Tim Flannery: where are we
“Try to convince your clients to build small” HAMISH MACDONALD SPEAKS TO ENVIRONMENTALIST, CONSERVATIONIST, EXPLORER, PUBLIC SCIENTIST AND FORMER AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR, TIM FLANNERY.
ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN
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PEOPLE
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O C T- D E C 2 0 2 1
now with climate change?
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HAMISH MACDONALD: Where are we now with climate change? TIM FLANNERY: We are in the early stages of the really detectable impacts. We’ve seen an increase in heat waves, in the average length of heat waves, in the average temperature experienced in the heat waves, and in the length of the heatwave season. We’re still in the early stages and the projections are we’ll see much more severe impacts in the next twenty years or so. Fires have obviously gone through a sort of phase-shift. Prior to the Black Summer fires of late 2019/early 2020 the maximum area during the fire season was about two per cent of the temporate broadleaf forests. That year it was 21 percent. That kind of quantum leap into a new fire regime is also being seen overseas in places like California, Southern Europe and Siberia. That’s a different phenomenon: we’re not just seeing a gradual increase but a leap into a new system. Those fire conditions are obviously affected by the overall climate. Then the warming trend and the drying trend in South-Eastern Australia is now quite advanced. In 2018-19 it was the driest year ever in South-Eastern Australia, and the driest year ever in the Murray-Darling Basin. Those conditions are starting to deepen as well, so we’re starting to see water stress. Eighteen months ago, regional towns in NSW were
running out of water, part of this ongoing trend of drying and heat. And that is going to affect cropping and the Murray-Darling scheme and all sorts of communities in many ways. And we are seeing an increase in the energetics of the climate system. Hurricanes, cyclones and storms getting stronger. And we’re getting an increase in rainfall intensity: the amount of rain that falls over a given period of time. It’s a global phenomenon that’s felt in Australia as well. What it means is the drainpipes and drainage systems we have built in Australia for a previous climate now are not capable of taking the volumes of water that we are increasingly seeing flow during these periods of increased rainfall intensity. So, it’s an engineering problem, left from an earlier time. HM: What about sea level rises? TF: It’s one of those hidden, creeping problems. If you travel around coastal Australia and keep your eyes open, you’ll see these coastal erosions almost everywhere. In some places like Stockton, on the north side of Newcastle, there’s quite severe coastal erosion which is affecting infrastructure and has seen the abandonment of several buildings. And in parts of Port Phillip Bay, Torres Strait, Southwest WA, and the coast of metropolitan Sydney. Sea level rise is going to continue for many decades and the various problems are going to be exacerbated.
HM: What can be done at this point? TF: We’re still in the early stage: The overall take-home message for those four problems is that the trend is now set, so that nothing we do now will affect outcomes over the next twenty years. Those problems are going to get substantially worse over the next twenty years, regardless of what we do. If we act very soon, if we act hard and fast, twenty years from now we may see those problems start to mitigate, to get less worse from their peak, about 2040. But if we don’t act hard and fast, they’ll continue to grow. And we may trigger tipping points in global climate systems that drive the warming regardless of what we do. HM: The Paris Agreement target keeping warming from pre-industrial levels to preferably 1.5 degrees. What does that mean? TF: That would be the safest level, but sadly it looks like we’ve lost that opportunity already. This isn’t widely acknowledged politically, as it’s quite unpalatable. But the best projections suggest we can top out at 1.7-1.8 degree warming then by drawing down CO2 in the atmosphere to get back down to 1.5 degrees. It’s relatively safe though there’s still substantial impacts. At two degrees warming you start to see a whole lot of undesirable outcomes.
