Dear Kevin,
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Melbourne, along with most of southern Australia, has lately busted all records. Last week we had three consecutive days of well over forty degrees, the last and hottest of which saw the mercury hit 45 degrees – the hottest January day for 70 years. Most of us had never experienced anything like it. Streets were deserted. Parks were empty. Traditional places of respite like cinemas, shopping centres and public libraries filled up with people then emptied out again as air-conditioning systems failed. Railway lines buckled in the heat and hundreds of trains were cancelled. 6 people died apparently simply because of the heat. Many people came home from work and school to find family pets dead, their noses pressed into shady airless pockets of the backyard. In Yarra Bend National Park the ground was littered with the corpses of dead bats and dead possums.By the end of the week the city, no longer properly functional, had more or less ground to a standstill. Emergency service sirens howled day and night. Bushfires destroyed homes and threatened the city’s power supply even further. Inner city shops caught fire as air-conditioning units exploded. Half a million homes were without power. Even the casino was closed and evacuated. It is estimated that over $100 million was lost by business over the three days.
Then late on Friday afternoon the change came through and temperatures at last fell. In fifteen minutes the thermometer outside my back door fell from 45 degrees to 37 and stayed there.
Some cool change.
I mention all this because if your present global warming policies stay in place we can expect more of this. The average January temperature this year was 29 degrees, which is three degrees higher than normal. This is within the 1.8 to 4 degree range of temperature increase that scientists predict would occur before 2100 under policies such as yours, with their very low targets for carbon reduction.
What we had last week was a glimpse of the future; your promised land.
Weather and climate aren’t the same thing, so one needs to be careful when looking at a hot spell or a cold spell. There is so much ’static’ in the weather system that only long term trends give a real picture.
But what we do know about this year thus far is that records are being broken with a regularity that fits the pattern of recent years. Hardly a month goes by without a new record being set somewhere in Australia. In Melbourne this January was the second driest on record, and the driest since 1932. We had just one millimetre of rain. 48 millimetres is normal. Mildura, in Norther Victoria, has had more than seven consecutive nights over 24 degrees and 13 consecutive days over 40. Adelaide has had an unbroken run of 40 plus temperatures and so many sudden deaths that the morgue has overflowed.
Local weather experts expect the trend to continue as global warming takes hold.
Despite the current La Nina effect, globally last year tied with 2001 as the eighth warmest year since records began. 1998 was the hottest. 2005 the second hottest. The seventeen warmest years on record all occurred in the past twenty years.
When you were elected many of us hoped you would do something to seriously tackle global warming. We now feel betrayed. We knew something was up when Penny Wong entered the room at your 2020 summit in early 2008 conference flanked by representatives of the fossil fuel industry.
Since then you have failed to support nationwide renewable energy initiatives and turned your back on the conservation movement and the alternative energy industry.
Then, in the wake of the Garnaut Report, after the biggest lobbying effort in Australia’s political history, you and Penny Wong and Martin Ferguson in effect sold our children’s future to the short term interests of the fossil fuel industry, the aluminium lobby, and the AWU. You then handed the fossil fuel industry $4 billion for their trouble.
Many of us thought you were the one who would have the imagination and vision to ‘turn the ship’ by crafting an economy that would wind back our dependence on fossil fuels, pointing the way forward to a future in renewables. How wrong we were.
Despite being elected on this issue, your policy agenda on this issue has ended up not far from where the Howard government would likely have set its targets.
That you have become captive to precisely the same vested interests as your predecessors says much about how undemocratic the political process has become.
The old style politics you have embraced – of handouts, pandering to industry bodies, sucking up to unions - are as dead as old style energy. New types of politics are needed that are as different as the weather.
True, this is a planetary problem what your government does will make little difference in the global scheme of things. But if western governments in rich countries don’t show moral leadership on this crucial issue, then who will? Australia is one of the highest per capita emitters in the world. If high emitters can’t show a will to cut back, then what moral imperative is there for the developing nations of Asia to keep their emissions low?
The irony is that as the sun blazes down and we turn up the air-conditioning we remain more dependent on fossil fuels than ever, even as this, the sunniest nation of all, lags behind all others in renewable energy. While we sweltered and the city stopped working around us many of us worried about global warming and recalled the ‘wasted decade’ that you said during the election campaign was the Howard government’s legacy on climate change. And some of us wondered, what will your legacy be?
