On hazards and climate

Let me make a confession. As a neophyte academic at the University of Wollongong in the late 1970s, I greatly admired Don Aitkin's work when he was Professor of Politics at Macquarie University. In particular I always read his weekly column in the National Times, a wonderfully refreshing newspaper now long gone. Don's compass was broad, and he was an acute observer of Australian life and society who brought to bear the insights of the historian, the economist, the sociologist and the political scientist. Periodically I quoted his observations approvingly to my students in lectures. I even read his novel about university life, The Second Chair, but I never met the man behind the words.

So I was pleased to find that Don became in retirement an insightful and prolific contributor to On Line Opinion. Judging from the usually positive responses to his pieces, which range at least as widely as he did in the National Times, his writings have stimulated and challenged many in recent times. I am one who has found his contributions to be interesting, thought-provoking and generally highly worthwhile.

But I have had some reservations. Especially these have arisen when Don has ventured into natural hazards and climate change. Hazard management is a field in which I have been a practitioner, and in my own retirement I have written frequently about floods and their management and occasionally about climate change, in OLO and elsewhere. So what I have to say is from one contributor to OLO to another.

I have four points to make, two about simple facts and two about interpretations and judgements. In Extreme weather in  Australia (OLO, 19 October 2012), a piece about floods, cyclones, droughts, storms and bush fires, Don says twice in quick succession that "We don't have tornadoes in Australia." But we do! Tornadoes have been noted here since 1795 and there have almost certainly been at least 20 fatalities as a direct result of them. In 1976, a Volkswagen with two occupants in it was picked up by a tornado in Victoria and hurled to the ground: both the driver and the passenger died.

And there has been much damage done over the years to houses, sheds, caravans and other constructions. Not a few people have been admitted to hospital recently with injuries due to  tornado strikes.

Of course our tornado problem is vastly less severe than it is in the USA, where substantial numbers of people die as a result of tornadoes and great damage is done each year. More of the tornadoes appear to be severe in the US, and the areas in which they typically occur are generally more highly populated with the result that more people are exposed.

And naturally tornadoes do far less damage in Australia and kill fewer people than tropical cyclones, floods and bush fires.

Don's not knowing of the existence of tornadoes in this country is part of a wider tendency amongst Australians to deny the severity of the agents of natural disaster. Years ago, the leaders of the Australian skiing fraternity were vehement in denying that avalanches occurred in the Australian Alps. But then in 1956 one happened, and a death resulted. A myth was debunked, and for the first time people started to think about the avalanche risk when they skied off piste or built mountain huts.

These are instances of our failure to understand hazards or to take them as seriously as we should. Too often we build in locations that are bound to see floods or bush fires. Our history is one of minimising the threats which nature poses. Either from ignorance or laziness, we deny the threats or become complacent about them and we discourage governments from confronting them. Thus we do not increase our resilience. Opinion leaders need to ensure that they do not fall prey to carelessness in these matters.

A second factual inaccuracy arose in Don's piece The IPCC now says it's OK to adapt to climate change (OLO 11 April 2014). Here the author quotes, approvingly, the view of geologist Bob Carter that Australia should adopt the New Zealand civil defence management system which is built around the '4 Rs' ─ reduction, readiness, response and recovery. But we already have this system, now subsumed within a broader risk management framework, though we use 'prevention' in place of reduction and 'preparedness' instead of readiness.

I happen to prefer the NZ words, but the system is the same in the two countries. 'PPRR' has been central to the education of Australia's emergency management fraternity (in the State and Territory Emergency Services, the fire agencies and local, state and federal government) for at least a quarter of a century. It has been part of the teaching of the Australian Emergency Management Institute, the nation's 'college' of emergency management in Mount Macedon.

PPRR summarises the ways in which we 'treat' the problems brought by natural hazards. In the context of flooding we seek to reduce the intensity or impacts of events (by building mitigation dams and levees and raising dwellings or removing them from floodplains), to prepare for them (by engaging people at risk of flooding about how they should react and by ensuring that the SESs plan how to warn and evacuate people), to respond to them when they occur (by rescuing and evacuating people, providing real-time information on a developing flood and its impacts and supplying farm animals with fodder and isolated communities with day-to-day necessities, amongst many other things) and  to recover from them afterwards (for example by providing financial and other assistance to those who have been hit by floods and fixing the infrastructural damage that has been caused). In my view we should do more of most of these things.

But this post of Don's has a more important deficiency than any small weakness in his knowledge of our emergency management teaching. This is the imputation, implied in the sarcasm of the title (which may not have been his), that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has until recently focused on the mitigation of climate change to the detriment of considering modes of adaptation to it. Perhaps it should not be surprising that climate scientists will focus their thinking on scientifically-based strategies which might reduce or prevent potentially undesirable tendencies (like rising levels of carbon dioxide, rising temperatures and rising sea levels) by attacking them at their causes. In doing this they may to a degree leave adaptation to engineers and social scientists: after all, the problems posed are problems that legitimately require all-of-society responses and the ideas of non-scientists will be central to some of them.

Climate scientists can't do it all. Their principal responsibility is to point out what is happening in the climate system. Only secondarily do they tend to involve themselves in prescriptions and then they do not necessarily canvas the whole range of possible actions.

My reading of the climate change literature, IPCC reports and all, is that adaptation has had a good run. It is not a recent arrival in the debate, and the scientists have not only recently given 'permission' to argue for it. Thus there is much thinking going on about how to manage rising sea levels that goes far beyond mitigation (for example via the building of sea walls) by considering such things as 'planned retreat' from coasts and even floating cities. In flood management both types of responses are practised, as will continue to be necessary if flooding becomes more severe over time as is the dominant expectation amongst climate scientists.

For relatively small amounts of warming ─ say an average global surface-level increase of 2 degrees ─ much adaptation is feasible as well as mitigation. But if warming becomes unstoppable ─ in other words if  2 degrees becomes 3, 4, 5, 6 or more degrees, the spectre of an uninhabitable world arises and adaptation will become less possible. This is today's worst-case scenario in the field, the equivalent of the 1960s realisation that with nuclear weapons humankind for the first time possessed the means by which civilisation and humanity themselves could be destroyed.

If 'runaway' warming is a realistic scenario, mitigation will of necessity bulk larger in the battle than will adaptation. And if it is not, there will need to be both mitigation and adaptation. There are many means of both.

My final concern with Don's writing was triggered by his piece entitled Conservatism and climate change (20 June 2014). He concludes this post by suggesting that 'orthodox' climate scientists ─ the oft-quoted 97% who take the non-sceptical view of the possibility that human activity is a substantial part of the cause of warming ─ have not convinced the population at large of their case despite the fact that they have had "virtually a monopoly of the mass media, the government and the scientific academies". 

He might be right about the academies, but there are many sceptics in government and certainly in the media which is important as an opinion leader for the public at large. The conservative-leaning Murdoch empire, for example, has been persistent in its scepticism and in its negative appraisal of the world's attempts to rein in climate change via such mechanisms as 'cap and trade' systems.

And outlets like OLO, entirely legitimately in a free-speech environment, give much space to those who are not in sync or sympathy with the 97%. Some of us are uncomfortable with the balance in what is published but sufficiently wedded to democracy to see that censorship to protect a majority expert view cannot be justified. It cannot sensibly be argued that the sceptics should get only 3% of the space. But that they seem to get so much more than that does not help governments, individually or collectively, to grasp the nettle of climate change policy with boldness.

Here and in the USA, but less so in Europe, climate change scepticism has had a rails run in the media. Hence the so-called 'pause' in global warming since the second half of the 1990s is used persistently to play down warming as a trend and a threat. Interestingly, the similar pause between the late 1940s and about 1970 (which gave way to nearly three decades of quite rapid warming) is little mentioned. Moreover the recent pause might be exaggerated: it is based on a single measure (global annual average temperature) and rests on unusually high mid-1990s temperatures which are not difficult to explain. Variations in solar output and episodes of El Niño also play parts in determining temperatures, as do major volcanic eruptions.

In any case there is much evidence that the last few years have been warmer globally than most of the 1990s. Since the middle of that decade there have been many high-temperature records set globally for individual months (including May of this year).

There, I've said it. Don Aitkin's work is valuable but flawed ─ sometimes in matters of fact. I suspect too that his judgements have been influenced by a drift to conservative thinking since middle age ─ a not uncommon occurrence. But that of course is no more than my own personal judgement, and I might be biased the other way. I am also fearful about where conservatism is taking us, both in terms of the climate change debate and in what I see as  our reluctance to take natural hazards as seriously as we should.

Above all I worry that conservatives discourage action on both climate change and the mitigation of and adaptation to the problems brought by natural hazards. Here they make real problems more difficult for following generations to tackle. Scepticism, an important quality in science and public debate, can drift into something bothersome ─ a near-automatic denial of science and the application of it, and perhaps even of reality.

It was the conservative Tony Abbott, after all, who called climate science 'crap'. Succinct and colourful, perhaps, but not his most rational statement.