Climate Change and the End of Australia

I’m generally a fan of Jeff Goodell’s work, but everything I find frustrating about the climate debate is on display in this paragraph:

In the past year – one of the hottest on record – extreme weather has battered almost every corner of the planet. There have been devastating droughts in China and India, unprecedented floods and wildfires in the United States, and near-record ice melts in the Arctic. Yet the prosperous nations of the world have failed to take action to reduce the risk of climate change, in part because people in prosperous nations think they’re invulnerable. They’re under the misapprehension that, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Tom Schelling puts it, “Global warming is a problem that is going to primarily affect future generations of poor people.” To see how foolish this reasoning is, one need only look at Australia, a prosperous nation that also happens to be right in the cross hairs of global warming. “Sadly, it’s probably too late to save much of it,” says Joe Romm, a leading climate advocate who served as assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration.

Yes, so sad. I can almost see the great climate prophet welling up as he said this.

But I digress. One of the big stories of humanity is how we’ve colonized the planet, moving into many areas with inhospitable landscapes. Our ingenuity has made life possible (and often prosperous) in arid deserts, icy climates, floodplains, and along beaches. By now, we have come to accept (if not fully appreciate) the risks associated with such places.

But the history of humanity is replete with examples of life that goes bad for people when certain landscapes become increasingly inhospitable because of extended drought, punishing rains, etc. Generally, the more marginal the landscape, the less margin people have to ride out extreme climate swings, which of course happens to be a characteristic of marginal environments.

And so, while Goodell’s article is meant as a cautionary story of global warming, he unintentionally highlights here what I think is a story of equal importance for our times:

Transforming a harsh desert into farms and shopping malls has also left large parts of Australia hugely dependent on seasonal rainfall.

This is the story we ignore at our peril. (Of course, we always have, right?) But Goodell is not interested in making that point clear. Rather, he prefers to dwell on our collective avoidance/dismissal of the risks associated with global warming:

Australians aren’t alone in their denial, of course. But there is a sense of fatalism here that is absent in America, a feeling borne by having lived for long years in a harsh climate, of being able to take whatever nature dishes out. It is why Australians don’t leave their houses during raging wildfires, and why they build cites in landscapes where no cities should be built. When it comes to dealing with Mother Nature’s nasty moods, Australians have a kind of outback machismo, a justifiable sense of pride for having built a nation in one of the most extreme climates on the planet.

Global warming may well be the story of the century. But building civilizations in the most extreme climates of the planet is the story of our species. There is a danger that we focus on the former while ignoring the latter, when, in fact, the two stories are now extricably linked.

By and large, these stories have been measured, with the appropriate caveats. (See here and here for two good examples.)

The brutal heat wave that preceded the fires (which Tom Yulsman graphically lays out here), combined with an epic drought, and high winds, set the stage for a tragic disaster that may have been initially caused by arsonists.

Still, in this insightful analysis published on the Forest History Society’s blog, environmental historian Stephen Pyne cautions against fixating on global warming or arson as the agents of destruction:

Both are reasons, and both are also potential misdirections.  Global warming might magnify outbreaks, but it means a change in degree, not in kind; and its effects must still be absorbed by the combustible cover.  Arson can put fire in the worst place at the worst time, but its power depends on ignition’s capacity to spread and on flame to destroy susceptible buildings.

Australia, says Pyne, knows this well. The country “developed many key concepts of fire ecology and models of bushfire behavior.  It pioneered landscape-scale prescribed burning as a method of bushfire management.”

In recent years, however, this knowledge has not been put into practice. Australia, Pyne writes,

seems to be abandoning its historic solutions for precisely the kind of telegenic suppression operations and political theater that have failed elsewhere.  Even when controlled burning is accepted “in principle,” there always seems a reason not to burn in this place or at this time.  The burning gets outsourced to lightning, accident, and arson.

Or global warming.

To this general combustibility its southeast corner adds a pattern of seasonal winds, associated with cold fronts, that draft scorching, unstable air from the interior across whatever flame lies on the land. At such times the region becomes a colossal channel that fans flames which, for scale and savagery, have no equal on earth.

Still, even Pyne calls Saturday’s fires a “horror.” And that speaks volumes. As he notes, “Australia has filled the weekly  calendar with Red Tuesdays, Ash Wednesdays, Black Thursdays, and is having to re-number its sequals. There was a black Saturday on February 12, 1977, but Black Saturday II is a bad bushfire on steroids.”

Pyne’s essay should be required reading for people living in flammable landscapes and especially for the planners, politicians and land managers that shape the built landscapes of these vulnerable communities. The bottom line, he writes:

With or without global warming or arson, damaging fires will come, spread as the landscape allows and inflict damage as structures permit. And it is there – with how Australians live on the land – that reform must go.

What this means, he insists, is fighting fire with fire:

The choice is whether skilled people should backburn or leave fire-starting to lightning, clumsies and crazies.

Over at Resilience Science, however, Garry Peterson says that Pyne “understates the change in settlement patterns, as increasing number of people live in ex-urban areas that complicate fire management.”

Hmm, from where I’m sitting (Boulder, Colorado), that certainly is true. Should the arid Southwest, with its own drought woes, growing ex-urban population, and fire-starved landscape, pay close attention to Australia’s agony?

Now, in the wake of southern Australia’s  catastrophic fires, which has leveled whole villages and killed up to 200 people,  climate change is again being cast as one of the culprits.

That’s too crude, similar to when some American environmentalists immediately blamed global warming for Hurricane Katrina.

For starters, Australia’s landscape is pretty damn flammable. Tragic wildfires have struck the country many times before. And, as The Australian points out,

The severity of bushfires is determined by a number of key factors: weather, including drought; fuel load; topography; the location of the population: their houses: and householders’ preparedness to manage fire.

In this latest case, what’s even more awful to consider is that authorities issued dire warnings to the public on the eve of the disaster. And still, many of the victims had no inkling that fire was upon them until the last minute.

As for the future, will hotter temperatures from greenhouse gases  lead to longer and more frequent dry spells in Australia? Most likely, say scientists.  And this, of course, will beget more nasty bushfires.

who filled pickup trucks with numerous personal items and left them parked in front of their driveways until they had to evacuate. That delayed rescue and notification attempts by firefighers.

Touching on a problem all too common in the West, the sheriff also was concerned that Boulderites

aren’t taking preventive measures around their property to keep fires at bay, such as clearing brush and stacking firewood away from decks.

Boulder residents better wise up or they’ll be on their own next time around. “If you don’t want to help yourself, we’ll just walk away. I’m serious about it,” the sheriff warned, according to the Denver Post.

Yeah, right.

But the message may well have gotten through, if anyone is paying attention to the news out of Australia.