Dawn of the new normal(?)

Is this a wakeup call we will heed? Or is it just more false light?

By David Salt

When did climate change arrive in Australia?

Was it when the rising seas swept away the last little native rat (a creature known as a melomys) from a tiny coral cay off the northern tip of Australia around ten years ago? This was reported as the first species extinction directly attributed to climate change.

Or was it Black Saturday, 7 February 2009, when devastating bushfires in Victoria killed 173 people causing everyone to acknowledge that more intense wildfires could no longer be resisted.

Or was it in 2007 when our Prime Minister of the time, Kevin Rudd, declared climate change to be ‘the greatest moral challenge’ of our time (noting he was then displaced by a Prime Minister who claims climate change is ‘absolute crap’).

Or was it this Australian summer, dubbed by our current coal-loving Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, to be our ‘Black Summer’? He then declared that we need to prepare for a ‘new normal’.

Of course, climate change has been impacting Australia for decades*, but it’s only been biting us with real venom in recent years. Unfortunately, rather than stimulate a significant, systematic and meaningful response, climate-change impact so far seems to have only galvanised the culture wars, entrenched the status quo and perpetuated inaction.

Scorched coral

To my mind, the inescapable consequences of ignoring climate change surfaced in the summer of 2016 with the mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. It destroyed around a third of the reef’s hard corals. It was then followed but another mass bleaching in 2017 destroying another third. The bleaching was caused by high water temperatures associate with global warming.

Of course, I say ‘inescapable’ because a larger more graphic example of the impacts of climate change would be harder to find; and it was an impact entirely predicted and widely communicated by a broad range of scientists. What’s more, those impacts came with severe economic, social and policy implications (in terms of World Heritage obligations) all of which had me believing this event would actually make a difference. (2016 also saw the massive loss of mangroves and kelp forests but these collapses didn’t carry the same direct human connection. They weren’t as visible, either.)

In the past we’ve discussed the importance of shocks and crises in breaking policy deadlocks. And I really thought the coral bleaching episodes might be a tipping point that might overturn our climate-change inaction. But I was sorely disappointed. Far-right, populist pollies like Pauline Hanson said the reef was in fine form, while holding up a piece of healthy coral from a portion of the reef unaffected by the bleaching; the Government said their policy settings were fine, while government agencies were putting out status reports describing the reef’s outlook as very poor; and fear campaigns on the possibility of losing regional mining jobs in Queensland outweighed concerns for the reef and led to the re-election of a conservative government with no effective policy for climate change.

Rubbing salt into the wounds of my incredulity, the head of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a guy named Col McKenzie, urged the Federal Government to stop funding marine biologists because their reports on coral bleaching were “harming the tourism industry”.

The summer of 2016 (and 2017) left me somewhat desolate. If the ongoing death of Australia’s most beloved and precious ecosystem wasn’t a sufficiently powerful wake up call, what was?

And then there was the Black Summer of 2019/20

I was sad about the ecological implications of the mass bleaching (and what it portends for the economically important eco-tourism industry of Queensland); but, truth to tell, it didn’t directly affect my quality of life.

The Black Summer of 2019/20, on the other hand, has shaken me to the core. In addition to scorching forests and beaches dear to my heart, it’s trashed the economies of regional towns where I know people; it’s battered the life out of the city in which I reside; indeed it’s poisoned the very air that I breathe. I’m also bracing myself for a set of dramatically increased insurance premiums on policies I’m already struggling to sustain.

All that has happened this past summer has been predicted by our climate scientists and climate workers (such as emergency service agencies). All of this has largely been discounted by our national government for most of the past decade.

But never before have so many Australian’s been hurt by so many climate extremes over such a large area and over such an extended period; nearly 80% of Australians according to a new survey. First it was drought, then wildfire (and smoke), flood, storms and hail.

Summer is almost over (according to the calendar) and it can’t come soon enough. ‘What else could go wrong,’ I asked myself. And, then, last night as I was closing down I spied an emerging story on the news wire – another wave of coral bleaching is hitting the Great Barrier Reef as temperature levels surge above average. Indeed, it could be even more extensive than the 2016/17 episodes.

In the next month we’ll see the extent of this bleaching event but it’s not looking good.

The new normal

In environmental terms, the ‘new normal’ has been with us for over half a century. Earth systems scientists have long been warning that the impact of humans on this planet has pushed our ‘spaceship Earth’ into a new way of behaving. Our activities are now distorting our planet’s very capacity to provide us with the stable habitat we need. Many refer to this as the Anthropocene.

This Black Summer is but a foretaste of the conditions we will need to endure in the summers ahead; summers that will likely be far blacker than this one past.

Our Prime Minister presents this new normal as merely a management issue, a need to organise our response agencies a bit better; so they can act with greater co-ordination if, god forbid, we should ever again see fires as bad as this seasons. He’s called a royal commission and seems to be looking among other things for a recommendation for new laws so that the Federal Government can declare states of emergency, call out the army and so forth without needed a request from the States,

But he’s not questioning our nation’s inadequate carbon emission targets or making any effort to show leadership to address the unsustainable trajectory our species is on. His ‘new normal’, then, is really just a minor iteration on the ‘old normal’. It simply isn’t going to do the job.

A new light of day?

A growing segment of the community is coming to this same conclusion. The student protests of last year, prior to the Black Summer, were suggesting the status quo may be breaking down. And the impact of these recent months may, finally, be the catalyst for genuine action.

And though I was upset over the lack of action following the bleaching events of 2016/17, the ‘truth’ they spoke about what is unfolding around us was heard by many, even those recalcitrant lobbyists for the reef tourism. Col McKenzie was much derided for suggesting marine biologists were the problem (rather than climate change). But he changed his tune. Following that episode he said it is time “to take a more public stance” on climate change.

“It was the bleaching events in 2016-17 that drove the message home,” he said. He added that it was reluctance within his 11-member board – particularly from tour operators who refused to accept ‘man-made’ climate change – that had restricted his own ability to speak out in the past. But those climate-change deniers have largely gone quiet, he said. “They realise it’s bullshit and we can’t be continuing it.”

So if the bleaching events of 2016/17 belatedly convinced this cohort of deniers, maybe there is reason to believe our Black Summer may belatedly raise the nation to action.

*Climate change is not a new phenomenon. Climate deniers will often suggest we don’t know enough or the jury is still out or it’s only an emerging science but the truth is the science has been around for over a century and the evidence confirming it has been conclusive since the 1970s – that’s 50 years ago! For an excellent guide to this history see the very readable ‘Losing Earth: The decade we almost stopped climate change’ in the New York Times.

Image: Bushfire smoke filters the sun in late January 2020. Image by David Salt

Calling all economists: don’t let the denialists leave you the blame

Climate change is both an economic AND a moral issue

By David Salt

“Where climate change is a moral issue we Liberals do it tough. Where climate change is an economic issue, as tonight shows, we do very, very well.”

These were Tony Abbott’s parting words on the 18 May 2019 as he conceded defeat at the recent federal elections. The voters in his Warringah electorate had finally tired of his denialist cant, and his wrecking and leaking from the side lines.

But in the ashes of his defeat he still found solace in the fact that while he had lost, his party, the Liberals, had won. They took no credible policy on carbon emissions (or the environment in general) to the election, they backed the development of new coal mines, and they scared the nation that the changes the nation would face under the opposition would cost everyone.

Against all poll-based predications, the Liberals won, and from their (close) victory they claim they have a mandate to ramp up the economic development of our fossil fuel reserves and continue with their non-action on the environmental front (with displacement activity on plastic recycling on the side to cover the void of their inaction).

Economics traduced

So, while Abbott has departed the political stage, possibly his parting observation of how the conservatives should be framing climate change held some truth: ‘Where climate change is framed as an economic issue, the Liberals do very, very well.’

If that’s the case then the once noble science of economics has been traduced – revealed as lacking a moral centre. It is merely a tool (a pawn) in a political game used to instil fear and prejudice in a jittery electorate.

Climate change is big – indeed it’s massive – but it’s also amorphous, uncertain and lies in our future (even though its impacts are starting to be felt). With clever economic framing it’s easy to convince people that the deep, transformative change that the world’s scientists say we need comes with ‘unacceptable’ short term costs. This is the exact game the Liberal party has been playing.

Indeed, the Liberals line in the run up to the last election was that their climate policies met their climate commitments “without wrecking the economy” and they released economic modelling suggesting Labor’s 45% target would cost the economy billions. The Liberals climate commitments have been shown time and again to be inadequate and their modelling of Labor’s higher target have been widely debunked.

It was a climate campaign based on fear and deception, and it seems that it worked in that it convinced voters the short term costs outweighed any longer term benefits. And then the government’s biggest denier (in the form of its past leader Tony Abbott) claimed it was simply an economics framing.

Stand up and be counted!

Well, I say to economists everywhere, please don’t accept this. Your science is based on rationality, public welfare and moral outcomes. Don’t allow conservatives to hide behind the economic façade of short term optimisation. Don’t allow them to sell your science as a reason to turn our back on climate change.

Of course, economists are some of the biggest supporters of meaningful action on climate change. And, truth to tell, there are real dangers in raising any issue to the status of a moral crisis.

In 2007 one of the world’s leading economists, Sir Nicholas Stern, told the world that “climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen.”

“The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming. We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century. The problem is global and the response must be a collaboration on a global scale,” said Stern.

Our own Prime Minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, then chimed in on this rising tide of concern by labelling climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation.” But then he seemed to squib on his commitment as soon as it hit resistance in parliament (resistance led by Tony Abbott). Surely the ‘great moral challenge of our generation’ was worthy of a bit of a fight.

But with major ecosystems failing, mass extinctions on the increase and Pacific nations drowning under rising seas, there can be no doubt that climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation. It’s also the great ecological, economic and social issue of our times, and experts from all areas should be standing up and demanding our political leaders see it as such.

For a past prime minister (Tony Abbott) to claim otherwise is immoral. To claim legitimacy for his party’s denialism by hiding it behind the cloak of economics is deceitful but in that he invoked economics it’s beholden on economists everywhere to set the record straight.

But the last word goes to the Pope

And another little postscript on Abbott’s election night epiphany. He began by pointing out that ‘where climate change is a moral issue the Liberals do it tough’. Where is Abbott’s moral centre in this debate? As a self-professed Catholic of deep faith, what does he make of Pope Francis’ declaration (coincidently also made in May this year). Pope Francis said: “We continue along old paths because we are trapped by our faulty accounting and by the corruption of vested interests. We still reckon as profit what threatens our very survival.” From this perspective, the Liberals economic framing is revealed to be merely faulty accounting and corrupt.

Not that Abbott has ever shown the moral fortitude of the leader of his Church. At the same time that Abbott was telling the world that climate change was not something to worry about, Pope Francis is on the record as saying: “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity.”

Image byPete Linforth fromPixabay

Sustainability and ‘big government’

A ‘good’ reason to deny climate change

By David Salt

Why do people deny climate change? Are they ignorant? Are they stupid?

I’m a science writer. I place great store in the scientific process and accept what the overwhelming majority of scientists say about climate change – that it is real and endangers all that I hold dear (including the wellbeing of my children).

But I’m also aware that many powerful people don’t accept the scientific evidence on climate change, and these people go out of their way to block meaningful engagement and action relating to it.

A case study in denialism

As one example, Tony Abbott, a former Prime Minister of Australia (our most powerful elected office), recently told an international forum: “Certainly, no big change has accompanied the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over the past century from roughly 300 to roughly 400 parts per million or from 0.03 to 0.04 per cent. Contrary to the breathless assertions that climate change is behind every weather event, in Australia, the floods are not bigger, the bushfires are not worse, the droughts are not deeper or longer, and the cyclones are not more severe than they were in the 1800s. Sometimes, they do more damage but that’s because there’s more to destroy, not because their intensity has increased. More than 100 years of photography at Manly Beach in my electorate does not suggest that sea levels have risen despite frequent reports from climate alarmists that this is imminent.”

Now Abbott is dead wrong about the two central points in this quote. Weather events are becoming more severe because of climate change, and sea levels are rising. There are vast quantities of empirical evidence from multiple studies demonstrating this. What’s more, there is a strong scientific consensus that the impacts of climate change will increase significantly as carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise.

And yet Abbott is far from alone in his beliefs, and many powerful people from the Conservative side of politics peddle the same set of falsehoods that prop up climate-change denialism.

Are they ignorant? As Prime Minister of Australia, Abbott had ready access to the world’s finest scientists; indeed many have gone out to their way to explain the science to him. He had at his fingertips the best knowledge around but has either chosen to ignore it or not engage with it.

Is he stupid? He was a Rhodes Scholar and made it to the top office in the land. He’s not stupid.

In any case, ignorance and stupidity are just two ‘excuses’ that might be invoked in an effort to explain the irrational situation of powerful people denying a demonstrable truth. Greed, vested interest and corruption might be other explanations, as might the ideas of sunk investments and system inertia. While each of these ‘justifications’ might apply in some situations, for me they simply don’t explain the entrenched visceral opposition to the idea that we need deep and concerted action to address climate change.

A core belief

As a younger man I believed in ‘rationality’ and common sense, and that a fact was a fact. The challenge of climate change (and sustainability) was simply a problem of information deficit. In other words, more information would eventually solve the problem.

As I matured, the evidence supporting climate change increased. The case for doing something became ever more compelling. But, rather than act on that evidence, political forces gathered to neutralize our capacity to deal with it. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, as one example, have been rising in recent years when our international commitment was to reduce them.

Better science and science communication is not working. Stupidity, ignorance and all the other possible reasons mentioned above play a role but for me they don’t explain the underlying force behind denialism.

And then I heard a talk by Naomi Oreske, a prominent science historian from the University of California (and co-author of the widely acclaimed book Merchants of Doubt) discuss the strategies of denialism. Whether it’s tobacco or ozone depletion or acid rain or pesticide regulation, the claims being made by deniers (she said) is always the same: extra regulation means an expansion of government and a constriction of freedoms – and this is an assault on Neoliberalism Conservative ideology which holds that big government is bad, markets are good and individuals should be free to maximize their wealth as they see fit.

As I reflected on this, it became crystal clear: the ‘idea’ of climate change is an existential threat to the ideology of free market fundamentalism (and Libertarianism). If we as a society acknowledge the clear and present danger of climate change (and the need for a deep and systemic response) then we are also acknowledging the need for bigger government and for greater constraints on our personal freedoms (in order to tackle climate change).

And the longer I thought about it the more I was convinced that here is ‘good’ reason underpinning climate change denialism. That’s ‘good’ as in strong, deep and powerful, not as in virtuous or right.

Anathema

Our world view is the well spring of our identity, the thing that gives substance to our meaning and to what we hold as important. And our world view is the frame through which we interpret everything around us, and the information presented to us. If that information does not conform to our world view, we often ignore it or distort it so that it does. Indeed, psychology has often demonstrated that attacks on our core identities often make them stronger.

In any case, the argument that a Libertarian ideology lies at the core of climate denialism makes a lot of sense to me. It’s also my response to Peter’s reflection on sustainability being a Conservative idea.

Maybe Peter is right; maybe I am too. Our arguments are not mutually exclusive.

If we are right, however, it’s reasonable to suggest that effective policy for sustainability will necessarily involve an engagement with Conservative and neoliberal ideology on several fronts. At the very least it will involve presenting ideas on sustainability and global change that are framed in a manner that Conservatives will engage with.