As floods follow fires, we need to hold our leaders’ feet to the flames – or, for that matter, to the water
Environmentalists once saw abstraction as the biggest obstacle to climate action. How, they wondered, could one focus the public on the distant future?
Today, we confront the opposite problem, with the very immediacy of the crisis generating a strange paralysis.
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that global heating made extreme flooding more common, its new report at the end of February spurred relatively little discussion – in part because of the water covering swathes of Queensland and New South Wales.
As tinnies plucked desperate residents from the deluge, who could give due weight to the warning from Prof Brendan Mackey, one of the IPPC authors, that the science clearly projected “an increase of heavy rainfall events?”
The urgency of rescuing flood victims muffled the impact of a document that the UN secretary general, António Guterres, described as “an atlas of human suffering”. It also diverted attention from a previous manifestation of that suffering: the 2019/2020 Black Summer fires that burned out 84m acres of land and killed at least 33 people.
That crisis remains far from resolved, with more than half of the $2.74bn pledged by the Morrison government to bushfire recovery still unallocated.
Yet, as the scale of recent flood damage becomes more apparent, the Black Summer survivors might legitimately wonder as to whether they’ll be remembered or not.
On Twitter, the chief executive of Greenpeace, David Ritter, has compiled a helpful list of scientific warnings connecting fossil fuels, atmospheric warmth and rainfall.
In 2007, for instance, the Garnaut climate change review predicted “longer dry spells broken by heavier rainfall events”; in 2015, scientists found that global warming increased the frequency of La Niña events; in 2016, the Department of Energy and the Environment published a State of the Climate report which warned of more intense floods.
A comparable dossier might be assembled about bushfires, beginning with the 2003 report that explained how “climate change throughout the present century is predicted to lead to increased temperatures and, with them, a heightened risk of unplanned fire.”
In 2007, the IPCC warned that “heatwaves and fires are virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency”; in 2008, the National Inquiry on Bushfire Mitigation and Management explained that “fires’ frequency, intensity, and size are expected to increase under climate change”.
But despite all of that, in 2017, Scott Morrison chose to borrow a “prop” from his friends at the Minerals Council of Australia to wave in the House of Representatives.
“This is coal,” he laughed. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you!”
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