If you think summers in the Northern Rivers are hot now, just wait a decade and a bit and they’ll be unbearable for most of that time.
And by unbearable temperatures, I’m not talking about the usual languid nights filled with humidity but something far more sinister: the inability of the human body to cope with temperatures and humidity so high that heatwaves become lethal for the most vulnerable, usually the very young and the very old, but also fit, able people who work or exercise out in the open in the heat of the day.
James Hansen, a former chief atmospheric scientist for NASA is one person who should know. Having spent a career modelling the atmospheres of other worlds, including being the first to find out that the clouds of Venus are basically sulphuric acid, he should know a thing or two about where our darling Earth is headed.
Having first raised the alarm about global warming as long ago as 1988 before a US Congressional hearing, Hansen could be forgiven for being a tad frustrated about the glacial pace of change for politicians to do anything about the problem, including last month’s climate talks debacle in Brazil that was COP 30.
Hansen and others say the ocean and many of the forested areas of the planet are no longer acting as carbon sinks, clouds are acting to reflect heat back down to earth and with it, humanity is now locked into at least two degrees of global warming.
Given that the world has already sailed through 1.5OC above pre-industrial age temperatures, the consensus among leading climate scientists is that we will reach 2OC warming some time in 2037, just 12 years away.
Two degrees warming means the collapse of all coral reefs, one of the nine major tipping points of the Earth’s planetary systems, some of the others being the polar ice sheets at slightly warmer temperatures.
But Hansen says we can’t rule out multi-metre rises – as much as five metres – in sea levels from these effects over the next 50 to 150 years. Two degrees warming means the economic collapse of North Queensland, an economy that is based on coral tourism.
James Hansen, at this stage, is a climate outlier, by his calculations the planet will warm by 4.5OC by the end of this century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reckons it will be a 2.6OC rise – still a disaster for humankind given the increased frequency of floods and droughts that this brings.
But according to several other scientific organisations that research climate change, the temperature increase won’t just stop there. Unlike the IPCC, NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (at least when they were funded before Trump) don’t take quite the least-common denominator approach. NASA reckons the planet will bump up against 3OC of warming by 2061 and 4OC by 2085.
The thin blue shell of atmosphere that protects us and gives life is for all intents and purposes only five to seven kilometres thick, below which humans thrive, above which, they die. And it’s not without reason that the most stable atmosphere for the past few hundred thousand years has only occurred in the past 10,000, a period that has coincided with the rise of civilisation.
To keep burning fossil fuels is akin to a planetary and generational game of Russian roulette, one where each bullet has the name of a coal or gas company but which all the barrels are loaded.
Joelle Gergis, an IPCC reviewer, who lives in the Northern Rivers, wrote an excellent essay last year for the Quarterly Magazine called ‘Highway to Hell’, with the subtitle ‘Climate Change and Australia’s Future’. It’s compelling, if not scary, reading.
What’s doubly scary is the increasing pace of climate heating and erratic weather. Australia’s highly variable climate is already in a tug of war between the tropics and the cooler systems from the Southern Ocean.
Overlay this with collapsing ocean currents and weather systems that no longer play ball in the usual way and it’s open season for a future Summer of extremes.
The nightmarish forecast of feedback loops of worsening weather systems could give rise to an Australia where average temperatures rise by between 4 and 7OC. But this is background warming. Maximum temperatures, Gergis says, often increase twice as fast as average conditions.
So, add between 8 and 14OC on top of your typical high-30s Northern Rivers’ heatwave and the area becomes basically uninhabitable.
