Gippsland Climate News

I have been wearing a “Show Your Stripes” badge (image above) for some months based on the Ed Hawkins design, and made and sold in Bairnsdale by the East Gippsland Climate Action Network. Hawkins, from the University of Reading, explained that the colour stripes design was to create conversation on global warming by illustrating the movement of temperatures below or above the average over 200 years at a particular place or country. The darker the red colour the warmer the year. It is now the eighth year of ‘Show Your Stripes Day’, held on the northern summer solstice, whose publicity states “No words, no numbers, no graphs. Just a series of vertical colours…” See youtube video here.

The badge has been on display in Traralgon in the heart of brown coal country where I have been assisting my wife while she has been receiving radiotherapy at the Latrobe Regional Hospital. This meant long periods of occupation in the waiting room with other carers/companions on a daily basis. On one occasion a carer came up to me and stated “I’m your enemy” and indicated my badge. I replied that this was not so, and asked a few polite questions. It turned out that he was a shift worker at Loy Yang and that his previous experience with climate activists was negative and argumentative, hence his introductory comment. Unfortunately this was a short conversation. I did not have the opportunity to mention the “just transition” and I did not see him again.

I have been a strong advocate of a “just transition” for workers and other dependants in the power industry for many years and have discussed it or at least mentioned it on ten pages of my blog – about seventy articles. See my “Jobs, the Just Transition and Electricity Generation” here as an example. As well I have published a series of articles on the same subject by retired CSIRO scientist Michael Borgas (see here and here). Finally I republished local resident Lorraine Bull’s letter in the Latrobe Valley Express of November 2016 on the need to start the Just Transition. Some small steps have been made to answer Lorraine’s request but mainly we are still waiting.

The next Federal election in the Gippsland seat of Monash (formerly McMillan) appears likely to be an interesting rerun of the 1972 election with a few variations. In 1972 there were four ‘conservatives’ standing including a dis-endorsed sitting member, Liberal, National and DLP candidates. This effectively split the vote enabling the National candidate to eventually be elected on just 16.6% of the primary votes, highlighting the importance of preference flows.

In 2022 the current sitting member Russell Broadbent received 37.8% of the primaries but enough of the preferences of the minor parties to get him over the line. Otherwise the performances of the Climate independent Deb Leonard (10.7%) (see here and here) and a strong Green candidate Mat Morgan (9.9%) were exceptional. On the downside the Greens head office did a preference deal with the ALP and their preferences did not flow to Leonard as they should have if climate change was the most important issue.

Since then Broadbent has quit the Liberal party, although technically he lost a preselection challenge and was therefore dis-endorsed, and has since sat on the crossbench as an independent. Broadbent just announced he will recontest the upcoming contest as an independent. It appears the National Party will also run a candidate as they have previously done in these circumstances making what is commonly known as a ‘three cornered contest’. Both the Nationals and the Greens are yet to announce their candidates.

The current state of play compared to 1972 is interesting. Instead of a choice of four conservatives versus the ALP this time there will be two strong climate candidates along with a lukewarm ALP. Depending on the circumstances and the number of candidates –with the sitting member deciding to run again – there is no doubt that the spread of preferences will be crucial to the outcome. Hopefully the Greens will this time direct their preferences to Leonard and if she can achieve a primary vote higher than what Hewson got in 1972 she may be in with a good chance. The key to the outcome will be a groundswell of support for the independent coupled with strategic voting by both Greens and Labor supporters. Support Deb’s campaign if you can.

There has been an almost universal failure of democratic governments to act decisively on climate change across the earth over the last 30 years. The reality of the climate emergency has materialised as extreme weather events now frequently occur around the world. Last year was the hottest since records began, and included many extreme weather events highlighted by floods in Spain and more recently by the winter fires in Los Angeles. Governments and big business have been aware of this for at least 60 years. The CSIRO has been measuring the main greenhouse gas CO2 in the atmosphere since 1977 and at Mauna Loa in Hawaii it has been measured since 1957.

Against this the fossil fuel lobby, assisted by a complicit media, have opposed any meaningful action on climate and managed to delay decisive action for decades. In an 2014 election speech I warned of worst-case climate change scenarios and of the criminal actions of the Murdoch media. In this speech I recycled a quote I had made a further ten years earlier – that is 2004. This stated:

“The political power of the oil and coal industries is far, far greater than that of the tobacco lobby. Currently they have the most senior politician of the most powerful country (on earth) in their pocket (George Bush)… They have the power to delay ameliorating changes almost indefinitely, thus eventually exaggerating the effects of global warming. Perhaps we all should be preparing for a worst-case scenario.”

Twenty years later the political situation is, if anything, worse. The climate denier in chief has been elected again as President of the US – a moron who famously bragged to his followers that climate change ‘was a hoax’. The Republican party has been captured by the fossil fuel lobby, the media (Murdoch) and various plutocrats (Musk, Bezos). The situation is similar in Australia with the climate deniers of the LNP and their plutocrats (Rinehart, Pratt) threatening a return to government – following a 10 year period of failure to act on climate when in government.

This will probably all be in vain. China is currently leading the world in the adoption of solar power and electric vehicles. Soon these products will flood the earth – at least outside the tariff-protected zones of the US and the European Union. Ironically it is the climate actions of a totalitarian regime that may save us from the worst-case scenarios of climate destruction, rather than the so-called democratic countries that have been swamped by lies and misinformation and other propaganda.

In a review of Barry Jones book What is to be done I wrote “Essentially though, Jones is writing about the failure of Australian politics to confront the climate crisis… Jones solutions are many but his emphasis is on a massive political re-engagement by the public in the political process and the main parties. I differ slightly from the author in that I would argue that the most likely path to rapid change comes from outside the main parties.”

I remain hopeful that the Independents and the Greens will capture the balance of power at the approaching Federal election and climate action based on science be given the priority it should always have had in a truly democratic system. Included in this I hope will be big swings in the electorate of Monash.

For many years I have blogged on the chances of having a nuclear power plant in Gippsland at almost zero (see here and here). Most of that near certainty was on the basis that governments, whatever their colour, would make decisions based on evidence. Unfortunately that is not so. In spite of all the evidence in favour of a rapid adoption of renewables the opposition Liberal National Party has gone full bore on the opposite – the adoption of nuclear energy in Australia and including a planned power station at Loy Yang.

On the basis of a LNP win at the next election and assuming the rapid and successful adoption of their nuclear plan the question of an accident at a Loy Yang nuclear plant can be posed. Whilst the chances of a Chernoble or Fukishima type accident are slim indeed, such an accident would make much of Gippsland and the Latrobe Valley uninhabitable. More likely are leaks of radioactive materials into the environment but the response to an event of this kind is still fairly drastic.

There are standard international procedures in place for action in the case of such events. A USA state’s (Maryland) advice on this is described as a “Plumed Exposure Pathway” under the heading “Emergency Planning Zones”. In a ten mile radius of a radioactive leak “evacuation or sheltering could be recommended”.) As the inner circle on the map above indicates this would apply to Traralgon, Morwell, Mid-Valley and Churchill.

The Maryland Paper also notes an “Ingestion Exposure Pathway” of “An approximate 50-mile radius around a nuclear power plant. Evacuation or sheltering of people is not expected beyond a 10-mile area. The safety of the food supply within the ingestion zone could become a concern. There could be internal exposure if you eat or drink contaminated products. Eating and drinking contaminated products could have harmful long-term health effects. State authorities, county authorities, farms, and food-related industries (including processing, transportation, and storage) would participate in a joint effort to identify and prevent contaminated food from reaching the public.”

The larger circle covers a substantial part of Gippsland including Sale, Rosedale, Yarram, Heyfield and Moe. Finally one of the big unknowns in any Loy Yang nuclear accident is the direction of the drift of the radioactive “plume exposure pathway”. As suggested by the broken lines above most likely it would be to the east – perhaps to Bairnsdale, Lakes or even further.

Currently some elements of the Nationals are running pathetic local ‘scare’ campaigns against solar farms. By comparison any ‘scare’ campaign against the nuclear proposals in Gippsland, and in particular of possible accidents, should be mother of them all.

*part of this blog was submitted to the Federal Parliamentary Inquiry on Nuclear Energy

A State Emergency Services flood guide stated that on Boxing Day 2023, “a severe thunderstorm resulted in localised intense rainfall causing significant stormwater run-off across Buchan, and severe flash flooding in Spring and Fairy Creeks impacting the Buchan Caves Reserve. During this event over 110 millimetres fell at Buchan with 69.4 millimetres in the 30 minutes to 4:48pm and 87.8 millimetres in the one hour to 6:18pm. The December 2023 rainfall amounts were extreme and more than a 1 in 2000 AEP rainfall event.” Referring to last figure the Flood Guide noted that the “Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP) is a term used to the express the percentage of likelihood of a flood of a given size or larger, occurring in a given year. If a flood has an AEP of 1%, it has a one in 100 likelihood of occurring in any given year.”

Previously I have commented on these floods and noted “on Boxing Day we had our own flash flood in the Buchan reserve with floating cars, caravans and two fatalities”. The Guardian reported on them in detail (image) and noted widespread damage. Local Councillor Mendy Urie referred to the floods as “I think people’s understanding of climate change is changing, even over the past six months, 12 months…But I think we need to be even more aware.” Whilst statistically this is an exceedingly rare event and obviously strongly influenced by climate change, it remains difficult to prove this link beyond doubt.

Here the new science of climate attribution may eventually help. It “is the study of whether [or how much] …human influence…contributed to extreme climate or weather event. Scientists can now estimate whether human activities have influenced extreme weather or climate events and how likely they are to occur.” Using computer models this event is compared with a pre warming state for the same location and then estimates can be made of the probability of the event occurring with human caused global warming.

The atmosphere holds 7% more moisture for each degree of warming and a recent study has confirmed that the moisture in the atmosphere that results in flash floods may be much more than this. A “hotter atmosphere has the capacity to hold more moisture. But the condensation of water vapour to make rain droplets releases heat. This, in turn, can fuel stronger convection in thunderstorms, which can then dump substantially more rain. This means that the intensity of extreme rainfall could increase by much more than 7% per degree of warming. What we’re seeing is that thunderstorms can likely dump about double or triple that rate – around 14–21% more rain for each degree of warming”.

The Buchan flood was not an aberration but entirely predictable and another warning that more events of a similar nature, and much worse, are on the way. Attributing events such as this clearly with global warming is becoming easier, and with litigation, perhaps one or two of the many responsible may eventually be brought to account.

At the same time (April/May) as heatwaves are continuing across south and south east Asia there have been record breaking floods on every continent. Climate scientist Michael Mann posted on twitter that “dangerous climate change is here. It’s a question of how bad we’re willing to let it get”. Recent images of cars floating down thoroughfares in China, Europe (Germany, Netherlands) and the Middle East (Turkey, Dubai) are common on the internet and news channels. The death tolls from floods in Brazil and Kenya are in the hundreds. In Gippsland on Boxing Day we had our own flash flood in the Buchan reserve with floating cars, caravans and two fatalities.

The warnings of extreme weather events exacerbated by global warming have been with us for a long time. Twenty years ago, A. Barrie Pittock, a long time visitor to Gippsland, wrote: “small changes in average climate have a disproportionately large effect on the frequency of extreme events. This is because the nature of frequency distributions (how frequency changes with magnitude). Extremes occur at the low frequency ‘tails’ of these frequency distributions. Frequencies in these ‘tails’ change rapidly as the frequency distribution moves up or down with the average. Moreover, variability can change, and this also rapidly changes the frequency of extremes.” (Climate Change CSIRO, 2005, p.117)

Barrie Pittock continued that this “is particularly important for high rainfall events, as global warming increases the moisture holding capacity of the atmosphere, and thus preferentially increases the likelihood of high intensity rainfall.” As another way of illustrating  this the image above shows how a small move in the average of frequency distribution of the normal curves dramatically increases the ‘tail’ of extreme weather events. Similarly Barrie talks of ‘thresholds’ and ‘abrupt’ changes and it is already clear, as Michael Mann states, that some of these ‘thresholds’ have been crossed and that abrupt changes are occurring.

Another example Barrie gives of this is “the wind speed threshold for damages… [where] peak wind gust speeds show a disproportionate increase in costs when wind speeds exceed 50 knots… A 25% increase in gust wind speed above this threshold causes a 650% increase in building damages” (p.111). As with the floods, the extreme wind event across Gippsland in February probably crossed this threshold with substantial damages including some week-long power blackouts, numerous trees down and the loss of the Bairnsdale Historical Society museum roof. The towns of Metung and Mirboo North were hit particularly badly.

It hardly needs pointing out that extreme wind events are often associated with “high intensity rainfall”. Research just published states “the bigger picture is now very clear: a hotter world is likely one with higher risk of extreme floods, often driven by extreme rain from supercharged thunderstorms.” We wonder how bad it will get before governments and the populace at large, realise we are in a climate emergency and that the floods are only a small part of an enormous problem.

Michael Mann’s Our Fragile Moment: how lessons from the Earth’s past can help us survive the climate crisis (Hachette, New York, 2023) is a climate and geological history of the planet from its beginning. Each chapter examines in some detail times when the earth was in various climatic extremes such as the “hothouse” of the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum of 55 million years ago or the “snowball earth” of the Proterozoic era 2 billion years ago, and the lessons we can learn from these events.

For personal reasons the chapter that grabbed my attention was called ‘Mighty Brontosaurus’ which covered the demise of the dinosaurs following an asteroid collision 66 million years ago. Mann wrote that: “there are remarkable parallels indeed between the dinosaur–killing asteroid impact and the Nuclear Winter worries of the 1980s” (p.94). I had been an anti-nuclear activist since the early 1970s but the publicity about a nuclear winter where the dust from a widespread nuclear war blocked out the sunlight certainly increased my activism – making nuclear war and its armaments doubly absurd. The nuclear winter book by Paul Erlich and others The Cold and the Dark (Sidgwick & Jackson, London 1984) came out in December 1983 and the following year I stood as a candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party in Gippsland on a platform of publicising the threat of the nuclear winter.

For the rest of the decade there followed support and work with local PND (People for Nuclear Disarmament) groups. In 1987 friend Barrie Pittock had published Beyond Darkness: Nuclear Winter in Australia and New Zealand (Sun Books, South Melbourne, 1987). Barrie’s lifetime study and work in the CSIRO department of atmospheric physics was on the antithesis of the nuclear winter – climate change – and the same year he was presenting a paper to the Monash University Greenhouse symposium and was later the author of a similar titled work.

In his Introduction Mann noted there: “is a duality that governs the human species and the climate it enjoys. Human actions, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and the generation of carbon pollution, have impacted the trajectory of our climate over the past two centuries, but the longer term trajectory of our climate has also impacted us. It’s what got us here. By looking back at that trajectory, we can see insights into what futures are possible.” (p.6)

Wading through the many scientific acronyms may slow the general reader down but this book is well worth the read. A copy is available in the East Gippsland Shire Library.

EGCAN booth at Orbost Sustainability Festival

The effects of climate change on extreme weather have been visible for a number of years in Gippsland but more so in the last 12 months. The Climate Council noted that “Australia’s driest three months on record (August to October 2023) was followed immediately by a month of well above average rainfall in Victoria. An early and ferocious fire season in Gippsland, Victoria was followed almost immediately by extreme rainfall and flash flooding.” This the Council referred to as ‘whiplash’ climate events – of having a distinct extreme weather event closely following another. Thus we had an extremely dry winter with early spring bushfires at Briagolong and Loch Sport. Then the fires were doused by heavy rain that led to moderate floods. Note that these fires were not the earliest recently experienced with an August bushfire at Marlo about 2017.

On the subject of floods, the Climate Council added “Much of the flooding we’ve experienced this summer has been the result of short, intense downpours that catch communities off guard, and can lead to dangerous flash flooding.” Such was the event that swept through the Buchan Caves campground on Boxing Day 2023 sadly resulting in two fatalities. More than two inches of rain fell in 30 minutes, Vehicles were under water, people were rescued from a nearby bridge, and the campground was trashed. Cr Mendy Urie and the East Gippsland Shire Council CEO Anthony Basford noted the influence of climate change. Cr Urie stated “I think people’s understanding of climate change is changing, even over the past six months, 12 months…But I think we need to be even more aware.”

Whilst the Buchan floods were localised the storms that crossed Gippsland on the evening of 13 February were widespread. In particular there was a severe wind which lasted only a few minutes causing trees and branches to fall and power lines to be cut across the region. The power outages themselves were chaotic with some areas of Bairnsdale unaffected but the centre of town was without power for 24 hours. In town, there were no traffic lights, no mobile phone communications, and no electronic payments – just another warning of the climate emergency. Places like Metung and Mirboo North were extremely hard hit with some residences without power for a week or more.

Most recently, in what is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, we have just had the Labour Day weekend declared a heatwave across south-east Australia, with temperatures 10 degrees or more above average. As well there were associated fire bans and cancelled events including the Moomba Parade. Somewhat ironically, heat closed down the Sustainability Festival event at Orbost (image) at one pm on the Monday.

All of these extreme weather events have been influenced by climate change and although the exact amount caused by our warming world currently cannot accurately be estimated. The influence of global heating on our extreme weather events becomes obvious as their numbers increase in severity and become more common, as they have in the last year in Gippsland. We are in a climate emergency and urgent action is required.

Dear Darren Chester MHR,

As concerned residents living in your electorate of Gippsland (“Gippslanders all”) and trusting in you to provide leadership and representation in Canberra, we wish to express our deep concern and alarm with the Leadership of the National Party. It is obvious from their recent actions that they wish to reignite and promote “the climate wars” that have stood in the way of meaningful climate action and energy policy in Australia for at least two decades. Your party leader, David Littleproud, wants to stop renewable energy projects whilst openly promoting the coal and gas industries.

Your ex-leader and former Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, has called renewable energy a “swindle” and wind turbines “filth”. He is pictured standing with supporters outside Parliament holding up signs saying renewable energy is “Unreliable, Unaffordable, Uncompetitive, Unpredictable, Unsustainable, Unsightly, Unfit”. Your energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, promotes nuclear energy (particularly SMRs of which only one is in operation throughout the world) as the answer to all our climate and energy problems.

Your party stands with the Liberals in refusing to support the introduction of emissions standards for new vehicles – effectively making Australia and Russia the only countries in the developed world to still not require manufacturers to take appropriate action.

These views have been called “unhinged” and “Trumpian” and in our view are calculated to cause division in our society. They are out of step with many farming communities and are politically dangerous.

So, Darren, our question to you is “do you hold the same views as your party leadership?” or are you able to act as a voice within the Nationals for a more rational approach.

Signed

Metung Science Forum

Aside from an odd letter to a politician my first written words on global warming and the climate crisis were in the form of poetry. Writing under the pseudonym Amelia Angove in the 1980s these few brief lines foreshadowed an occupation that has dominated the last twenty years of my life. The climate crisis was briefly mentioned in four of the six slim Angove volumes published in the 1990s. Using fiction inevitably involved the baggage of spelling mistakes and occasionally the more serious factual errors or misdirection.

In the poem ‘Numblamungie 1989’ I wrote “it is easy to believe / the greenhouse effect / is a scientist’s creation” and “as phrophets (sic) of doom our lives / pass us by, preoccupied with / anticipating the greenhouse effect.” Obscure and somewhat ambiguous the second quote meant anticipating the consequences of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – that is global warming. The last verses published in 2000 (see image above) completed the process of using fiction as a vehicle included the following: “No 80. The ground is hard / and the water tanks are low; / perhaps El Nino / is merely the grandson / of global warming.”

By this time I had already published several opinion pieces (see here and here) and numerous ‘letters to the editor’ – mainly in the Bairnsdale Advertiser. Gradually the detail increased until it involved the 500 word blogs that appeared regularly on my website from 2013-23. An occasional piece like this one still appears. The objective analysis of the crisis had overwhelmed all the subjective, emotive attempts.

Since then the only verse written has been limited to lyrics for a few songs – all unpublished. One was a single verse set to the tune of ‘Plastic Jesus’: “Global warming, global warming, / it’s a fact that some of us deny / doesn’t matter whether it rains or freezes / it’s a happening now by Jesus / happening before our very eyes.” When Tony Abbott was opposition leader I penned a six verse song to the tune of ‘Nobby Hall’: “Your name sounds like a rabbit Dr No / and you’ve got a nasty habit Dr No / as the gutters deep you scour / in your endless push for power / with the devil you’d cohabit Dr No” went the chorus.

The first verse went “You deny there’s global warming Dr No / and of the greenhouse you are scorning Dr No / you did not hesitate / to say CO2 had no weight / and give science such a flooring, Dr No.” I still get angry thinking about the ten wasted years of climate denialism that the Abbott era inaugurated. Hopefully the words of songwriters and poets will express these emotions far better than I have been able, in the continuing struggle for meaningful climate action.

The poetry is available in pdfs here