Knocking on the door - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by James Woodford
IN AUSTRALIA, CLIMATE CHANGE WILL HIT THE WEALTHY, especially those who live in beachfront or harbourside homes. Late in January 2006, the world's premier science journal, Nature, reported the findings of Australian researchers from CSIRO's Marine and Atmospheric Research, Hobart. The team found that by 2100, based on current trends, sea level will have risen thirty-one centimetres. "This will push back typical beach shorelines by around 300 metres," Nature reported on January 19, 2006. As most Australians live near the coast, few will be unaffected. It seems an extreme figure and obviously depends on the slope of the land, yet even a three-metre retreat would lay to waste billions of dollars of infrastructure and real estate. It is easy to imagine the environmental damage that will be done to shorelines, by seawalls and other engineering in an effort to protect the homes of wealthy Australians.
Director of the Coastal Studies Unit at the University of Sydney, Professor Andrew Short, says the expense of protecting and moving infrastructure will be extraordinary. He points to structures like Sydney Airport, which is practically at sea level. Eventually, however, every wharf and jetty in the nation will have to be adjusted or moved. "Saltwater will penetrate further inland and all the mangroves and seagrasses will also have to shift. If you get an increase in cyclones, as predicted by climate-change models, you get more winds from the east and north-east and the beaches will rotate," he said. In other words, sand that is normally pushed to the northern end of beaches by southerly systems will instead be driven to the southern end of beaches. Such a dramatic change in wave and wind regimes will have huge impacts on beach erosion.
This is just one of the many changes that are likely to occur, according to climate scientists. In essence, the CSIRO predicts an average temperature increase of between 0.4 and two degrees by 2030 and up to six degrees by 2070. There will be more heatwaves and fewer frosts and more frequent El Niño-driven droughts. The big drought of 2002-03 saw farm output fall by $3 billion. While rainfall is predicted to continue to decline in southern Australia, it will increase across the tropics. A warming of a mere 0.3 degrees will see the area of snow cover in alpine regions contract by eighteen per cent. As habitat is lost, biodiversity is expected to crash and some introduced pests, such as the cane toad, may benefit from soaring temperatures. Scientists also predict an increase in extreme weather events such as the Sydney hailstorm of 1999. That storm dumped 500,000 tonnes of ice on the city, much of it the size of tennis balls, and caused $1.7 billion of damage. As the insurance industry is now warning, a twenty-five per cent increase in wind gusts will lead to a 650 per cent increase in claims. Even for those who like warm weather, the coming century is unlikely to be an enjoyable one for humans. Direct health impacts of warming will include higher incidence of heatstroke and skin cancer. In addition, diseases like malaria are likely to begin to march into previously temperate zones.
Charles Sturt University's Professsor Nick Klomp says most people do not believe a temperature change of a couple of degrees could make much of a difference. "Actually, it makes a heap of difference. Life is on a knife edge and often there is nowhere for it to go. If a species tries to move it hits water, mountains and towns so there are limits to where species can move."
Klomp warns that people need to be careful of being lulled into a false sense of security that the changes are not yet dramatic or apparent to any but the more observant. "Some things change gradually and some things change at a critical level. The best example of a critical-phase change is water melting. Water stays frozen through a huge temperature range but once the temperature hits zero, nothing will stop it from melting." It is such critical-phase changes that are potentially the most frightening of climate change's impacts. Most of these possible phase changes are not yet well understood.
What is understood is that these changes will affect the way we live, our ability to engage with the environment and the nature of the physical world around us – its topography, animals and plants. One of the most ubiquitous Australians is the gum tree, which belongs to a group that consists of 800 different species. Dr Lesley Hughes of Macquarie University's School of Biological Sciences has found that about a quarter of all eucalypts live in an extremely narrow climate range – less than one degree Celsius. With predictions of temperatures increasing by two or three degrees, what will happen to these trees?
CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT GOING TO BE OUR CHILDREN'S OR GRANDCHILDREN'S PROBLEM. It will be ours. It is ours. My wife, Prue, and I realised several years ago that living in Sydney in a home of our own, with space for children and dogs, was beyond our reach unless we were prepared to spend our entire lives working. We did, however, own land on the south coast and after nearly a decade of wanting to escape the city, we are now living there. Our fifty hectares used to be part of a much bigger farm beside a coastal lake, close to the ocean and looking back on the escarpment of the Great Dividing Range. Nearly three-fifths of our land is a fenced-off forest, untouched and little visited for perhaps half a century.
All around us, urbanisation is taking hold and we knew that if we did not act, our land too, would one day be broken up, the forest cleared and its extraordinary values killed – a death by a thousand cuts. We were determined that we would do everything we could to protect the forest and its wildlife from ourselves, our children and anyone else who might one day own our property.
We placed a voluntary conservation agreement over thirty hectares of eucalypt-dominated forest and now take our obligations under this agreement with the state government very seriously. Most importantly, the forest is legally protected from subdivision. We have been pulling out weeds, planting trees in erosion gullies, encouraging the native species, providing habitat for birds and animals. But it may well be that attempting to protect the forest from being cleared or subdivided is a waste of time. Climate change has many weapons in her arsenal and putting a line on a map and defending it with English property law will not keep her out. Even if a temperature increase doesn't make our forest vulnerable, increased bushfires, weeds and disease may.
On the cleared land, we have begun establishing a native hardwood plantation. It is predominantly made up of gum trees and, while our tree planting is on a relatively small scale, it has consumed a considerable amount of time and money. Hughes' research suggests a betting man wouldn't rate the odds of it ever reaching harvestable age as high. Knowing this, everything I now plant is chosen for its capacity to cope with a large climatic variation.
At the end of the day, electricity consumption is at the heart of why we face such a climate-change mess. The generation of electricity is the biggest contributor to climate change. The fossil fuels that power the turbines are not renewable and the waste they produce is polluting our entire planet.
We did not want to give up on a lifestyle powered by electricity, but we did want to live smarter.
Moving beyond the reach of a major power company is not easy, and last year I discovered just how powerful electricity companies are. The landscape around our home is blighted by powerlines. They are not only ugly but keeping the land beneath them clear of vegetation creates moats dividing ecosystems. The one across our place has cleaved the local forest in two. An aerial photograph of the area reveals a chopping board of powerline cuts. A power easement crosses our property and a line passes within fifty metres of the home site.
We had wanted to rely on solar power but were advised against it. We were warned about the price and perceived technical difficulties. In rural areas, the cost of connecting to the grid is borne by the householder and can often run into tens of thousands of dollars. When we contacted the local monopoly for a quote we were not surprised to be told it would be between ten and fifteen thousand dollars to tap into the closest power pole – the one we would be spending the rest of our lives looking at whatever power source we chose.
"But exactly how much?" I asked
"Well, a formal quote will cost you $500," the officer said.
We decided to start counting our solar savings immediately. I was prepared to live a dim and difficult life rather than pay an outrageous quote to a corporation with a monopoly to make a fortune and destroy the environment.
We planned to use a generator for power to build the frames and part of the roof of the house before installing a solar system. My brief to our local supplier was to install the best system possible for less than the cost of connecting to the pole. I wanted the inside of our building to be as "normal" a home as possible. Subscribing to the sustainable hedonism school of environmentalism, we did not want to send our family back to a Palaeolithic existence. On the day the panels were bolted onto the roof, I asked the supplier about the limitations of the solar set-up. Could we use power tools to finish the building?
"No worries at all. Anything less than 2400 watts should be fine," he replied.
The two builders working with me were sceptical as we plugged in drills and drop saws and continued building. To our amazement the solar system was incredibly robust. The rest of the house was built using power from the sun and, at the end of a full day (even in winter), we struggled to reach night with a battery capacity of less than 99 per cent. During several blackouts we kept working, powered by our own plant consisting of seven desk-sized panels on the roof and a battery box the size of a chest freezer. We bought an energy-efficient fridge from the local appliance store and installed a house full of guilt-free lights.
We began enjoying solar-powered banana smoothies and I started writing solar-powered stories. One night, after a huge thunderstorm swept out of the Wadbilliga Wilderness, taking out mains power throughout the area, we sat and ate dinner, our lights shining and fridge humming. Ours were the only lights in the district that evening.
Our neighbour looked on enviously one week as twenty blackouts threw him into a frenzy of clock and appliance resetting. Yes, there are energy costs in both batteries and panels and it takes years to repay the bill if account is taken only of power bills. But if you add in the price of a blackout preventing me from working, freezers full of spoiled food, not to mention the cost of connecting to the grid, then the debt is quickly repaid. The panels will last decades and the batteries at least fifteen years.
Our home is the same as any other. The power points are identical, it isn't dim or difficult, the maintenance is minimal – once a month I lift the lid of the battery box and check water levels. Best of all, we never get an electricity bill. As Klomp says: "People have grown up thinking they can just push a button and get anything they like. Everyone has now got to have an attitude change. It doesn't mean being uncomfortable. It means a few new tricks."
To me, terrorism is not as scary as the fact that some flowers bloom weeks earlier than they used to or that we don't have a clue what happens when an ocean current breaks down. The only thing scary about al-Qaeda is that they are likely to be the big winners from the social and economic dislocation wreaked by climate change.
Even without global warming, it's a no-brainer that it is wrong for a handful of generations to use almost all the easily obtainable fossil fuels. Even if there were no such thing as climate change, the amount of waste in our society is disgusting – why did the four chocolate biscuits I opened for guests this morning come inside a box, a plastic bag and a plastic container?
Energy bingeing is not only lazy and greedy, there are consequences. Did we really think we could burn fossilised forests and swamps from the age of dinosaurs without consequence? Did we really think that voting for George W. Bush or John Howard was good for anything other than short-term self-interest? It's not the economy, stupid. It's the ecosystem.
Men in suits talk about technical solutions such as carbon sequestration and zero-emission coal-fired power stations. The public only needs to note who is putting such ideas forward to understand they are code for business as usual. Climate change is starting to look like a planetary manoeuvre to expel a species too big for its boots.
My prediction is that the twenty-first century will shatter one of the great and most harmful human delusions. We are not mere observers of the food chain, a separate class of life on Earth. For the first time, we will see that humanity's existence is as fragile as that of any other big charismatic carnivore. ♦