Facing up to our responsibility

This Law Dome snowfall series has been used in Tas D. van Ommen’s and Vin Morgan’s ‘Snowfall increase in coastal East Antarctica linked with southwestWestern Australian drought’ (Nature Geoscience, 7 February 2010) to demonstate how un-natural modern observed low rainfalls are.

Tonight, after a rather quiet afternoon and evening in the State Library, I was told by a tired mother that it was 42˚C today. This could lead to a record number of days over 40˚C this summer with another forecast and no sign of mild weather again – after a promising start to January. Whilst I feel I have said too much too “noisily” over the years about the solution to the problem, I will note very clearly two utterly false denial signs:

1. Greenhouse scepticism – whilst it reigns supreme amongst those who fear loss of convenience or privacy in Australia’s suburbs, the scientific evidence from studies such as those of the Law Dome ice core and Perth water flow data is too strong.
• What needs to be done is for education series, instead of being focused fuzzily on abstract temperature series, to be focused instead on practical cases like changes in SWWA, Central Chile, or CWA rainfall, where easily understood, precise data can be seen.
2. Denial of responsibility – an all-too-common problem is belief that Australia’s emissions have no significant impact by themselves on the global climate. This occurs even in peer-reviewed articles like ‘Halving global CO₂ by 2050: technologies and costs’ and ‘Illustrated implications of the Terrifying New Math of Meinshausen and McKibben’ which do not go into details about Australia’s emissions and instead focus on China, India, Russia and the United States. There are several problems with this attitude:
1. As Zhang et. al. have shown, Australia’s extremely low soil phosphate means that it has much lower absorption capacities than other major emitters, and hence a lower allowable emissions value
2. Australia’s per capita emissions are the highest in the world so that each Australian – living on the lowest-energy land in the world – makes the greatest contribution
3. Most greenhouse emissions in China and India, and to a lesser extent other Eurasian and Western Hemisphere nations, are built from Australian coal and aluminium so are indirectly the responsibility of Australia

For these three reasons, there needs to be a culture of responsibility amongst the next generation of Australians – one where it is acknowledged Australia bears unique responsibility for creating and hence for solving climate change. This responsibility is one that must extend to both ordinary Australian citizens – most especially when doing the responsible thing and cycling or using public transit for every journey is uniquely tough – and for tourists who, used to higher-quality public transport in countries with incomparably less need for it, must not sacrifice keeping emissions lower for convenience even if they could at home. In fact, the attitude towards Australia’s environment among tourists is one that has to change a great deal: although Australia may seem peculiar and strange to those used to uniquely fertile and young soils, it is not peculiar but how Eurasia and the Americas looked a mere 20 million years ago.

Thoughts on riding from Belgrave to Pakenham

Today I set myself a challenge I had desired for a long time: to ride by myself in the ranges east of Belgrave Station - which I felt would provide some sort of challenge for me and maybe even help myself to improve my grossly obese body mass.

I had hoped that I would be able to travel to Belgrave earlier when the weather was much better, but it was only today, on a day hotter than average for November but the coolest day for many weeks ahead it seems, that I got out of the house early enough to be able to take a train to Belgrave at a reasonable hour.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take my water bottle, which I certainly would have needed on a day of 25˚C with blazing sunshine - and I knew it was to become hotter and hotter all through the remainder of the month. I bought two discounted bottles of Diet Coke, but as my mother and dentist had told me, the drink could not quench my thirst at all adequately. the train trip to Belgrave was trouble-free and there was little problem with my behaviour: accostings of other people, whilst not completely absent, were much fewer than normal. However, once I began cycling on the road to Gembrook with the expectation I might be able to go even beyond Gembrook towards Tonimbuk and the Black Snake Range, I realised that I was not well-prepared. I was having to push my bike on the side of the road except on downhill stretches, and took over two hours to travel the eleven kilometres from Belgrave to Emerald.

The striking thing, though, was how much safer I felt on the road than I ever have riding suburban laneways! In the entire ride, I never failed to hear a vehicle coming in either direction and consequently could always stay far off the road to avoid being hit. That I was never in danger is the more remarkable when one considers that the whole road was listed as a blackspot zone for people on bicycles! It does reveal, as I have been studying lately, the influence of an environment as quiet as the Dandenongs - which I can tell you is by no means as far towards a silent environment as one can go.

During the trip towards Gembrook, I stopped at Emerald Library for an hour to refresh myself, after having a donut and cream lamington at the local bakery. I then went onto Cockatoo, but when I realised I was only halfway to Pakenham I felt it would be a ridiculous idea to follow my original plan to reach Gembrook and beyond. Thus, without hesitation, I turned my bike towards Pakenham. It was an easier, mostly downhill, ride to Pakenham, but it took longer to find the station than I expected. Worse than that, by the time I reached the station I was so tired that I fell asleep on the train - even with my iPod in my ears! It was also hard to keep the bike stable on the train. Moreover, when I reached the city and transferred to a train to Rushall Station (so that I would be mostly riding downhill instead of uphill) I found that I had strained myself in the chest region and was worried about how difficult it would be to ride even from Rushall to my home in Carlton. When I did reach home, I was so tired that - very unusually for me - I went straight to bed after having a bit of fruit to eat.

All in all, I feel as though I do want to repeat the trip - even though the climate is changing so fast that it will be from now on very hard to do this sort of cycling outside of a short period in the winter and I will have to wait until long after returning home from Europe for weather cool enough to try it again!

A pity I could take no picture!

Today, I spent most of the day travelling around on buses in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, mainly looking for secondhand bookshops. I did not find anything I had not known of before, but I unfortunately was accosting more people than I ever had done before owing to my feelings about the ongoing global warming disaster affecting Victoria. Many of the people actually liked me and quite a number enjoyed talking to me – often I took great pains to ask people I was accosting whether or not I was actually offending or hurting them. The subject of all accostings was the same: petrol prices. Given that most of the people were from ultra-car-dependent outer suburbs, it was not surprising that they disagreed that petrol was too cheap.

However, they were generally very willing to listen to my point that the fifty or more percent loss of rainfall in thirteen short years was a good point in favour of radically higher petrol prices.

One exception occurred at Ringwood Station where a man angrily said that if my argument for $50-per-litre petrol was acceptable said that I should imagine $50 daily public transport fares. He then told me to watch The Great Global Warming Swindle. I decided not to rebut his argument as I felt I might be hurt or would lose in an aggressive debate. Another person at Ringwood East station got very upset when I pointed out how we would have twice the rainfall we have now if every single cent spent on CityLink had been devoted to railways or road demolition. On this occasion, though I apologised extremely willingly and the man accepted.

Still, when I finally came home my mother was upset to be told I had accosted people about petrol prices. She also said that people in the outer suburbs were likely to be kind and hide the fact that they did not like me accosting them – something I am willing to accept with few if any grudges.

A more interesting highlight of my visit was looking at the doomed forests of the Dandenong Ranges on my trip to Belgrave. Every moment I was moving between Upper Ferntree Gully and Belgrave I just knew it would be my last chance to photo these wonderful forests, which still looked pretty good although doomed.

Every time I heard the radio today there was news of catastrophic fire danger and 40˚C temperatures. All that was unaccompanied by needed calls to fight for a rigid zero emissions target (that Australia should have reached before now without the slightest overseas emissions reduction) or even pointing out in the most sensible manner that the coal and car industries have caused these dangerous bushfire scenarios and should pay for them.

What we will sadly see tomorrow is more than just bushfires. It is the destruction and extinction of an entire ecosystem. Evidence from international climate models clearly shows that southeastern Australia is likely to experience far larger declines in rainfall that the 40 percent decline observed since 1997 (see here). With declines in rainfall of over 80 percent, there would be nowhere for the mountain ash forests to go and even the drier forests would not survive. Instead, what we will see is a barren sandy desert that is already creeping up on Melbourne’s suburbs as it is. They way I imagine it, even on the exceedingly rare occasions it does rain significantly (say, over 10 millimetres once every decade) there is not likely to be much vegetation growth, especially if annual seedlings are burnt out be the very high temperatures likely to be experienced every summer from now on.

The real pity that I regret is that I could not be the last one to take a picture of the mountain ash forest before the fire burns it to the ground to be replaced by a desert as dry as the Sahara. In an age where rain in Melbourne is as rare as a unicorn, a souvenir of how southern Victoria looked before Robin Underwood, Jeff Kennett and the coal and electricity companies turned it into desert would no doubt be a valuable rarity that I sadly will never have the luxury of possessing.

The future climate of Melbourne

Twenty-five days with no rain in Melbourne and only dreadful hot weather in sight have really hit hard on me.

Along with a repeat of the super-powerful 1999/2000 tropical wet season – nearly as much rain has fallen in Camooweal as during the big wet of January 1974 – it is clear that what Australia will have, even from this year, is a climate unlike anything known from instrumental or paleoclimate records even in recent global-warming affected years.

What would surprise most people is that under this new climate Melbourne – Australia’s second-largest population centre – will rather than a very temperate climate be the most arid place in the entire continent. Reduced reflection form the centre of the continent will allow a deeper monsoon displaced as far south as the cycle of the Sun – or approximately as far as Alice Springs – and this will drench the majority of the continent during the summer months almost every year in a manner beyond even that of January 1974.

However, for southern Victoria, Tasmania and adjacent areas of South Australia, this extended monsoon will bring hot north winds with a consistency unknown in the instrumental record. As the old tropical air crosses the Great Divide, it will be left dry and incredibly hot. More than that, it is known that the Hadley circulation or subtropical high has already shifted seven degree south since 1979 (probably about ten degrees since global warming took hold of our climate in 1967) and can be expected to have its centre around Bass Strait year-round from this year, with the result that the last cold fronts will have passed southern Australia in 2008.

The consequences will be threefold for southern Victoria and adjacent areas:
1) entire absence of their once-reliable rain-bearing winds, so that the winters will be as rainless as in, say, Burketown historically.
2) entire absence of relieving cool changes – even dry ones – in the summer. This will permit, instead of a record over 150 years of five successive days over 40˚C in Melbourne, an average of twenty to thirty in succession every summer.
3) forest trees adapted to fire will never recover because the bone-dry weather will allow annual summer fires to ultimately kill off seedlings, leading to the extinction of not only the wet-adapted tall eucalypts like Mountain Ash, but even to species adapted to a subhumid climate like that of the Western Plains

My mother told me yesterday that the extinction of the tall eucalypts and cool-climate rainforests would not be a crime to compare with what the USSR did to the Aral Sea. It is hard to agree given how unique such species as mountain ash, snow gum and the numerous heathland wildflowers that typify the native flora of southern Australia are. It has grown clear to me that Australia’s masses are not going to cause a reduction in the greenhouse emissions of a nation that should be allowed, not twelve times the world’s average per capita emissions, but as a reflection of its fragile ecology and sensitive hydrology no more than five percent of the average. Thus, it is time Australia was internationally regarded as a “rogue” state akin to Cuba, Iran and Sudan. At least that might make Australia’s people and others think about how awful their environmental record already is and will prove in the future on present trends.

A lesson from Marble Bar

The so-called "heatwave" at the tiny Pilbara town of Marble Bar is well-known. I have always been suspicious it is a world record due to poor data in hot parts of the Sahara and Arabia.

The summer of 1923/1924 was one of extraordinary drought in the Pilbara. Some stations in the de Grey district which includes Marble Bar did not record measurable rain during 1924, and the average for the de Grey district was only around 33 millimetres. This drought caused the persistent heat since only a cyclone can lower temperatures below 100˚F.


In Melbourne, however, that very summer was the fifth coolest on record, and the year 1924 easily holds the record for the fewest 30˚C days with only twelve. Lower greenhouse gas levels and the absence of a monsoon in the northwest permitted highs to establish over Northern Territory longitudes and drive cool air persistently over southeastern Australia. As many as a third of the days during summer were below 20˚C in Melbourne, and on the west coast fewer than a third of the days in February 1924 reached 20˚C. Moreover, with all those moist southerly winds and cold fronts, Melbourne's dams actually filled during that summer - something they do not do in winter today.

What's worse is that as cold fronts and southern lows become a thing of the past in Australia's weather and climate, Melbourne will begin experiencing the sort of heatwaves Marble Bar did in that era of weaker monsoons. Without cold fronts or southern lows, the situation that used to apply only in the tropics that only influxes of moisture can keep temperatures down will apply everywhere over the continent except the eastern coast. With no rain to speak of not only in Melbourne, but as far north as Alice Springs, one is tempted to think that the inflows of moist air from the tropics that caused rainfall over pastoral districts of SA to increase from 1968 (and delay declines in Victoria and settled areas of SA by over a quarter of a century) may not be so much related to land surface heating as to stratospheric ozone depletion, which the phase-out of CFCs is just beginning to reverse. If I am right, then southeastern Australia could be in for much worse heatwaves than were moist air inflows and heavy (if variable) rain likely during persistent blocking in the Tasman.

No doubt we will get longer and longer heatwaves in southeastern Australia in the future. If my theory that rainfall increases over South Australia are related to stratospheric ozone loss pulling moist tropical air southward, then as global warming allows natural halogens to thin the ozone layer heatwaves will be broken by heavy rain more often inland and north of Mount Lofty.

In southern Victoria, however, with cold fronts and soon cool changes a thing of the past at present greenhouse gas emissions, summer heatwaves will by 2020 be unrelenting in a way Melbourne has never known. Sixty successive days over 35˚C or thirty successive over 40˚C will be normal in summer, and with the monsoonal winds that might relieve the north producing a rain shadow, Melbourne could by 2050 be the most arid place in Australia, with annual rainfall too low even for extensive grazing. In the absence of increased monsoonal weather, aridity beyond anything historically known (except perhaps during the dry era of 1922 to 1938) will be general over southern Australia right up to the Thomson and maybe anywhere west of the Snowy.

Record Adelaide heatwave and what it means for the future

As I swelter in 39-degree temperatures and Melbourne potentially breaking a 68-year-old record for the latest last 40˚C day, and Adelaide swelters in twelve days in a row over 35˚C with no cool change forecast, I feel as though I should present some of my thoughts about the issue.

The heatwave has been caused by a stationary high in the Tasman Sea preventing cold fronts touching Adelaide - and only very weakly affecting Melbourne. High-pressure systems are stationed in the oceans on either side of Australia and are unable to establish over the interior of the continent.

Failure of highs to establish over the interior of the continent has been an increasing tendency since the late 1960s. This is because high-pressure systems will establish where there is maximum reflection of heat to space. Because of increased greenhouse gas concentrations, this has increasingly occurred over the oceans, which warm less rapidly than land. The absence of highs over the interior of the continent and a strong tendency for high-latitude blocking in the Tasman has already reduced Melbourne's rainfall since 1997 to 450mm from 650mm. As enhanced greenhouse gases pull southern depressions further and further south - they have already fallen during the winter from 33˚S to 53˚S since 1966 - not only will there be further declines but the rate will increase -so that Melbourne will be by 2020 probably drier than Coober Pedy has historically been.

With global warming making highs over the centre of Australia a thing of the past, this heatwave shows how within a very few years, heatwaves in southern Australia will last without cool changes for months. Melbourne will probably experience whole months continuously over 35˚C in the near future.

Adaptation to such radical climate change will be one of the most difficult challenges possible. With runoff from even the biggest rivers like the Goulburn likely to vanish, Melbourne will have no water supply except desalination and Adelaide only the extraordinarily erratic Darling, which can dry for over a year, or perhaps runoff from the Monaro via the Murrumbidgee. Politicians or the private sector will probably fund a pipeline from the north to meet demand for water. Reduced reflection to space over central Australia has pushed the winter cold fronts too far south to produce rain over southern Australia but has strengthened the monsoon trough and produced major rainfall increases over the north - which already possessed the great bulk of Australia's renewable water. The consequences of a north-south pipeline, inevitable as it is with enhanced greenhouse gases, remain to be seen.