Climate change now A shared fact
TWENTY years ago a worried and slightly frustrated climate scientist rushed to my desk in the old Mercury building in the city centre. “It’s already happening, take a look,” retired CSIRO researcher Stuart Godfrey said, busily pulling out graphs and numbers to spread out on my desk, while launching into an excited monologue.
It was Tasmanian rainfall data dating back to 1910 showing a sharp drop in rain since the 1970s. The downward trend, most obvious in autumn, showed rain decreased about 30 per cent. Winter rain had remained stable, but was marked by more extreme events.
“Geez,” I spluttered, as my mind began to catch up with the racing narrative of a man deeply submerged in his subject.
“This is evidence of climate change in Tasmania, isn’t it?” I said, my initial confidence waning by the end of the sentence. Looking for confirmation, I received a curiously puzzling smile and an awkward shrug from Dr Godfrey.
I had been writing about global warming in the paper since the early 1990s, and had just finished a series of two-page spreads for the Sunday Tasmanian in 2001, localising the findings in the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
I had hunted for evidence of climate change in Tasmania for years, but was met by the frustrating reality that the island’s wide variety of microclimates made it hard to model. Rain could dry up in a local valley, only to bucket down for decades in the next grassland plain. That was the nature of a small triangular island of mountains and plains in the path of the Roaring Forties.
Only months before the day Dr Godfrey arrived to see me, the Sunday Tasmanian published a picture of my then one-year-old son wearing a nappy and a Thai-dye T-shirt on the front page, with a story about him as a “greenhouse baby” and lamenting what the planet might look like when he is an old man if we kept burning fossil fuels.
Climate debate was raging in the US at the time, but denial and scepticism was rife in Australia. Former US president Bill Clinton, on a speaking tour of Australia in 2001 when asylum seekers were dominating the news Down Under, warned that millions of globalwarming refugees would make our current concerns pale into insignificance. But his dire warning, published in newspapers across the country the next day, was swamped by news of the US terror attacks. The war on terror stole our attention for the next 20 years.
ROUND the time Dr Godfrey came to see me, I remember being the butt of jokes at more than a couple of long lunches, where global warming theory was ridiculed akin to tarot cards and astrology.
The Sunday Tasmanian was pilloried in parliament at the time by late former premier Jim Bacon and his deputy Paul Lennon, who referred to the publication as “The Green Left Weekly, oops, Sunday Tasmanian” whenever they could. It was an infantile response that demonised and politicised climate science.
Around that time I learnt, to my dismay, there was no climate modelling in Hydro Tasmania’s initial drafts for a business case for the multibillion-dollar power cable under Bass Strait that was to be paid for over 25 years. If ever there was a case for climate modelling it was this project as it depended on rain replenishing dams over three decades as stored water was spent generating power for local and interstate markets.
Documents leaked to me at the time showed modelling was late to the party and hurriedly factored in to the equation — thankfully, with increasing importance and significance — as the business case for Basslink progressed. The data Dr Godfrey showed me was elementary to such a project, especially if linked to catchment statistics.
NOW, 20 years on, enough political and professional water has run under the bridge to reveal that Dr Godfrey came to me because CSIRO climate scientists in Hobart faced obstacles getting support for their research. Dr Godfrey was the chosen messenger because he was recently retired and unlikely to be sanctioned by anyone whose nose was out of joint from the unofficial public release of CSIRO data.
It was clear Dr Godfrey had the support of the linchpins of the scientific organisation, as I had to give my word I would send my article to a senior CSIRO figure in Melbourne before publishing. I did, and it was cleared without amendment. My understanding was the Sunday Tasmanian article would be circulated at a national conference about to happen, I think in Adelaide, in a bid to force the hand of the organisation, or its political masters, into deeper targeted research.
Dr Godfrey was adamant the rain data was indicative of, not necessarily due to, climate change. More work was needed. I quoted him, with the qualification that scientists remained unsure “beyond reasonable doubt” whether the Tasmanian climate changes were a result of global warming. “I have to say, I do not know but I am concerned,” Dr Godfrey said. “The models are not yet capable of giving reliable predictions for a small climatically diverse island like Tasmania.”
Dr Godfrey told me CSIRO scientists were concerned the general Tasmanian trend since the 1970s was mirrored in southwestern Western Australia and parts of South Australia and Victoria. Winter rain in southwestern WA had declined 25 per cent since the middle of last century, with a sudden dip in the 1970s. This was accompanied by changes in weather similar to those projected by greenhouse climate models.
“The best way to deal with such unpleasant possibilities is to face their consequences rationally,’’ Dr Godfrey said at the time. “We need to conduct the debate with civility and regard for the facts, trying to reach a reasonable degree of consensus among people with differing political views.”
In hindsight, it’s fair to say climate scientists did conduct the debate with “civility and regard for the facts”, but were met in the public arena by denialists with scant regard for facts.
Meanwhile, we all watched as unprecedented wildfires burned, cities were flooded, and coasts were ravaged by storms and rising seas.
In September 2007, former Mercury reporter Peter Boyer began writing his weekly column about climate change science and politics. At the time, I thought it was a mistake to have a dedicated climate column, fearing it would marginalise the issue. I’d seen it before in politics and journalism with “women’s” and “Aboriginal” issues. Tokenism keeps important voices busy, hushed and out of the main arena.
But I was wrong. Boyer’s column has proved invaluable in getting the latest research into plain English for all Tasmanians to read for the past 14 years. It’s one reason the Mercury readership is so far ahead of the rest of the nation on climate change. Mercury readers will be aware their local paper has led the country on this and other issues, but I don’t think many fully comprehend the resilience required by the likes of Boyer, who face being undermined, opposed and abused by angry critics and ideological nuts.
NEWS Corp this week turned a corner by taking a lead on climate change. From this point, the debate is about what we do to tackle it, not whether the theory of global warming is true or false. The evidence is overwhelming, the jury is in, the science adds up.
Thanks to Tasmanians like Boyer, Godfrey and many others, including frequent Mercury letter-writer and retired CSIRO climate scientist John Church, who all helped win this honourable battle, climate change is now a shared fact.
In today’s highly contested world that’s well worth celebrating. The voices of reason won.
the debate From this point, do to tackle is about what we the theory of it, not whether is true or global warming is false. The evidence the jury is in, overwhelming, up. the science adds