South Wind

As another tumultuous US presidential campaign reaches its climax, at least as traumatic and certainly more consequential than last time, something vastly bigger threatens to derail all the plans of mere candidates in a mere election.

Donald Trump keeps saying climate change is a hoax. In 2017 his first official act as president was to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. He promises to do the same again, while also defunding climate-focused agencies and institutions.

The public, over there and here in Australia, can choose to believe Trump or the agencies he so despises, such as our own world-leading CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), which last week jointly released Australia’s eighth biennial State of the Climate Report.

The day the report came out, a catastrophic rain event in Spain gave substance to its key message that an exceptionally warm global ocean driving more extreme weather will challenge governments, communities and economies around the world. The horrifying toll of death and destruction has been pinned to authorities’ failure to warn people to move quickly to higher ground.

Jaci Brown, Hobart-based head of CSIRO’s Climate Science Centre, told the ABC we should expect more of this, more often. Asked if there was anything positive in what’s happening now, she said old climate scepticism had gone. “People understand this is real, and now they’re asking, what does this mean for me and what can I do about it?”

Hardly anyone asks that on the US campaign trail, and they’re all in Kamala Harris’s team, which argues that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act is lowering carbon emissions by supporting renewable energy. But Harris still opposes curbs on oil and gas. 

Trump is less nuanced. In what science calls this “critical decade” of accelerating warming causing climate chaos, he calls for the aggressive obstruction of climate mitigation efforts and an end to environmental controls, summed up in his catchcry, “drill, baby, drill”.

Some of Trump’s conservative allies have publicly backed this approach in a 900-page document called Project 25. Also in its sights are equal opportunity, social inclusion, a multi-cultural society, immigration, women’s reproductive rights, “big government” and free and fair elections.

How that all plays out on election night and beyond – starting Wednesday our time – is anyone’s guess. Here’s mine:

An Electoral College majority for Trump will see Harris concede defeat, to the dismay of advocates for democracy, social inclusion, women’s and migrants’ rights, climate action and nature conservation. On taking office Trump will pardon himself along with others jailed and indicted in the wake of the 2021 Capitol invasion, and then get on with dismantling government institutions.

In all other scenarios – an unclear outcome or a clear Democratic win – Trump will declare foul and go full throttle on overturning a favourable Harris vote.

Having already launched court challenges and moved to ban neutral observers (a red flag if ever there was one), Republicans plan to disrupt local vote counting, refuse to certify results and use state legislatures to determine outcomes regardless of counting. The current Republican majority in the House of Representatives may break convention and refuse to certify the election.

Trump surrogates have expressed high confidence in victory and ruled out a win by Harris, which looks like a deliberate ploy to prime supporters for mass denial and protest. And unlike in 2020 Elon Musk, the world’s richest person – on a promise of a job under Trump – is using his X platform to reinforce Trump’s victory narrative.

Stopping Trump is no panacea. “The America we thought we knew is not coming back,” Australia Institute US specialist Emma Shortis said at the weekend. “A Harris victory might give the United States a temporary reprieve from its current woes, but the divisions and instability of American politics will not be resolved any time soon.”

While Trump’s divisive rhetoric remains as potent as ever in Republican heartland, especially among men, I can’t see it prevailing against Harris’s principled stance on minority groups and her relatively sane economic, education and health policies. She should secure a majority in both the popular vote and the electoral college. That said, Congressional endorsement and inauguration are no longer the simple formalities we always thought they were.

The US election still matters. Our overheated, war-ravaged world doesn’t need what The Economist calls the “unacceptable risk” of another Trump presidency. Setting aside its disturbing implications for democracy and the rule of law, the supercharge that it would deliver to accelerating global emissions in these critical years may be the straw that breaks the back of a stable climate.

Friend, mentor, anchor, eco-warrior, a kind, compassionate, joyful, funny man… these are among words chosen by friends to describe University of Tasmania Distinguished Professor Jamie (James Barrie) Kirkpatrick, geographer and conservation ecologist.

In his official biography on the university’s website, Kirkpatrick, who died last week aged 78, offered this self-analysis: his success should be measured “by the new things discovered that allow better protection of the natural world, and by how much they are used to do so.” On that basis, his life and career (the two were inseparable) were hugely successful. 

When Victorian-born Kirkpatrick, aged just 25, joined the university’s geography department in 1972, a beautiful southwestern lake with a dramatic white beach was disappearing under the rising waters of a hydro impoundment. Lake Pedder was the first of many harsh lessons for Kirkpatrick in how natural values can be lost amid the political din.

Kirkpatrick noted early on the incongruity of Tasmania’s large areas of unique ancient ecosystems in unprotected native forest. Back then, just five per cent of the state’s lands were in reserves. Today that figure is nearly seven times higher at 34 per cent.

That achievement owes much to Kirkpatrick’s untiring research into habitat loss and his advocacy for its preservation. Earlier this year he put that lifelong effort into a nutshell: “I came to Tasmania, saw this amazing place, knew … it was worth fighting for, and decided to dedicate the rest of my life to doing just that.”

As our planet’s climate crisis has come into sharp focus, scientists investigating the geology, chemistry and physics of the Earth system and of all heavenly bodies have come to see that the science they do is inseparable from their own lives – a truth that has long been clear to those caught up in the life sciences. 

Besides about 600 research papers, at various stages of his long career Jamie Kirkpatrick wrote for the wider public about the things that mattered to him, including essays and notes in a string of publications by and about the acclaimed wilderness photographer Peter Dombrovskis.

In 1983, the year the High Court stopped the Gordon-below-Franklin dam project, it was Wild Rivers. In 1996, the year Dombrovskis died, he contributed an introduction for On the Mountain, and in 1998 collaborated with Bob Brown in a commemorative volume, Dombrovskis. Three years later he contributed a personal essay, “About Trees”, for yet another Dombrovskis collection, In the Forest.

Just 11 days before he died Kirkpatrick celebrated his 78th birthday. With the help of close collaborator Jen Sanger, he marked the occasion with the launch of some print publications he’d been working on for some time. 

Kirkpatrick was especially proud of one of these, Ecology Underfoot: The Fine Fabric of the Rest of Nature, and I can see why. Jen Sanger’s colourful plant drawings on the cover signal that this is a book for non-scientists, and it is. But the information-rich, context-aware notes accompanying its 75 engrossing images, all at the scale of a human foot, are the mark of a scientist through and through.

Kirkpatrick’s field observations and exceptional publishing record show his dedication to science as a uniquely effective pathway to understanding our world. But academic achievement is not measured solely by research and publishing. As a beneficiary of some outstanding mentors I would argue that in the scheme of things teaching – often ignored when the glittering prizes are handed out – is least equal to any other branch of scholarship. 

A huge part of Jamie Kirkpatrick’s university career was encouraging and mentoring generations of undergraduate and postgraduate students. The effort he put in over decades at the university never ceased. As his illness advanced to its final stages he got a new plant ecology student started while supervising to near-completion another student’s thesis on how roadkill affects tourism. 

Over the years, if the grizzled, bearded figure of Jamie was not physically present in any discussion about nature on this island, he was there in spirit – as he will be for a long time yet. It’s hard to get the head around his absence, says scientist Lisa Gershwin, whose PhD scholarship happened because of Kirkpatrick’s generous assistance. 

“He was like one of those big old tall trees that you just cannot imagine what the forest would look like if it fell,” she said last week. “Sometimes you only really grasp how big it really was when you see the hole it leaves.”

Jamie Kirkpatrick’s life will be celebrated at a bring-your-own-picnic at Hobart’s Cascade Gardens from 4 pm on Friday afternoon. All are welcome.

Sleep and warm nights don’t go together for me, and a string of them last week found me pondering, as you do, the state of the climate. Bear in mind that the most telling sign of greenhouse warming isn’t the midday maximum but the night-time minimum.

Inevitably the late great atmospheric scientist Will Steffen came to mind. Recognised globally for his work at the leading edge of Earth systems science from the 1980s, Steffen, who died last year, was also a formidable climate warrior in offices, law courts, boardrooms and town halls around the country – including here in Tasmania.

In July this year the Australian National University celebrated his illustrious career with the inaugural Will Steffen Lecture, delivered from Germany’s University of Potsdam by his long-standing friend and collaborator, the Swedish scholar Johan Rockstrom, whose video image was joined live on the stage in Canberra by Australian colleagues of Steffen. 

There was distinguished ecologist Lesley Hughes, Steffen’s long-time colleague on the Climate Commission and its crowd-funded successor, the Climate Council. For a time she chaired Tasmania’s climate advisory council, until that body was rudely terminated in 2014 by Will Hodgman’s incoming government on the basis that it wasn’t worth the money. 

Another ecologist, the ANU’s Brian Walker, recalled Steffen’s rare ability to draw together diverse talents in the manner of an orchestra conductor. And Penny Sackett, astronomer and Australia’s chief scientist under Kevin Rudd, spoke movingly of how her fellow US expatriate Will Steffen had become like a brother to her, the one she had yearned for as an only child.

The big-picture thinking of Steffen and Rockstrom was behind the 15-year-old concept of planetary boundaries, central to understanding what is at stake as we plough through the 21st century. Man-made climate change is one of nine planetary processes that Rockstrom, Steffen and others identified as critical determinants of our Earth system’s stability, resilience and life support – most of them now well outside their safe limit.

In Seattle at the height of this year’s fiery West Coast summer, Rockstrom told a TED audience that science had for many years underestimated climate risks. Current change is well outside what used to be considered realistic expectations. Earth’s surface was now the warmest it had been for 100,000 years, and in this “Great Acceleration”, the Earth system’s stability is being undermined by mass extinction of species and increasing stress on freshwater systems.

“After the enormous privilege of a planet at 14C for 10,000 years, ever since the last Ice Age,” our present pathway sees us warming by 2.7C in only 70 years, said Rockstrom. “Is it surprising that we scientists are getting really, really nervous?”

Two overarching risks to the Earth system are increasing, said Rockstrom. Earth’s buffering capacity – its ability to dampen shocks and stress – is being damaged, and the risk of the planet being pushed out of its exceptionally stable state since the last Ice Age, passing critical tipping points, is rising. Stressed plants and warming oceans losing their ability to take up and store excessive greenhouse gases are “sounding the alarm.”

Loss of buffering capacity, said Rockstrom, is increasing chances that tipping points will be crossed, pushing the planet out of its stable state and starting an unstoppable drift towards a hothouse Earth, where warming is self-amplified warming and life support is lost. If we ignore key indicators – the big ice sheets, the Atlantic overturning circulation, coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest – “they will flip over from a desired state that helps us to a state that [takes us] in the wrong direction.”

As we have learned more about the Earth system, said Rockstrom, the danger threshold has come closer. Thirty years ago the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that 5C of warming was needed to cause irreversible climate change. Now that mark is between 1.5C and 2C – perilously close to where we are now.

In other words, we have to attend to our planet’s natural systems or we are lost. It’s a bleak prospect, but it’s also a challenge. Rockstrom ended his Seattle TED talk with the usual gee-up for the audience: “Solving the planetary crisis is not only necessary, it is possible, and we all win if we succeed.”

Key to this message is not the words themselves but the humanity behind them. That was Will Steffen’s message to those whose lives he touched, including mine: big-picture science is important, but vastly more so is how we respond – a theme that will recur with rising urgency as this critical decade grinds on.