South Wind

Anthony Fauci could reasonably have looked forward to a peaceful retirement, bolstered by pride in his lifetime of public service, when he stepped down in 2022 after a long career in charge of America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Now aged 85, Fauci was the scientist-administrator who for decades led the global response to viral threats (the real kind), including HIV-AIDS, Ebola and all manner of flu-like diseases including Covid. In 2008 George W Bush awarded him America’s top gong, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his work on AIDS relief. At the time of his retirement, he was everyone’s champion.

Well, almost everyone’s. President Donald Trump took a dislike to his chief Covid advisor in the pandemic’s early stages, when with good reason Fauci responded negatively to Trump’s thought-bubbles around treatments and “cures”.

Fauci had other enemies. Anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr wrote a book about him, The Real Anthony Fauci (2021). The book promotes unproven COVID-19 treatments including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, while accusing Fauci of abuse of power. Kennedy, who has no medical qualification, is now Trump’s health secretary.

Rand Paul, eye surgeon, US senator and another enemy, wrote another book about Fauci titled Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up (2023). Defying genetic data tracing all initial Covid cases to a Wuhan food market, indicating a natural zoonotic spillover, he accused Fauci in the book of concealing evidence that the virus was engineered in a nearby scientific laboratory.

With these powerful men wanting Fauci’s scalp, on leaving office last year President Joe Biden granted him a pre-emptive pardon. But that didn’t stop Paul, as chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, calling him in a fortnight ago to answer questions.

Primed by his lawyers to avoid giving the Republican majority on the committee any space for further attacks on his reputation, and citing Paul’s “obvious obsession” with seeking to put him “behind bars”, Fauci used his constitutional right to decline to answer any questions. In response, Paul had his committee pursue Fauci’s indictment for contempt of Congress.

Obsession isn’t too strong a term for the attitude of both these men towards Fauci. In different ways, both feel they know more about infectious diseases than most people, even including the man who had led national responses to numerous infectious disease threats since they were boys.

Their hubris seems preposterous until you remember the charged political atmosphere we all live in today. Another thing: if they can keep Fauci in the headlines there’s a good chance it will boost book sales for each of these two authors.

In the long shadow of Trump, Kennedy and Paul have assigned value to the exercise of raw power. On that subject, another author has something to say. The story of power is the story of despair, Richard Flanagan said on ABC radio at the weekend, and we should never look to power to define us.

We are living at a time when the need for impartial public service of the kind represented by Fauci – not to mention the many thousands of government employees sacked under Trump 2.0 – has never been so desperate.

In the US and Australia alike, such service is being undermined, devalued, even ridiculed by political and corporate interests seeking to protect power and profit by maligning and if possible eliminating regulation and other potential obstacles to their success – including, notably, taxation.

Tolerating these attacks on the people charged with upholding principles that underpin civil life, including the rule of law and the primacy of science, is to condemn one’s country to a dog-eat-dog future in which everyone loses, including ultimately the perpetrators of those attacks.

What the tech-bros and other enablers of strongman politics miss, repeatedly, is that to oppose the machinery of good government as they do is to bite the hand that feeds them – to destroy what has brought them to where they are. They might continue to profit under an autocracy, but such oligarchs often end up emigrating to where the air is breathable.

A final word from Flanagan: In the preface to his new book, Heresies, he describes the Spanish Inquisition’s procedures for marking heretics before burning them at the stake, including use of the “sanbenito”, a sleeveless vest emblazoned with a large X that heretics were forced to wear.

“And so it is perhaps fitting,” he continues, “that the same X that crossed out the words of heretics on their sanbenitos… is today the name of the most popular vehicle of the new inquisitors, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and now called X.”

When wars between nations threaten to erupt into the unimaginable, when an American strongman attacks democracy, and when artificial intelligence looks set to upend our daily lives, it’s all but impossible to focus on something like the changing climate.

It’s even harder when that same strongman, leading a global populist push, creates false narratives about climate change to discredit science and destroy counter-measures.

For all that, we’re now at the point where climate change is set to force itself into the global conversation in ways we have long secretly feared but always felt able to set aside to attend to other things.

It’s been a slow burn. Way back in 1997-98 a powerful El Niño had the world wondering whether the heat was on, but for more than a decade the ocean’s take-up of excess heat held air temperatures in check. The non-appearance of a new hottest-ever year after 1998 was fodder for the concocted 2009 scandal of “Climategate”.

Meanwhile the new century saw devastating weather events – multi-year droughts in Australia and Africa, multiple Northern Hemisphere heatwaves, Asian typhoons, Atlantic hurricanes, catastrophic rains. And wildfires burning in Australia, North America and in surprising places in Europe and Asia – in ways never before seen, even to the point of creating their own weather.

All the while in the background the world was warming. That’s what the science told us, but it was easy to overlook. Between the “hottest-ever” years were respite years that allowed people’s attention to move elsewhere, which wasn’t hard given the increasing distractions of other news.

Now the stars are aligning, and not in a good way. For a couple of years, two climate science heavyweights, IPCC lead author Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth and the legendary James Hansen (formerly NASA, now Columbia University) have produced different interpretations of the state of the climate.

They continue to exchange jibes. Hansen, who unlike Hausfather asserts that a currently-moderate 2026 will turn out to be the warmest year on record, said earlier this year that “when the horse race comes down the stretch, in November and December of this year, we will be riding a thoroughbred, a strong young horse, and Zeke will be atop a fading old nag.”

“For the record,” said Hausfather last week, “I am the fading old nag in this metaphor. I have been called worse.” For his part, Hausfather maintains the two scientists are not so far apart, and now thinks Hansen may be right about 2026 being warmer than the current record year, 2024.

But the key message from both these leading scientists is that while 2026 is going to end up about as warm as the current record year, 2024, the odds are even stronger that next year will set a new record and that it will be by a big margin. With that combination, says Hausfather – a powerful El Niño and accelerating background warming – we’re in for a wild climate ride.

As Berkeley Earth’s June report found, this northern summer saw central Pacific temperatures already crossing the threshold for a “super” El Niño months ahead of the pattern of 1997 and 2015, when the two strongest events of the satellite era were forming. No prior event in the 45-year El Niño-La Niña record was this warm this early.

Long-range predictions involving weather patterns with a global reach like El Nino attract a lot of scepticism. Past predictions of big El Nino events, which involve the warming of surface waters of the eastern Pacific at intervals varying from two to seven years, have often come to little or nothing.

But the signals around a currently developing El Nino are exceptional, “outside the envelope of anything we have ever observed” in the words of leading US scientist Zeke Hausfather. Not known for extravagant language, Hausfather says that this El Nino could be “the strongest event since reliable records began… by a truly mind-blowing margin.”

The duelling between Hansen and Hausfather is science working as it should. As my go-to popular science commentator Dave Borlace puts it, “you make the best assessment you can from the evidence currently available, then when better evidence comes along, you update your conclusions – not because science has failed, but precisely because science is working.”

So the heat and fire of this northern summer – still far from over – stands a fair chance of happening again next year, just as it does here next summer. But the coming El Niño will not have a uniform impact, and a rising global mean temperature is just that – an average. So nothing is certain. My plan is to take each day as it comes, and keep on keeping on.

Folk in rural Argentina ask their deity, Pachamama, for permission to take raw materials from Mother Earth for the things they need, I learned at the weekend from the ABC’s Race Around the World.

Like so much else in that show, that little sketch was a reminder that some communities – mostly in parts of the world where know-it-all modernity hasn’t taken over – are deeply and genuinely humble about their place in the scheme of things.

Which may explain why it was drilled into me as a child in a simple bush family to pause before eating and thank God for food on the table and all other good things.

Back then the church was the source of our moral guidance. As religion and saying grace became unfashionable and God faded from our thoughts, the environment movement took up the cudgels on behalf of nature. But in the words of Kermit the Frog, being green isn’t easy. When you serve as the world’s conscience you have to be prepared for backlash.

Both major parties, except in brief periods when the Greens supported one of them in power, have for decades represented environmental advocates as extremists standing in the way of ordinary people just wanting to survive.

Over the decades both Labor and the Coalition – the established centre of Australian politics – have used “green” to mean an attitude standing in the way of progress. It may help them feel better, but does nothing to help people understand the issues in play.

There’s a lot to like about the smorgasbord of readers’ opinions appearing daily in The Mercury, like the debate over the past couple of weeks prompted by John Raison’s 9 July article about forest management – the sort of discussion that should accompany all the big public policy decisions.

Another example was Michael Rowan’s contribution last Friday pointing out how living, growing forests over the millennia have taken up carbon from the air and turned it into something solid and substantial while enabling modern humans to grow food for ever-larger concentrations of people.

As the letter pointed out, carbon dioxide in the air has stayed around 280 parts per million from the end of the last ice age until last century. CO2 levels have since risen by over 50 per cent, pushing global average temperatures to their highest for millions of years. We’re in trouble, up to our necks.

Growing trees to offset emissions from coal, oil and gas is a favoured “net-zero” policy in most countries, but it’s up against it. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says the world is losing millions of hectares of forest each year from logging, drought, disease and fire. We could do with more trees, but we’re not getting them.

So when you hear One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce or Coalition leaders Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan, or any number of media and other commentators, railing about the crushing burden of the “Labor-Green” net-zero target, ask yourself, what are they putting at risk?

Along with fringe players like One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, these voices loudly belittling net-zero policy have in effect declared they know better than science what’s happening to the climate. Do they really believe that?

Anti-green sentiments – Labor wanting to distance itself from the Greens, Coalition ranting about net-zero, One Nation’s unhinged anti-science propaganda – must be seen for what they are, a clear and present threat to our species’ future. Each of these attitudes is cutting us off from the forces that made us and can unmake us.

Like nature, science keeps getting ignored, but like nature it never gives up. Last week John Hunter, a retired climate scientist I’ve known for years, sent me an article from the magazine of his old Cambridge University college written by a PhD candidate investigating ways to capture carbon dioxide from both industrial emissions and the atmosphere as a whole. Just like plants do.

The researcher, Cerys Walsh, is working on “supercapacitive swing adsorption”, a process where certain charged supercapacitors have been shown to be able to take up carbon dioxide – and nothing else – from mixed gas streams. We don’t yet understand this miraculous electrochemical process, but who knows where it might lead?

Science is the eternal human struggle to understand the many miracles of nature. Over a billion or two years, the shambolic, wondrous process we call evolution has delivered the myriad life forms and ecosystems on which our own single human species depends completely.

Nature conservation is utterly fundamental to our survival on Earth, our only home, yet it’s being presented as an enemy of the people. What’s that about?