The last embers will still be cooling somewhere in some patch of ground in eastern NSW or Victoria. The first big fire of the 2019-2020 fire season is over.
It may be the last, since so much of the most high-risk areas have been burnt out. On the other hand, there’s a lot left to burn, if it all starts again: northern NSW, the forest areas around Melbourne, more of southern WA.
We have three months of high heat to come, and fire season is usually February-March. Since the seasons seem to have shifted back in recent years, that may well continue into April.
In the meantime, things will play out as they usually do. The devastated communities will be ignored, having had their brief, smoking moment in the sun.
Half the promised donations won’t turn up. The government money assigned to rebuild tourism and other industries won’t start for months, half of it won’t arrive, half of what does will be legally rorted by consultants, etc.
And in a few weeks it may all burn down again. Faced with such a conflagration, the common assumption, and expression, in the media sphere, has been that “this will change us”; that “something has happened”.
And it may have done.
Though this series of fires was less lethal than Black Saturday and Ash Wednesday, and other such hitherto once-in-a-generation fires — largely due to occurring in less populated areas — the total area and the degree of fire-joining was larger (though not as large as some other historic fires).
The sheer level of damage and habitat lost is vast, and weighs on our consciousness more than it once did. The assumption that things simply can’t go on as they are is widespread.
But it’s an assumption which is possibly confined to the knowledge class, and spruiked heartily by the media section of such, for all the usual reasons.
By that, I don’t mean the accusations of propaganda that the right is hurling. This is coming from a point where the right is now fully irrationalist; if actual science constitutes an opposition to the conservative-capitalist framework, then reality itself is held to be left-wing propaganda.
What I mean is that people living in the knowledge frameworks of said classes will see the fires as not merely evidence of, but the presence of, climate change.
Knowledge yokes abstract understandings to concrete events; the scientist in the lab “sees” the chemical structures of the materials they’re working with.
For everyone else, it’s just sludge and powder. That division has become, in our era, a political one.
As “black box” technology takes over more of our lives, and the structures of power, science — which was once taken up enthusiastically by working-class and popular movements as a weapon in their struggle — becomes, for many, the “master’s discourse”, the mode of control of those inheriting power from the old bourgeosie.
Scientific explanation makes the new knowledge class feel energised, surgent; it leaves everyone else feeling more powerless than they were a couple of decades ago.
Resistance to science thus becomes a form of class political resistance, a demand for recognition. The rise of anti-vaxx is one example of this. Vernacular climate change denialism is another. This is not the whacko “BOM did 9/11” stuff, or combover ruminations on the medieval warming period.
It’s the shrug of the shoulders denialism, which attaches to homilies “well the climate is always changing”, “how can we really know” and the kicker: “well I’m just a brickie/truckie/masseur, what would I know. But…”
As acceptance of climate change spreads wider, so too, in parallel, does this new form of denialism, or scepticism, or disengagement.
Such a phenomenon connects with deep human tendencies — particularly the manner in which we concretise and personalise abstract phenomena.
For traditional peoples the thunderstorm is thus obviously and naturally an angry God; for the modern cancer sufferer, with a terminal diagnosis, diets, spirituality, magical healing will take over many minds.
In the case of climate change-caused fires, the concrete and personalised “causes” offered by the right — evil greenies stopping backburning — will be attractive to people who would hitherto have been immune to them.
That is amplified by our deep tendency to see a background and a foreground within nature — that which is unchangeable and is the context one acts in, and that which one can change.
You can’t stop the raging river, but you can dam part of it, and catch the fish that gather therein. You can’t stop fires happening, but you can fuel burn, fight them heroicially on the day, etc.
To conclude that the background is now foreground — that we have transformed the structure of the atmosphere — evacuates much immediate action of its heroic and meaningful content.
To battle brute nature in the name of humanity is one thing; to deal with the shit we caused over and over again is another.
The temptation to shut down the category of climate change altogether is a powerful one indeed, and one that has been taken up by the “ignore it and carry on” brigade such as “Twiggy” Forrest and Barnaby Beetrooter.
There’s a lot of it about: Van Badham’s column on the fires in The Guardian is headlined “The bushfire crisis has shown a way forward for Australia” and then has practically nothing on climate change, but a lot about “community” and fireproof kit homes.
Doubtless all sincerely meant, but also usefully runs interference for Labor, as the party asserts a pro-coal-export policy. De facto, it’s a “left” version of right-wing climate change do-nothingism. How far will this go?
Well things only happen when they happen twice. A one-off doesn’t establish itself as a changed reality. But if this all happens again in February and March, and then again next year, well, a thing becomes its opposite in a moment.
If, after all the heroism, collectivism, and pulling together, the joint just burns down again, the mythologising that both Labor and the right want to call on will exhaust itself.
In the meantime, we are going to need, in the next few months, to find out what people in the burntlands actually think about it, outside media hypotheses (including this one), as the embers cool.
The early signs for change don’t look promising. A few cracks appeared the bulwarks of the denialist camp at the height of the blaze (Matt Kean, platitudes about current government actions achieve in required levels of de-carbonisation and so on) but these are being sealed again very quickly. There was also a cohesive counter strategy launched almost from the start of the fires: blame the greenies for as long as possible (even though debunked, that one still resonates with many, especially in the bush) then switch to arsonists. Following that, delay with a Royal Commission. That seems to have gone quiet the last few days, but I think the government is hoping that some good rains will extinguish the fires so that the news cycle moves on. Even the sports rorts affair is acting for the greater Liberal good at the moment. Anything will do, so long as we don’t mention the climate war.
Other than further disasters, the only thing that might shake things up a bit is the passing of the elder Murdoch. The Murdoch media is the glue that holds the denialist camp together. It provides a platform on which to mount a consistent denialist philosophy and has the reach to broadcast that philosophy across society, both here and in the US and UK. My sense is that the younger Murdochs possess neither the bitter venom of the father, nor his business nous. Once that toxicity is flushed from society’s veins, there might be a chance for recovery.
Unfortunately, the younger Murdoch in favor at the moment is apparently just as denialist and right wing as his old man.
And possibly even more so, frighteningly.
Interesting picture of the place of the knowledge class in Australia. The comparison with a chemistry experiment was stark. If there is really this kind of divide between the abstract consciousness of the knowledge class and the pragmatic realism of the rest, then we need to get a better grasp of its dynamic.
What do we call this other class? There are plenty of disparaging terms like red-neck, bogans or tradies. What is a useful analytic tool?
And might this divide now be exacerbated by the expansion of university education to the point where not having a degree is seen as a failure, which prompts resentment?
Where are the Australian fiction authors who can explore this divide for us?
First of all, you are already on the wrong track asking for a name for every class that isn’t yours. Secondly, grasping for a non disparaging term and coming up with ‘tradies’ (themselves a class of highly trained, skilled labour, often requiring scientific background) shows a lack of appreciation for the complex division of labour.
Today, we don’t all have the opportunity to simply generalise our personal knowledge. Even knowledge workers can become myopic, too involved in one particular thing, losing sight of all else. A brain surgeon can believe some pretty silly stuff, as we found out in 2016.
Climate science is a black box to most people. I’m 100% on board with the idea of needing to drastically change to stop a coming crisis, but I’d stumble if I had to explain it precisely. This took faith on my part, I had to assume that enough trained people looked at it objectively using the scientific method and the theory didn’t fall over. I can’t confirm this, I don’t know these boffins from a bar of soap and have never run experiments to confirm for myself. You are probably not directly in the sort of scientific fields that you would have confirmed it yourself, and made a similar leap of faith.
The thing with leaps of faith is it requires trust. No one, no matter how good their intentions are, or how confident they are, should assume everyone trusts them.
That needs to be understood or advocates of deep cuts to emissions will have to wait for people to confirm first hand that the theories are valid and the denialists are conmen.
After that, maybe not treat laymen with open contempt? I’d like our comfy climate to not change, so could everyone try stomaching that for a moment so we can sort this out? Cheers.
Seems fair and reasonable Draco. I’m on board.
Have often thought the bullshit divisiveness and general distrust, particularly regions with city folk, is the first domino that has to fall.
The confected outrage towards the greens is a problem, partly of their making.
‘Climate science is a black box to most people. I’m 100% on board with the idea of needing to drastically change to stop a coming crisis, but I’d stumble if I had to explain it precisely.’
Oh stop it with the ‘CC science is soooo hard’ bullshit, Draco. Climate science is ridiculously straightforward. There’s nothing ‘black box’ about it (unlike say quantum physics or string theory). Dude: if you can grasp how babies are made, or how a lever works, or indeed why it’s hotter inside your car than outside on a pleasant summer day, you can understand CC science.
It was absurd enough when erudite wankers like Clive James tried on this disingenuous and only slightly-more-sophisticated version of ‘I’m not an expert, but…’ . But you’re way smarter than him still.
Knock it off. And go and do 15 minutes of reading. That’s all it takes to break open that ‘black box’. FFS.
PS: you too, Dogs. FFS, go and LEARN a bit about what is going to kill your kids…if you don’t. Get it? It’s survival homework. You know there was a time when people regarded being informed about the most urgent issues of the day as a basic civic obligation.
Especially the power-excluded classes, whatever the hell we wanna call them.
You are not very informed if you think your explanation even approaches the kind of precision I am talking about. Go do some reading of your own.
Next you’ll be telling us rocket science is easy, and you are an expert neurosurgeon.
Jack Robinson gave us a good learning analogy for the greenhouse effect by pointing to a very familiar phenomenon – that the inside of our cars get hotter than the outside on a sunny day. To interested laymen, it is an excellent start to the subject. Further reading would introduce them to the concept of a leaky radiation cavity.
It is, indeed, as ridiculously easy to understand as Jack says.
If you understand how a garden greenhouse is warmer inside than outside, then you are able to form an intuitive understanding of the Global Warming mechanism, once you know that carbon dioxide gas acts like glass in the greenhouse and reflects heat back into the earth’s atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases are a blanket which gets ever thicker as we put more and more CO2 into our air.
The science was settled by John Tyndall demonstrating the effect in his London lab in the 1850s.
The complexity that is often mentioned in association with the topic of Climate Change is in predicting the precise severity and timings of the downstream effects of increased global temperature upon weather systems & ice sheets & etc.
We do not need to know exactly how many days earlier our tomato will ripen inside the greenhouse. We just need to know that it will be sooner.
The core of climate science is *not* a Black Box at all……its basic chemistry & physics that I got taught back in around Year 9-10 High School (before the era of the Denialists). Coal & petrol are fossilised plant life. Burning them generates excessive levels of CO2 (CO2.that hasn’t been part of the natural carbon cycle for half a billion years). The C-O bond is extremely good at trapping heat in the lower atmosphere. Ergo, more CO2 means a warmer planet. That is the matter in a nutshell. How a warming planet leads to droughts, floods & bushfires is a bit more complex, but not black box if you *want* to understand it. Most of modern medicine is a black box, but you’d be pretty friggin’ dumb to ignore the advice of doctors, wouldn’t you? So why are people so willing to ignore the advice of scientists, who have been collectively studying climate for over 100 years?
Draco, I was using words like “tradies” to demonstrate a point that our image of those outside the knowledge class is often derogatory (though “tradies” does have an endearing element). On the other side, we hear of “battlers” and “quiet Australians”.
The bigger problem is a Western mindset, inherited from the Greeks, which presumes that knowledge has higher status over action. With the expansion of the knowledge class beyond the professions, we need to re-imagine how the two halves of society might complement each other. Otherwise, climate science will continue to be tainted by resentment about knowledge snobbery.
I feel part of the problem is the generalisation of knowledge just isn’t there yet. We are in a better place today, especially compared to the slaver Athenians. But we could all use more time to do things like read non fiction.
With an abundance of knowledge on the internet, time itself remains as a gatekeeper. We may have to reimagine the way we work to overcome that.
Right now, having that kind of good general knowledge is like when someone who works out tells you anyone could do it, you just have to make time. In theory we all could, but we don’t. It has an opportunity cost with the telly and videogames. Some are up to their eyeballs in responsibilities and barely get time to even do that.
Basically, the more leisure time, the more likely it gets that the vast majority finds time for their own self education, done frivolously, for the sake of learning.
A huge chunk of the knowledge worker class are in the same boat, despite their academic efforts in developing their expert skills.
An entirely anecdotal viewpoint from rural Victoria is my sense that public sentiment is fickle but slow-moving. It is difficult for people to quickly transition to a contradictory opinion. Had there not been such rapid and authoritative rebuttal of fuel reduction and greenies myths many more would have settled on these postures as a comfortable concession. Those myths, however, were always going to resonate more with urban people rather than people out in the countryside who tend to be awake to fallacies inherent in them.
There is some momentum towards recognising the realities of climate change and its consequence for fire and I agree with the hypothesis that more severe bushfires will likely result in the momentum becoming irresistible.
The psychology behind the processes is undeniably complex and it may be that resentment and the simple desire to lay blame more than a swing to belief in the full implications of climate change will land the blame in the government’s lap.
It is sort of distressing watching people close to me being brought kicking and screaming on the issue. If only the politics never made it to this point, but that horse bolted double digit years ago.
Out in the country side people are awake to the fallacies ? Out here in East Gippsland, where I live , I can assure you that there are still strong currents of the it’s the greenies ,the environmentalist vandals that have locked up the bush, that done it .Throw in we need more logging ,and bring back cattle to the high country and the bush fires wont be so bad .They’ll just go back to being normal. Fallacies in the bush can match any urban fallacies any day..
You may be right. There are over seven million hectares of publicly owned native forest alone in Victoria. If people on the land can’t conceive the scale of fuel reduction required to do anything much more than achieve localized asset protection then maybe we have no hope of convincing those in the towns and cities.
Eric, there is no way you can do hazard reduction for anything more than localised asset protection. If the entire country spent a month or two a year we still couldn’t cover even Vics 7 million hectares. You seem unable to grasp just how big that is, over some very rugged terrain.
That hazard reduction can cover any more than localised assets is the first myth that has to go.
Isn’t that exactly what I said?
“Those myths, however, were always going to resonate more with urban people rather than people out in the countryside who tend to be awake to fallacies inherent in them.”
I hope you’re right Eric, but by Crikey I doubt it. Seems to me those myths were mostly accepted by the regions rather than the cities.
This is a good summary for why I despair for the ability to address this issue. Climate change needs to be treated as a scientific question and depoliticised as quickly as possible if there is any hope of doing something about it. Our ability to follow the science cannot be dependent on how that aligns with our political tribe. Not only does it mean that we get bogged down in partisan rhetoric, it becomes impossible to show one cares without being dismissed on partisan grounds.
The government is going to do as littl as it can get away with, and we’ll give a collective shrug as we watch conditions deteriorate.
Good luck with that, there isn’t a ton of agreement on what exactly must be done.
For example, if my own position, that we need to drastically change how we both produce and consume, fundamentally changing the global mode of production, is the correct one, are you prepared to go the full pinko?
For me, I’d be about ready to riot if the powers that be decide action on climate change means a focus on ‘overpopulation’ and we all have to eat bugs.
There are so many proposed solutions. Are you alright with grand scale geoengineering? Down with nuclear power and hydro? How do you feel about the form of policy to internalize costs of emissions to businesses?
Can’t swing a cat for all the politics surrounding the issue. This won’t change no matter how much you wish it away.
There might not be agreement on what must be done, but that’s precisely where the role of politics comes into it. What ought to be done can be scientifically informed*, but it’s the role of a democracy for that to require the collective will and consent of the population. The role of politicians and political commentators is not to be scientists or engineers, but to shape the vision of how we as a nation (and a planet) deal with the facts.
*There are plenty of issues sounding climate change where there are ways we can mitigate or adapt to a changing climate.Agriculture and water management are two areas where planning and prevention can work now, as well as plans for urban management and health. Even something like a better disaster response can be looked at and addressed. But that’s the way human progress always goes – we build from what we know, probe the limits of that knowledge, and (hopefully) learn from the mistakes made along the way.
It was a purely.scientific issue for around 90% of the 20th century. Heck, even the people creating the problem had research that proved the problem existed, back in the 1970s. Then Kyoto happened, & nations started to commit to actions that would harm the bottom line of the fossil fuel industry……so they turned to the tried & true tactics of the cigarette industry-manufacturing doubt via politicians & the media. Heck, the cigarette industry wishes it had been as good at this tactic as the fossil fuel industry has been.
The scientists brave enough to face the truth are whispering that it’s too late. And even if it isn’t, we are not ready to make the necessary changes. Tim Flannery’s history of “Europe, the last 100 million years”, demonstrates how nature recovered from the mass extinctions of the past. It’s little consolation, but it’s all we’ve got.