Global warming? LOL!

It’s late Spring on the Mornington Peninsula and I’m down the beach wearing a lined spray jacket to fend off a freezing southerly blast and occasional bullets of rain. The BoM app tells me its 110C, with a ‘feels like’ of 80C.  Where’s the comforting embrace of all that global warming that everyone talks about?

You can just shrug your shoulders and say ‘it’s typical Melbourne’, four seasons in a day and all that stuff. But there is a more serious side to this that all advocates for climate action should note. It’s these day-to-day experiences that shape people’s reality. For most, there’s nothing like personal experience to test and validate what they’re being told, particularly when we’re all flat out sorting what’s fake or not.

It’s great context for considering the Essential research published in The Guardian on 31 October 2023, the very day that we were being hit in the face with that taste of weather from the Great Southern Ocean. Here we are reading about the influence on our weather of the Pacific Ocean’s imminent El Nino and the Indian Ocean dipole. No mention in The Guardian of the ocean to our south.

But there we were, reading about research that forecast 2027 as the likely first year of passing the oft-discussed average global temperature of +1.50C above pre-industrial levels of the 19th Century, as El Nino conspires with rising CO2 levels to thwart our climate change action goals.

To the true believers in human-accelerated climate change, this will come as no surprise. News bulletins have recently covered a number of assessments that we’ll pass the +1.50C threshold earlier than anticipated. However, it is important that we resist the temptation to trumpet ‘Aha! I told you so’ to the sceptics and denialists.

The 2027 milestone is unlikely to be sustained. As researchers point out, a year does not make a climate change. In fact, the marker of permanent climate change is 20 consecutive years of consistent temperature change. The 2027 event is predicted to be result of a confluence of conditions conducive to higher temperatures. Temperatures in some subsequent years could return to what we would consider the norm.

But here’s the thing in the way we maintain the alert on climate change and especially the rate of change due to human activity. The reversion to norm will be a dangerous time for communications on the need for climate action. Denialists, sceptics and those with vested political, commercial and other interests in maintaining the status quo on fossil fuels, will leverage the one-off year to argue that it is just another of many hot years experienced from time to time.

The Essential research provides clear indicators to the scope of the task ahead for climate advocacy. There is declining belief among Australians in the need for on-going rollout of renewable energy generation. About half are subscribing to the view being pushed by the Dutton federal opposition that nuclear is a viable alternative to dealing with the climate crisis.

Within days of The Guardian report, one of the epicentres of climate scepticism, SkyNews’ Bolt Report was loud hailing us with news that half of Australia supported nuclear power. You can bet this and other members of the nuclear cheer squad will back the coalition’s bid to make this a centrepiece of the energy transition debate in the next federal election. One thing is for sure, there’ll be no pork-barrelling nuclear plants in marginal electorates for fear of arousing the NIMBYs!

There appears to be a growing momentum in belief or at least in message on the conservative and extreme right of politics that we can take our foot off the gas on renewables (excuse the pun).

As we know from the recent indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, the simplest and most comfortable messages are those that most easily gain traction across demographics. Advocacy outside of our common comfort zones is hard work, with most of the population not sufficiently engaged to do the hard work on building an informed view.

Make no mistake, climate change is outside our comfort zones. At its most fundamental, acting on climate means making substantive changes to personal behaviour for all of us – from threatening our freedom to light up our houses like Christmas every night to saying no to the rampant consumerism and waste of fast fashion and the fun of churning our smartphones. How much easier are uninterrupted, guilt-free behaviour and lifestyle pursuits?

For many of us, climate is an abstract until it isn’t – until our home is caught in a bushfire or flooded on an engorged river flood plain. It creeps along furtively. Even the idea of a 1.50C temperature rise over more than a century hinders the campaign to action. Outlier years like 2027 come and go, assuring us of their aberration rather than their inevitability.

Nonetheless, all is not lost. Climate change has a twin and the Essential research tells us that it is more noticeable, more engaging and more empathetic to our sensibilities. It is biodiversity loss.

Climate action and preventing biodiversity loss walk hand in hand, both sustaining the other – one challenged by the battle for our minds, the other opening up new opportunities by pitching for our hearts. It’s much easier to connect to homeless and burned koalas, threatened bandicoots and fish tangled in nets than it is to look skyward to visualise the changed chemical composition of our air.

The interconnection of climate change with the capacity of ecosystems to support biodiversity should be a gift to those championing action on both. Great movies are born of imaginative and compelling storytelling. They have heroes and villains, opportunities and setbacks, humanity and courage.

The issues of climate and biodiversity are global, but our experiences and opportunities are local. Those who stand to gain from putting a handbrake on change advocate that Australia is an insignificant influencer of global outcomes. But this ignores the power of compounding. Every effort, no matter how small, duplicated billions of times will produce the necessary outcomes we need to protect the planet.

History will read and judge the story of our success or failure in protecting the planet as the the greatest of our time. Let’s hope it’s not a tragedy.