South Wind

Friend, mentor, anchor, eco-warrior, a kind, compassionate, joyful, funny man… these are among words chosen by friends to describe University of Tasmania Distinguished Professor Jamie (James Barrie) Kirkpatrick, geographer and conservation ecologist.

In his official biography on the university’s website, Kirkpatrick, who died last week aged 78, offered this self-analysis: his success should be measured “by the new things discovered that allow better protection of the natural world, and by how much they are used to do so.” On that basis, his life and career (the two were inseparable) were hugely successful. 

When Victorian-born Kirkpatrick, aged just 25, joined the university’s geography department in 1972, a beautiful southwestern lake with a dramatic white beach was disappearing under the rising waters of a hydro impoundment. Lake Pedder was the first of many harsh lessons for Kirkpatrick in how natural values can be lost amid the political din.

Kirkpatrick noted early on the incongruity of Tasmania’s large areas of unique ancient ecosystems in unprotected native forest. Back then, just five per cent of the state’s lands were in reserves. Today that figure is nearly seven times higher at 34 per cent.

That achievement owes much to Kirkpatrick’s untiring research into habitat loss and his advocacy for its preservation. Earlier this year he put that lifelong effort into a nutshell: “I came to Tasmania, saw this amazing place, knew … it was worth fighting for, and decided to dedicate the rest of my life to doing just that.”

As our planet’s climate crisis has come into sharp focus, scientists investigating the geology, chemistry and physics of the Earth system and of all heavenly bodies have come to see that the science they do is inseparable from their own lives – a truth that has long been clear to those caught up in the life sciences. 

Besides about 600 research papers, at various stages of his long career Jamie Kirkpatrick wrote for the wider public about the things that mattered to him, including essays and notes in a string of publications by and about the acclaimed wilderness photographer Peter Dombrovskis.

In 1983, the year the High Court stopped the Gordon-below-Franklin dam project, it was Wild Rivers. In 1996, the year Dombrovskis died, he contributed an introduction for On the Mountain, and in 1998 collaborated with Bob Brown in a commemorative volume, Dombrovskis. Three years later he contributed a personal essay, “About Trees”, for yet another Dombrovskis collection, In the Forest.

Just 11 days before he died Kirkpatrick celebrated his 78th birthday. With the help of close collaborator Jen Sanger, he marked the occasion with the launch of some print publications he’d been working on for some time. 

Kirkpatrick was especially proud of one of these, Ecology Underfoot: The Fine Fabric of the Rest of Nature, and I can see why. Jen Sanger’s colourful plant drawings on the cover signal that this is a book for non-scientists, and it is. But the information-rich, context-aware notes accompanying its 75 engrossing images, all at the scale of a human foot, are the mark of a scientist through and through.

Kirkpatrick’s field observations and exceptional publishing record show his dedication to science as a uniquely effective pathway to understanding our world. But academic achievement is not measured solely by research and publishing. As a beneficiary of some outstanding mentors I would argue that in the scheme of things teaching – often ignored when the glittering prizes are handed out – is least equal to any other branch of scholarship. 

A huge part of Jamie Kirkpatrick’s university career was encouraging and mentoring generations of undergraduate and postgraduate students. The effort he put in over decades at the university never ceased. As his illness advanced to its final stages he got a new plant ecology student started while supervising to near-completion another student’s thesis on how roadkill affects tourism. 

Over the years, if the grizzled, bearded figure of Jamie was not physically present in any discussion about nature on this island, he was there in spirit – as he will be for a long time yet. It’s hard to get the head around his absence, says scientist Lisa Gershwin, whose PhD scholarship happened because of Kirkpatrick’s generous assistance. 

“He was like one of those big old tall trees that you just cannot imagine what the forest would look like if it fell,” she said last week. “Sometimes you only really grasp how big it really was when you see the hole it leaves.”

Jamie Kirkpatrick’s life will be celebrated at a bring-your-own-picnic at Hobart’s Cascade Gardens from 4 pm on Friday afternoon. All are welcome.

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.