‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief

As I write this, much of inland eastern Australia is enduring what is likely to be the worst drought ever recorded. Bushfires are devastating parts of New South Wales and southern Queensland, tearing through rainforest that should not be dry enough to burn. Major towns will probably soon run out of water. The condition of the vital Murray-Darling river system is dire.

A researcher completing bleaching surveys in the
southern Great Barrier Reef after a major bleaching event. 

Some federal government MPs have responded by questioning whether these events are linked to anthropogenic, or man-made, climate change. Others deny the science outright. Now we have a politically motivated Senate inquiry into water quality on the Great Barrier Reef.

This situation brings me to despair. For the past 45 years I have researched and managed coral reef water quality in Australia and overseas. Now 72, I see that much of my work, and that of my colleagues, has not led to a bright future for coral reefs. In decades to come they will probably still contain some corals, but ecologically speaking they will not be growing, or even functioning.

Read the story from The Conversation - “‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief.”

We know about climate change, but still we prevaricate

by Robert McLean

Only retrospective judgement allows for the pinpointing of a drought’s beginnings.

Climate change is a different beast – we already know pretty much when it began, or at least when the symptoms became clearly obvious, and yet the world still prevaricates.

Serious difficulties demand equally serious responses and while we have quibbled about the seriousness and reality of the unfolding catastrophe, opportunities for effective mitigation have slipped away and now the conversation has changed to adaptation.

Confusing the conversation is an array of morals, values, ethics, ideologies, religious beliefs, cultural attachments, economic dogmas, emotive drivers, a reality obscuring educative understanding of the science and even worse, a zero or near zero realization that the world is in serious trouble.

Intertwined with all that is our sweeping inability to see that humanity’s wellbeing is not inextricably linked to how the world fares economically, rather in a striking contradictory way our lives become richer, more complete and more rewarding as we connect with others, something that becomes obvious during times of stress, whether that be personal or a societal difficulty brought upon us either by nature or through the corruption of our behaviour toward each other.

Our response to climate change needs to be swift, decisive and in that take humanity in a different direction.

The question that if often asked, and most feared I suspect, is “What do I do now?”

Such questions are mostly greeted with a pall of silence or a retreat in a rhetorical answer in which the science of climate change is used to protect the answerer from the need to arrive at and provide a definitive answer, for to do so threatens everything upon which modern society depends.

Mitigation and adaptation ideas become increasingly byzantine as the circumstances disrupting earth’s atmosphere are more apparent and obvious, but in almost every instance it is about protecting and allowing for the continuation of the modern life that particularly the developed world presently enjoys.

The sheer numbers of humans who walk the earth is an obvious problem, but that is not insurmountable and if for a moment we could abandon the values, cultural morals and ethics, and ideologies to which we are wedded and put the boundless beauty of humanity ahead of the perverse need for personal possession and power, then it is possible we could meet the challenge spelt out so clearly by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest pre-Paris 2015 synthesis report.

Clearly we face dire times and so any response needs to be daring and demanding of courageous leadership hitherto unseen, certainly in Australia.

Having rattled in about that, I urge you to read this unrelated piece by Tristan Edis from the Climate Spectator headed: “Three heroes of climate change denial - a synthesis report”.