Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial by Peter Stott

Author:Peter Stott [Stott, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838952488
Google: A1VxzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2021-10-15T21:21:41+00:00

9

Mounting devastation

The New Zealand newspaper the Dominion Post carried a shocking image on the front page of its edition for Wednesday 9 January 2013. It showed a woman and five young children cowering beneath a jetty in a small Tasmanian township called Dunalley. The terrified victims were floating up to their necks in water while red smoke billowed around them. ‘Family of 7 escapes tornadoes of fire’ was the banner headline that accompanied the picture.1 According to the article, record-breaking heat and rapidly spreading flames had brought them to this pass. Stranded in this desperate limbo, breathing toxic air while shivering in clammy water, this photo seemed to sum up what climate change had become for many. Global warming was no longer a question of discernible anthropogenic fingerprints or future climate impacts; it was a matter of life and death.

I had picked up the paper while on holiday across the Tasman Sea in the land of the long white cloud, hiking through the gorgeous scenery of the country’s South Island. I had been struck by this story, not just because of its graphic depiction of weather-related jeopardy, but because I was soon to travel to close by where the picture was taken. A few days later, I took that long-anticipated trip, my first to Australia, to attend the fourth and final lead author meeting for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report in Hobart, Tasmania’s most populous city. As my plane came into land, I could see burnt landscapes around the airport and smoke billowing around the Tasman Peninsula where the small settlement of Dunalley stood.

From my hotel room I could still see clouds of smoke, a pertinent reminder of why what I did mattered. For the first time since scientists had started to gather to prepare IPCC reports in the late 1980s, our lead author meeting was happening in the immediate aftermath of a weather-related disaster. That felt significant.

I knew that around the globe, the toll of heatwaves, floods and droughts continued to mount. But the fact that such devastating fires had struck so recently so nearby made our task here seem all the more significant. Coincidentally, my co-leader of the section of the IPCC report on the causes of climate change, an Australian scientist called Nathan Bindoff, was based here at the University of Tasmania. For him, the local conflagration was not just of professional interest but also of personal concern, given his own home’s vulnerability to such fires. The recent events only confirmed a decision we’d made earlier in the writing process: for this IPCC report we needed to break new ground.

Previous reports had concentrated on analysing long-term changes in climate, assessing what had caused the increasing atmospheric temperatures over many decades, the diminishing snow and ice and changing rainfall patterns. It was vital we updated previous assessments with the latest knowledge, so we could determine whether the scientific confidence in the role of human activities on climate had increased. But this time, Nathan

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