(AU SMH) The Facts We Need To Face If Australia’s Coastal Towns Are To Survive Devastation

Sydney Morning Herald - Harry Creamer

Author Harry Creamer is a mid north coast NSW climate campaigner, and member of Climate Change Hastings.

Here we go again.

In northern NSW and south-east Queensland we are once more witnessing a high intensity rainfall and flood crisis.

Lismore is suffering terrible flooding, the Clarence River is about to overflow its banks, and if the weather system moves south, Port Macquarie will get hit again, less than a year after the record-breaking floods in March 2021.

At times like this, we must respond with facts on what is driving such extreme weather.

Since the north Queensland floods in 2019, there have been 137 disasters declared in 398 local government areas, covering close to 20 million Australians.

This is an ongoing threat to our safety and security and local economies.

The town of Lismore has been inundated as heavy rainfall pushed the Wilson River over its banks. Credit:Elise Derwin

Humanity is interfering with natural Earth systems.

As we burn fossil fuels and destroy forests, we are adding energy to the climate. For every degree of global warming, the atmosphere holds 7 per cent more water.

Climate models show global warming increases the risk of intense rainfall by more than 20 per cent. Extreme rains and record floods have increased since 1950.

Climate change doesn’t cause these events, but it makes them worse.

Living on or near the coast makes communities more vulnerable. Warmer oceans create more evaporation, leading to higher rainfall. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, means higher rainfall.

High intensity rainfall and flooding are becoming worse and breaking records.

NSW floods

‘A tragedy unfolding in front of our eyes’: Estimated 400 still trapped in Lismore flood

Today, in northern NSW and south-east Queensland, flood records are toppling.

The SES says “we are talking record-breaking floods”. The future doesn’t look good for all locations that are prone to these events.

The message is clear – we need to understand that climate change is real and governments need to act, pushed on by people power.

Federal Coalition government policies come nowhere near to tackling the problem here and now. In fact, they are making it worse by funding fossil fuel projects and approving land clearing.

Nor is their funding for climate adaptation measures and disaster recovery anything like enough. State and local governments also have an important role to play.

Every structure, be it a roadside gutter, a bridge, or an office block, is built to withstand a flood of a given size.

But as rainfall changes, we need to re-design and build these structures to withstand more destructive floods.

Business suffers too in multiple ways – just ask the shop owners in Gympie and Lismore right now.

Climate policy

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It may feel uncomfortable, and many people may want to deny it, but we need to have a serious talk about climate change. 

We must do everything we can to help those affected, and we need to confront the elephant in the room - climate change is here, and it’s doing the damage and threatening our lives and the way of life we treasure as Australians.

It’s affecting all Australians and our Pacific and Asian neighbours.

These are not easy conversations to have, but with each flood, bushfire, heatwave, drought and other natural disaster made worse by human-induced climate change, they are conversations we must get better at having.

Links

• NSW deputy premier savaged for fighting dam building ‘culture war’ during floods disaster
• Lismore businesses that couldn’t afford insurance premiums face huge flood damage bills
• It’s slower than a cyclone but the east coast low can be deadly too
• Our climate window is closing, this is what needs to happen
• (AU The Conversation) Like Rivers In The Sky: The Weather System Bringing Floods To Queensland Will Become More Likely Under Climate Change
• (AU The Conversation) Our Hospitals Are At Greater Risk Of Flooding As The Climate Changes. We Need Better Evacuation Plans.
• (Reuters) Killer Heatwaves And Floods: Climate Change Worsened 2021 Weather Extremes

(AU ABC) Doctors Say Climate Change Is Already Having Devastating Effects On Our Health

ABC 7.30 - Jess Davis

Jen Speers at home during her pregnancy while the air was filled with bushfire smoke. (Supplied: Spears family)

Key Points The IPCC warns that health systems need to be strengthened to protect human health and wellbeing Jen Spears had a baby after the Black Summer and her doctor said she had "the placenta of a heavy smoker" Dr Michael Holland says he attributes three full-term still-births to poor air quality during the bushfires

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned to expect an increase in illness and premature deaths as the earth warms, but Australian doctors say they're seeing devastating health effects already. 

Jen Spears lives in Tura Beach on the New South Wales south coast and was three months pregnant with her third child when the Black Summer bushfires hit, exposing her to smoke for five weeks.

"It was a very nervous time because we'd heard reports of babies that had trouble breathing or were born underweight," she said. 

"When they inspected the placenta, it was the placenta of a heavy smoker, which I'm not. I've never smoked a day in my life."

Her daughter Mia was born early but healthy, although it's unclear what the long-term health impacts for babies like her will be.

"You worry for her and her development, because when they're tiny babies, they can't tell you if something's wrong," Ms Spears said. 

Jen Spears was pregnant with her daughter Mia during the bushfires.(ABC News: Jess Davis)

"I don't know how to sit and be content and not worry when it's a hot day or the weather blows, or my daughter is sick for any reason."

Further up the NSW coast at Moruya, Dr Michael Holland saw more immediate and devastating impacts on his patients.  "Personally, I saw in that period of time, three full-term stillbirths," he said. 

Dr Michael Holland believes bushfire smoke had negative impacts on a number of pregnancies during the Black Summer. (ABC News: Jess Davis)

"Two out of those three, I believe can be directly attributed to the air quality at that time because they were direct placental abnormalities."

He believes around 15,000 births on the east coast of New South Wales have been exposed to conditions that could leave lasting consequences. 

"We know that the incidence of high blood pressure in pregnancy, gestational diabetes in pregnancy, low birth weight of babies and preterm birth are all increased by this air pollution," he said.

Never-ending cycle of disasters

A man trapped on his roof near Woodburn in northern NSW this week.

Once again, Australians are battling a natural disaster on a scale never seen before, as floods devastate large parts of the east coast. 

"This is a stark reminder of the impacts of climate change in our immediate vicinity here in Australia," Professor Kathryn Bowen, a lead author on the UN report, said. 

"Climate change is a threat to human health and wellbeing and the health of the planet. 

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"Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a really brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future."

While natural disasters bring imminent danger to people's lives, the IPCC report warns climate change will lead to increased deaths and illness from heat, malnutrition, malaria and gastro, as well as increasing threats to mental health.

"One thing that we're seeing now is what we're calling cascading and compounding impacts," Professor Bowen said. 

"For example, the Black Summer in Australia was preceded by severe droughts and then the summer fires were followed by floods in some places.

"These compounding and cascading impacts really affect individuals and society's ability to recover as often there's little time between the onset of these shocks." 

The report warns that heat in Australia will reach the limit of human survivability, with parts of northern Australia becoming uninhabitable and that rural communities will face increased stress.

Rural communities vulnerable

Debbie Wilmot says the drought and bushfires had an impact on her health. (ABC News: Jon Daly)

Debbie Wilmot owns a gift shop in Stanthorpe, Queensland, and has seen first hand the devastating impacts of drought on her community. 

"The drought was horrendous," she said.

"The heartbreaking stories that we got from our farmers and our locals, it just was gut wrenching."

Water had to be trucked into this town in southern Queensland for 18 months after it ran out of supply in 2018, before bushfires shrouded the town in smoke the following year after years of drought.

"I'm a chronic asthmatic and the dry and the dust and the smoke and the bushfires really had an impact on my health," Ms Wilmot said. 

"Being out in regional areas, you don't have access to a lot of health professionals."

Dr Dan Halliday says regional health services need more resources and funding. (ABC News: Jon Daly)

Stanthorpe doctor Dan Halliday said the extreme weather led to more people presenting to hospital due to a lack of water for sanitation and clean drinking water, as well as respiratory problems.

He wants to see regional and rural healthcare bolstered to cope with increasing acute and chronic illnesses.

"What we're seeing is that we're providing a just-in-time service for rural remote areas," Dr Halliday said. 

"Realistically, if we don't have the resourcing and funding to actually go into our rural and remote communities, who are going to be the most vulnerable in terms of climate change, we are going to see ongoing challenges going forward."

Strengthening health systems

Jen Spears says authorities need to do more to tackle climate change. (ABC News: Jess Davis)

The IPCC has warned health systems need to be strengthened to protect human health and wellbeing, and that a key risk for Australia is an "inability of institutions and governance systems to manage".

"There's a very large gap in our adaptation efforts to date. National Planning on a health and climate change is advancing," Professor Kathryn Bowen said.

"For example, the Victorian government released its health adaptation plan earlier this year, but implementing these plans is key and remains challenging.

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"We know that [climate change] will primarily affect the pre-existing diseases and morbidities that are in our community," Dr Holland said.

"If you have people who already have chronic respiratory or cardiac diseases, they will be the first affected. However, it also severely affects the areas with the least resources and that is our rural and remote areas."

In a statement, a spokesperson for federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the government's Climate and Resilience Adaptation Strategy, released last year, includes health system considerations and is designed to support governments, communities and businesses to better adapt. 

The statement said climate change was a global challenge and all countries, including Australia, needed to take action.

But Jen Spears said authorities can't wait for more victims before they act. 

"You hope that maybe today will be the day that they take it seriously," she said.

"My daughter is maybe the first generation to be impacted in this country. 

"We need to start taking stock of what's important to us as Australians. If it's not the health and wellbeing of our most vulnerable, like our babies, our children, what's the point?"

Links

• (USA Psychology Today) How Climate Change Affects Our Brains
• (AU The Conversation) Our Hospitals Are At Greater Risk Of Flooding As The Climate Changes. We Need Better Evacuation Plans.
• (UK Independent) Climate Crisis Increasing Risk Of Premature Birth And Childhood Illness
• (Japan Times) Climate Change Is Also A Very Real Public Health Emergency
• (Forbes) Climate Change And Health: A Heart Specialist’s Notes On How A Warming Planet Impacts Our Health And Wellbeing
• (CNBC) Yale Psychologist: How To Cope In A World Of Climate Disasters, Trauma And Anxiety
• 'Managed retreat' from coastal living could soon be reality, climate report warns
•  Tim Winton says Australia's climate change approach a 'dumpster fire of business as usual'
  
• Jen thought she'd done everything right to protect her unborn baby from bushfire smoke

(AU SMH) The Climate-Change Changes The Politicians Don’t Want To Talk About

Sydney Morning Herald - Ross Gittins

Author Ross Gittins is the Economics Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald

It’s strange to think that both sides of politics are leading us to a policy-free federal election campaign at a time when we have so many problems we should be debating.

Not that the parties won’t have policies written on a bit of paper somewhere, but that they don’t want to talk about them.

Why not? Because any policy you propose can be used by your opponent to spread scare stories about your intentions. Last time, for instance, Scott Morrison used Labor’s support for electric vehicles to claim it was out to destroy the weekend.

Consumers will save money and reduce emissions when all new houses are all-electric. Credit: Simon Letch

This time, one issue neither side wants to dwell on is climate change. We have – at long last – reached bipartisan agreement on getting carbon emissions down to net zero by 2050.

And on the question of how far we should have got by 2030 (yes got, not gotten; you may have reverted to English as it was spoken when the Pilgrim Fathers left England in 1620, but I haven’t), the parties are offering a genuine choice between ambitious and unambitious.

But neither side wants to talk about how we’ll get to net zero. Which leaves us in debt to a top energy expert, Tony Wood, of the independent think tank the Grattan Institute, who does want to talk about it.

Wood and his team flesh out something we know: that the main strategy is to get as much as possible of the energy we need from electricity.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Labor leader Anthony Albanese. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Households and business will rely on low – or zero – emissions electricity more than ever as it replaces their current use of petrol and diesel for transport and gas for cooking and heating,” he says.

Thanks to the move to renewables, emissions from the electricity sector have fallen consistently over the past five years and are expected to fall much further over this decade.

But, on present policies, emissions from all other sectors – including transport, industry and agriculture – are expected to stay much the same.

To achieve net zero by 2050, demand for electricity is likely to double, at least. That means installing a lot more wind and solar (including rooftop) to meet this increased demand and to replace existing coal and gas-fired power stations as they’re retired.

As the anti-renewables crowd continually reminds us, this requires much ingenuity, effort and expense to ensure a reliable supply of power across the national electricity grid, despite the ups and downs of demand and the vagaries of wind and sun.

Climate policy

The climate clock: What’s the world’s carbon budget and what’s Australia’s share?

But it also involves a lot of investment in changing the transmission grid from one that largely moved high-voltage electricity from a handful of big power stations in the country to the big cities, to one that joins up a multitude of small commercial and household sources of solar and wind power.

An increasing proportion of homes will be putting power into the grid sometimes and taking it out other times. The Morrison government is insisting on a large and continuing role for natural gas in the electricity system.

Wood is far from convinced. “The large-scale use of gas as a ‘transition fuel’ – supplying ‘base-load power’ with lower emissions than coal – does not stack up economically or environmentally,” he says.

Nearly 80 per cent of Australia’s hugely increased gas production is exported as liquefied natural gas. It’s sold at the world price, meaning “the good old days of low-priced east-coast gas are gone, making gas an increasingly expensive energy source”.

At present, gas provides about a quarter of Australia’s local energy consumption and contributes close to 20 per cent of our emissions. And whereas electricity prices have been falling, gas prices have been rising.

Gas has been declining as a share of Australia’s power supply since 2014, and this is likely to continue. “Gas will play an important backstop role in power generation when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing – but this role will not require large volumes of gas.”

Pollution

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In the home, people value being able to choose between gas and electricity for cooking and heating, but this can’t continue. They’ll save money and reduce emissions when all new houses are all-electric.

“The uncomfortable truth is that natural gas is most likely in decline in Australia, and achieving the net-zero target requires that to happen … Attempts to hold back the tide through direct market interventions, such as contemplated in [Morrison’s] National Gas Infrastructure Plan, will probably require ongoing subsidies at great expense to taxpayers.”

As for cars and other light vehicles, achieving net zero by 2050 requires all new cars to be electric or hydrogen-powered by 2035. That’s because, on average, our cars stay on the road for more than 15 years. The alternative is “costly and inefficient measures to scrap large numbers of cars in the 2030s and ’40s.”

To achieve the 2035 target, we need to do what almost every other rich country does. We need to do what the car manufacturers have asked for: set mandatory emissions standards. But neither major party is willing.

Links - Grattan Institute - Orange Book 2022: Policy priorities for the federal government (pdf)

• Overview
• Imagining a better Australia
• Economic policy
• Housing
• Energy and climate change
• Transport
• Health
• Aged care
• School education
• Retirement incomes
• Budget policy
• Integrity