Interview with Tim Flannery
Professor Tim Flannery, internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer and conservationist, has spent the past 12 months addressing world leaders on the impacts of climate change. His award-winning book, The Weather Makers, continues to be a best seller around the world.
In this video podcast, Professor Flannery talks to WWF about the reality of climate change for all Australians and why we're running out of time.
Interview transcript
Does the world believe that climate change exists?
Professor Tim Flannery: We are in the middle of some very large-scale changes. The melting of the Arctic ice cap is proceeding at, quite frankly, a horrifying speed. The destabilisation of ice shelves in the Antarctic is likewise going much too fast for comfort. We've seen the extinction of species, we're seeing rises in sea level now and the abandonment of Inuit village and of coral atolls in the Pacific. We're seeing very widespread changes in rainfall at what I think is quite an astonishing increase in severe weather intensity.
We all know that if you heat a pot of spaghetti on the stove, it'll get more energetic but scientists haven't quite realised how much more energetic the atmosphere would get as we warmed it. So these are very onerous trends and we are polluting more and more every year so the situation has become quite dangerous for humanity and we need to see action in the next one-to-three electoral cycles or I'm very afraid, we will have lost the battle to stabilise the climate.
WWF: Given that evidence, what do you say to the sceptics? They're still getting quite a bit of airtime.
TF: There's probably a few per cent of the population who we will never convince. There's still people who believe the earth is flat and the moon shot never happened. You just ignore them and get on with business.
WWF: Do you personally know climate sceptics who've changed their mind?
TF: I do. It was very interesting in the US. The industry had separate representatives to talk to annual meetings of meteorologists around the US - these are people who read the weather on television - and had done a very good job of snowing them with misinformation. When the book came out I had several phone calls from meteorologists who just said: "Thank you so much for making this clear to me. I was a sceptic before, now I know what the real situation is."
WWF: This must have been fairly inspirational.
TF: It was fantastic because those weather people do reach many, many millions of people every day, so it was lovely just to see that they had been convinced by the science that this was a real issue.
Is it too late to act on climate change?
TF: It's about rate of change and what's happening at the moment is a large amount of heat is being transferred into the oceans. Once that reaches a certain point it will be come inevitable that the ice caps will melt and once that happens the heat balance of the entire planet will change. This is because ice reflects sunlight into space and cools earth whereas the oceans, if the ice melts away, will trap sunlight and turn it into heat energy. So we have only a short amount of time to halt that process of that heat transfer into the oceans. Some has already happened.
I think that in the next decade or so, if we're lucky enough to survive this period and get on the right track, we'll be working very, very hard to pull the gas out of the air because there's already far too much pollution in the air to allow the climate to stabilise quickly.
So the window of opportunity really is probably one-to-three electoral cycles. If we'd started 10 years ago we definitely would have been in a much, much better position than we are today. But several governments around the world have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, refused to act on the issue and they're the anchors that are holding us back.
WWF: But there is still time.
TF: There is still time. Some damage is inevitable. [But] I do believe there is time to avert a major catastrophe - but not a lot.
A window of opportunity for change
WWF: What does a window of opportunity mean for the average Australian?
TF: The window of opportunity means that we still have a chance to leave our children a better future. If we don't act we will be condemning them to live in a world where there's rapidly rising oceans, greater damage from extreme weather events, different disease patterns, different rainfall patterns and all of that's going to add up to a very stressed society both economically and politically.
And of course [Australia is] exporting 10,000 tonnes of uranium ore a year, some of that's made into bombs. I can imagine where Australian coal and Australian uranium conspire to destabilise earth's climate and leave us with a world full of the most dangerous weapons that humanity's ever devised.
WWF: Do you think that there will be a debate [in Australia] about the length of this window of opportunity?
TF: I think it's too late for debate now, I think we simply need to get in and start fixing things. And the fixes are so simple, they're not going to cost anyone a great deal. We're simply going to have to start investing in new energy infrastructure. What we have to do is wrest control of the debate from the old dinosaur industries who want to keep on polluting and not to change.
What are the clean energy solutions for Australia?
TF: I have my own particular views over what technologies might succeed or fail but I don't believe they should dictate the debate.
I think what we've got to do is simply get the polluter to pay and then - in a well-regulated free market - let the free market decide what the most effective ways of generating transport, fuel and stationary electricity are.
Very, very simple, just put a carbon tax in place, let the free market and the investor work out what the most viable solutions are.
WWF: Do you think Australia has a role to play in exporting cleaner energy solutions?
TF: Australia has an enormous role to play. We are richer in alternative energy than many other countries. In fact I'd say we're almost uniquely blessed. We're sort of "the Middle East of renewable sources of energy".
We've got the world's best geothermal provinces, the world's best top two or three wind provinces. We've got a huge amount of sunlight of course and some fantastic technology in that area ... solar thermal, solar hot water, photovoltaics. We're doing very well in all of those. We have over 40% of the world's uranium. We're just so wealthy in all of these resources and of course a lot of natural gas. So for low emissions sources of energy we're incredibly well off.
How will Australians be affected by climate change?
TF: James Hansen - who is the world's leading thinker in this area with the Goddard Institute of NASA - believes we're on the brink of triggering a 25m rise in sea level. So anyone with a coastal view from their bedroom window or kitchen window is likely to lose their house as a result of that change. So any coastal cities, coastal areas are in grave danger.
We've already seen with changing rainfall patterns, the emerging danger to primary producers in eastern and southern Australia as the winter rainfalls are in declines. I paid $15 a kilo for bananas recently because Cyclone Larry destroyed Australia's banana crop. Just one extreme weather event of several we had last year.
So lots and lots of people are going to be losers. I don't think there are going to be terribly many winners unless they're the people who back the new energy infrastructure that is just inevitable. We have to move to that because the costs are growing by the day of the old energy infrastructure and we need to recognise that.
How easy is it for Australia to shift to clean energy?
TF: It's a very overwhelmingly large task but the solutions are quite simple. Carbon tax is the way forward. If we raise $1 billion taxing the polluters, we give $1 billion back as an income tax break to all Australians. Noone has anything to fear from that. It is simply making the polluter pay. A very straightforward process and something that would make an enormous difference. Most Australians would hardly register the sort of shift or any impact from that in their lifestyles.
I think powerlessness is a problem for people. It seems like a very big issue and I just keep reminding myself that people have changed the world before.
My great hero, William Wilberforce, was an abolitionist who got rid of slavery in Britain. He lived in a world where there were whole colonies that only existed because of slavey and where there were shippers and bankers and the ruling class getting richer by the year on the back of a very iniquitous institution. The average man in the street would never have given slavery a thought and Parliament was so corrupt that it would never move to abolish slavery.
And yet despite all of that - just by force of his leadership and the moral argument that he put forward - we've inherited a world without slavery from Wilberforce. And we know that his moral argument, his moral equation was that it is absolutely wrong to degrade some individuals to enrich others and that's why slavery's wrong.
And today we know that it's absolutely wrong to degrade our children's future to enrich ourselves, it's the same moral equation. It's a very, very powerful one and it should move people to act.
Is Australia ready to change?
TF: Australia is without doubt the most backward nation on the planet in terms of addressing this issue.
Even the US - which has been a slumbering giant up until now - is starting to awake to this issue. The quality of the debate in Australia is appallingly bad, there is no political leadership from either party and industry is too timid to come forward and state what they know to be the case. So I'm finding it really difficult here in comparison with the rest of the world.
How can Australians make a difference?
TF: I think Australians, by exerting moral leadership, can make a really big difference.
Of course the little bit we contribute by buying a solar hot water system or hybrid fuel car, is a small bit in the global picture. But what we're saying to the manufacturers when we do that - and to politicians when we take that message on - is that we're willing to change to leave our children a better future. And the question that we should ask our manufacturers and our political leaders is: "What are you willing to do to ensure the same thing?"
WWF Futuremakers
TF: I think that WWF is doing a great thing launching this new campaign [the Future is Man Made] because community leadership is just so critically important and to start building that community leadership is the key to success.
We are on the brink of change, I think in Australia. We're on the brink of getting a better debate and seeing some action but that will only come about by committed individuals living their life as testimony to what needs to be done.
The opinions expressed in this piece are those of Professor Tim Flannery and do not necessarily reflect the views of WWF. Photo used with permission.
