South Wind

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.

The babble of voices opposing science, reason and effective climate action will doubtless never be silenced, but last week those voices were called to account in no uncertain terms. 

The turnaround was centred on Florida, “the sunshine state”, a corner of America especially vulnerable to impacts from growing climate instability, and also to malicious conspiracy theories.

In Florida’s coastal cities, including parts of Miami, high tides on the back of rising sea levels have often made life confronting when seawater filtering through the peninsula’s porous limestone has carried sewage into the streets.

Jutting into the ocean at an average elevation of just 30 metres, Florida is uniquely exposed to storms from the east (Atlantic Ocean), the south (Caribbean Sea) and the west (Gulf of Mexico). Its record speaks for itself: it has around double the number of hurricanes experienced by the states next in line, Texas, Louisiana and North Carolina.

Current sea-surface temperatures around Florida – still around 30C well into autumn – are causing storms to form at record pace. Before it hit last week, Milton grew from a small low into a massive Category 5 hurricane, with winds gusting to over 300 km/h, in just two days – a rate described by one hurricane specialist as “insane”.

But Milton was just another chapter in weeks of chaos. Late last month Helene, among America’s most damaging and deadly hurricanes on record, tore through Florida’s north-east before wreaking even more havoc in states to the north. 

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, running to succeed Biden, did what you would expect elected leaders to do. They dropped everything for long enough to get familiar with things on the ground and to ensure first responders had what they needed to rescue people, provide shelter and food, and generally minimise suffering.

But the twin hurricanes didn’t stop Republican campaigning for the US presidential election, the most controversial and consequential in anyone’s lifetime. It was once normal for opposing candidates – in this case former president Donald Trump and running mate J.D. Vance – to drop their political point-scoring and do what was needed to support recovery. Not any more.

A fortnight ago, Florida resident Trump falsely told a rally in the coastal city of Fort Myers that “Kamala spent all of her FEMA [federal emergency agency] money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants”. Despite repeated rebuttals by the Biden Administration, the lie was amplified by Vance at another rally and spread by other climate change deniers including Representatives Matt Gaetz and Steve Scalise and Fox News host Sean Hannity. 

Even wilder claims were made on social media. One said that Hurricane Helene was created by the Democrats to seize North Carolina lithium deposits. Trump congressional ally Marjorie Taylor-Greene offered this ludicrous tidbit: “Yes they can control weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

The Helene falsehoods were put to bed by a Republican congressman from North Carolina, Chuck Edwards, in words that could not be misunderstood. He listed a string of lies and conspiracy theories, including Trump’s funding falsehoods, under the heading “Debunking Helene Response Myths”, and went on to do just that, one lie at a time.

Another wild claim said that FEMA was planning to seize property while owners were away sheltering in evacuation centres. Faced with the prospect of people fleeing Milton returning home into danger, a staffer for climate-denying Florida governor Ron DeSantis was forced to put out a counter-tweet that “spreading LIES like this could have serious consequences.” Indeed.

Last weekend a North Carolina man called a talkback radio show in despair to tell them that his father-in-law, “a hardcore Trumper” badly affected by Helene, was refusing FEMA relief money because Trump had said that if he accepted it FEMA would “take his house”.

Television host Chris Hayes of MSNBC put it this way:“Republicans who suddenly see a conflict between the welfare of their constituents and the toxic effect of their party’s propaganda – and also who don’t want to fly back to Washington for an emergency session to fund FEMA when FEMA has money – are now struggling to explain to their audiences that, well, up is up, and down is down, and water is wet, and two plus two equals four.”

As for DeSantis, he has some serious questions to answer. Of all people, Floridians need to know about climate change. Yet it was DeSantis who refused federal money for energy efficiency, banned clean energy goals and expunged climate change from school curricula (“woke”, he called it).

While having to contend with living in the eye of the global warming storm, and with an anti-science zealot as governor and a resident denier-in-chief campaigning ferociously to become their nation’s dictator (“but only on day one”), the people of Florida have a lot to think about.

A young counter assistant – at a guess she was around 30 – was processing my personal details last week when she told me that she wished she was in her sixties.

Her casual comment startled me, bringing into sharp focus the anxiety of young people about the state of the world and their prospects for a good life. I could have tried to reassure her about the future, but in that moment could think of nothing that didn’t seem trite and empty. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised. The macro- and micro-worries swirling around us add up to great pressure on individuals and on the institutions we expect to keep us safe. And over all our futures looms the biggest, darkest cloud of all, a destabilised climate. 

When I first realised that humans were driving climate change, ignorance and scepticism seemed the biggest obstacles to success. Now the great challenge is fatigue born of anxiety – personally, in family and friends, and in the wider public. Young people are in the vanguard of this huge public health issue.

Whether or not it’s well-founded, anxiety is never solved by saying simply that all will be well. As then-schoolgirl Greta Thunberg once told the world’s rich and famous at Davos, Switzerland, “We don’t want your hope… we want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”

To have hope, we need things to be happening around us along with personal agency and a keen sense of our standing in the natural world – pretty much what humans experienced when they first descended from the trees. Another young woman, Lauren Fuge, has taken this theme and run with it – literally, to far corners of her Australian homeland (including Tasmania’s tall forests) and beyond.

In her outstanding new book, Voyagers, Fuge is concerned with what her different experiences in different places teach her about Earth, its species and the future as we navigate the Holocene, the new man-made geological epoch in which we now find ourselves.

Her book shares its name with two legendary NASA spacecraft. Voyagers 1 and 2 are now in interstellar space, over 20 billion kilometres from the rocky planet – Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” – which they left 47 years ago. 

Writes Fuge: “Sometimes, travelling across the world feels like launching myself into space, tipping over the edge to seek where the solar winds end. The Voyagers will never return from their missions, and there will be no true return for me, just as there was none for our wandering ancestors.

“On voyages we change in ways we can’t anticipate. We fracture and mend, again and again, until we no longer fit the space we left behind. My pursuits have upended me and shown me the world upended, throwing me towards the ever-changing horizon of the future…”

“As we decide our collective legacy on this planet,” asks Fuge, “can we avoid haunting the generations to come?” That is the question of our age, and while Fuge doesn’t exactly answer it in the book (who can?), she offers reasons aplenty not to despair. Her twin inspirations are science and indigenous culture, making and re-making “the life-giving connections between people and place.”

We are now, writes Fuge, “at the edge of all that we know, gathering our courage and compassion as we head unstoppably towards the glittering horizon that influences us and is being influenced by us across the permeable barriers of space and time.

“Stepping into that future is an act of exploration. We’ll never reach the horizon, but we’re not going in order to find out what’s where – we’re on an eternal journey of making, in which we actively create the world we’re walking into.” 

“Those who walked this Earth before you,” writes Fuge, never definitively solved problems, but continually responded to predicaments. You’ve always faced them with grit, bravery and the will to survive… You can learn from the choices and adaptations of your ancestors and their beyond-human kin, and apply the best tools to the current moment, and the next, and the next.”

Reasons for hope are hard to find these days, but I’m curiously comforted by these and many more profound insights in Fuge’s extraordinary book, written by a person barely three decades old. 

I referred earlier to the gifted scientist and communicator Carl Sagan, who in 1977 led the team that compiled digital recordings representing our planet’s life and human culture, placed on both Voyager spacecraft in case an extra-terrestrial being found them. Lauren Fuge was a baby when Sagan died in 1996, but his spirit lives on in her.