Climate Change

In Feeling the Heat, journalist and science writer Jo Chandler voyages to Antarctica (mostly), where she meets and talks with scientists about the meaning of their work. She reminds me of the eighteenth-century philosophical travellers, the first anthropologists who travelled to strange lands (Australia included) to observe the language and customs of savage peoples, and to learn from them. From ice field and coral reef, Chandler reports on the latest in climate science, as if meeting the inhabitants of a distant country where they do things differently.

These two books share common assumptions about the nature of our cities and our collective future as homo urbanis. If we are to survive the impending disaster of climate change and build an environmentally durable and socially just future, then we must do so within our existing, sprawling suburban landscapes. Gleeson and Mees know and respect one another’s work – each quotes the other approvingly – but the two authors diverge sharply in tone and intention.

Have you heard the latest joke about emissions trading? There was this factory in China that produced so much carbon dioxide from coal they had to get rid of it somehow. So they sold it to Coca-Cola. We shall burp away in the cause of carbon sequestration, imaginatively interpreted. Somewhere in the joke is a kernel of truth. If there’s a buck to be made from climate change, there’ll be someone, somewhere, who’ll be making it, and we’re right to be suspicious.

In 1994, I stood at the foot of the mighty Athabasca Glacier in the heart of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. At places more than 300 metres thick, the ice was treacherous, riven by great fissures and studded with rocky debris carried down from the Columbia Icefield, seven kilometres away. We had parked our car outside the chalet, a kilometre or so behind us, and traversed the moraine stretching across the treeless valley. As I waited for a break in the clouds before taking a photograph, it was disconcerting to consider that, one hundred years earlier, my vantage point would have been compressed under tons of slowly flowing glacial ice. Indeed, the glacier then extended beyond the site of the current Chalet carpark. This was my first direct experience of global warming. With such compelling evidence of climate change, it is not surprising that award-winning photo-journalist and environmentalist Gary Braasch begins his book on global warming with matched images of the Athabasca Glacier taken in 1917 by A.O. Wheeler, and in 2005 by Braasch himself.

The former co-chair of scientific assessment for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Houghton, declared in 2003 that global warming is a weapon of mass destruction that is at least as dangerous as chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and, indeed, terrorism. It is therefore no small irony that two prominent members of the ‘coalition of the willing’ and the world’s two highest per capita carbon emitters – the US and Australia – should choose to devote so many resources to eradicating conventional WMDs, yet do so little to address global warming. Australia’s stance on climate change is logic-defying, unprincipled and lacking in remorse. The Howard government has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol because of the short-term economic costs to Australia, but it claims that Australia will seek to meet its Kyoto target anyway. But Australia’s Kyoto target is so generous relative to other developed countries that it does not have to do much to meet it.

To the west through the windows of my primary school in Terowie, I could see wheat fields, farmed by solid, middle-class farmers who sent their children to the local schools. To the east, if I squinted to the distant hills, I could make out the start of the station country, run by ‘squatters’ who sent their children to private schools in Adelaide. In between, the land was neither one nor the other and the strugglers who farmed it were often obliged to take work in the railways or as labourers on the lands to the east or west. It was all due to Goyder’s Line, I was told. There was always a lurking implication of guilt when Goyder’s Line was mentioned. Anyone who hadn’t the foresight to buy, or inherit, land sufficiently inside or outside the Line probably deserved to struggle.