Tim Flannery: people are shocked about climate change but they should be angry

Tim Flannery laments that young Australians today will never be able to experience in the same way the natural wonders he enjoyed in his youth.

Tim Flannery: ‘We’re in a different world now, a world where
people are living with climate change consequences’ 

He grew up in Melbourne on remnants of the sandplain flora, “one of the great floristic gems of Australia,” he says. Once smothered in flowers in springtime, it has now largely been lost through development and altered burning regimes. Flannery, 63, spent his youth swimming and scuba diving in northern Port Phillip Bay, which he says is now also gravely deteriorated.

He further points to the Great Barrier Reef, which suffered unprecedented mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017 and the “serious questions” about whether it can now be saved. “Something like 70% of the reef that was there a century ago is now dead,” he says.

But without detailed records on species distributions, it’s impossible to map the losses due to climate change, explains Flannery, who recently returned to the 192-year-old Australian Museum in Sydney, where he was principal mammalogist from 1984–1999.

Read the story from The Guardian by John Pickrell - “Tim Flannery: people are shocked about climate change but they should be angry.”

Energy policy captive to lobbyists and 'mad ideologues', Tim Flannery says

Five years since the Abbott government scrapped the Climate Commission, the environmentalist Tim Flannery says our energy policy remains hostage to lobbyists, political self-interest and “mad ideologues”.

‘We’re being held hostage at a federal level,’
Tim Flannery told Guardian Australia.

But the organisation Flannery helped start from the ashes of Abbott’s climate bonfire, the Climate Council, says that attitudes have shifted substantially since 2013 – at least those outside federal parliament.

“We’re being held hostage at a federal level,” Flannery told Guardian Australia.

“It has been a disgrace. Our failures are the failures of a small group of politicians who are supposed to be acting in the national interest. Instead, they’re using energy policy as a cudgel, they’re listening to paid lobbyists and doing their bidding.”

Read the story from The Guardian by Ben Smee - “Energy policy captive to lobbyists and 'mad ideologues', Tim Flannery says.”

Renowned Australian scientist Tim Flannery warns NT against investing in gas, Jemena pipeline

Former Australian of the Year and climate expert Tim Flannery has warned the Northern Territory not to invest in "dying" fossil fuel industries like gas.

Tim Flannery believes the Northern Territory
would lose out if it invested in gas.

Professor Flannery, the former chief commissioner of the now defunct Climate Commission, was brought to Darwin by the Environment Centre and Nightcliff Sea Breeze Festival organisers to speak at the festival on the weekend.

Ahead of the event, he told the ABC despite the Territory's economic woes, investing in gas infrastructure or fracking would mean the NT would lose out economically and environmentally.

"There is no conflict between going renewable and economic development; what we do have is an industry that is determined to hang onto life," Professor Flannery said.

Read the ABC News story - “Renowned Australian scientist Tim Flannery warns NT against investing in gas, Jemena pipeline.”

Great Barrier Reef is losing its adjective - Tim Flannery

Tim Flannery disillusioned after a
dive at the Great Barrier Reef.

A few weeks ago I dived the Great Barrier Reef, near Port Douglas. It was one of the saddest days of my life. I am haunted by what I've seen. And infuriated.

I had come with hope, for some recovery at least from the largest coral bleaching event on record. But what I found was worse than I could have imagined. The Great Barrier Reef is losing its adjective.

Most of the reef's usually vibrant staghorn and plate corals are covered with an ugly green slime. Even some of the massive stony corals – the hardiest of all – are scarred with the tell-tale white of bleaching. The reef's diverse and stunning fish population are starving.

A green turtle passes by. As the dead reef breaks down, its habitat will be eroded to rubble. And climate change is affecting the species in other ways. Rising seas have massively degraded its most important nesting site – Raine Island in the northern Great Barrier Reef. Those same rising waters caused, around 2011, the first mammal extinction brought about directly by climate change, when the entire habitat of the Bramble Key melomys (a native rodent unique to the Great Barrier Reef) was destroyed by saltwater intrusion.

Read Tim Flannery’s opinion piece in today’s Melbourne Age - “The Great Barrier Reef is losing its adjective and it's our fault.”

Reef preservation should dominate election campaign: Tim Flannery

Tim Flannery - Great Barrier Reef should
be at the heart of the election campaign.

Tim Flannery says preserving the Great Barrier Reef from coral bleaching linked to climate change should be a central issue in the federal election campaign.Flannery, a scientist and member of the Climate Council, said the lack of attention paid to climate change so far in the eight-week campaign was “staggering”.

“This needs to be the reef election,” he told Guardian Australia. “This is the last moment I think that we can realistically expect that we can enact some policies … to close down coal-fired power stations and save the reef.

“Other issues are still going to be there in another four years. This one won’t.”

A study in April found that almost 93% of the Great Barrier Reef had been affected by global bleaching, part of a global coral bleaching event that scientists say was caused partly by El Niño and partly by background global warming.

Read The Guardian story - “Saving Great Barrier Reef from climate change should be central election issue, says Tim Flannery.”

Peter Spinks reviews Flannery's 'Atmosphere of Hope'

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s the December UN Climate Change Summit in Paris draws near, talk about saving our planet from a lengthening list of woes is becoming increasingly shrill. And not without reason: the size of humans' environmental footprint has grown slowly but surely since the Industrial Revolution and much faster after World War II.

As Tim Flannery suggested in “The Weather Makers”, which was translated into 23 languages, humans have become a global force to be reckoned with. As ecological costs mount, the world is entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, so named because of the profound effects we have had on the Earth's natural cycles of biology, chemistry and geology.

Read a review of “Atmosphere of Hope” by Peter Spinks in The Sydney Morning Herald - “Atmosphere of Hope review: Tim Flannery's plans for our climate's future”.

Lunching with Flannery and lamenting a decade of lost leadership

T

Tim Flannery.

here's a hilarious, if slightly unsettling, scene in Two Men In China where Tim Flannery and John Doyle (aka Roy Slaven) find themselves in a penis restaurant in Beijing which serves up the mighty members of various animals and fish – sheep, shark, dolphin, dog and the like. It's an altogether horrific buffet of the unthinkable. With dipping sauce. Flannery says he got through it by choosing to view the experience as a first-year biology experiment. And, no, he didn't get stuck in. Not even a tasting plate.

The internationally renowned climate scientist, paleontologist and author of around 30 books and I are in the comparatively less challenging culinary environment of Dr Jekyll's cafe in Grey Street St Kilda, a convivial and evidently popular eatery with a courtyard out the back.

Read Graham Reilly’s story in Spectrum in today’s Age - “Tim Flannery laments 10 lost years of political leadership.”

Tim Flannery's 'hero-like' status was evident at book launch

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im Flannery’s hero-like status was evident at last night’s launch of his new book, “Atmosphere of Hope”.

Tim Flannery signs a book for
one of his many fans after
last night's book launching
at the University of Melbourne.
 

Some who had been admirers and supporters since Flannery wrote “The Weather Makers” a decade ago were almost breathless when the scientist, chief of Climate Council and author walked by.

Some 400 people were in the Basement Theatre in the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne to hear Flannery talk about why and how despair after the dishevelment of the Copenhagen United Nations climate summit in 2009 had changed to hope.

The world, as Flannery pointed out, has had a levelling-off of greenhouse gasses in 2014, something he attributed many things – “like an army of mice nibbling away at a very big problem” – and that gives him hope.

Although he was optimistic about many things, such as carbon-negative cement, Flannery was still a realist and said: “There is no doubt that in the lead up to the Paris meeting our focus needs to be firmly on cutting back on fossil fuels, that’s really the name of the game, we need to reduce emissions from greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels if we are to have any hope of stabilizing our climate.”

Flannery saw humanity as having little chance of avoiding the two degree “guardrail” that has been broadly accepted throughout the world, but pinned his hopes on mitigating the worst changes our damaged climate will bring by adopting what he is calling “the third way”.

And although the ideas, such as deliberate growing of seaweed, are largely nascent and in some instances still little more than computer simulations they, as he said about solar energy, riding your bicycle or simple using less energy, like the ”army of mice” chewing at the problem.

The full audio from last night’s launch will soon be on the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute website.

Climate contrarian given $4m - 'makes my shoulders droop'

-      Robert McLean

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ews such as this makes my shoulders droop.

Climate contrarian Bjørn Lomborg has been given $4m by the Abbot government to establish his “consensus centre” at an Australian university.

This contradictory move comes at a time when Abbott and coalition cohorts are struggling to impose deep spending cuts on the higher education sector.

The scientific and morally discredited Lomborg is to chair of body which will set up the “Australia Consensus Centre”, modelled on the Copenhagen Consensus Center methodology, at a new centre in the University of WesternAustralia’s business school.

A spokesman said the “Australia Consensus Centre” was a proposal put forward by the “university and Dr Lomborg’s organisation”.

A story in The Guardian - “Abbott government gives $4m to help climate contrarian set up Australian centre” – said, “Sources have told Guardian Australia the establishment of the centre had come as a surprise even to senior staff in the business school, who were unaware that the centre was being established until shortly before it was announced this month.”

Meanwhile, Climate Council chief, Tim Flannery, wrote to the council’s supporters saying:

“The Australian Government today announced they would contribute $4m for Danish climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg to establish a new “consensus centre” at the University of Western Australia.

In the face of deep cuts to the CSIRO and other scientific research organisations, it's an insult to Australia’s scientific community.

As the Climate Commission, we were abolished by the Abbott Government in 2013 on the basis that our $1.5 million annual operating costs were too expensive. We relaunched as the Climate Council after thousands of Australians chipped in to the nation’s biggest crowd-funding campaign - remember this video?

It seems extraordinary that the Climate Commission, which was composed of Australia’s best climate scientists, economists and energy experts, was abolished on the basis of a lack of funding and yet here we are three years later and the money has become available to import a politically-motivated think tank to work in the same space.

This is why the work of the Climate Council is so important - to counter this continuing ideological attempt at deceiving the Australian public.

Please consider chipping in a few dollars a week to help us stay independent and continue to fight the rising tide of misinformation.

Mr Lomborg’s views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasn’t varied at all in the last decade and he still believes we shouldn't take any steps to mitigate climate change. When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it's usually a sign those views are politically motivated.

But with your support we will continue to fight back and reach millions of Australians with information that is based on the best science available. “

Tim talks and hundreds listen, intently and quietly

Tim Flannery at the University of
Sunshine Coast with one of
his admirers, Brittany Elliott.

More than 250 people listened intently, and quietly, last night when Tim Flannery spoke at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

Flannery, the former chief of the Federal Government’s Climate Commission, who has now joined other sacked commissioners to set the community funded, Climate Council, was the “rock-star” in the university’s series of events for the “Research Week”.

The former Australian of the Year (2007), also a mammologist, palaeontologist, environmentalist and global warming activist alerted listeners to the dilemma settling upon us because of climate change and discussed the challenges and opportunities within mitigation for regional communities.

He talked about opportunities for universities such as the Sunshine Coast which we unencumbered by the tradition and formalities that frequently limited the work of older and bigger institutions.

Tim was scheduled to speak for an hour, finished his formal address in about 40 minutes and then answered questions for another 50 minutes, exceeding his allotted time by half an hour, but it an extension that was enthusiastically welcomed by the audience.

He explained the scale of the situation talking about the size of global human  emissions, what was naturally sequestered and what we would have to do in terms of sequestration is we were to slow or reverse climate change.

He talked about how seaweed was a fascinating natural sequestration plant and how the many benefits of the aquatic plant had been found by a woman working at a regional university.

Tim said that the growth and harvesting of seaweed in just nine per cent of the world’s oceans would be sufficient to slow climate change. The harvesting of the seaweed was critical as it would simply ocean acidification and contributes further to global carbon dioxide emissions if allowed to die and rot.

A raft a questions came from the floor, but it was the one about “what do I do personally” that promoted some comments from Tim about Australia’s democratic system.

Being the day after Australia’s carbon pricing mechanism had been repealed, he said: “We live in a failed democracy, where the will of the people isn’t truly represented in our democratic process, it’s partly there, we have people of good will in our parliaments, but we don’t have a mechanism which allows people to have their correct say”.  

He delighted the audience, when arguing for energy adaptation – “The most successful adaptation we can have” -  he pointed that rooftop solar is now the fourth largest energy generator system in Queensland.

Integenerational responsibility and decency not being discussed

Intergenerational responsibility and decency appear to elude the thinking of the freshly elected Tony Abbott-led Australian government.

David Suzuki.

The climate, not money, is going to shape and control what happens in Australia, not the mention the world, as the decades unfold.

Last night (September 23) on the ABC’s QandA, Canadian scientist and environmentalist, David Suzuki, argued that many politicians were guilty of “wilful blindness” in relation to climate change and should be charged with an offense.

Writing for The Conversation, Suzuki said: “There is in Canada a legal category where people can be sued and thrown in the slammer, called wilful blindness. If people in positions of power deliberately suppress or ignore information that is vital to the decisions they’re making, that is wilful blindness. I call it more than wilful blindness. I call it criminal negligence because it’s a crime against future generations to avoid facing the reality.”

“That is what Mr Abbott is doing, by cancelling the (Climate) Commission, by firing Tim Flannery. It criminal negligence through wilful blindness,” he said.

Suzuki’s comment on The Conversation can be read in a story headed: “David Suzuki: Australian scientists should be on the ramparts”.

Meanwhile the Abbott-axed Climate Commission is being re-launched with private funding under the title of the Climate Council.

Head of the former Climate Commission, Tim Flannery, was prompted to create the Australian Climate Council following an Australia-wide groundswell of support for his work and that of fellow commissioners.

A story in today’s Melbourne Age (September 24) headed: “Backers breathe life into climate body”, tells of this latest development.

Further, the intergenerational connections with climate change are discussed in a story headed: “Children will bear the brunt of climate change impact, new study says”.

Flannery featured in Britain's Guardian newspaper

Tim Flannery.

Tim Flannery is probably the best known Australian advocate of the science of the climate change.

The former Australian of the Year and now the boss of the Federal Government’s Climate Commission, along with being among the most vocal about the loss of species because of climate change, was only recently featured in Britain’s Guardian Newspaper.

In the article headed: “As Australia burns, attitudes are changing. But is it too late?”, Flannery argues that in this summer, life in Australia represents a game of Russian roulette.

Actually, according to Flannery, it was no ordinary game; it was a “very unpleasant game”.

Call for volunteers

There is much to be done.

Tim Flannery
for Shepparton?

Beneath the Wisteria supporters are called on to consider volunteering their skills and time to join a working group to help create a major public event in Shepparton at which climate change and its implications would be discussed.

The idea for the event arose from an idea brought to the November Beneath the Wisteria gathering by Terry Court.

Terry suggested that someone such as Tim Flannery should be invited to speak and although that idea was seemed to be universally accepted, fellow supporter, John Lawry, warned that the former Australian of the Year can be divisive and that he should share the podium with another speaker who is somewhat less polarizing.

Terry suggested, in an email subsequent to Saturday’s discussions, “That we form a working group- for the sake of a name- to organise the event. GVEG/ GV Community Energy will provide support and I reckon the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority will also support.  Need to think about format and other speakers- Malcolm Turnbull/ Ross Garnaut /Tim Costello”.

The event would not be until 2013, but as such speakers can be difficult to secure and sometimes need spoken with months in advance, Terry has suggested that working group should meet within two or three weeks.

Anyone who feels they would like to be involved with such a group should just send their name to Robert McLean at robed@sheppnews.com.au.