Optimism and resilience in the face of calamity

Eight days ago the peer-reviewed science journal Environment published an analysis by the legendary climatologist James Hansen and 17 fellow scientists of the breathtaking leap in Earth’s mean surface temperature over the past two years.

The paper foresees more extreme storms, floods, heat waves and “flash droughts”, but its most disturbing prediction concerns a pivotal system of ocean currents. It says the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), linking Arctic and Antarctic waters, is now likely to shut down within 30 years, locking in “major problems including sea level rise of several metres”.

An AMOC shutdown, the paper says, is “the point of no return”. It wants scientists, politicians and the rest of us to grasp this looming crisis, “to avoid handing young people a dire situation that is out of their control.”

That’s the point of this discussion – not climate or science, but us. How do we deal with this?

San Francisco-based futurist Alex Steffen is not into blind hope or “apocalyptic optimism”, a belief that when things get bad enough people will change suddenly. But he is optimistic about “our ability to understand the problems in front of us better, to arrive at better solutions through new thinking and innovation, and to change the politics of how and how quickly we deploy those solutions.”

When enough people clearly see the danger in an unstable climate, he says, humanity can respond with urgency. “Obviously not many places are moving as fast as we’d like to, so sometimes it can feel hard to have much hope… but that can change.”

“There’s this dance that needs to happen between massive decarbonisation done as quickly as we can manage it, carbon cycle restoration and some combination of other potential things.” Action is inevitable, he says, and it’s plausible that warming can be limited to 2C, but there will still be “really serious, catastrophic consequences.”

If you fear for the future, live in the present. That’s how Emily Schoerning sees us getting around mental roadblocks. A microbiologist and science educator based in the American midwest, Emily Schoerning began a movement called American Resiliency which combats climate anxiety with useful, practical tools for ordinary people living ordinary lives.

Humans think of their species first, but climate change affects all species. Small populations of species matter, says Shoerning.“I love life. I love living things. We’re in an extinction event. Saving what biodiversity we have is very important.”

Tasmania’s major party leaders clearly disagree; they believe it’s far less important than jobs and company profits. That’s something which should bother all of us who vote them into parliament.

Last month Shoerning told Ben Thomas on his YouTube channel Sisyphus 55 that heatwaves in hot countries are now delivering temperatures at or above the level at which plants – any plants – can fix carbon through photosynthesis. If and when such heatwaves become everyday experiences, plant food will disappear, imperilling us and every species.

Given past failures to change the current trajectory of emissions and temperature, it seems foolish to think that such a turnaround might somehow be achieved. But Shoerning believes it will be, and in the meantime her recipe for surviving our troubled times is staying focused in the moment.

The more aware we are of what our senses are telling us right now about the real world, she says, the better equipped we are to act. Solutions may be as small as something you keep in your pocket, an object with good sensory textures, reminding us that we’re here – “a little ritual that helps you to be present in your life”.

“It helps me to acknowledge that I’m still in the good time. It’s extremely likely that things are going to get worse, but do I want to spend the good times crying? There will be time to cry later. Now is the time to have an active and present way of living.”

It’s a matter of allowing time to stop and smell the roses – and feel the thorns as well. Shoerning’s recipe for resiliency calls for us to be acutely aware of our real, three-dimensional, living world, in which we are only one of millions of species. We ignore those other species and their accelerating extinction rate at a cost that is mounting as the years pass.

Looking out over a morning coffee to our garden the other day, the sight of a host of tiny flying bugs highlighted by a bright sun took me back to my childhood, when summer warmth after a spot of rain would bring out insects in their thousands – mosquitoes included, but plenty of less bothersome ones besides.

There is still time. We’re not there yet.

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Roches Beach’s sea level signal

Safe and sheltered, pleasant natural qualities including bird life, east-facing with good morning sun, the perfect suburban beach for the whole family… that’s how residents described Roches Beach, east of Hobart on Frederick Henry Bay, in a Clarence City Council resident survey last year.

The survey was instigated by the fact that the beach has been getting smaller. One respondent pointed to private homes whose back yards “go straight into the beach” so that a visitor “feels like an intruder walking on private land”. Another was fearful that a child playing on an eroded dune might be buried by a sand fall.

Another expressed annoyance at “property owners showing complete disregard and treating the dunes as if they own them”. For their part, property owners expressed fear at losing their homes to coastal erosion, one of them lamenting council money spent on a Bellerive boardwalk and New Year fireworks instead of protecting the coast. Criticisms included bad modelling, self-interested consultants, “sub-par” scientists and “incorrect measurements”.

One survey respondent commented that both council and community face “huge challenges in our lifetime and beyond”, lamenting that governments were failing to address those challenges. Another begged to differ: “The last community meeting that I attended in the Lauderdale Hall was more of a climate change scare campaign rather that the sharing of genuine… knowledge of the Lauderdale coastal erosion situation.”

There’s an underlying message here about the response of communities, governments and the world at large to the growing impact of climate change. When concentrated personal wealth is at stake, like a home, people will take in only what they want to and discard the rest.

Here’s what science says about the kind of climate change Roches Beach residents should be most concerned about. Hotter oceans and melting ice are accelerating sea level rise, from a 20th century average rate of 1.4 mm a year to about 4.7 mm a year in the decade to 2023.

At current warming rates the seas lapping Tasmania will be at least 20 cm higher by 2050 and a metre higher by 2100, but projections so far out are inevitably imprecise. A projection by a Singapore-based team published last week put the latter figure, globally averaged, at a “very likely” 1.9 metres.

Chris Sharples has spent many decades studying the interplay between land and ocean, a study whose focus has been sharpened by our changing climate and the rising global sea level. Last year he turned that lifetime of study into a hard-earned PhD based on a protracted study of the behaviour of the Roches Beach shoreline.

Sharples picked Roches Beach for his thesis topic because annual aerial photos from 1946 enabled a study of changing behaviour over many decades. What he discovered is that after being stable for at least four decades, in 1986 a major section of Roches Beach shoreline began to recede in a trend that only slowed from 2011, when Clarence City Council began replenishing sand at the dune front.

In a major research paper published last week in the prestigious international journal Marine Geology, Sharples and co-author Christopher Watson, also of the University of Tasmania, reported their finding that “the rising sea-level has increased the frequency and scale of upper beach erosion events, causing increasing net losses of eroded sand from the [Roches Beach] embayment”.

In career terms this is a significant moment for Sharples and Watson, his PhD supervisor. And though perhaps none of them know it yet, it’s more momentous still for Tasmania and the Clarence municipality – and especially for coastal residents of the Roches Beach-Lauderdale area struggling to get their heads around what’s happening to their beloved beach.

Many of these residents have for years felt a gnawing anxiety about their future. Some have found a sort of comfort in hearing or reading about other possible explanations for their predicament, but despite everyone’s best efforts that predicament has never gone away.

Now they have something unique among Tasmanian coastal dwellers. Thanks to decades of dogged effort by Sharples, their beach has been studied more intensively than any other part of our state’s 3000 km of coastline, and the finding is clear. They now know that the central, underlying reason for their disappearing beach is a rising sea level.

Certain coastal management measures may hold the seas at bay for a while, but in the long term the only way to stop the beach from receding is to lower the amount of carbon that we Tasmanians, all other Australians and everyone else in the world (especially the developed part) are putting up there. End of story.

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The weeping wound that is Australia Day

“Australia Day is our day,” everyone’s tennis hero John Newcombe said last week. “All we are doing is recognising how lucky we are to live in this country.”

But the Australia Day debate is not about whether we should celebrate nationhood, but when. Those objecting to the fuss over the 26th of January take no account of the history around that fateful day in 1788 when Captain Arthur Phillip unilaterally declared the land on which he stood to be part of the British Empire.

In the previous century, in much the same way, Britain added to its empire 13 colonies on the east coast of what is now the United States. Those colonies sparked a war with Britain when they declared their independence on 4 July 1776, a date all Americans now know as Independence Day.

In both the Australian and the American cases, Indigenous people had no part in the decisions made at that time. But the American rebels differed in that they rejected remote rule by a distant, unrepresentative government. Their declaration laid the basis for an independent nation.

Arthur Phillip’s declaration on 26 January 1788 was something else altogether. Far from proclaiming any sort of independence, it effectively laid down that the people already there would lose their independence. Their land stewardship, the basis of their ancient belief systems, would be revoked and the land given to a king on the other side of the world.

It wasn’t a nation that was founded at Port Jackson on 26 January. It was a colony of the Empire, which over subsequent decades, besides delivering cast-off felons by the shipload, imposed British law on the far more venerable First Nations land and justice systems. Britain used its law to determine unilaterally that Australia was uninhabited, giving cover to the Empire to allow First Nations people to be marginalised or hunted down and killed.

The toll was greatest in high-population regions, fertile country with the best food resources. In places like Tasmania’s Northern Midlands, Victoria’s Western Districts, the Murray Valley, the NSW Northern Rivers, the Brisbane Valley and many more besides, First Nations people were denied the material and spiritual support of the lands on which their culture was based.

It’s worth looking at how other countries have gone about establishing a national day. India shares our date, 26 January, but unlike us it made that choice because on that day in 1930 the Indian National Congress proclaimed independence from the British.

New Zealand’s big day is Waitangi Day on 4 February, when the country’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi between Britain and First Nations Maoris, was signed in 1840. Japan’s day, 11 February, is the date understood to be when the country’s first emperor was crowned in 660BC.

France celebrates the start of its revolution on 14 July, 1789, when rebellious subjects released the Bastille’s prisoners. Germany celebrates on 3 October, when the country’s western and eastern halves were united in 1990. And Mexico and other Latin American nations base their national days on key events in their wars of liberation from Spanish and Portuguese overlords in the early 1800s.

In all of these cases, dates of national celebration mark occasions of national empowerment, when a king was crowned or a treaty signed or lands brought together – or most often, when a people’s independence was asserted.

The arrival of the British did the exact opposite to Indigenous Australians. Their belief systems were truly independent, but they lost out to an empire that sought to dominate them, driven by an implacable belief in its superiority.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton declared on Australia Day that a Coalition government would ensure that “the days of being ashamed of Australia Day are over”, while Liberal deputy leader Sussan Ley talked up the success of the “daring experiment” of Australia’s settlement by the British.

The brazen settlement of our vast lands, across unfamiliar seas on the other side of the world, was remarkable, and no-one could be ashamed on an Australia Day that celebrates our success in bringing together multiple cultures and forging a stable, democratic and prosperous nation.

But all that is missing the point. There are hundreds of days in the year, numerous other anniversaries, when we could enjoy a good party. But to choose the day that marks Australia’s annexation by the British cannot avoid attention falling on what followed: the dispossession, murder and marginalisation of Indigenous people.

The 26th of January is an old habit we must break. If we don’t find a date that better represents our shared history and aspirations, our national day will be a permanent, weeping wound.

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