Month: January 2013

Australia is in the grip of “a once-in-20 or 30-year heatwave” with extremes over 40 degrees. Despite the heat, and the likelihood that there will be many more extreme events like this as climate change hits, the Australian media almost universally omits to mention greenhouse gas, global warming or climate change in its reporting. A quick search (1, 2 & 3) finds less than ten stories.

The consequences, of extreme heat, are usually mainstream media material. For example 370 people died from extreme heat in Victoria during the same week that 173 people died from the 2009 Black Saturday fires in the state.  The same report predicts that extreme heat in Melbourne could, without mitigation by 2050, kill over one thousand people in an event.

Numbers like these seem to be losing salience in with the Australian public, or at least our media.  The lack of reporting certainly enhances research that demonstrates fear won’t do it and views that “Our leaders and the community at large are still in denial (or studiously unaware) of the realities of global change“

So what might do it? Beyond Denial: Managing the Uncertainties of Global Change from Australia 21 looks at this. In it:

Paul Gilding, the author of “The Great Disruption,” … argues that rather than a steady decline, the human world will, in the next one or two decades, experience shocks of such magnitude arising from our disordered economic system, climate change and peak oil, that they will call forth an emergency crisis response that will enable us to harness human ingenuity to craft a genuinely sustainable future for those humans who survive the shocks. 

There’s plenty more here but, of course, no simple solutions for complex entangled problems such as global warming.

Image: Sydney Morning Herald The Heat and Dry is On

George Monbiot and Ross Gittins, an environmentalist and an economist, both have two related and compelling reveiws of 2012 trends.

Ross writes about Jeffrey Sachs’ evidence for “the four business gangs that run the US“. Sachs’s highlights how:

”corporate wealth translates into political power … into further wealth … Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,” Part of this power “has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda” underwriting “a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.”

George covers 2012 as “the year we did our best to abandon the natural world“:

Governments have now begun to concede, without evincing any great concern, that they will miss their target of no more than 2C of global warming this century. Instead we’re on track for between four and six degrees. To prevent climate breakdown, coal burning should be in steep decline. Far from it: the International Energy Agency reports that global use of the most carbon-dense fossil fuel is climbing by about 200m tonnes a year. This helps to explain why global emissions are rising so fast. 

Australia however may have bucked some these trends (ironically as the world’s leading coal exporter). Australia’s Environment Minister Tony Burke, perhaps a little optimistically, points out “in 2012 we returned the Murray Darling to health, became the world leader on protecting the oceans…“. Australia also introduced a carbon price in 2012 and, within the context of what Sachs and Monbiot outline, this is genuine progress.

What is different? Leadership perhaps? A more civil society? An economy that still supports a broader environmental debate? Regardless of the fact that we are clearly far from a successful sustainbility shift on the scales needed (e.g. see Beyond Denial: managing the uncertainties of global change) are there some pointers to come from Australia’s 2012? It’s not easy to generalise from such trends so comments welcome!

Image: Giant fish made entirely from discarded plastic bottles. Rio, UN Conference on Sustainable Development.