Humans Are Good At Thinking Their Way Out Of Problems – But Climate Change Is Outfoxing Us

The Conversation - John Quiggin

In some areas of human activity such as farming, we are exhausting our capacity to adapt to climate change. Daniel Mariuz/AAP

John Quiggin John Quiggin is Professor, School of Economics, University of Queensland. He is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, a former Member of the Climate Change Authority, and an active campaigner for action to mitigate global heating.

There is growing evidence that Earth’s systems are heading towards climate “tipping points” beyond which change becomes abrupt and unstoppable. But another tipping point is already being crossed - humanity’s capacity to adapt to a warmer world.
This season’s uncontrollable bushfires overwhelmed the nation. They left 33 people dead, killed an estimated one billion animals and razed more than 10 million hectares – a land area almost the size of England. The millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide the fires spewed into the atmosphere will accelerate climate change further.
Humans are a highly adaptive species. In the initial phases of global warming in the 20th century, we coped with the changes. But at some point, the pace and extent of global warming will outrun the human capacity to adapt. Already in Australia, there are signs we have reached that point.

Climate change and its effects, such as drought, challenge the human capacity to adapt. Dean Lewins/AAP

Wine woes
For Australia, the first obvious tipping point may come in agriculture. Farmers have gradually adapted to a changing climate for the last two decades, but this can’t go on indefinitely.
Take wine grapes. In the space of just 20 years, a warming climate means grape harvest dates have come back by roughly 40 days. That is, instead of harvesting red grapes at the end of March or early April many growers are now harvesting in mid-February. This is astounding.
The implications for wine quality are profound. Rapid ripening can cause “unbalanced fruit” where high sugar levels are reached before optimum colour and flavour development has been achieved.
To date, wine producers have dealt with the problem by switching to more heat-tolerant grape varieties, using sprinklers on hot days and even adding water to wine? to reduce excessive alcohol content. But these adaptations can only go so far.
On top of this, the recent fires ravaged wine regions in south-eastern Australia. Smoke reportedly ruined many grape crops and one wine companies, Tyrrell’s Wines, expects to produce just 20% of its usual volume this year.
At some point, climate change may render grape production uneconomic in large areas of Australia.

Smoke has tainted grape crops across southeast Australia. James Ross/AAP

The Murray Darling crisis
Farmers are used to handling drought. But the sequence of droughts since 2000 – exacerbated by climate change – raises the prospect that investment in cropland and cropping machinery becomes uneconomic. This in turn will negatively impact suppliers and local communities.
The problems are most severe in relation to irrigated agriculture, particularly in the Murray–Darling Basin.
In the early 1990s, it became clear that historical over-extraction of water had damaged the ecosystem’s health. In subsequent decades, policies to address this – such as extraction caps – were introduced. They assumed rainfall patterns of the 20th century would continue unchanged.
However the 21st century has been characterised by long periods of severe drought, and policies to revive the river environment have largely failed. Nowhere was this more evident than during last summer’s shocking fish kills.
The current drought has pushed the situation to political boiling point - and perhaps ecological tipping point.

Thousands of dead fish at Menindee Lakes in the Murray Darling river system underscored the effect of drought. AAP/Supplied

Tensions between the Commonwealth and the states have prompted New South Wales government, which largely acts in irrigator interests, to flag quitting the Murray Darling Basin Plan. This may mean even more water is taken from the river system, precipitating an ecological catastrophe.The Murray Darling case shows adaptation tipping points are not, in general, triggered solely by climate change. The interaction between climate change and social, political and economic systems determines whether human systems adapt or break down.

Power struggles
The importance of this interplay is illustrated even more sharply by Australia’s failed electricity policy.
Political and public resistance to climate mitigation is largely driven by professed concern about the price and reliability of electricity – that a transition to renewable energy will cause supply shortages and higher energy bills.
However a failure to act on climate change has itself put huge stress on the electricity system.
Hot summers have caused old coal-fired power stations to break down more frequently. And the increased use of air-conditioning has increased electricity demand – particularly at peak times, which our system is ill-equipped to handle.
Finally, the recent bushfire disaster destroyed substantial parts of the electricity transmission and distribution system, implying yet further costs. Insurance costs for electricity networks are tipped to rise in response to the bushfire risk, pushing power prices even higher.
So far, the federal government’s response to the threat has been that of a failed state. A series of plans to reform the system and adapt to climate change, most recently the National Energy Guarantee, have floundered thanks to climate deniers in the federal government. Even as the recent fire disaster unfolded, our prime minister remained paralysed.

Failure to act on climate change is putting pressure on our electricity systems. Darren England/AAP

The big picture
Australia is not alone in facing these adaptation problems – or indeed in generating emissions that drive planetary warming. Only global action can address the problem.
But when the carbon impact of Australia’s fires is seen in tandem with recent climate policy failures here and elsewhere, the future looks very grim.
We need radical and immediate mitigation strategies, as well as adaptation measures based on science. Without this, 2019 may indeed be seen as a tipping point on the road to both climate catastrophe, and humanity’s capacity to cope.

Links

• Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against
• In this new world of bushfire terror, I question whether I want to have kids
• Scientists hate to say 'I told you so'. But Australia, you were warned
• Australia's bushfire smoke is lapping the globe, and the law is too lame to catch it
• Some say we've seen bushfires worse than this before. But they're ignoring a few key facts

(AU) Scientists Sign Open Letter To Australian Government Urging Action On Climate Change

ABC News - AAP | ABC

The letter comes amid a horrific bushfire season. (AAP: Dean Lewins)

Key points The scientists have expertise in climate, fire and meteorology They are calling for urgent action to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions The scientists warn the impacts of climate change are coming faster, stronger and more regularly

More than 270 scientists have signed an open letter to Australia's leaders calling on them to abandon partisan politics and take action on climate change.
The letter comes as Parliament sits for the first time this year and amid Australia's ongoing bushfire threat.
The scientists, who have expertise in climate, fire and meteorology, are calling for urgent action to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions and for Canberra to engage constructively in international agreements.
"The thick, choking smoke haze of this summer is nothing compared to the policy smokescreen that continues in Australia," University of NSW climate scientist Katrin Meissner said in a statement on Monday.

"We need a clear, non-partisan path to reduce Australia's total greenhouse gas emissions in line with what the scientific evidence demands, and the commitment from our leaders to push for meaningful global action to combat climate change."

The scientists warned an increase in bushfires was just one part of a deadly equation that suggested the impacts of climate change were coming faster, stronger and more regularly.
Heatwaves on land and in the oceans were longer, hotter and more frequent, they said.

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that defined the bushfire crisis

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Australian National University climate scientist Nerilie Abram said the letter was the product of scientists' despair as they witnessed the deadly fire season unfold.
"Scientists have been warning policymakers for decades that climate change would worsen Australia's fire risk and yet these warnings have been ignored," Professor Abram said.
Separately, Oxfam said the Government must demonstrate it had fully grasped the lessons of this "horrific" bushfire season.
"In spite of the scientific evidence and the extreme weather we're living through — bushfires, hailstorms and drought — the Government still hasn't joined the dots and taken action to tackle the root causes of the crisis," Oxfam chief executive Lyn Morgain said in a statement.
She said Australia must dramatically strengthen emissions reduction targets and move beyond fossil fuels.
"The Government's narrow-minded focus on adaptation and resilience simply does not go far enough," she said.
She said Australia could wield great authority and leverage globally if it changed its policies.
"If we led by example and immediately strengthened our own emissions reduction commitments, and if we linked our own crisis with those escalating around the world, we could be a great catalyst for stronger international action," she said.

Links

• Academics call on Government to 'acknowledge the threat' and cut greenhouse gas emissions
• Scientists say we have 10 to 12 years to turn things around. Individuals can make a difference
• 11,000 scientists declare climate emergency, warning world faces 'catastrophic threat'
• Top Academics Write To Morrison Government Asking For 'Deep Cuts' To Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Two pioneering scientists who changed how we think about the climate
• Ross Garnaut's climate change prediction is coming true and experts warn it's going to cost the nation billions
• The Year In Climate Change: Leaders Keep Ignoring The Science, And This Is Not Fine
• The 2010s Were Another Lost Decade On Climate Change
• (AU) 'Cause For Great Concern': Australia Ranked Last In Global Assessment On Climate Change Action
• (AU) About 100 Countries At UN Climate Talks Challenge Australia's Use Of Carryover Credits
• UNEP Says Global Emissions Must Be Cut By 7.6% Every Year For Next Decade
• 'Dangerously Close': Tipping Points May Trigger Climate Cascade

(AU) Media ‘Impartiality’ On Climate Change Is Ethically Misguided And Downright Dangerous

The Conversation - Denis Muller

A catastrophic summer has brought climate change into sharp relief – and our media need to have clear policies about how to report on it. Bianca de Marchi/AAP

Denis Muller Denis Muller is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne.

In September 2019, the editor of The Conversation, Misha Ketchell, declared The Conversation’s editorial team in Australia was henceforth taking what he called a “zero-tolerance” approach to climate change deniers and sceptics. Their comments would be blocked and their accounts locked.
His reasons were succinct:

Climate change deniers and those shamelessly peddling pseudoscience and misinformation are perpetuating ideas that will ultimately destroy the planet.

From the standpoint of conventional media ethics, it was a dramatic, even shocking, decision. It seemed to violate journalism’s principle of impartiality – that all sides of a story should be told so audiences could make up their own minds.
But in the era of climate change, this conventional approach is out of date. A more analytical approach is called for.
The ABC’s editorial policy on impartiality offers the best analytical approach so far developed in Australia. It states that impartiality requires:

• a balance that follows the weight of evidence
• fair treatment
• open-mindedness
• opportunities over time for principal relevant perspectives on matters of contention to be expressed.

It stops short of saying material contradicting the weight of evidence should not be published, which is the position adopted explicitly by The Conversation and implicitly by Guardian Australia.
Guardian Australia’s position is to concentrate on presenting the evidence that human-induced climate change is real and is having a detrimental effect on global heating, wildlife extinction and pollution. It states that this is the defining issue of our times and fundamental societal change is needed in response.
The position of Australia’s other big media organisations is far less clear and rests on generalities applicable to all issues.
The former Fairfax (now Nine) newspapers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, have separate codes. The Age code does not mention impartiality but requires its journalists to report in a way that is fair, accurate and balanced. The Herald’s does mention impartiality but confines it to an instruction to avoid promoting an individual staff member’s personal interests or preferences.
Both say, however, that comment should be kept separate from news.
News Corp Australia’s editorial professional conduct policy is quite different from all these. It states that comment, conjecture and opinion are acceptable in [news] reports to provide perspective on an issue, or explain the significance of an issue, or to allow readers to recognise what the publication’s standpoint is on the matter being reported.
Its journalists are told to try always to tell all sides of the story when reporting on disputes.
However, the policy also states that none of this allows the publication of information known to be inaccurate or misleading.
Markedly different as these positions are, they have one element in common: freedom of the press does not mean freedom to publish false or misleading material.
From an ethical perspective, this is a bare minimum. The ABC requires that its journalists follow the weight of evidence, which is a substantially more exacting standard of truthfulness than anything required by the Fairfax or News Corp newspapers. The Guardian Australia and The Conversation have imposed what it is in effect a ban on climate-change denialism, on the ground that it is harmful.
Harm is a long-established criterion for abridging free speech. John Stuart Mill, in his seminal work, On Liberty, published in 1859, was a robust advocate for free speech but he drew the line at harm:

[…] the only purpose for which power can be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

It follows that editors may exercise the power of refusing to publish climate-denialist material if doing so prevents harm to others, without violating fundamental free-speech principles.
Other harms too provide established grounds for limiting free speech. Some of these are enforceable at law – defamation, contempt of court, national security – but speech about climate change falls outside the law and so becomes a question of ethics.
The harms done by climate change, both at a planetary level and at the level of human health, are well-documented and supported by overwhelming scientific evidence.
At a planetary level, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report last year on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.
It stated that human activities are estimated to have already caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, and that 1.5°C was likely to be reached between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.
At the level of human health, in June 2019 the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners published its Position Statement on Climate Change and Human Health.
It stated that climate change resulting from human activity “presents an urgent, significant and growing threat to health worldwide”.
Projected changes in Australia’s climate would result in more frequent and widespread heatwaves and extreme heat. This would increase the risks of heat stress, heat stroke, dehydration and mortality, contribute to acute cerebrovascular accidents, and aggravate chronic respiratory, cardiac and kidney conditions and psychiatric illness.
At both the planetary and human-health levels, then, the harms are serious and grounded in credible scientific evidence. It follows that they provide a strong ethical justification for the stands taken by The Conversation and Guardian Australia in prioritising Mill’s harm principle over free speech.
Aside from these two platforms and the ABC, journalists are offered very limited internal guidance about how to approach the balancing of free-speech interests with the harm principle in the context of climate change.
External guidance is nonexistent. The ethical codes promulgated by the media accountability bodies – the Australian Press Council and the Australian Communications and Media Authority – make no mention of how impartiality should be achieved in the context of climate change. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s code of ethics is similarly silent.
These bodies would serve the profession and the public interest by developing specific standards to deal with the issue of climate change, and guidance about how to meet them. It is not an issue like any other. It is existential on a scale surpassing even nuclear war.
As I write in my study at Central Tilba on the far south coast of New South Wales, the entire landscape of farmland, bush and coastline is shrouded in smoke. It has been like that since before Christmas.
Twice we have been evacuated from our home. Twice we have been among the lucky ones to return unhurt and find our home intact.
The front of the Badja Forest Road fire (292,630 hectares) is 3.6 kilometres to the north, creeping towards us in the leaf litter. A northerly wind would turn it into an immediate threat.
From this perspective, media acquiescence in climate change denial, failure to follow the weight of evidence, or continued adherence to an out-of-date standard of impartiality looks like culpable irresponsibility.

Links

• The Murdoch Media: Polluting Australia's Airwaves? (video)
• James Murdoch Criticises Father's News Outlets For Climate Crisis Denial
• (AU) How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia’s Bushfire Debate
• (AU) News Corp Employee Lashes Climate 'Misinformation' In Bushfire Coverage With Blistering Email
• (AU) Foreign Media Rips Into Australia Over Causes Behind Bushfire Crisis
• Can The Internet Survive Climate Change? 
• Bushfires, bots and arson claims: Australia flung in the global disinformation spotlight
• Bushfires won't change climate policy overnight. But Morrison can shift the Coalition without losing face

(AU) ‘Futuring’ Can Help Us Survive The Climate Crisis. And Guess What? You’re A Futurist Too

The Conversation - Clare M. Cooper

When we are imagining this time, next year, are we limiting our thinking to how we avoid the conditions we faced in this summer? Or are there bigger questions we can ask? Shutterstock

Clare M. Cooper Clare M. Cooper is Design Lecturer, University of Sydney. Her work spans futuring, pedagogy, interdisciplinary design research, workshop facilitation, consultation, and the performing arts. She has recently completed her Ph.D. at Macquarie University.

Australians, no matter where we are, are coming to acknowledge that our summers – and our autumns, winters and springs – are forever changed.
We are, bit by bit, reviewing our assumptions. Whether we need to radically rethink our calendars, or question where and how we rebuild homes and towns, we face a choice: collective, creative adaptation or increased devastation.
How might this time next year feel - anxious, hot and sticky? How might it smell - like bushfire smoke? How might it taste - would seafood and berries still be on the menu in future summers as our climate changes? (One of my favourite placards at a recent climate rally was “shit climate = shit wine”).
When we think about this time next year, are we freaking out, or are we futuring?

How might the Australian summer of the future look, taste, smell? Shutterstock

Collaborative futuring in a climate crisis
“Futuring” is sometimes called futures studies, futurology, scenario design or foresight thinking. It has been used in the business world for decades.
Futuring means thinking systematically about the future, drawing on scientific data, analysing trends, imagining scenarios (both plausible and unlikely) and thinking creatively. A crucial part of the process is thinking hard about the kind of future we might want to avoid and the steps needed to work toward a certain desired future.
But futurists aren’t magical people who sweep in and solve problems for you. They facilitate discussions and collaboration but the answers ultimately come from communities themselves. Artists and writers have been creatively imagining the future for millennia. Futuring is a crucial part of design and culture-building.
My research looks at how futuring can help communities work toward a just and fair transition to a drastically warmer world and greater weather extremes.
Collaborative futuring invites audiences to respond to probable, possible, plausible and preposterous future scenarios as the climate crisis sets in. This process can reveal assumptions, biases and possible courses of action.

Cars lie damaged after a surprise hailstorm hit Canberra in January. Extreme weather events are predicted to worsen as the climate changes. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

Getting creative
Futuring is not predicting futures.
It’s a way of mixing informed projections with imaginative critical design to invite us to think differently about our current predicaments. That can help us step back from the moment of panic and instead proactively design steps to change things for the better – not 20 years from now, but from today.
If you peeked into a futuring workshop with adults, you might see a lot of lively conversations and a bunch of post-it notes. For kids, you might see them making collages, or creating cardboard prototypes of emerging technology.
You might have done some futuring today, talking with friends and family about changes you might make as it becomes obvious our summers will grow only hotter.
I’ve seen futuring occur at my daughter’s school, where children are invited to imagine being on the other side of a difficult problem, and then work out the steps needed to get there.

13-year-old protester Izzy Raj-Seppings poses for a photograph outside of Kirribilli House in Sydney late last year. AAP Image/Steven Saphore

Futuring a just transition to a warmer world
When we are imagining this time next year, are we limiting our (mostly city-dwelling) thinking to how we avoid the conditions we faced in this summer?
For example, are we thinking about staying away from bushfire-prone areas, or buying air purifiers and face masks? For those who can afford it, are we thinking about booking extended overseas holidays?
Or are we challenging each other to think beyond such avoidance strategies: to imagine a post-Murdoch press and a post-fossil fuel lobby future? Can we imagine ways to respond to extreme weather beyond individual prepping?
Including a diverse range of voices, especially Indigenous community members, is crucial to a just transition to a warmer world. We can’t allow a changed climate to mean comfortable adaptation for a wealthy elite while everyone else suffers.
Many of us have joined climate protests in recent months and years.
But more work needs to be done and bigger questions asked. What steps are needed to meet demands for public ownership of a renewable energy system: more support for those battling and displaced by bushfires? How do we work toward First Nations justice, including funding for Indigenous-led land management, jobs on Country, and land and water rights?
It is not enough to pin an image of our future to a wall and pray we get there.
Short term fixes in the form of drought or emergency relief won’t address the fact that extreme weather events are not going away.
Responsible, useful futuring mixes equal parts of imagination and informed projections. It’s not wild speculation. Futuring practitioners draw on scientific and social data, and weave it with the stories, concerns and desires of those present to find new ways into a problem.

Short term fixes in the form of drought or emergency relief won’t address the fact that extreme weather events are not going away. Shutterstock

Speaking of catastrophe to avoid it
Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating last year criticised the Morrison government for what he saw as a lack of vision:

If you look, there is no panorama. There’s no vista. There’s no shape. There’s no talk about where Australia fits in the world.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s performance during the unfolding bushfire horrors – widely perceived as lacklustre – suggests growing thirst for bolder vision on dealing with “the new normal.”
In their book Design and the Question of History, design scholars Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot and Susan Stewart argue that we should speak of catastrophe “in order to avoid it”.
Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote:

prophesying the advent of that catastrophe as passionately and vociferously as we can manage is the sole chance of making the unavoidable avoidable — and perhaps even the inevitable impossible to happen.

We owe it to those worst affected by the climate crisis – and to ourselves – to dedicate time to collaborative futuring as we rethink life in an increasingly hostile climate.
The next time you’re having a chat about this time, next year, are you collectively fretting or collaboratively futuring?

PODCAST 'Futuring' can help us survive the climate crisis. And guess what? You're a futurist too 10m 15secs

Links

• Why we should make time for remembering the future
• How we forecast future technologies
• 'This situation brings me to despair': two reef scientists share their climate grief
• What would a fair energy transition look like?
• A Better Way To Talk About The Climate Crisis
• Climate Change Splits The Public Into Six Groups. Understanding Them Is Key To Future Action
• Inequality Makes Climate Crisis Much Harder To Tackle
• Telling Stories To Battle Climate Change, With A Little Humor Thrown In

Early Lessons Emerge From Bushfires As Disaster Review Season Begins

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam | Laura Chung

Early last month, as fire crews monitored a huge blaze burning out of control beneath a major power transmission line near Batemans Bay, a senior Rural Fire Service official signalled a very different challenge that awaits once the bushfire emergency finally recedes.
“At the back of our minds, we know there’ll be inquiries coming,” he said, just before overhead cables ominously twanged, forcing an immediate move from those nearby.

Volunteer firefighters work to keep a fire north of Batemans Bay from crossing the Kings Highway, in early January 2020. Credit: Kate Geraghty

Indeed, the disaster review season has begun, with the Berejiklian government this week declaring the first of what could be a blitz of formal probes. It unveiled plans for a six-month independent inquiry to examine the role played by climate change, drought, fuel loads and human activity.This coming week, the Morrison government will likely consider a royal commission. If history is any guide, the pile of past bushfire inquiries, already some 56 reports high since the 1939 Stretton report into Victoria’s Black Friday fires, will be stacked a lot higher before long.
The inquisitions already have much to work through with 12 million hectares torched - the equivalent of 1.5 Tasmanias - and the fire season still has months to run. Canberra remains under threat from a blaze - started by an army helicopter’s lights which ignited dry vegetation - and large areas of Victoria, NSW and elsewhere remain at risk.

More than 1000 power poles were burnt in NSW in the fires so far this season. Credit: Kate Geraghty

The military’s belated direct intervention - Prime Minister Scott Morrison called in the 3000 reservists and sent in naval ships only when the emergency peaked in early January - could feature highly.
Australia’s armed forces have been quietly “war-gaming” disasters including large bushfires with federal and state agencies for years. Scenario testing is what most militaries do, and the memory of Cyclone Tracy’s devastation of Darwin around Christmas Day in 1974 - which prompted the dispatch of almost every available plane and ship - hasn’t been forgotten.
A multi-year project, the Australian Vulnerability Profile, led by the CSIRO, is just one of a series of programs that have been workshopping away with the aim of improving preparedness for calamities and the necessary “pathways” to recovery for communities and governments alike.
The project detailed scenarios for South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia/Northern Territory, but it was ended before the country’s two most populous states - NSW and Victoria - had mock disaster runs of their own.
The SA scenario came closest to the current crisis in that it modelled a multi-day heatwave similar to the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires with temperatures approaching 50 degrees. A 5.6-magnitude earthquake, similar to one that rocked the state in 1954, was added to the mix.


Shocking footage taken on January 4 by the Dunmore Rural Fire Brigade in NSW shows how a bushfire engulfs an area in just over three minutes.

Michael Thomas, a retired army major, says the military has been preparing for years for the challenges from climate change, such as a simultaneous extreme bushfire event at home and a more intense cyclone smashing one of our Pacific neighbours.
“The [Australian Defence Force’s] voice has been lost in the Australian debate,” Thomas told the Herald in January. "Climate change is talked about as a 'threat multiplier' but it's actually a 'burden multiplier.'"
Whether or not the ADF should have been more involved in the fire efforts sooner and in greater effect - such as acquiring or renting Module Airborne Firefighting Systems (MAFFs) to convert military transport planes into 30,000-litre water bombers - will likely feature in the inquiries.
But Thomas says it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how even the military could quickly get overwhelmed by “sudden, multiple regional disasters”.
“The ADF becomes very stretched, very quickly in its ability to respond,” he says.

Fires have burnt through about 12 million hectares of Australia this season, or 1.5 times the size of Tasmania. Credit: James Brickwood

Chris Barrie, a retired admiral and former chief of the Defence Force, and now adjunct professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, agrees the public has largely been left in the dark about how much disaster scenario work has been under way.  He says military leaders have become accustomed to downplaying climate change in their public utterances since the Abbott government. This includes a reluctance by senior officers to commend junior offices for their work on such security issues. “They don’t get any support," he said.
A spokesperson for the ADF says the 2016 Defence White Paper identified climate change "as one of the causes of state fragility, a key driver of our security environment to 2035".
"Defence factors climate change considerations into our strategic planning for Defence capabilities, estate, personnel and equipment, as well as related operational responses and preparedness."

The clean-up and recovery costs from the fires will run into the billions of dollars nationally. Debate will likely turn to whether governments could have done more to limit the bill. Credit: Nick Moir

An insider who has worked on joint efforts by federal and state agencies says the disconnect between research and policy is widespread. For instance, some lower-level work on preparing for disasters such as worsening bushfires doesn’t make to the highest levels, including ministers, because it won’t be “re-funded” when the program ends, the official said, requesting anonymity.
The most prominent federal effort to increase the nation's climate resilience, the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, lost its funding in 2017 under the Turnbull government, when Scott Morrison was treasurer.
And, as the ABC reported last September, regular meetings of the heads of federal government department - the so-called Secretaries Group on Climate Risk - started meeting in March 2017 and abruptly stopped in the middle of 2018. Meetings of less senior officials continue.
Barrie is among those who say the reliance on a mostly volunteer firefighting force, as in NSW, will likely be prominent in any review of how prepared agencies were for this fire season and whether it will be “future fit” in a warming world. With an average age of active volunteers at more than 50 years, “that doesn’t really work”, he says.
Officially, the RFS has grown into one of the largest firefighting services in the world, with about 72,491 volunteers at last count.

Army reservices are helping with cleanup operations across bushfire affected areas. Credit: Justin McManus

Mick Holton, president of the Volunteer Fire Firefighters Association, says the true figure is probably closer to 18,500 volunteers. “We've said all along [the 70,000-plus figure] is not the case and if it was the case, they wouldn’t have to import all these other firefighting resources as they have had to,” he says.
Ben Shepherd, a senior RFS spokesman, earlier in the season said 46,000 volunteers were “more or less active” with many playing key support roles, from drivers to managing logistics and assisting at air bases.
With this fire season already approaching six months and more big battles in prospect before it ends, scrutiny is turning to how volunteers are coping - physically, mentally and financially.
One seasoned RFS firefighter, already active for months this season, has watched on with a mix of frustration and determination as the extent and severity of the bushfires appears to have caught authorities routinely on the hop.
As far as he could tell, there were no bushfire plans for public assets in his area, whether it was for power substations, water supplies or even some fire sheds - often the place locals would be expected to evacuate to if they were unable to defend their homes and couldn’t leave the area. In his area, crews were scrambling to clear vegetation from RFS depots on the day before the worst of the fire dangers.

Australia had its hottest and driest year on record in 2019 - factors that have contributed to what fire agencies say are "unprecedented" bushfires this season. Credit: Nick Moir

The one sector that appeared to have a “really detailed” plan to reduce fire risks to their assets was the power industry, including Ausgrid and Endeavour Energy.
A spokeswoman for Endeavour Energy said the group aims to "fire proof" major zone substations by using vegetation exclusion zones and fire walls surrounding substations located in bushland."[The] Tomerong zone substation on the South Coast survived a ferocious South Coast fire due to this design, she said. Fires burnt across 45 per cent of Endeavour’s network area, "but we only had minor damage to one zone substation at Hartley Vale in the Blue Mountains".
Other preparations included the use of helicopters equipped with cameras and light detection imaging radar to pinpoint network defects and identify encroaching vegetation, which are then fixed before the bushfire season starts, she said.
Trent Penman, an associate professor in bushfire behaviour at the University of Melbourne, says the inquiries should, where possible, be community led, since they can be an important process for the public to air their grievances and even grief. Handled badly, they can also add to the trauma of those giving evidence or submissions, he says.
However, any tinkering with the volunteer model should also be done cautiously as such firefighters were often the core of local communities.  “In NSW and Victoria ... they’ve done an amazing job given the circumstances,” he says, noting the human death toll, tragic as it was at 32, could have been much higher given the scale of the blazes.
And while the reviews will have to tackle complex issues - such as why some backburns got away or whether increased hazard reduction burning would make much difference to reducing fire risks -  there is no need for hasty verdicts.
"The decisions we take over the next six months to six years will play out over the long term,” he says.
The RFS itself says it welcomed the inquiry but would also conduct its own internal one. "We owe it to the community and future generations to review what has happened and take lessons wherever possible to improve for the future,” a spokeswoman said.

Links

• Praise for inquiry but more investigations to come, former fire chief warns
• NSW wildlife recovery plan to stress protection of unburnt areas
• The country's top bureaucrats say Government appears unprepared for climate change
• 'Dystopian future': Climate change to force review of military's role
• Australian Vulnerability Profile
• Safety in numbers: As a horror fire season looms, firefighters are struggling to attract new volunteers
• (AU) Getting Down To The Business Of Evolving Australia's Climate Policy
• Top Academics Write To Morrison Government Asking For 'Deep Cuts' To Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• (AU) Climate Change Is A Serious Threat To National Security

Thomas Keneally: ‘These Fires Have Changed Us’

The Guardian - Thomas Keneally

The swamp near my home has been dry for two years, and fires burn down to the beaches

A firefighter battles a fire consuming a home near Bundanoon, New South Wales. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

Thomas Keneally Thomas Keneally is the author of more than 30 novels, including Schindler’s Ark, which won the Booker prize in 1982. This article has details on how to help with the Australian relief effort.

Last Australian autumn, and all through winter, a group of retired fire chiefs wanted to meet with prime minister Scott Morrison, and warn him that Australia had passed, as if through a gate, to a new level of combustibility, and that the fire peril for the coming summer would be unprecedented in length and ferocity. For fear that the group might link this menace with the forbidden term “climate change”, the leader Australians now call “Scotty from marketing” refused to meet them, though in good faith they kept on trying to arrange a session with him into the spring. As they pointed out, Morrison took considerably less time before meeting church leaders who wanted to be exempt from anti-discrimination laws involving the employment of gay staff and similar “freedom of religion” matters. The fire chiefs worried that we share our combustibility with the Pacific coast of the United States, and that given the overlapping North American and Australian fire seasons, the hiring of air tankers was going to get more and more difficult. Above all, they were concerned that this summer’s fires would take on a new scale and not surrender to normal firefighting. They felt they had begun to see abnormal symptoms in the 1990s.

Once we got over our colonial Eurocentrism and realised that the Australian bush was not going to go to any trouble to imitate European flora, we began to take a perverse pride in the fact that so many of our plants are germinated by fire: “phoenix plants”. We know now that our species has been in Australia so long, for tens of millennia, that Indigenous Australians learned fire-stick farming – regenerating the continent with skilfully lit fires, which also had the benefit of flushing protein-rich marsupials out into the open. The reality is that swathes of Australia must burn for its own good. Les Murray, the late, great poet, said Australia had only two seasons: drought, of which fires were symptomatic, and flood.

Both sides of the country, east and west, have had calamitous drought and fires in their time. But the drying out to which Australia has been subjected in this last year is unprecedented and seems to most people to proclaim climate crisis. The denialists are making a last stand by accusing the Greens of preventing back-burning in national parks; and of course the Murdoch press embraces that proposition and emphasises cases of arson. The fact that there are cases of arson, and always have been in Australia and California, explains a minority of blazes, but it does not explain the voracity and appetite of these flames. On the right wing of the coalition that governs Australia, and which Morrison needs if he is to govern, sturdy climate denial remains undented. Yet the climate crisis has for the first time replaced the economy as the nation’s chief political issue, for the very question of the habitability of Australia now stares us in the face. On 4 January, an outer suburb of Sydney – Penrith, below the Blue Mountains that were burning at the time – achieved the highest temperature on Earth that day, 48.9C. Sydney suburbs, as hot as they can be in summer, have never achieved such Saharan heights before.

Kosciuszko national park in New South Wales, shrouded in smoke from the fires. Photograph: Walter Bibikow/Getty Images/AWL

What have I noticed, living as I do between the harbour and the Pacific Ocean on the North Head of Sydney? Day after day, beginning as early as August, smoke has rendered going abroad in the city an unknown risk about which experts warn us but cannot accurately predict. Air quality has on some days been 11 times the hazardous level.

Today, a Thursday in late January, is better than many days, in that the air quality is merely poor and visibility good, though not as good as it traditionally is on cut-crystal summer days on the coast. We have frequently been sunk in smoky dimness. The water in the smoke condenses on particles and creates a kind of cloud we have seen a lot of, the pyrocumulonimbus, which blankets the earth but does not bring rain, although it is capable of creating dry lightning. For most of my life, heat waves – and today is nudging 40 and qualifies – used always to bring, after a time, a southerly change in the late afternoon or evening. There were always strong winds and a drenching thunderstorm. In the last few years, we have had to get used to the southerly buster that brings no rain, the dry southerly that whips up fire. There is no rain forecast for today or at the end of this hot spate, though there is a prediction for next week.

The New South Wales coast is a place of childhood vacations and dreams, with beaches that stretch for miles

I am lucky enough to live next to a national park, and when I first moved here there was a hanging swamp on top of the vast sandstone block of North Head. This was a swamp that in most seasons had water in it, though it would occasionally dry out for short periods. It was the home of a number of species of frog. It was visited by ducks and other water birds, and by a handsome lizard called the water dragon, which enjoyed eating the tiger moths that lived there. That swamp has been dry for two years. Drying out has happened all along the coast, and we have had the extraordinary spectacle of fires burning down to the fringe of beaches, and populations taken off the coast by warship.

The New South Wales coast is a place of childhood vacations and dreams, with atmospheric paperbark swamps running behind beaches that stretch for miles. The lagoons and swamps were perpetually too moist to burn. Fires burning down to the coast is, to use the catchphrase, the new normal. The coast and its valleys and beaches have been places where great numbers of nature lovers, retirees and escapees from the city have chosen to settle. The coast north and south of Sydney is a dream every city dweller has entertained, a migration always on the cards for us. Now an exceptional vulnerability has overtaken regions where people previously lived securely in the bush. The Keneallys’ chosen town on immigration – Kempsey, New South Wales – has for the first time since settlement been ringed by fire. Its long, exquisite river, the Macleay, has become tainted with so much ash that fish have died. Even rainforest has become combustible.

Recently, on a walk in the bush, I encountered one of the species threatened, by the fires and the state of the world, with extinction. It is one of the two survivors from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland: the echidna, a spiny anteater that both lays an egg and suckles its young in the comfort of its burrow. I love this creature: it gives off an air, despite its limited movement, of industry, and she was turning over the earth to the depth of her beak in her search for provender. It was touching to see this most enduring of animals at its ancient earthwork, unchallenged by fire here, unlike in other forests. It speaks to how much human occupation, a tower of millennia, there has been in Australia, and of the contrast between its Indigenous stewards and the stewardship of us immigrant groups. It had taken us less than two and a half centuries to bring the 50m-year-surviving echidna, and the system sustaining it, to crisis.

The fires threaten some species with extinction, including the echidna, or spiny anteater. Photograph: Lisa Mckelvie/Getty Images

In this crisis, the volunteer bush firefighter was once an unassertive creature like the echidna. Now, in an age of bitter politics and economic palaver, they have asserted themselves as miracles of social cohesion and human goodwill. The volunteers often come from areas in which they are fighting the fires, and in many cases have helped save houses without knowing if their own home was still standing. They were also, of necessity, the first comforters of those who had survived the loss of their houses. They have lost wages and tested the patience of their employers by needing to take tranches of time off work. One of the retired fire chiefs who tried to speak to “Sco-Mo” last year was Greg Mullins, a volunteer who recently said, “Like countless other men and women on the front line, I have faced off against 30m walls of flame, seen many homes burned to the ground, tried to console inconsolable residents, been forced to run for safety and seen native animals bounding out of the burning bush to collapse and die.” He is angered as politicians describe climate change as “perhaps one of the factors”.

These fires have not been a straw in the wind. They have been brutally manifest and undeniable in the force of their argument. They have the power to change politics here and in other places, as long as they are read honestly. After our long glorying in minerals, it is promised that, if it wishes, Australia can be a leader in the new post-fossil-fuel world. It is a destiny our politicians seem unwilling to embrace, but they may have to.

For the fires have changed us. Perhaps we, too, need fire to germinate an essential concept.

Links

• (AU) Dear Australia, Elegy For A Summer Of Loss
• Six Sentences Of Hope: Defining A Unifying Vision In The Face Of The Climate Crisis
• The Climate Crisis Movie Isn’t Out Yet, But We Just Saw The Trailer
• We All Smell The Smoke, We All Feel The Heat. This Environmental Catastrophe Is Global
• We Underestimate Young People Because It's Convenient
• Tim Winton: Our Leaders Are Ignoring Global Warming To The Point Of Criminal Negligence. It's Unforgivable
• ‘We’ve pissed mother nature off, big time’: the people coming home after Australia’s fires

Heritage On The Edge Urges Action On The Climate Crisis

Google - Toshiyuki Kono

Protecting cultural sites against climate change.

Dr. Toshiyuki Kono Dr. Toshiyuki Kono is President of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. Distinguished Professor Kono also teaches private international law and heritage law at Japan's Kyushu University.

Preserving and protecting the past is essential for our future. This belief is at the core of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a global non-government organization dedicated to the conservation of architectural and archaeological heritage.
Our 10,000 members across the globe—including architects, archeologists, geographers, planners and anthropologists—share the same vision: to protect and promote the world’s cultural heritage. The recent youth climate demonstrations shed a spotlight on the urgency of the climate crisis, which is having a devastating effect on our cultural monuments too. It is important to take action, and we must act now to save this part of our human legacy.
That’s why, in collaboration with CyArk and Google Arts & Culture, we’re launching Heritage on the Edge, a new online experience that stresses the gravity of the situation through the lens of five UNESCO World Heritage Sites. You can join us and explore over 50 online exhibits, 3D models, Street View tours, and interviews with local professionals and communities about Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) iconic statues, the great mosque city of Bagerhat in Bangladesh, the adobe metropolis of Chan Chan in Peru, Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle and the coastal city of Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania—all heritage sites that are affected by the climate crisis.
Above all, the project is a call to action. The effects of climate change on our cultural heritage mirror wider impacts on our planet, and require a strong and meaningful response. While actions at individual sites can prevent loss locally, the only sustainable solution is systemic change and the global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Heritage on the Edge collects stories of loss, but also of hope and resilience. They remind us that all our cultural heritage, including these iconic World Heritage Sites, are more than just tourist destinations. They are places of great national, spiritual and cultural significance.

Built from volcanic stone  by the native Polynesian inhabitants from the 10th to 16th centuries, the Easter Island Statues—called Moai—stand at an average height of 13 feet and weigh 14 tons each. As sea levels rise and storms increase, the cliffs where the monuments are located are being undercut. The statues will eventually fall into the sea.

 

Peru's Chan Chan is the world’s largest adobe city. It is being washed away by increasing torrential rain caused by climate change. But building roofs won’t solve the problem either: Thanks to rising groundwater levels, they could cause a dangerous microclimate and ultimately affect the buildings’ structural stability.

 

A 3D visualization of the Nine Dome Mosque in the Mosque City of Bagerhat in Bangladesh uses a “point cloud” to represent its high concentration of finely made religious monuments and spatial planning. But the monuments are rapidly decaying due to salt water flooding and erosion. With help of this data we were able to also create another dedicated “Pocket Gallery” that lets you explore the Nine Dome Mosque in Augmented Reality.

 

The historic fortress and urban center of Edinburgh is Scotland's most-visited tourist attraction and at risk from rapidly increasing rainfall and groundwater flooding.

 

Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania is the most famous Swahili Coast trading port on the Indian Ocean. Site Director Mercy Mbogellah and her team monitor and work to preserve the site, which is at risk from sea-level rise, mangrove depletion and ocean acidification. Explore the site’s Gereza Fort and the impact of climate change up close in a Augmented Reality “Pocket Gallery”.

 
Links

• Heritage on the Edge
• The Heritage Sites Threatened By Climate Change
• The Future of Heritage in Three Dimensions
• It’s not just Venice. Climate change imperils ancient treasures everywhere.
• Cultural Heritage Has A Lot To Teach Us About Climate Change
• We’re Covering Heritage Sites Threatened By Climate Change. The List Just Got Longer.
• From The Everglades To Kilimanjaro, Climate Change Is Destroying World Wonders