SYDNEY — A verdict rendered in a Sydney courtroom last Friday underscores how climate change and the past several months of weather catastrophes across Australia are influencing opinion across this country. On Feb. 8, an Australian court for the first time invoked climate change as a reason to reject a proposed coal mine.
The ruling, by Chief Judge Brian Preston in the New South Wales Land and Environment Court, refused approval for the proposed Rocky Hill mine, located near the small town of Gloucester, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Sydney. Preston ruled building and operating the mine, along with transporting and burning the coal, would “result in the emission of greenhouse gases, which will contribute to climate change.” The costs to the community would exceed the mine’s economic and social benefits, he said.
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David Morris, head of the NSW Environmental Defenders Office, which provided legal support to a group in Gloucester opposed to the minen, hailed the decision over Twitter as a “seminal moment in the development of climate litigation in Australia.” He said it would “weigh heavily on the minds of decision-makers” considering whether to approve new fossil fuels projects.
That the ruling became the first time a court in this country cited climate change as a reason to reject development is historic. Perhaps more noteworthy, however, is the court’s position stood against Australia’s most lucrative export, coal, showing just how heavily worries over the impact of global warming are weighing on both the public and policymakers.
Coal is Australia’s single most valuable export item, worth 66 billion Australian dollars (roughly $47 billion) in 2018. Most thermal coal is shipped to Asian markets, and a big new export mine proposed by India‘s Adani group for the Galilee coal basin in north Queensland has so far been delayed by environmental protests.
Coal is part of a fossil fuel sector so valuable that it largely shielded Australia from the degree of economic pain that the great global recession of 2008-09 afflicted on the world’s other wealthy countries.
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But extreme weather events are making even valuable industries subject to scrutiny. In the past year the possible markers of climate change in Australia include a once-every-200-year flood in the tropical north; bush fires and devastating drought in the south; fish dying by the millions in oxygen-starved inland rivers; farms ruined by crop failure and livestock losses; big cities brought to a standstill by windstorms; and lightning strikes on power grids and transport systems.
Add to those events the daily unrelenting heat as the Southern Hemisphere summer grinds on.
The dilemma for Australia’s political leaders is to identify whether those events are a snapshot of climate change in action, or to see them simply as part of the ongoing weather cycle. Most mainstream political parties, peak business and farming groups and energy providers are now in tune with the environmental groups that have led the debate on climate change.
Public opinion in Australia is also focused on the changing climate. A global survey conducted in 26 countries and released on Sunday shows how climate change is seen today as the greatest threat to international security. Australians name it as the top security threat.
But exactly what to do next remains a vexed question in Australian society.
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Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Alan Finkel, put it succinctly when he addressed academics and students in Brisbane recently: “The science is clear: Stop using fossil fuels.” Then, he added: “But society is also clear: We need energy.”
Finkel once proposed nuclear energy to replace the fossil fuels — primarily coal and gas — that underpin baseline power generation in much of Australia, but that is unpopular for most of the Australian population and the body politic.
“The solutions to a global problem are not acceptable at the local level,” Finkel said in his address to the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences. “We need to develop breakthrough technologies while simultaneously persuading billions of people to change the way we live.”
Technology, Data May Improve Weather Forecasting
A technological breakthrough can’t come soon enough for the 170-plus permanent inhabitants and the thousands of visitors who pass through Marble Bar, a town in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. Since the start of December, Marble Bar has endured 10 weeks of stifling heat where the temperature has been above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for all but six days. On Dec. 27, it reached a record high of 49.3 degrees Celsius followed by 49.1 C on Jan. 13.
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With doctors warning that prolonged exposure to temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius can bring on heat stroke, air conditioners are working overtime in this Outback community. The recent heat wave isn’t the first time Marble Bar has been in the record books. Between the end of October 1923 and early April 1924, the town endured 160 days when the temperature was 37.8 degrees Celsius or above.
Across Australia, January 2019 was the hottest month on record, with a mean temperature exceeding 30 degrees Celsius. But being “on record” covers a relatively short range of data held by Australia’s government weather agency, the Bureau of Meteorology. Its standardized records date back only to 1908, though it has non-standard information going back another 120 years to the start of European settlement.
Conclusions from any earlier periods must rely on natural evidence such as tree rings, core samples from the ocean floor and coral skeletons, or defer to indigenous Australians’ “Dreamtime” stories on past weather events. Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders have lived in Australia for at least 50,000 years, and their stories tell of icy times many years ago. Scientific research confirms an ice age arrived in these lands 20,000 years ago and lasted about 5,000 years. Average temperatures fell by 10 degrees Celsius and rainfall decreased. When warmer times resumed, rising sea levels separated Papua New Guinea and the island of Tasmania from mainland Australia.
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Australian scientist Jennifer Marohasy, a skeptic of human-induced climate change and a prominent critic of the Bureau of Meteorology’s work, says using “big data” and artificial intelligence could lead to better long-range weather and climate forecasts. She advocates using artificial intelligence to mine historical climate data for patterns, and then construct statistical models to use in forecasts.
Support Grows for a National Climate Policy
On the political spectrum, the Australian Greens party is unequivocal that human activity is behind the catastrophic weather events of recent years, that all coal mining should cease and all the country’s energy needs should be met by renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydro.
The two mainstream parties, the ruling Liberal-National coalition government and the Labor opposition, support the need for a workable climate change policy, but are more circumspect. Both know the value of fossil fuels such as coal and gas as big export earners for Australia, big employers in the mining industry, and as the main source of baseline power generation.
In a new report, Australia’s Climate Council, which identifies itself as an independent group of climate scientists, health, renewable energy and policy experts, says recent events are “part of a trend of increasing extreme weather since the 1980s, both globally and in Australia.” Pointing out that nine of the 10 hottest years on record in Australia have occurred since 2005, the council is adamant that climate change is driving an increase in the intensity and frequency of heat waves in Australia, exacerbating drought conditions.
Fiona Simson, president of the National Farmers Federation, agrees, saying people on the land can’t and won’t ignore the intense weather variability they are encountering. “We are on the front line of climate change,” she told the National Press Club in Canberra in a 2018 address.
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“It exacerbates the already unpredictable impacts of drought.”
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has sought to ease farmers’ woes with a future drought relief fund of $5 billion Australian dollars. But that money won’t be available until next year.
Drought and bush fires, like the floods now enveloping the tropical city of Townsville in north Queensland, have long been part of the Australian landscape. During the great drought of 1982-83, bush fires across Victoria and South Australia killed 75 people, including 17 firefighters, in February 1983. An even greater toll came in 2009, when devastating bush fires claimed 179 lives and destroyed thousands of homes in Victoria. Up to 1 million wild and domesticated animals also died, according to Wildlife Victoria. Eight days before those fires, a massive dust storm had enveloped the Victorian capital, Melbourne, bringing traffic to a standstill and causing serious health issues.
Beyond the lives lost, these weather catastrophes require costly rebuilding of destroyed infrastructure, housing and businesses. The single biggest insurance loss in Australian history remains the April 1999 Sydney hailstorms, which caused damage of about 4 billion Australian dollars.
In the past year, the Insurance Council of Australia has declared six weather “catastrophes,” giving claimants priority status. They are the March 2018 bushfires in New South Wales and Victoria; floods from tropical cyclone Marcus in Queensland, also in March 2018; storms in Tasmania in May; hailstorms in New South Wales in December; and the Townsville floods in January-February 2019.
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Extreme Weather Pushes Climate Change to the Top of Public Debate in Australia originally appeared on usnews.com
