Global warming is a major factor in Australia’s extreme weather events and is fundamentally a spiritual problem, argues Michael Northcott, Professor of Ethics at Edinburgh University and an Anglican priest. He spoke to Roland Ashby on a visit to Melbourne last month.
Michael Northcott is in no doubt that the recent floods and cyclone in Queensland have a direct link with climate change. “The main cause is the warming of the ocean to the east of Australia and the resulting increase of water vapour in the atmosphere, which are both the result of global climate change. Cyclone Yasi was almost certainly caused by global warming.”
He believes the extent of the flooding was also, in part, “a consequence of unwise clear cutting and deforestation upstate, because trees in a tropical region are flood defences and also act as an air conditioning system. Australia’s forestry policy of replacing old growth forests with plantations means that high ground cannot hold the water in extreme storms."
The CSIRO, he says, is predicting that by 2070 Sydney will be six degrees warmer. “So it is going to be very hard to still live there, it will be just too hot. To me this is really ironic because New South Wales is the main source of the coal, which is one of the main drivers of climate change.”
He is also concerned about other ‘climate challenged’ parts of the world, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have suffered from their own catastrophic flooding, and also parts of North India, which are undergoing extreme climate change. The whole of Sub-Saharan Africa is also finding it difficult to grow enough food for its population. “Droughts which used to occur every 100 years are now occurring every 10 years, and droughts which used to occur every 10 years are now occurring every year.”
He is surprised by the number of people in Australia who still dispute the climate change science. “The science is unarguable and 99 percent of climate scientists think it is convincing. CO2 is a warming gas, and the human race has doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. What we have done is similar to double glazing a house to keep the heat in. We have effectively put double glazing around the planet. Lord Monckton, Ian Plimer and Rupert Murdoch would have you believe that you can double glaze the planet and it won’t make any difference. Unfortunately it’s not true.”
He also has an answer for those who say that recent cold weather in the northern hemisphere is evidence of global cooling rather than warming. “This colder weather was the result of Greenland and the Arctic being too hot. Greenland was six degrees in November and it should have been below zero. This, together with high pressure over the arctic, pushed the cold air down to north-eastern Europe and the north-eastern United States, and gave them extreme winters.”
Well known and well established weather effects, he says, are being ramped up by climate change. “This means we will get more extreme weather, not just warmer weather, but also more extreme cold, as well as at different times of the year, or more wet or more dry. One of the problems is with the phrase ‘global warming’. While average temperatures are rising, there are other places on the planet where it will be colder for a while before it gets hotter, and other places where it will be hotter and maybe cool down a bit. We are just going to get a lot more, what I sometimes call, ‘global weirding’ rather than global warming. The weather is not going to be consistent and reliable in the way that it once was. It will be weird.”
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"Global weirding"--whatever the cause--man-made or natural, the weather has certainly been weird.
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