Last Monday The Climate Institute’s released its latest report on the real costs of inaction of climate change “Climate of Suffering”. It has evoked some disappointing but predictable responses. “Wallowing in Doom and Gloom” ran The Australian’s editorial comment (August 31). Even Bjorn Lomborg, the internationally renowned “sceptical environmentalist” has chipped in, clearly without reading the report, suggesting that it is an “extreme reaction” to draw a link between cutting carbon emissions and mental health objectives.
Far from wallowing in gloom and doom, this report has been scrupulously reviewed and researched and was launched by Professor Ian Hickie, of the Brain & Mind Research Institute, with support from the Australian Psychological Society’s Dr Susie Burke, and other leading mental and public health advocates.
The report is intended to provide a reminder about the real costs of inaction on climate change. These costs are human costs. They are social costs. They are economic costs.
The report, and The Climate Institute, is careful about attributing recent extreme events to climate change. But there can be no denying that we have experienced events such as the unprecedented fire weather conditions in Victoria and unusually powerful cyclones. The point is that CSIRO and other scientists predict an increase in extreme weather events in coming years if serious action is not taken to tackle accelerating climate change. Carbon pollution from human activity being the main cause of recent accelerated climate change.
The resilience of Australians in the face of extreme weather events is indeed, as The Australian points out, a great resource. Australians have on many occasions magnificently drawn from the well of that resource. This report highlights, however, that this is not an inexhaustible resource to be recklessly managed.
The report carefully brings this to light with case studies of survivors experience from the Kinglake bushfires, cyclones in Queensland and from the drought in western NSW and Victoria.
One of these includes the story of Daryl Taylor, from the Kinglake bushfires, who said “our local community volunteers of community organisation were incredible in the aftermath of the disaster tackling massive challenges head on. I have never before witnessed so many enduring selfless acts of profound leadership. But it is now apparent that many groups have lost momentum and are losing key leaders, as passionate people finally turn their hands and minds to the mammoth task of rebuilding, or withdraw completely from social commitments because of absolute exhaustion. Too often now, there is no one around to fill the void leaving greater burden on those who persevere.”
Daryl goes on to note “it would be negligent of us, as a society not to learn from this and other events and prepare and plan accordingly. We have a duty to do this even if there is some short term ‘hip pocket pain’.”
Another of the case studies Dr Allan Dale, from Innisfail, notes, as does the report, that while there may be fewer cyclones making land under climate change they are likely to be stronger. He speaks of the fear that communities experienced during cyclone Yasi itself but says that for communities such as his, what comes after “is perhaps more traumatic”.
“Living for years in a slowly recovering and devastated built and natural environment brings its own downers. Slowly, post-disaster trauma gathered its community toll. Once proud businesses called it a day.” Dr Dale goes on to say that it is vital we learn from what has happened and use this to help address a major gap in the current public debate about climate change and how we should respond to it.
It’s all well and good to bask in the glow of Australians great capacity for resilience. It is, however, insulting for those who are on the front line and surviving extreme weather events, to pretend that this resilience is all that’s required and she’ll be right mate. It needs far greater thought, respect and dignity than we have seen to date in Australia.
This goes both to the support and space provided for those communities, and the services that are needed for them, but also to the urgency in taking action here, and with other nations globally, to help prevent the worst impacts of unmitigated climate change by reducing our economy’s dependence on pollution.
The Climate Institute is proud of this research and the focus it puts on the risks of further delay and inaction. Our vision is for a resilient Australia prospering in a low carbon global economy, participating fully and fairly in international climate-change solutions. It is an inherently optimistic vision but we must all face up to the actions necessary to achieve it.
Although one swallow does not make a summer, I suspect we need another reminder of the potential consequences of climate change like the summer of 2008 – 2009 where in Victoria we had been in drought for around 13 years, had minimal rainfall over the summer and had several days in the mid 40’s before Black Saturday (47c at my place). Virtually everyone you spoke to agreed the climate was changing as a consequence of human activities and immediate action was required.
Now after a wet 9 months (including some of the worst flooding in Victoria’s history), the deniers have come out of the woodwork and apparently swayed public opinion against action.
I suspect my partner is right when she says not much will change until things get very bad. However by then it may be too late..
Reading this piece sympathetically I was lost by the author when I came across his trite clichéd “carbon pollution”as in “Carbon pollution from human activity being the main cause of recent accelerated climate change.”
As John Connor is prima facie not stupid such a tin-eared performance can only come from spending all his talking and listening time with people of the faith. How else could he not see how counterproductive it is to warble on using such ridiculous phrases jerked out as propaganda by the prima facie not stupid but devious. Only some particulate carbon could be called a pollutant. And carbon and carbon dioxided are decidedly not synonymous.
Oh yes, Penny Wong and her leaders were trying to give us a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. So, is John Connor willing to have him and his organisation regarded as if they were just a bunch of politicians and a branch of the unholy ALP/Greens/opportunists push at that?
George Rebus:
At my local waste management facility (rubbish dump) general waste is weighed and is paid for at $150 per tonne.
In Australia, those who place their waste gases, including CO2, into the atmosphere, are currently paying nothing at all.
Is a carbon tax of $23 acceptable to you, or not? Do you agree that it should be equal to the fee (tax, if you like – a rose by any name… and all that) levied on solid but fairly innocuous waste? I suggest that $150 is at least a starting point for negotiation.
Given that CO2 has been very reliably demonstrated to be acting right now to destroy the climate systems of the planet and is very probably going to be the cause of acidification of the oceans involving loss of almost every species therin which you and I would want to eat, as well as the corals that I have enjoyed, from time to time, looking at, I assume that starting at $150 per tonne is a fair place to start.
Not only that, but the land dwellers are going to have to squeeze a little closer together and eat less. Sea level rises don’t just happen, they flood things, kill people and other species, make cities unlivable.
Still with me, GR?
I suggest that we should start the bidding at $150 per tonne.
You mock anything at all.
One of us is wrong about the science, and it isn’t me.
Both of us might be asked to explain what we just wrote to our grandkids, when the time comes and they ask the question “What did you do about climate change when the IPCC reports were released, Grandpa?”
I see no reason to let industries dispose of CO2 into the only atmosphere we have at anything less than the charge we put on piling up solid stuff in an out of the way place on the edge of town.
As the actor says on the lamb adds on TV: “You know it makes sense… I’m Sam Peckovitch.”
@ John Bennetts
What did I say about “the science” as to which “one of us is wrong” – “and it isn’t [you]”?
Do you not see the point about people with your strong belief in the need for action – even an ineffectual carbon tax (i.e. ineffectual in terms of what it will do for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere to a degree which is helpful to our grandchildren and in terms of causing India, China or the US to do something effectual) speaking and writing in a way which doesn’t tag themselves as out-of-touch preachers, not to say w**kers. And I specifically refer to the nonsense about “carbon pollution” (ibid.). The point you make in favour of fees to offset externalities is fine but nothing to do with the point I was making.
For what it’s worth I haven’t a problem about a carbon tax provided it applies to imports and the proceeds are not going to be squandered as the government proposes on vote buying bribes.
Now can you tell me something. The commonly cited 97 per cent of “climate scientists” who are said to agree on the basic IPCC publicised hypotheses about CO2 and climate change is, I have read somewhere, totally unsubstantiated but merely an opportunistic quote from some student’s mini-thesis based on some not very scientific surveying: a kind of urban myth. That sounds plausible enough, or at least possible, but perhaps you can give chapter and verse.
One of the problems about the supposed consensus of “climate scientists” is that it is hard to say what a “climate scientist” is. Someone who studies tree rings in the Arctic? Sure, but that doesn’t make a person the kind of “climate scientist” that you would want to pay attention to if asked about whether the general climate circulation model adequately models the feedbacks from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. While the leading sceptic Prof Richard Lindzen would be about as well qualified to be called a “climate scientist” as anyone I wonder about some of the modellers. Do mathematicians like David Karoly qualify? After all I have just been reading a piece about one of the greatest of 20th century physicists, Richard Feynman, which quoted him as saying that it only counted as science when you had precise figures which were then checked by experiment. By extension, at least some of the many IPCC models’ predictions ought to match up very closely with the successive experiments conducted by Nature year after year. When all the models are materially different and all are wrong by the strict Feynman test, where are we now with the science. (I ask in the relaxed mode of one who expects our world will go on getting warmer and is quite sure that, in Australia, we can no more affect what the outcome will be for us than we can make ourselves immortal. Do you worry about the inevitability of your death?)
GR:
Unproductive, ranting, offensive and simply incomprehensible.
Time for a cup of tea and a good lie down, fellow.