Flannery warns of climate change apathy
April 12, 2010 & September 26, 2010

The half-asleep look on a koala’s face is a reminder that not all creatures use their brains in responding to the harsh reality of climate change, a leading climate scientist says.

Speaking at an International Federation of Surveyors Congress in Sydney today, former Australian of the year Tim Flannery warned that rising sea levels in the coming century could affect more than a quarter of a million homes and major infrastructure including port facilities, airports, hospitals and schools.

“Despite that, the urgency of those warnings, I find that many Australians are quite resistant to the idea that these changes are likely to occur,” he told the congress, attended by 2000 surveying and land professionals from more than 100 countries.

Part of the problem, Mr Flannery said, was that the impact of rising sea levels was still too small to be felt.

“Somehow as human beings we fail to see the accumulative impact of such rises and think out a decade, or two decades, to what that might mean,” he said.

He urged the surveyors at the congress to use their professional skills to help measure the effects of climate change.

“The challenges of climate change can only be adequately met with the precision that you bring to locating things, to being able to measure accurately the changes that we will see in our environment, and to lay boundaries around critical resources and other aspects of our land that are going to be under more and more pressure in future,” he said.

Across much of Australia, where there is not a lot of nutrition in the soil and water holes are spaced far apart, gum trees have evolved not to shed their leaves in autumn because “it is too expensive to replace them in terms of basic nutrients”, Mr Flannery told the congress.

In an attempt to put koalas off eating the leaves, the trees fill their leaves with toxin.

“The koala then has to spend 20 per cent of its energy budget just detoxifying the leaves,” Mr Flannery said.

“So in evolutionary terms the koala had to make a decision.”

“Where does it put all its energy?

“Does it put it into the muscles in its body that it needs to climb the trees, and into growing claws that will help it to climb the trees, or its brain?”

The koala chose to sacrifice its brain, Mr Flannery explained.

Most Australians had not made the same decision, he joked.

But he warned that “thousands of species” could be lost if the challenges of climate change were not dealt with.

The tree kangaroo, an animal that looks like a cross between a panda and a kangaroo, was one example.

It lives in mountains high up in West Papua, but with global warming the species increasingly found its territory was no longer high enough to provide sufficiently cool conditions.

“And not only Australians, but people from all around the world have barely begun to think about this enormous challenge,” he said.

“We are going to have to in future deal with issues like biodiversity loss, change in coastlines, impacts on food production.”

AAP

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/flannery-warns-of-climate-change-apathy-20100412-s3jb.html

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Anatomy of hope
Peter Munro
September 26, 2010

He has spent much of his life charting human folly, but scientist Tim Flannery remains a determined optimist. He talks to Peter Munro about love, skeletons and his latest book.

IN THE skeleton gallery, by a skeleton man set astride his skeleton steed, its bony forelegs reared like some fossilised horse of the apocalypse, Tim Flannery sounds cheery. Behind him looms an elephant, by his side a skeletal goat stripped of all but horns and teeth fixed in a maniacal grin.

”I think you need a little bit of whimsy,” Flannery says, looking about at so much death. This exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney was his last flourish while chief scientist here in the 1990s, and includes a skeleton sitting comfy in an armchair by an open fire, a display dubbed ”Domestic Bliss”. Flannery’s latest book, published tomorrow, has him in an equally good frame of mind.

Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope, he says, is the climax of a life spent studying the planet and its inhabitants. He has dug into the history of the Earth and humankind, and somehow found love. ”The world is impossible without it and it represents the very best of us,” he says.

We meet outside the museum, where Flannery, 54, points out an ibis on a rooftop, looking down on the spew of traffic. He admits missing home on the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, and pulls an iPhone from his black leather jacket to show off photographs of wildflowers by the shore.

His new book, which he calls a ”twin biography of our species and our planet”, starts with Charles Darwin walking at home in Kent in a forest of hazel, privet and dogwood, while shaping his evolutionary theory. Flannery’s own sanctuary, which is accessible by boat only and relies on solar power and rainwater, is blooming with flowering yellow bloodwood, pink pigface and pea flowers.

On a still evening, he sits on his balcony and smells the clean watery perfume of mullet swimming upriver to spawn. ”There is something wonderful about the tides that seems to slow me down,” he says. ”Watching the whole procession of nature somehow roots you in the physical world – I need to feel part of that.”

He describes in the book looking out his window and seeing hope in a scribbly gum tree. The indecipherable script written by a beetle on bark shows how evolution by natural selection has created a living, working planet, he argues, based on co-operation rather than savage self-interest. ”The beetle cannot live without the tree, and the tree cannot live without its invisible partner, a fungus so humble that it cannot be seen, which sheaths intimately the scribbly gum’s finest rootlets and improves the tree’s access to nutrients.

”Fungus, beetle, bird, tree, and the human sitting in its shade, joyed by the song of the bird and the thought that a beetle has learned to write on bark  ¢â‚¬ ¦ Our world is a web of interdependencies woven so tightly it sometimes becomes love.”

The Chinese called evolution ”heaven’s performance”. Flannery likens his book to a play trying to make sense of the complex theatre of life. The writing is more determinedly optimistic than his previous works. The title, Here on Earth, is an echo of the Lord’s Prayer, though he long ago rejected Christianity in favour of humanism.

”I believe in the sacredness, if you like, of other people. I’m not arrogant enough to be an atheist because we know so little about the world.”

The book is, in part, a retort to what he calls the growing ”millennial doomsday feel” about climate change, which is ironic, given conservative columnists blame him for spreading some of the gloom. As we come to know ourselves and our planet, we will be moved to act, Flannery says.

Where does he draw such hope? ”Looking at our current politics and trying to work out if we are going to succeed at combating these problems or not is a bit like looking at the stock market every 10 minutes to try to work out if you are getting richer or poorer.

”For me, the right timescale is thousands of years. If you look at what we have achieved as a species in 10,000 years, it is unbelievable, going from an organisation that didn’t differ very much from that of lions and hyenas to building a global super-organism,” he says. ”Evolution is on our side. The Earth is the ultimate manifestation of the evolutionary process and it’s not one of chaos, it’s one of coherence and co-operation.”

The book is grandly ambitious, even for someone who has covered topics from megafaunal extinction, in The Future Eaters, to climate change, in The Weather Makers. The contents alone stretch to nine pages, from ”the sagacity and morality of worms” to immigration, poverty and the sexual liberation of women. ”The question I was really interested in is not only whether we’re going to rise to this challenge of addressing climate change but whether we as a species are constituted so as to be able to live sustainably – whether we can reconcile ourselves with the planet,” he says. ”To answer that question you need to take a broader view, a deeper view.”

He is driven by a ”shocking curiosity” to know how things fit together. As a boy in Sandringham, he spent weekends fossicking alone by the cliffs of Port Phillip Bay. ”Looking back, I think I was a strange kid,” he says. ”I loved watching the rhythms of the bay, I loved diving for fossils.

”I was pretty solitary. I think it took me a lot longer than most people to become properly socialised, which is not such a bad thing in a way because you are always on the outside looking in, and trying to understand how things work rather than being engaged in it.”

There weren’t many books at home for Flannery and his two younger sisters. His dad, an accountant, directed him towards business. His mum (to whom Here on Earth is, in part, dedicated) once bought her curious four-year-old son half a pig’s head from the butcher’s. Flannery, famously, failed to win the marks to study science, so opted for English at La Trobe University in 1973.

He was later allowed to transfer to science and in the early 1980s wrote a PhD at the University of NSW in Sydney on fossilised kangaroos, under the supervision of palaeontologist Mike Archer.

He was an eclectic student with florid prose and ”prodigious energies”, recalls Archer, now professor of biological science at UNSW. Flannery once sought to expose a kangaroo’s skeleton by hanging a carcass in a hessian sack from the biological sciences building. Weeks later, thousands of maggots escaped through a hole in the sack and wriggled down the halls. ”I don’t think he ever thought he had any natural limits,” Archer says.

The pair fell out in 2003, when Archer was director of the Australian Museum, over the museum’s response to the thefts of specimens, some collected by Flannery. Archer prefers not to comment on the stoush, saying only that Flannery ”doesn’t mingle in science circles really any more”.

Some of his peers consider Flannery more salesman than scientist, but Archer remains broadly sympathetic: ”This kind of affliction is cast at anybody who tries to do work beyond their own expertise. Your colleagues will cock an eye at you and wonder why you are standing up in public when you should be back in the lab studying science.”

”There is probably a sense that I will always be an outsider,” says Flannery, who is professor of environmental sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney. ”I am not a natural gown man or university academic, even though I am in a university. And I am not a business person, even though I work in the business world.

”I still feel I can step outside and ask fundamental questions, like how this all came to be, how did we develop this civilisation. When you’re trying to understand something quite complex, the only way to do it is to come at it from a new angle.”

Friend and collaborator John Doyle, who floated with him down the Murray River on the ABC television series Two Men in A Tinnie, reckons Flannery ”would have loved to have been born in an earlier era when there was more of the world to explore. I think he is disappointed so much of it has been discovered”.

The pair will start filming a new series in January, along the Great Dividing Range. ”Whenever I imagine Tim, I imagine a huge grin and a sense of delight,” Doyle says. ”Even given the overwhelming evidence that humankind’s position on this planet may not be here for much longer, he still sees optimism everywhere he looks.”

The closest to despair he has seen Flannery was while filming Two in the Top End in the Kimberley and witnessing the deadly spread of the cane toad. ”The greatest thing I would say about Tim in these moments is he’s disappointed he has allowed a crack of despair to enter his soul, because there is nothing to be gained by it,” he says.

”He is a terribly practical person. He defines himself by his work – he is one of the most driven people I have ever met.”

That drive took him exploring in Papua New Guinea as a new father, collecting specimens for several months at a time while working at the Australian Museum. His eldest child, David, 26, an astrobiology student in Sydney, recalls him coming home smelling of formaldehyde.

Flannery ended his book Throwim Way Leg, a memoir of his adventures in PNG, by thanking his son and daughter, Emma (now a 24-year-old science student), for loving him despite being ”away far too often when you were growing up”. David recalls standing in his backyard as a boy, wondering when dad was coming home. But he is quick to add: ”If I need time from him, he has always come good. He is not as career driven as you would expect.”

Two weeks ago, they went on a wildlife conservation trip to the Kimberley, sleeping on airbeds under the stars by a river. ”I think that’s when he feels most at home and relaxed – that’s why he loves living on the river, it is so disconnected from everything else,” David says.

Flannery prefers to walk about barefoot in the bush. ”He told me once in PNG his shoes fell apart in the highlands and he started getting around barefoot, and once you’ve done that, you don’t really care.”

While laid up with scrub typhus deep in the PNG mountains, Flannery noticed a strange black claw dangling from the neck of his stretcher bearer. That specimen from the previously unrecognised Tenkile tree kangaroo now sits in a small vial inside a metal cabinet at the Australian Museum.

Flannery holds up his discovery to the fluorescent light, which shows the small string hole where it was once worn as a necklace. He writes admiringly in Here on Earth about naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who described evolutionary theory at the same time as Darwin, but while in the grip of a malarial fever in what is now Indonesia. ”Wallace realised that while evolution by natural selection is a fearsome mechanism, it has nevertheless created a living, working planet, which includes us, with our love for each other and our society.”

Flannery sees similar harmony at play in the shade of the scribbly gum or the workings of fire ants, which form collective decision-making systems, not unlike our own democracy. Even football, he reckons, is a ”miracle of co-operation” rather than competition, despite admitting he is not a fan.

Every creature is, in some sense, dependent on the rest, he argues. But he leaves dangling the question of whether we might rise or fall together. ”Go through all the horrible things we have done, like destruction on natural ecosystems from 50,000 years ago to the present. But there is also this other side we often don’t see,” he says.

”The book says there is this broad trend towards co-operation and co-evolution, but whether it will deliver the right outcome in time is an open question. We still can’t say whether we are going to rise to this climate change event. But it opens up the possibility, and evolution is on our side.”

Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope (Text Publishing, rrp $34.95 paperback)

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/anatomy-of-hope-20100925-15rog.html

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A hopeful tale for climate change policy

September 29, 2010  ¢â‚¬“ 11:54 am, by Crikey

Ellen Sandell, from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, writes: I was going to write an article today about why Greg Hunt and Tony Abbott should stop playing politics with climate change, and come to the table. But instead of spending 800 words berating them for refusing to join the multi-party climate change committee, I ¢â‚¬â„¢m going to talk about hope. This is an article about good news stories, and how Australia can be one of them.

Tim Flannery has just released a new book called Here On Earth, and far from being a lament about the state of the world, he describes it as prosecuting the case for hope.

This might come as a bit of a surprise, given that he has spent a large part of his career working to solve the global challenge of climate change. Given the enormity of the task, and the vested interests working against him, I suspect few people would blame Tim if he decided to throw his hands up in despair.

Instead, he ¢â‚¬â„¢s decided to prosecute the case for love and hope. And he ¢â‚¬â„¢s right. At this moment, we have more to be hopeful about than in the previous few years.

For example, three years ago the Scottish Government announced a target to source 50% of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020  ¢â‚¬” and it was dismissed as unachievable and unworkable. Yet, just days ago they decided to up their ambition to 80%, because they met their original target ahead of schedule. And what ¢â‚¬â„¢s more, their government has acknowledged that reaching this target will mean massive environmental, economic and social gains for their country.

Scotland is not the only one catching on to these opportunities. Take a look around the world and you ¢â‚¬â„¢ll find that 32 countries now have emissions trading schemes  ¢â‚¬” including the UK and the EU. Even China, often seen as the key to a global deal, has committed to putting a price on carbon next year. India also recently announced its plan to start an emissions trading scheme very soon.

We often don ¢â‚¬â„¢t tell these good news stories. We ought to. The greatest fear coming out of the Copenhagen climate conference was that the world would see it as a failure, and give up on ever being able to solve such a large, global problem. Talking to taxi drivers, and family and friends around the dinner table, this seems to still be the pervading view. But it is fundamentally incorrect, and it ¢â‚¬â„¢s time we started to tell people what ¢â‚¬â„¢s really going on.

The truth is that the rest of the world is doing something, but Australia and the USA, the two largest polluters per capita, are trailing behind.

The world is moving, and even the staunchest climate skeptics, such as Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Hanlon of Britain ¢â‚¬â„¢s Daily Mail, have started coming out of the closet, admitting they ¢â‚¬â„¢ve taken another look at the science and discovered we do indeed have a climate problem.

Tiny Pacific nations who have the most to lose from the impacts of climate change, are taking bold actions. This month, Kiribati, committed to close over 38 million hectares of its territory to fishing, even though this activity accounts for nearly half the government ¢â‚¬â„¢s tax revenue. Its reason?  ¢â‚¬Å“That we need to make sacrifices to provide a future for our children and grandchildren ¢â‚¬  said President Anote Tong.

This is a country that has everything to lose from climate change. If they can put so much on the line to do their bit to solve a problem they did almost nothing to create, it ¢â‚¬â„¢s hard to say that we can ¢â‚¬â„¢t do more.

Hopefully though, recent movements at home have shown that Australia can be part of the good news stories.

Numerous big businesses, including BHP, have come out in support of a price on carbon. Regardless of their motive, it ¢â‚¬â„¢s re-starting the discussion and putting climate change back into our living rooms. Climate change is again getting a hearing in our Parliament, despite the Coalition ¢â‚¬â„¢s efforts to thwart plans to introduce a much-needed carbon price.

Let ¢â‚¬â„¢s also not forget that government action is backed up by an enormous grassroots movement of citizens worldwide. The Australian Youth Climate Coalition is part of the International Youth Climate Movement. We have lost count of how many groups and coalitions are part of this movement, but this map gives you an idea of the groups we know about.

In his much-quoted graduation speech in 2009, environmentalist and author Paul Hawken famously said:  ¢â‚¬Å“If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren ¢â‚¬â„¢t pessimistic, you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth, and you aren ¢â‚¬â„¢t optimistic, you haven ¢â‚¬â„¢t got a pulse ¢â‚¬ .

At this point in time, we have a lot to be optimistic about, but only if laggards like Australia and the US start coming to the party. That means putting political posturing aside and really working for the good of the country and the globe (I ¢â‚¬â„¢m talking to you Greg Hunt and Tony Abbott). Australia is one of the sunniest and windiest countries on earth. If Scotland and Kiribati can do it, so can we.

Ellen Sandell in General Manager of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and 2009 Joint Young Environmentalist of the Year.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/rooted/2010/09/29/a-hopeful-tale-for-climate-change-policy/