Climate change is a massively complex ‘wicked’ problem hence solutions require human capacities of logic and imagination guiding action. Our leaders appear bereft of science-based logic, acknowledging neither magnitude nor urgency of climate change.
This denial may be facilitated by refusal to imagine themselves inside these impacts and become mobilised to take responsibility for the suffering of those who are and will be affected by their decisions.
A Devastating experience of natural disasters
Let’s explore the plight of people in India and Bangladesh salvaging a future after Cyclone Amphan smashed their lives on May 20. With millions affected, over 100 deaths and hundreds of thousands needing urgent assistance, farmers bear salt water inundation of their lands, mass fish kills, contaminated drinking water and rising COVID19 in intolerable heat. Consider the anguish in one of the world’s poorest, most densely populated regions.
In 1970 Cyclone Bhola killed 300,000 in the same region, but despite fewer direct deaths assisted by improved warning, circumstances bode particularly poorly for post-Amphan recovery. Indeed even in US territory Puerto Rico, recovery from Cyclone Maria in 2017 remains poor, perpetuating suffering three years later.
In 2019, 5 million people in India (24.9million globally) were internally displaced by weather disasters. With vast ecosystem damage, there is little to go home to.
Meanwhile at the recent summit with Indian Prime Minister Modi, Mr. Morrison said, “We share an ocean and we share responsibility for that ocean as well, its health, well being and security”. Unfortunately the grave risks both countries face on their East and West coasts and inlands from climate change–charged cyclones, floods, heat waves and droughts wasn’t discussed. The talk was about energy, defense and trade, not climate change mitigation, adaptation or humanitarian aid.
NOAA has confirmed that tropical cyclones severity increased 8% from 1979-1998 and 15% from 1998-2017. IPCC modeling demonstrates that 2oC warming will be vastly more dangerous, from cyclones and flooding, land and marine heat waves, droughts, species extinctions, food and water insecurity, famines, etc.
Health savings from staying below 1.5oC are also massive, reducing injuries, infectious diseases, air pollution, malnourishment, poverty, displacement and mental illness. Even so, WHO warns any rise enhances risk, even below 1.5oC.
Two stern messages also came from IPCC and WHO in 2018 – we cannot return from an overshoot of emissions over 1.5oC and the greater the warming, the lower the chances of safely adapting.
Yet limiting warming to 1.5oC degrees is now beyond us without heroic effort – the world must reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 for any hope.
Since the government’s planet revolves around an economic sun, their problem is best explained as a sizable debt (atmospheric CO2 and methane), increasing annually with compounding interest. Each passing year the debt becomes larger and more difficult to pay back. This is a world debt, but as the Paris Agreement requires, rich countries like Australia must lead – carrying greater proportions of debt because of their wealth and ability to spearhead global clean energy transitions. Inexplicably, Australia remains locked in a pathological greenhouse gas spending spree.
Imagine the consequence of default for Australia
Imagine the vulnerability of your own family to these devastating predictions.
Imagine worsening heat waves –the deadliest climate emergency – and as predicted, large swathes of Northern Australia, including Darwin, with average annual temperatures similar to the Sahara Desert’s hottest pockets.
Like many Bangladeshi’s probably feel today, we would be cooked.
Imagine dealing with regular epidemics from diseases jumping species and temperature barriers, facilitated by habitat and biodiversity loss.
Imagine economic collapse has resulted from our failure to reduce emissions. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2020 ranks climate action failure the #1 global economic impact risk, above weapons of mass destruction, and now calls for a ‘great COVID19 reset’ on sustainability.
Imagine the state of our mental health, especially bearing knowledge of our leaders’ failure to join this call for their own people.
Even after recent unprecedented megafires and smoke that directly killed 33 people, accelerated about 400 deaths and put 4,500 more people in hospital climate mitigation and adaptation is conveniently deferred into a Royal Commission that will report what we already know.
Just three months post-megafires, Australia’s COVID19 recovery planning appears determined to deliver a fossil fuel-coated silver bullet, using taxpayer’s money to rescue and expand gas and coal. Australia is already the world’s leading exporter of coal and LNG.
How this can happen within wealthy democracies is climate change’s greatest mystery. It requires abject leadership failure, subservience to fossil fuel industries for inexplicable reasons, inability to understand science or to imagine the magnitude of intergenerational suffering.
How to drive more action?
We call on political leaders who buy into the fossil fuel silver bullet to imagine millions of Australians coping with tropical cyclones, floods, megafires, droughts of ever growing fury in 2025, 2030 and 2040.
Or failing their imagination, ask them to prepare explanations to their grandchildren who will experience the outcomes of their governance.
Without major change the long term outlook for our nation under either major Party is arguably as poor as those in India and Bangladesh.
Solutions are in their hands. Australia is rich with 65,000 years of ecological knowledge, detailed plans, vision, affordable technology, world class universities, innovative brains and widespread desire for healthy, secure futures.
In the face of inaction, surely there are sufficient thinkers among the Parliament’s 226 members and senators to make a stand and demand action?
Surely there is overwhelming medical evidence to support a legal case of negligence against government that starkly exposes the intent and reasoning to promote fossil fuels via the COVID19 Commission.
When this issue is addressed, we can all breathe easier for the solutions to climate change will simultaneously advance Australia’s interlocking wicked problems of social and racial injustice, as it is the poor and Indigenous who suffer the most.
Dr Melissa Haswell is the Professor of Practice in Environmental Wellbeing, Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services) at University of Sydney and Professor of Health, Safety and Environment at Queensland University of Technology
Dr David Shearman AM FRACP is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Adelaide University
Dr Melissa Haswell is the Professor of Practice in Environmental Wellbeing, Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services) and an Honorary Professor in the School of Geosciences at University of Sydney. She is also a Professor of Health, Safety and Environment at Queensland University of Technology. She has been teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students, researching and advocating for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and wellbeing, the epidemiology and control of infectious and chronic disease, environmental toxicology and planetary health for over 40 years.
David Shearman is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Adelaide University and previously held senior academic positions at Edinburgh University, where he qualified in Medicine and Biological Science, and at Yale University. He is author of many books on climate change and related issues. He has served on the IPCC, has been President of the Conservation Council of South Australia. With the late Professor Tony McMichael he founded Doctors for the Environment Australia in 2001. He is author and co-author of several hundred scientific and medical papers.
Comments
11 responses to “The Climate Tide roars in, yet leaders fail to understand and act”
The number Of World Natural (meteorological, Climatological, hydrological) Catastrophes, 1980-2018 has risen by a factor of near 4 (Munich Re-Insurance)
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-global-catastrophes
P.S.
Please change “Na2O” to “N2O”
Suggestions regarding climate mitigation and adaptation need to involve climate science just as much as suggestions for treatment and restrictions of COVID-19 have to involve medical scientists, yet to a large extent governments are IGNORING climate science and nowadays the issue is mostly discussed by journalists, economists and politicians.
A major example: the concentration of CO2-equivalent (i.e. CO2+CH4+Na2O) is now near 500 ppm CO2-e (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/), which requires sequestration (down draw) of atmospheric carbon, is as essential as the arrest of carbon emissions, i.e. both need to be applied, yet little is done about this by governments.
‘Solutions are in their hands. Australia is rich with 65,000 years of ecological knowledge, detailed plans, vision, affordable technology, world class universities, innovative brains and widespread desire for healthy, secure futures.’
Sadly, at least 1.5c warming is inevitably and 2.0c unavoidable for all practical purposes. It is not in Australia’s hands. Without a worldwide transformation in industry, energy, agriculture, human settlement, transport and trade (preferably one that took place a couple of decades ago) a warming of well over 3.0c is probable by 2100. And that just isn’t going to happen. We need to prepare for the worst because that’s the most likely outcome!
As well as the vital information available on this great website, I urge readers to look up futurist David Houle and his finite economy and spaceship earth web blogs and books, if you are not already admirers of his work.
This decade is our one chance to get off the path to oblivion, and onto the path to Utopia.
Yet Bangladesh has a long history of mega cyclones dating back to the 1500s. 200,000 dead….in 1582.
The increased severity? 8%? The paper states: “a homogenized data record based on satellite data was previously created for the period 1982–2009. The 28-y homogenized record exhibited increasing global TC intensity trends, but they were not statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. ”
Unprecedented megafires? 1974-75 saw 6 times the area burned and still many multiples if you discount the NT fires entirely….
But tacking on another decade gets the job done? What about pre 1982? The 1970 cyclone claimed 500,000 lives….
This is what the empirical record tells us, not some pie in the sky computer model….
Only response needed:
“The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception”, David Michaels, OUP, 2020
Yes there is always someone that thinks they know better through a few conveniently sifted out statistics than the monumental research done by the world’s scientists concerning climate change. Not a reference in sight to anything you say either. Why does this not surprise me?
You have misread the abstract and are quoting information about NASA’s previous study that ran from 1982 to 2009. However the new paper by NASA extended and updated the period from 1979 to 2017, and “statistically significant (at the 95% confidence level) increases are identified. Increases and trends are found in the exceedance probability and proportion of major (Saffir−Simpson categories 3 to 5) TC intensities, which is consistent with expectations based on theoretical understanding and trends identified in numerical simulations in warming scenarios”.
I see covid-19 as the harbinger of the sort of future we are going to have this Century. It’s a bit like the beginning of the end as we knew it. Expect ongoing instability and insecurity of globalised corporate suppliers, as we are experiencing already. It will wreck havoc on economies and ways of living pretty much taken for granted.
While the corporate profit driven world is hoping it will all go away and soon business will return to normal, they are so detached from the living world most don’t even see the regular threats coming our way from climate change, or deliberately expunge them from their views. Hopefully for their interests, our views too through the use of pseudo-scientific stooges attacking the science.
It is too late now to mitigate the worst effects, and according to a recent article I have read, 9 out of 25 tipping points appear to have been triggered. This observation comes from some of the most respected climate scientists in the world including “Australian National University emeritus professor Will Steffen”. He uses the analogy: “If the Titanic realises that it’s in trouble and it has about 5km that it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it’s only 3km away from the iceberg, it’s already doomed,” he said. [1].
Meanwhile both in Australia and the US, the Coronavirus, has served governments with a cover to introduce a swathe of policies and responses that promote more pollution, more environmental destruction, more blatant use of fossil fuels and cutting so called ‘green tape’.
It is fair to allege our governments are corrupt, they do not want to listen to the science, they are controlled by the fossil fuel industries themselves that are purely profit driven. (See Michael West’s site for Australia). They get away with this because many voters out there are living in a imagined world of Aldous Huxley’s soma (from Brave New World), the soma being consumer distractions, and the hope that they will be a winner in the capitalist game, not a loser. Newspapers encourage this and economists talk of nothing except ‘growth’ and more consumption as if the Earth was infinite. No change in greedy neoliberal capitalism from our leaders while 0.1% (not 1.0%) of the people on Earth now control 20% of the wealth.
[1]. https://voiceofaction.org/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/
Correction
I wrote: “9 out of 25 tipping points “.
The article I have referenced says: “9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points”.
The situation is therefore even more critical