David Karoly at the University of Melbourne. He liked her research proposal to reconstruct Australia’s climate history of the past 1000 years. Karoly knew that nothing like this existed for Australia, so he backed her to write a multi-disciplinary research funding application, bringing on board some of Australia’s leading climate scientists, historians and water managers.
The result was the SEARCH team. Their work was to gather early weather observations from historical sources and align climate information extracted from tree rings, corals and ice cores. The research would provide a better assessment of the range of natural climate variability over longer periods.
By 2012, the SEARCH project had produced remarkable results, including a study showing the unprecedented recent warming of Australian temperatures associated with greenhouse gases. The timing proved crucial, Gergis recalls: "Because the results had relevance for the climate change policies that were being fiercely debated in Canberra at the time, the paper received more attention than I could ever have imagined." The findings were seen as reinforcing the iconic "hockey stick" image of abrupt late 20th century warming which had become the bete noire of the climate change sceptics.
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| "As I wrote my book ... the Great Barrier Reef experienced back-to-back bleaching for the first time in its history." Credit: Dean Miller/Great Barrier Reef Legacy |
International and local climate change sceptics had also noticed the error and soon set to work. The credibility of the team's results was lampooned. The sceptics claimed this was proof of cheating, ridiculed Gergis' credibility and in some cases referred to her as a “bimbo” and a “brain-dead retard”. The Australian published a piece by Queensland academic and climate sceptic the late Bob Carter that accused Gergis of producing "tendentious science". “It was a complete nightmare,” Gergis says.
The inboxes of Karoly and Gergis were deluged. Under Freedom of Information laws that apply to university staff, critics demanded access to four years of email correspondence, determined to prove collusion and intent to deceive. Karoly stood solidly behind Gergis but nothing prepared her for this onslaught, which included abusive and bullying emails. She took unpaid leave in 2013 and Karoly had to talk her into returning to take up a prestigious Australian Research Council fellowship she’d been awarded during the ordeal.
But the sceptics didn’t win. Their trawling found nothing, no trail of deceit. Over four years, the SEARCH team re-crunched all of the statistical inputs using de-trended data and the outcome was virtually identical. The original research was now reinforced by extensive review. An independent group of international scientists reproduced the results using three additional statistical methods in one of the field's leading journals, Nature Geoscience.
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| Sunburnt Country by Joelle Gergis. |
In the book, Gergis gives a full account of the campaign of bullying by climate change sceptics. She concludes: “In the end, this saga will be remembered as a footnote in climate science, a storm in a teacup, all played out against the backdrop of a planet that has never been hotter in human history.”
In 2016 Gergis moved to the north coast of NSW. Reflecting on that time she now says: “As I wrote my book, my home town was flooded by record-breaking rainfall generated by Cyclone Debbie. The Great Barrier Reef experienced back-to-back bleaching for the first time in its history. It felt like there was no distinction between what I was writing about and what was playing out across the country.”
During the scheduled final proofing of Sunburnt Country, Gergis' father fell seriously ill and died. She had no choice but to complete this exacting work between distraught flights to family in Sydney and her university teaching in Melbourne.
At the Brisbane Writers' Festival in September, an interview delved into her personal experience as a climate scientist with a public voice. Gergis reflects: “It's an enormous privilege to be a spokesperson for this issue, but sometimes the responsibility and emotional toll is hard to bear. I can’t just go home and forget about it.”
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| The audience at the Melbourne launch of Sunburnt Country. Credit: Les O'Rourke |
In January 2019, while most Australians are on holidays, Gergis will be at an IPCC meeting in Vancouver, volunteering her time alongside almost 200 climate scientists from around the world. Afterwards they will write thousands of words in careful reports, despite the fact that many of them realise they are working in politically hostile environments.
The most recent IPCC recommendation by 91 eminent scientists – to end the use of coal power by 2050 – was dismissed in October by Federal Environment Minister Melissa Price as “drawing a long bow”. The disconnect between political comments like this and public perception of the issue has fuelled a growing response – most recently in demonstrations by thousands of Australian schoolchildren and the COAG revolt by the NSW government over federal inaction on emissions.
For her part, Gergis is as direct and determined as she was when I first met her 12 years ago: “We’ll keep going in the hope our work can help turn the tide before it is too late.”
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