Considering life retrospectively

The dynamics of a drought can only be understood retrospectively.

Floods - are they the opening
gambit in the next drought?

What happened throughout the Goulburn Valley in the past few days is hugely different, but it too can only be understood retrospectively.

People throughout the area, particularly those living in Tallygaroopna and Congupna, wrestled with an excess of water, the reverse side of the drought coin.

Accurately pinpointing the beginning of the recent south-eastern Australian decade-long drought never happened, but had we understood that, our communities would have been able to avoid the worst of the difficulties.

Knowing a decade with scarce water supplies was about to unfold, we would have planned and conserved our resource, easing practical difficulties and ensured people were psychologically prepared for the certain changes in their lives.

Drought, however, is remote from the minds of those presently wrestling with the outcome of record rains, filling sandbags and doing what they can to protect their property from rising water.

Considering the reality that we never really know when a drought has started – strangely, considered in retrospect, this could be the start of another – how do we know whether or not the flooding of late should be attributed to changes in our climate brought on by human activities.

The climate change doubters, or skeptics, will rush to the barriers declaring recent record rains were simply cyclical and little more than nature doing what nature does, while the global warming adherents will argue the event fits exactly with scenarios predicted by the climate scientists.

So while knee-deep in water, do we mark this as the beginning of a drought; a predictable and understood cyclical event; or is it evidence of human-induced climate change?

It is the latter argument that is beyond question and, yes, it may well be the beginning of another decade long drought and, no, it is not a predictable and understandable cyclical event.

Had it been predictable and understandable, the events that filled the pages of this newspaper in recent times could have been avoided.

Climate change is subtle and silent and remains that way until we experience events such as those of the past few days, but it is something which we can neither touch nor see.

So while we need to band together and support all those troubled by the floods, what is even more important is that entire communities need to gather and consider their response to a demonstrably changing climate.

Dr Cameron Hepburn

Our behaviour is the root of the trouble and it was only on Thursday that a visiting professor, Dr Cameron Hepburn told nearly 300 people at a Melbourne lecture that about half the complications leading to climate change would be eradicated if we stopped subsidizing technologies dependent on fossil fuels.

The saved money, he suggested, could then be used on a small suite of climate change abatement policies to support Australia’s carbon tax.

Life looked at through the rear view mirror is easily understood, but Dr Hepburn, like us, does not have one and so is eager to understand future workable climate change abatement processes.

Feeding the doubt and worsening the dilemma

Life at either end of any spectrum is mostly untenable.

Life at either end of 
most any specrrum can
 be untenable.

Contentment, serenity, ease, happiness and reward are all to be found mostly near the heart of that span, with the discomfit worsening as one reaches the realms of the malcontent.
Although that underlines and reinforces populism, it doesn’t necessarily mean the other, who might be simply a protestor or a mischief maker, is mistaken in their beliefs.
They are, in the minds of some, iconoclasts; therefore being people who challenge traditional beliefs, values and customs and in disturbing populism they are frequently forced to the extremes of the spectrum.
Having listened to many debates about climate change, it is one of those conversations that almost immediately dumps people at the extremes of the spectrum – to participate you are forced to those extremes declaring yourself a believer or a skeptic for no-one, it seems, can logically, and comfortably, walk the middle ground.
That became clear recently when listening to ProfessorGeoffrey Blainey talk in Shepparton about climate change, its impact nationally and on the Goulburn Valley in particular.
The professor had a wonderful historical argument, that being as it should for he is a noted Australian historian, but that view, as sound as it was, overlooked modern science that illustrates, conclusively, the existence of significant changes to the earth’s climate.
It was interesting to sit in the Harder Auditorium at Shepparton’s TAFE College and hear the John Furphy Foundation Memorial Lecture and almost feel the near 160 strong audience warming to the thought that we need to apply more than simple raw science to the climate change conversation.
For too long it seemed people had been forced to the extremes of the debate and driven into that untenable position of either being for or against climate change.
In his friendly and knowledgeable way, Prof Blainey allowed people to stroll, intellectually and metaphorically at least, in the comforting middle ground, some distance from those untenable extremes.
Personally, the professor’s views were somewhat discomforting as he cast some doubt on the modern reasons for climate change and encouraged those in the audience to give even more weight to historical arguments.
Being a thinker of particular clout in our national community, his views that brought doubt to the modern understanding of climate change would be seized upon by skeptics and used to further leverage their argument that the climate debate it a fraud – it is not, and to interpret the eminent man’s views that way would do him disservice, or maybe it wouldn’t?
Skeptics thrive on such doubt and the subsequent confusion they sow further delays the action this human induced dilemma demands.