Hope is key as future gets bleaker

The oddest and most interesting scientific story of the past week must be the one about the possible reappearance of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, officially known as the thylacine.

Scientists in the University of Melbourne’s TIGGR (Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research) Lab are collaborating with a Texan biotech company and say they could have a baby thylacine within a decade. The same Texan company, Colossal Biosciences, was previously in the news for plans to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth.

Obviously there are enormous ethical problems with all this. Jurassic Park’s famous line comes to mind about scientists being so preoccupied with whether they could that they forgot to stop and think whether they should.

It can seem less like science fiction than science folly. Trevor Mallard was roundly mocked when he mused that genetic technology could bring back the moa to roam free in the hills behind Wainuiomata. On the other hand, there is a way in which it appeals. Like most extinction stories, that of the thylacine, which is really a marsupial dog, not a tiger, is heartbreaking. There is a sad piece of short footage of the last thylacine in captivity in Hobart in 1933.

But the story has deeper appeal than just one species. It suggests extinction need not be forever and humanity’s devastating ecological impacts could somehow be reversed. It offers reassurance at a time when we see man-made climate change accelerate in increasingly unpredictable ways.

No-one in New Zealand needs to be told we are experiencing an unusually, even disastrously, wet winter. This week, Nelson and Northland bore the brunt of it. In other weeks, it was Wellington, Christchurch and Westport.

Last month was New Zealand’s wettest July on record, but also the fourth-warmest. This is what climate change modellers told us to expect: wetter winters and drier summers. More wind, more storms, more floods. And in summer, more droughts. But did we expect it to come so soon?

There have been wildfires and record temperatures in Europe.

Until this years, wildfires on the suburban outskirts of London seemed unimaginable. The bone-dry riverbed of the Loire in France is another powerful symbol.

It is easy to feel a sense of doom and helplessness, but we can prioritise political action, starting at the level of local body politics. What do this year’s council candidates say about climate change, and related issues of transport policy, land use and housing density?

There was some good news within the week’s cavalcade of bad news. In the United States, President Joe Biden was finally able to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, an amended version of his ‘‘build back better’’ strategy, that will direct a record US$375 billion into climatechange strategies that should cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 44% by 2030.

There are tax breaks for renewable energy and EVs, and US$4b towards tackling droughts in the western states. Political will clearly exists, public resistance seems to be declining and technology is catching up. It needs to, because climate change is speeding up as well. But the crisis has become impossible to ignore, and a background issue has moved to the foreground, where it may stay for years or decades. It means no serious person doubts the reality of climate change any more. ‘‘A great upheaval is coming,’’ the aptly named Gaia Vince warns in a new book about climate change nomadism.

Despite destructive weather events, and the insurance and infrastructure burdens that follow, and a global picture of millions of displaced climate refugees, hope is not just possible but necessary. Unlike the thylacine, we can save ourselves.