South Wind

When will it happen? When will a sudden loss of polar ice cause sea levels to rise rapidly, not by millimetres but by metres? That’s the multi-trillion dollar question that should be keeping the world’s policymakers up at night, but alas, they are otherwise engaged.

Not so polar scientists. The focus of their attention has long been on continental ice on Greenland and West Antarctica, the part of Antarctica south of the Pacific Ocean and South America. Now it’s shifted to the Antarctic coast directly south of Tasmania.

A riveting Antarctic Antarctic Program science and policy seminar in Hobart last week highlighted abrupt events in south polar regions, including loss of “permanent” coastal ice shelves and two dramatic crashes in sea ice cover in 2016 and 2023.

Due south of Hobart are the towering ice cliffs forming the face of Ninnis Glacier, one of the main outlets for the ice of Wilkes Basin, an extensive depression in underlying rocks descending over 2000 m below sea level.

Early this century the ice of East Antarctica (the main part of the continent south of Australia and Africa) was considered by scientists to be a very long-term melting risk because of its isolation and altitude, with the greater risk coming from smaller West Antarctica, whose bedrock is mostly below sea level.

That remains the case today, but exceptional ocean heating is changing calculations. A landmark study of the 150-year ocean temperature record published in 2022 found that ocean heating passed a point of no return 12 years ago, and that extreme temperatures – ocean heatwaves – are the new normal.

This extreme heat is no surprise to science. It simply reflects the increasing rate at which carbon compounds are pouring into the air and the consequent heating of the lower atmosphere. Well over 90 per cent of that heat energy finds its way into the ocean.

Abrupt change is an abnormally rapid shift in climate or environmental conditions, like the sea level and ocean circulation shifts at the end of the last ice age around 11,000 years ago. This century has seen rapid sea ice decline and melting Greenland ice, a rise in Arctic methane release, and extreme weather events happening more often and with growing intensity.

All are related to that massive increase in ocean heat, which is where Wilkes Basin comes into the picture.

At various points around the Antarctic coast, warming Southern Ocean waters can penetrate under the ice sheet margin. Drawn by gravity into submarine basins in the continent’s interior, that water can cause the ice above it to float. If that were to happen to ice in Wilkes Basin, global sea levels would rise by three to four metres.

For many years such a mind-boggling scenario has focused on the West Antarctic coast including Thwaites Glacier, dubbed the doomsday glacier on account of its vulnerability to warming seas and its potential impact on sea levels.

More recently Aurora Basin to the south of Australia’s Casey station was the subject of coastal and ice sheet studies, driven by that same potential for sea water penetrating underneath large coastal glaciers to open up the interior to melting from below.

Now Ninnis and neighbouring Mertz Glaciers, over 1500 km east of Casey, are getting attention. They are named after Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, who died during Douglas Mawson’s famous, fateful sledge journey in 1912. But this corner of the continent has been little explored since then.

It’s generally agreed that the tipping point for Thwaites Glacier, beyond which complete ice sheet loss is inevitable, is just a decade or so away, but we know much less about East Antarctic glaciers, least of all about those in Wilkes Basin. And the clock is ticking.

This troubles scientists like Philip Boyd, Sonya Fiddes, Poul Christoffersen, Tas van Ommen, Paul Spence and Steve Rintoul, all speakers at that Hobart seminar. But they lack the resources to get the answers they need – tools that aren’t readily available and don’t come cheap when they are, like a research ship and retrievable submersible drones.

The fuel crisis has brought some Australian politicians and commentators close to hysteria about the cost of our renewable energy rollout. “There is no benefit, only huge costs… generational pain but no gain,” wrote Chris Kenny in The Australian at the weekend.

How many of these people have given a moment’s thought to what it’s like to lose home, livelihood and heritage to rising seas, as is happening now for coastal and island dwellers as close to home as Torres Strait?

Their sea level rise is measured in millimetres. Multiply that impact by a thousand, and you’ll begin to understand those scientists’ state of mind.

A fine joke about prejudice I heard a Jewish New Yorker (political writer David Rothkopf) tell on YouTube last week goes like this:

Two old friends, one Jewish, the other Chinese, are chatting on a Central Park bench. The Jew says, “I’m always surprised that I enjoy our friendship so much.” His Chinese friend asks why he’s surprised, to which the Jew replies, “You know, Pearl Harbour.”

The Chinese man is startled. “But I’m Chinese, not Japanese; it wasn’t the Chinese who bombed Pearl Harbour.” His Jewish friend responds, “You know, Chinese, Japanese, it’s all the same.”

After a short silence, the Chinese man says that he, too, is surprised they’re friends. Asked why, he says, “Titanic”. The Jew says, “Titanic? What are you talking about? Jews didn’t sink the Titanic.” To which his Chinese friend replies, “You know, Goldberg, Greenberg, iceberg… all the same.”

The Jew takes a moment to ponder this, then they move on to other things, as friends do.

If that joke wasn’t told by Paul Ehrlich, who died last month aged 93, it ought to have been. Born of Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, this giant of evolutionary biology and fervent advocate for sustainable living was also a gifted raconteur and storyteller.

Ehrlich burst on to the global scene in 1968 with The Population Bomb, a book he co-wrote with his wife Anne (who survives him, aged 92), which said that Earth was over-populated and would soon run out of resources. That flew in the face of political and economic orthodoxy, then and now, calling for more people spending more money.

The Ehrlichs weren’t alone in their concern. The 1972 Club of Rome study The Limits to Growth anticipated collapsed economies and populations in the first half of this century due to resource depletion and environmental destruction. And Ehrlich shared the 1990 “Swedish Nobel” Crafoord Prize with E.O. Wilson, the great ecologist and champion of nature conservation, who died in 2021.

There are signs that Ehrlich’s predictions of half a century ago were right in substance, but his timing was definitely out. Earth’s resilience and man’s ingenuity have kept things ticking over when he said they would be dead and buried.

He was branded a doomster who despised humanity, but his informed, thoroughly entertaining media chats said otherwise. Like Wilson and biologists generally his interest was life in all its forms, wild and domestic, non-human and human. He just wanted our species to fit better with the others.

In that vein, Climate Tasmania’s David Hamilton has referred me to some thoughtful observations in a substack post by Alex Fein, a consultant with opinion pollster Redbridge. She writes that deep-dive surveys show that Australia, far from being polarised, is much more united than divided, strongly committed to social unity and mutual support.

Seeking to divide and distract, writes Fein, people protecting their hold on levers of power have magnified Australian cultural and social differences, leaving the impression that we’re a polarised society and that rising support for One Nation “represents a lurch to the far right.”

Instead, she says, One Nation’s rise represents “a furious rejection of the neoliberal consensus shared by both major parties”. Redbridge polling shows that Australians strongly object to Labor and the Coalition accommodating sectional interests’ demand for laws that are clearly against the national interest.

Redbridge found that when given the space and time to talk about what actually matters to them, Australians revealed strikingly consistent wishes: being able to afford a decent life, functioning healthcare and education, a future for our kids, kindness, fairness and supportive communities.

Adds Fein: “And they want a government that governs: that legislates and regulates in the public interest and stops letting only the powerful dictate terms.”

Extremism exists: the loud voices within One Nation and other right-wing groups in Australian politics aren’t just stooges of big business. But their noise is amplified by those making money from division, distracting us from maintaining a functioning, coherent society.

The spirit that moved the Ehrlichs, Wilson and the Club of Rome team, and that moves climate and environmental scientists today, is shared with the vast bulk of humankind. We are united, not just within Australia but globally, in our desire to leave our world better for our presence.

We continue to have our differences. A person with Jewish heritage isn’t the same as someone from China. Cultural and racial differences will always exist because without variety there is no life.

But we are inclined by our nature to make connections, to be together in a common cause, in defiance of the forces threatening to tear us apart. Just like those friends on the Central Park bench.

“People just chasing philosophical butterflies” was how New England MP Barnaby Joyce described the federal department of climate change last week, adding for good measure that far from changing the climate, “a lot of the people within it couldn’t change a tyre.”

Philosophical butterflies? Joyce likes to label climate mitigation “ideology” – a political belief. In the same interview he placed himself in a political movement that “started overseas”, listing some European countries as sources. He didn’t mention Donald Trump’s America, which was wise in light of America’s disastrous Iran “excursion” (Trump’s word).

But he shares with Trump’s interior secretary Doug Burgum a belief that there’s no need to cut carbon emissions. This is how Burgum justified the Trump administration’s February edict that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant: “When we breathe, we emit CO2. Plants need CO2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO2.”

Veteran US environmental writer Bill McKibben likened that statement to telling a drowning person you won’t help them because “water is a building block of life”. He added that the edict was “one of the signal moments in America’s descent into idiocracy”.

The Iran war is helping everyone see the danger of something central to the MAGA cause: relying on fossil fuels for energy. Trump’s ignorance of physical reality – including the changing climate he dismisses as fakery – is now on full display. The emperor has lost his clothes.

Trump’s war has changed the debate about solar and wind power. For years the Opposition and other conservative parties, in lock step with the global Right everywhere, have disparaged measures to ramp up clean energy and studiously avoided promoting electrified transport. Now, the advantages of vehicles that don’t need petrol or diesel have become painfully clear to all.

It should be no great leap from there to appreciate the real reason we’re into clean energy. The Middle East war is a shaping up as a disaster, but as disasters go it’s a minnow alongside the unfolding catastrophe that is the global climate.

It’s become one of my annual rituals to discuss every March the World Meteorological Organisation’s “State of the Climate” report. This year’s came out a week ago, and a warning to those bored by repetition, yes, this year’s is much the same as last year’s – only worse.

Needless to say the report got little publicity, despite the efforts of United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres. “The global climate is in a state of emergency,” said Guterres at the WMO launch. “Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits. Every key climate indicator is flashing red… Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record.

“When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act.… Oceans are absorbing epic levels of heat, fuelling ever stronger storms. Glaciers and sea ice are vanishing. And sea levels are relentlessly rising.”

Following an earlier decade of frustrated effort by his predecessor, Ban Ki Moon, and nine years into his job as UN chief, Guterres must be fed up trying to draw the attention of political leaders to what is happening under their noses. You could sense the despair, even desperation, in his voice as he spoke.

This will likely be the last WMO report he launches; his second five-year term is to end in December. By that time, meteorologists and other climate scientists expect the world to be well into a powerful new warming phase.

Following the La Niña which in Tasmania helped keep last summer’s temperatures within tolerable limits, a powerful El Niño is now forecast to follow quickly in its wake. Added to background warming, this will surely have a big impact on our lives as 2026 rolls on.

The WMO findings, said Guterres, “are written into the daily lives of people. In families struggling as droughts and storms drive up food prices; in workers pushed to the brink by extreme heat; in farmers watching crops wither; in communities and homes swept away by floods.”

He concluded: “In this age of war, climate stress is also exposing another truth: Our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security.

“Now more than ever, we must accelerate a just transition to renewable energy. Renewables deliver climate security, energy security and national security. Climate chaos is accelerating and delay is deadly. The way ahead must be grounded in science, common sense and the courage to act.”

As Trump’s war spreads across the Arabian Peninsula to Yemen and the Red Sea (another shipping choke-point), science and common sense are nowhere to be seen. Just when we needed them most.