According to scientist and author Tim Flannery, Australia is at the sharp end of the devastating impact of climate change and must undergo an energy revolution immediately if it is to survive.
Credit: AFP
If ever a textbook example of the impact of global warming was needed, Australia provides it, says Flannery. Bushfires have raged for weeks in the country's alpine regions and water reserves in the major cities are drying up while a once-in-a-century drought has ravaged farming land, cutting into the nation's economic output.
"We are the worst, as a developed country. There is nowhere else that is getting the hammering that we are getting at the moment," he says. "It may be that other factors will be unleashed in the future which will make it much worse for places like Europe and North America, but at the moment every city in Australia - with the exception probably of Darwin - has got water rations. That is not due to poor infrastructure planning or anything else," he added. "It's actually due to a natural cycle of water availability which is driven by greenhouse gas pollution."
To avert biological disaster, Flannery's suggestions are radical: the coal industry should be shunted aside, traditional methods of producing power junked, and a desert metropolis established and placed at the centre of Australia's electricity grid. "We need to 'decarbonise' the economy extremely rapidly - which we could do if we were on a raw footing," he says. "We could just close down the coal-fired power plants. We could. We could mandate we are going to have electricity rationing, we are going to close things down, we are going to build a new infrastructure as quick as we can."
Flannery is unmoved by the possibility that this approach might cripple the country's economy - currently riding a commodities boom thanks to north Asia's hunger for Australian resources. "Won't the Australian economy collapse if climate change continues? There are a lot of ways to make electricity. Burning coal is just one of the more antique and stupid ways of doing it. We've got solar, we've got wind, we've got geothermal."
| Climate change timeline |
|
1827: French scientist Jean-Baptiste Fourier is the first to consider the 'greenhouse effect' - the phenomenon whereby atmospheric gases trap solar energy, increasing Earth's surface temperature, rather than let the heat radiate back into space. 1979: Landmark report by U.S. National Academy of Sciences pins greenhouse effect to climate change and warns "a wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late". 1988: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set up under U.N. auspices. A milestone in forging scientific consensus on how to measure and analyse global warming, it is charged with issuing regular updates on the state of knowledge. 1990: First IPCC assessment report says levels of man-made greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere and predicts these will cause global warming. 1992: Creation of U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which also calls for voluntary cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. 1995: Second IPCC assessment report suggests that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate". 1997: UNFCCC countries sign the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrialised countries to reduce emissions of six greenhouse gases by 5.2 per cent compared with 1990 levels by 2012. 2000: The 1990s are dubbed the hottest decade on record. 2001: Third IPCC report declares the evidence for man-made global warming to be incontrovertible ,although the effects on the climate are difficult to pin down. Predicts that by 2100, the global atmospheric temperature will have risen between 1.8 and 5.6°C and sea levels by 0.09 to 0.88 metres. The United States, the biggest single greenhouse-gas polluter, abandons the Kyoto protocol, along with Australia. 2004: Russia ratifies Kyoto. Its approval is needed to turn the draft pact into an international treaty under the arithmetic of its ratification clauses. International Energy Agency (IEA) says China is now the world's second-biggest carbon polluter, due to surging use of fossil fuels. 16 February 2005: Kyoto Protocol takes effect. 29 August 2005: Hurricane Katrina devastates U.S. Gulf Coast, prompting speculation that exceptional season for tropical storms has been triggered by global warming. 2006: New studies suggest climate change is already well under way, with the loss of alpine glaciers in Europe, shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic Ocean ice pack, and retreating permafrost in Siberia. California unveils plans for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and files lawsuits against six automakers for their contribution to global warming. British report written by former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern says that climate change will cost up to 20 per cent of global GDP if nothing is done. 4 January 2007: British scientists predict 2007 will be warmest year on record around the world. |
Flannery explores these ideas in his latest book The Weather Makers, which explains how the build-up of greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels has damaged the atmosphere and led to global warming. This has resulted in melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and the extinction of some species - incontrovertible evidence that mankind's pollution is heating up the Earth, he says. "[The book] just makes the simple point that the atmosphere is very small - it's about one-five-hundredth [the size] of the oceans. So it's very easy to pollute."
Flannery has invited controversy from environmentalists for arguing that nuclear energy should be used to counter global electricity shortages, but his energy solution for Australia is even less conventional.
One of eight finalists for the 2007 Australian of the Year award, Flannery, a zoologist, biologist, explorer, conservationist and writer, rose to prominence following the 1994 publication of the ecological history of Australasia, The Future Eaters. He believes the solution for Australia lies in harnessing the heat contained in the Earth's crust.
Geothermal energy is already used in Iceland, North America and New Zealand, but Flannery believes Australia has the best geothermal resource in the world in the South Australian desert's Cooper Basin.
"One of the things I have suggested is that, if Australia is serious about this, we could build a major new city out there, link up with the north-south railway line, make it the centre of our electricity grid and use that resource. It will provide enough electricity to run the entire Australian economy for 100 years," he says.
Speaking quietly but intently, Flannery hopes that Australia will change from being one of the worst polluters on a per capita basis to the best example of the responsible use of world resources. "We could do that. We need a government to admit that it was wrong in ignoring this issue for so long and get on with a new vision," he says.
"Ultimately there is only one set of accounts that matters at all. It's not what [Prime Minister] John Howard says or what the current account balance in the Australian economy is - it's the one held by the atmosphere, the greenhouse gases held by the atmosphere, and that's the one we all need to keep our eye on."
To the climate change sceptics, Flannery says the changes the world has recently witnessed provide clear evidence that the Earth is heating up at an alarming rate. "What has become evident over the last three years … is that climate change is proceeding at a far more rapid rate than even the worst pessimist among the scientists imagined. We all underestimated the power of the greenhouse gases."
Flannery, who later this year will take up a post at Macquarie University in Sydney to research climate change, has sobering predictions for the future. "Let's project ourselves 50 years out and imagine that the rate of melt has continued so that the sea level has come up three or four metres. What that would mean is that there's barely a functioning port facility on the planet.
"So how do we go about international trade which is actually the centre of our global civilisation? Every coastal city is under enormous threat. People would be spending trillions just trying to keep their cities going. You've got refugees on a scale that is unimaginable. The stresses on peace would be enormous. Does that sound like a stable situation? That's just projecting what we've seen so far. That's just saying if we continue as we are, that's where we will end up."
Flannery is not alone in his predictions. His voice joins growing calls from around the world for a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas pollution and equally dire visions of the future. But while the amount of greenhouses gases already in the atmosphere is enough to cause disaster, Flannery believes this is no reason for inaction.
"This is about survival," he says. "The underlying conditions in the biosphere are getting worse and worse. The biggest danger with climate change is that it will go off the boil because it's got too big, too overwhelming. We've got to keep fighting against that."
*quiet applause*
*quiet applause*