foreword*
In 2018, Australia experienced its third-warmest year on record. The national mean temperature was 1.14 degrees above average. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005.
Not only that, but a number of extreme weather events beset the nation. In early December 2018, Cyclone Owen unloaded 678 millimetres of rain on the tiny North Queensland town of Halifax – a new December daily rainfall record. In mid-December, a month’s worth of rain fell in parts of Victoria in 24 hours. Sydney had 3 instances of unseasonable extended heat waves in Autumn 2018. On 7 January that year the temperature reached 44 degrees, and in early August the temperature exceeded 40 degrees for 3 days in a row.
On 20 December, a monster thunderstorm in Sydney dropped giant hail stones, some the size of cricket balls. “And then the sun came out”. By month’s end, much of Australia was baking under torrid temperatures. Marble Bar in Western Australia reached 49.3 degrees, the third-highest December temperature recorded anywhere in the country [1].
A central-west NSW farmer reported that he was grappling with a third 1-in-100-year drought in the past 16 years, a river he relies on dried up for the first time in recorded history, heat waves in October and November, nights in June hot enough to sleep without a sheet, and record frosts.
Fast forward to 2019, and a local veterinarian and beef cattle farmer at Inverell, also in the Central West of NSW, reports a world where bulls cannot breed because they are becoming infertile from their testicles overheating, where mares are not falling pregnant, and through the heat, piglets and calves are aborting. Koalas are dying from thirst. Cattle that sold for thousands are now in the sale yards at $70 a head. Those classed as too skinny for sale are costing the farmer $130 to be destroyed. The paddocks are bare, the dams dry, the grass crispy and brown. The whole region has been completely destocked and is devoid of life. Most farmers have not a blade of grass remaining on their properties. “Climate change for us is every day”. But one thing those in the inner west do not have to worry about is bushfires. There's nothing left to burn, just dirt and dead trees.
Meanwhile, in July-August 2018 in the northern hemisphere, where Arctic warming is occurring at no less than twice the global average, a weakened polar vortex, the product of melting Arctic summer ice, meant that those icy winds which usually flow from west to east and stay confined to the Arctic regions, moved south where they came into conflict with a wobbly jet stream causing it to stall, and get stuck in place for days on end, resulting in a series of extreme weather events: California wildfires, heavy flooding rains in mid-Atlantic US, drought across central Europe, wildfires in Greece, heat waves in Scandinavia and Japan and other catastrophic events. In Chicago and New York, the temperatures were unseasonably well below freezing, even by their standards, until warm air coming up from the deep south meant that everyone was suddenly walking around in shirtsleeves.[2]
With the advent of 2019, Australia posted its hottest start ever for the first 6 months of the year, and Sydney's start to the year was also the hottest in records dating back to 1858. The average daytime reading so far came in at 25 degrees, eclipsing the 24.8 degree average set in 2016. And worse was to come in 2019.
In the European summer of 2019, soaring temperatures shattered records in Germany, France and the Netherlands, as a second heatwave gripped Europe for the second time in a month. In July 2019, temperatures reached as high as 43.6 degrees Celsius near Paris just as fires have devastated some 6,500 hectares of forests, farm fields and other land. Record temperatures were measured in Germany on two consecutive days. The heatwave then moved west causing the Greenland ice sheet to shed its load at the rate of 12.5 billion tons of ice per day, a record outpacing all data collected since 1950 and following another record-breaking episode recorded the day before.
Then in August 2020, "epic" wildfires spread once more across California and a single fire surpassed 1 million acres. A new frontier occurred for the August Complex - a massive wildfire burning in the Coast Range of Northern California, in Glenn, Lake, Mendocino, Tehama, and Trinity Counties - in the Coast Range between San Francisco and the Oregon border. The complex originated as 38 separate fires started by lightning strikes on August 16–17, 2020 and came a day after the total area of land burned by California wildfires this year passed 4 million acres, more than double the previous record.
The following October, not too far into the European autumn, unrelenting rainfall hit levels not seen since 1958 in northern Italy's Piedmont region, where as much as 630 millimetres of rain fell in a 24-hour period, and on the other side of the border, in south-eastern France, almost a year's average rainfall fell in less than 12 hours in the mountainous area surrounding the city of Nice. Over 100 homes were destroyed or severely damaged.
The Greenland Ice Sheet covers 80 per cent of the island and rises to a height of 3,000 metres. Its total volume is approximately 2.9 million cubic kilometres, which would raise global sea levels by 7 metres if it melted entirely, according to the Polar Portal website. The Ice Sheet lost 160 billion tonnes of ice through surface melting in the month of July 2019 alone. And in September 2020, a huge chunk of Greenland's ice cap estimated to be 110 square kilometres broke off the fjord called Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden which is about 80 kilometres long and 20 kilometres wide in the far north-east Arctic.
It behoves any thinking person to turn their minds as to why this is happening. Why these aberrant weather patterns? The answer proffered by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the basis of the consensus views of some 97% of peer reviewed scientists, lies in anthropogenic climate change caused in large degree by the burning of fossil fuels, and to remedy the damage already caused, opines the Panel, one will need to limit global warming to some 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, preferably even lower.
Needless to say, there are many who dispute these findings: those who have a vested interest in the outcome, and others who, without bothering to familiarise themselves the science, proclaim their uninformed intuition like a badge of pride because renewable energy poses a significant threat to their own preconceived personal or political world-view, particularly where the subject-matter happens to be the pre-eminence of coal.[3] Others resort to climate myths which have been discredited long ago.
It wasn’t always thus. Back in that more enlightened time, the 1980s, the NSW Greiner cabinet simply accepted the complex science about chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the underlying reason for the developing hole in the ozone layer, and after a global ban on ozone-depleting chemicals was introduced with the Montreal Protocol in 1989, the ozone layer has recovered at a rate of up to 3% every 10 years. And as recently as January 2020, in recognition of the fact that chlorine-free hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) (not to be confused with CFCs) that are used as a substitute coolant are also harmful to the climate, the Montreal protocol has ben adjusted and 197 countries have undertaken to reduce their production and use by at least 80% by 2047. So why can’t we achieve the same unanimity on climate change generally?
Having taken some time to familiarise myself with relevant principles and the scientific evidence, I offer the analysis within. I have no particular, or indeed any, qualifications in this area. However, I have read a considerable number of sources available to anyone who wishes to be better informed. I have incorporated these into my narrative and amended them as it has suited my purpose to produce a commentary which is I hope comprehensible and informative. In this regard I can only reproduce - again - one of the opening paragraphs of Ibn Warraq’s magisterial tome Why I am not a Muslim as equally applicable to my cause:
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I am not a scholar or a specialist (in this field). I certainly do not lay claim to originality; I lean heavily on the works of real scholars. I present to the reader in (hopefully) a more digestible form what I have culled from their works. I have quoted extensively. And where I have not quoted, I have paraphrased, all with the proper acknowledgments in the notes and bibliography. There is hardly an image or a thought that I can claim to be my own creation. If some critic were to dub this work “an extended annotated bibliography” I would not be offended [4].
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I have not necessarily been shy about repeating direct citations from the texts otherwise than in quotation marks, but have reproduced them more or less as they appear in the original author’s language and have always acknowledged my sources. The text is pitched at the level of the layperson, of which I indeed am one.
In short, what I have attempted to do is to present in an organised and systematic fashion an amalgam drawn from the sources I have read, watched and seen, more-or-less as an aide memoire for my own benefit (and hopefully also to others), thereby facilitating easy reference and editing as the occasion arises.
It remains a work in progress.
* Header Source: Wildfire rages near Delta, California, in September 2018, stoked by relentless heat and drought. Article by Michael E Mann, “The weather amplifier – Strange waves in the jet stream foretell a future full of heat waves and floods”, Scientific American, March 2019, 37
[1] Nicole Hasham, "The stunning chart revealing Australia's record-breaking run of rising temperatures", Sydney Morning Herald, 10 January 2019. For a projection of these figures into 2019, see 2019 Australia's hottest year; 2010-2019 the world's hottest decade.
[2] Steve Mirsky, “None so blind – disregarding new scientific information can be deadly”, Scientific American, February 2017, 70; also at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dirty-doctors-finished-what-an-assassins-bullet-started/
[3] See also Appendix D: "Climate science myths that refuse to die".
[4] Why I am not a Muslim, Prometheus Books, New York, 1995 (2003), Acknowledgments p xv. The portions in italics are my own interpolations.
Elwyn Elms
June 2017
Last revised: January 2021
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