South Wind

“Trumpet of Patriots exposes the truth about climate change,” proclaims the wholly-owned political party of mining magnate Clive Palmer in one of its advertisements. Except that it doesn’t.

The ad uses a video showing a glaciologist talking about Greenland ice cores, apparently saying that global temperatures are cooling. But as science writer Peter Hadfield says on his YouTube channel Potholer 54, if you think you’ve stumbled on a video that completely overturns current scientific wisdom, scientists may know something you don’t.

As Hadfield points out, Palmer’s ad uses footage from the late 1990s about events in Greenland only. Since then, the glaciologist in question, Jorge Peder Steffensen, has said many times that man-made global warming is real and happening. But that doesn’t stop Palmer or the man he so admires, President Donald Trump, from spinning their yarns.

It’s easy to spread this sort of misinformation because climate change involves many processes interacting over vast areas and time scales, a complexity that stretches the capabilities of the best scientists and the most powerful computers. Politicians and the wider public have an incomplete grasp of it, and their “not knowing” is at the heart of climate policy failure here and everywhere.

This lack of public awareness has long troubled David Hamilton, a former physicist with experience in the oil and gas industry and a member of the voluntary advisory group Climate Tasmania. So much so that he has a new YouTube post, Words Matter, outlining his thoughts. You can find it by entering “words matter tas” in the Youtube search engine.

Hamilton’s eight-part discussion explores how apparently small things in our use of language have allowed rampant carbon pollution to continue unabated, imperilling the future of humanity. He introduces it with these words:

“We have a climate crisis on our hands which is continuing to worsen. While the crisis has several causes, the primary cause is our past and continuing extraction and burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. To stop making the crisis worse… we need to address the primary cause by shifting from coal, oil and gas to clean energy.”

Many have said this before, but not much has changed. Most Australians say they’re “concerned” or “very concerned” about climate change, but we see no evidence of that in the amounts of petrol, diesel and bottled natural gas being burned.

This has frustrated David Hamilton as much as anyone, but he hasn’t allowed that to defeat him. Instead he’s explored in forensic detail the ways politicians and others (including myself) have talked and written about why we’re in trouble and what needs to be done to turn this around.

Hamilton produces good evidence from recent polls of small business and people more broadly that political and business leaders are using terms like “fossil fuels”, “emissions”, “net zero” and “decarbonisation”, or reading about these concepts, without fully grasping their meaning or how they relate directly to things the respondents do every day.

Why don’t people know this stuff? muses Hamilton. As he says, we all have other things to think about, the language is vague and technical, and people haven’t been told about the situation in a way that’s meaningful to them. He cites the example of one apparently informed business person who didn’t know that moving off fossil fuels meant stopping using diesel.

This confusion is not helped by politicians telling us we need to cut emissions while simultaneously approving new coal and natural gas projects. Most people miss the contradiction, says Hamilton. They are mildly reassured by buzzwords, taking comfort in the idea that offsetting by planting trees will neutralise burning of petrol or diesel or jet fuel to get them from A to B.

The offsetting elixir has been embraced by politicians and business leaders promoting “net emissions” – the basis of net-zero targets used by most countries including Australia. But it doesn’t stack up. Hamilton rightly points out that while emissions to the atmosphere endure for thousands of years, carbon taken up by trees remains sequestered only for the life of the trees.

The desired end result – phasing out fossil fuel use – means we must all use less petrol, diesel and bottled gas. Politicians may find this home truth a challenge, but it’s not insurmountable. Hamilton says they can meet the challenge by expressing the facts openly and plainly while explaining that they’re simply clarifying the steps involved in reducing emissions.

Like so much else around climate change, Words Matter is a work in progress. Hamilton and others at Climate Tasmania are currently working on a new, more viewer-friendly video. Watch this space.

The water was still receding across the huge expanse of country hit by Cyclone Alfred, sodden homes and belongings were yet to dry out, and immovable cars still sat abandoned on muddy roads, when the insurance claims (pardon the pun) began pouring in.

Early last week the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) reported around 3000 claims from property owners. That early figure more than trebled within a day, and after another day the figure had risen to over 22,000. A day later still the Insurance Business Magazine was reporting a figure of over 34,000 and rising rapidly. No-one has a clue where it will finish up.

At that early response stage last week, insurers had distributed nearly $2.4 million to about 6000 policyholders (about $400 per claim) in emergency payments for food and temporary housing. But that’s nothing compared to the colossal payout that will inevitably roll out over coming months and years.

What can be said about this disaster that hasn’t already been said? The Climate Council’s scientific people put out a lengthy media statement last week pointing out that while science was still working with the detail, it was clear that Cyclone Alfred was not simply “natural”, but was made more destructive and dangerous by carbon pollution from fossil fuels.

With many Queensland and NSW communities hit this time still recovering from catastrophic floods in 2022, the Climate Council cited evidence from weather records showing more frequent heavy rain events, proving exhausting, traumatising and costly for communities repeatedly affected.

Brisbane has had four major floods since 2011. Over the past five years over half of all Queenslanders have either been forced to relocate due to disaster or know someone else who has. And since the 1970s the cost of extreme weather disasters in Australia has more than doubled, with floods, cyclones and storms making up 70 per cent of that cost.

In the months ahead, affected people and communities will face the costs of recovery and rebuilding. With many days of rain over a large densely-populated coastal area, this will be a massive hit costing billions of dollars. To try to facilitate assessments, the ICA has declared an “insurance catastrophe” – the sixth such declaration in the past five years in Queensland, Australia’s Disaster Central with Brisbane at its epicentre.

“We already have a huge crisis when it comes to providing insurance for homes that are in a flood area,” ICA CEO Andrew Hall told ABC Radio National last week, pointing out that the same areas are being hit repeatedly by storms and floods. He’s calling for state and federal governments to spend more insurance tax money on flood levies, to “normalise” policies in the most affected areas. But what does that mean? How can anything be made normal in times of rapid change?

One thing we do know: unless we decide to risk losing everything you and I will keep paying more for insurance. Those in the major disaster zones will pay most, but everyone has to share some of the burden. And it’s a global burden. We all have to help pay for disasters everywhere on the planet, as every other policyholder has to help pay for ours.

Along with all other insurance industry CEOs, Andrew Hall doesn’t need convincing that we’re drifting into a climate catastrophe. Standing apart from the rest of the commercial world, everyone in this industry knows about the rising impact of weather events because it’s up in lights for them all the time, measured in the increasing amounts of money they’re having to fork out to customers.

It should also be up in lights for us customers. The cost of home and contents insurance has everywhere been rising at a markedly greater rate than the consumer price index (CPI), especially over the past 20 years. In Brisbane, according to an Australia Institute report last November, from 1989 to 2024 the cost of home and contents insurance rose well over five times CPI. In Hobart home insurance rose 3.5 times CPI.

Where is all this taking us? For Australians on low or fixed incomes under-insurance is now the preferred option. In disaster-prone parts of Australia many home-owners have abandoned any kind of insurance. For them it has become the stuff of dreams, along with disposable income. We’re in a whole new place.

ON SATURDAY, Sustainable Living Tasmania is convening the Big Day of Circular Living Ideas from 10 am in the C3 convention centre, South Hobart, with special guest Craig Reucassel of the ABC’s War on Waste; also Gardening Australia’s Costa Georgiadis. Details: slt.org.au

Consider these events in Washington last week: President Donald Trump’s vacuous, triumphal speech to Congress, his hostile measures against Canada, Mexico and Ukraine, his friendly remarks about Russia, and the raiding of government agencies and sacking of their employees by the president’s “efficiency” enforcer Elon Musk.

In history’s sweep they’re just moments in time, but they carry a lifetime’s worth of implications for the global order we grew up with. The idea of a “Western alliance” – nations supporting democracy and the rule of law, connected by mutual trust – suddenly seems old-hat.

Take Canada. An old ally across a 9000-km undefended land border, that country today is by far America’s largest trading partner. After loose talk about making it the 51st state of America (and about annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal), Trump slapped a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian imports alleging falsely that it’s a major smuggling conduit for the highly addictive drug fentanyl.

In a memorable interview last week Canada’s foreign minister, Melanie Joly, spoke openly of her people’s united opposition to Trump (“We’re not Americans… we created Canada because we didn’t want to be part of the United States”) and of her country’s moves to strengthen ties with Europe and East Asia.

An even greater threat to the Western allies, unthinkable just weeks ago, is Trump’s abandonment of a democracy, Ukraine, in its war with Vladimir Putin’s invading Russians. Remaining NATO members are now scrambling to fill the yawning gap left when Trump halted military aid to Ukraine – a daunting task to say the least, and impossible in the near term.

All allies including Australia are now revisiting their intelligence-sharing arrangements with a US administration that in Ukraine’s absence held talks with the Russians in Saudi Arabia and according to the the US news outlet Politico is in secret talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pro-Russian opponents in Ukraine.

Is Trump a Russian asset? The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher thinks so; so does Grok, an AI chatbot developed by Musk. Last week the Arizona Herald reported Grok’s response to a request that using public information from 1980 onward, it rate on a scale of 1 to 100 the likelihood that Trump is a Putin-compromised asset. Grok concluded there was “a 75-85 per cent likelihood” that he is.

It is one thing to abandon a democracy battling a dictator; it’s another to abandon the whole world. While Trump was telling Congress, “we are going to conquer the vast frontiers of science”, his agents under Musk were busy sacking scientists working in disease control, environmental protection, climate projections and weather forecasting.

The immediate impact will be felt most keenly within the US, but ultimately we are all victims. Science has immeasurably enhanced humanity’s success as a species. If we lose it we’re back where we started, or worse. It’s also the means by which we gauge our impact on nature, and define safe limits for what we do.

Thumbing its nose at such limits, early this month the climate-denying Trump administration stalled support for clean energy while raising support for fossil fuels, pulled America out of the Paris climate agreement and slashed environmental controls, firing thousands of workers in key agencies.

Climate, ecological and medical science needs continuity because it builds its knowledge incrementally, through an intricate network of personal and institutional relationships. Losing that knowledge through those widespread sackings is devastating in a country which for generations, alongside and usually ahead of Europe, has been a shining light for science.

Over many decades US medical science has led the global response to disease threats including AIDS, ebola and various influenza strains. From 2020 the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Tony Fauci led the global response to the Covid pandemic, including the development in record-breaking time of leading-edge mRNA vaccines.

Fauci was hounded for years by anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists led by Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr, now his health secretary. Another Fauci opponent in those early Covid years, a low-ranking National Institutes of Health staffer named Matthew Memoli, was promoted through several levels by Trump to lead the NIH in January – just ahead of the purge of agency scientists.

Now we know the true meaning of making America great again. It’s imposing tariffs on false pretexts, staking claims to other countries’ territory, helping a dictator defeat a democracy, walking away from the Western alliance – and swinging a wrecking ball through scientific agencies whose medical, weather and climate record-keeping and research have made us all safer.

“I am your retribution,” said Trump in 2023. This is what that looks like. And it’s just the beginning.