Week 4 – Audio Lesson: Listen & Read

Refer to lesson PDF for transcript with highlighted vocabulary (download here).

Pete: So, do you want to switch gears on to climate change? 

Ian: Yeah. 

Pete: And talk about… I guess, from when you were younger, was climate change a worry? Was it associated with the bushfire season?

Ian: No.

Pete: Was there anything going around where you were worried about that exacerbating things at a time?

Ian: No. Really from my memory, the first times that we started… and I used to be a high school science teacher, so, the first time we started to think and talk about human-induced climate change was in the late 1970s, early 1980s. So, when I was a child in the ‘60s, we didn’t think about climate change. We didn’t even think about looking at data to see if there was any climate change. You just expected that there would be differences annually, and those differences we plus or minus the norm, which is what climate is. It’s just the averaging of weather. And so, we didn’t really think about that. But now we’re obviously highly concerned about these things and… But climate change doesn’t cause bushfire. What does is… 

Pete: Any individual bushfire.

Ian: Any individual bushfire. Yeah, because climate change is averaging. And…

Pete: That’s like saying, though… That argument too where people say, “Well, climate change isn’t responsible for this bushfire.”, that’s kind of like, “Well, any single cigarette isn’t responsible for your cancer.”

Ian: Isn’t responsible for your lung cancer. Yeah, exactly. Or at least the one that is, you can’t identify it…

Pete: Yeah. 

Ian: …’cause it happened 20 years ago. But when we start to talk about where we’ve got bushfire seasons over the last few years have been starting in early- to mid-spring where we have drought that is just much more significant that has been occurring in Australia, where we have areas in the country where it hasn’t rained for months, where you would have expected significant amounts of rainfall, and that means that you just get hotter and drier summers and that means any bushfire that occurs is going to be larger and more dramatic.

Pete: Yeah, well it’s crazy. So, when did you start noticing that? Or at least when did the public sort of when did it reach the Zeitgeist, I guess, you know, of people realising that climate change is actually going to have a significant effect on even Australians, whether or not, you know, sea level change and all of that sort of, let’s say, living as bushfires now. Where it’s linked.

Ian: Well, sea level rising was the first one that that people talked about. And there are… Yes, there are places in Australia that will be affected by rising sea levels directly. Obviously, there are far more of our Pacific neighbours that will be directly affected. There are countries where the highest point on these islands is tens of metres. And so significant parts of their country is just going to disappear if the sea level rises a metre. And evidence of sea level rising is always going to be debated by people because again, it’s an averaging thing.

Pete: But we’re already seeing it in places like Bangladesh. Right?

Ian: Oh, yeah.

Pete: Where entire… And it’s one of those things where it’s inch by inch, and entire areas of farmland, even though you can still walk there because the sea… the sea level’s risen, it’s increased the salinity of these places…

Ian: It’s increased the salinity.

Pete: …and they can’t grow food and it’s unstable. They can’t build houses.

Ian: And the annual flooding, which occurs from flooding rivers, lasts longer because the water’s got nowhere to go.

Pete: And it gets exacerbated by natural events like hurricanes and everything to which raise the sea level.

Ian: Yeah. Yeah. And look, there have been things where we’ve been watching glaciation, disappearing. You know, glaciers in New Zealand, Canada, in northern Europe, in Greenland. 

Pete: Especially now that you’re there, red and brown like the smoke from Australia.

Ian: Exactly. Yeah. Those glaciers are disappearing in my lifetime significantly.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: You know, places in New Zealand that I went to in the 1970s where you could walk from the… in a couple of the glaciers on the south island and you could walk from the little tourist office, you know, where you bought your ticket to go and visit the glacier. And it was, you know, a few-hundred-metres’ walk, now you’ve got to get in a bus and travel kilometres to get to them. And so those glaciers have retracted quite significantly. The same thing in Canada and the same thing in Greenland, Antarctica. So, we are definitely losing ice. And losing ice is a pretty good indicator that the temperature is rising. Now we’re getting to the point in Australia, in western North America, in Canada and The United States, where the bushfire seasons are just getting longer. We’ve had… California, they were having they were having huge bushfires months after summer. September-October, where…

Pete: Again because of that drying out. 

Ian: The drying out. And the winter was just dry. It didn’t rain. And so, if you didn’t get bushfires in the summer, it meant that all that material was just there to keep burning when you did get fire. You know, we’ve got a second cousin who lives in California. She was evacuated from a house in October. That’s unheard of. 

Pete: Yeah, true, ‘cause for them, that’s winter.

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: Right? Or at least going into winter.

Ian: Yeah. It’s coming in… it’s going into winter. Yeah. So, those sort of things. Yeah. Yes, they’re all anecdotal and those individual anecdotal stories can always be argued about them not being evidence, but they are anecdotally, you know, they’re anecdotal evidence to suggest that something is happening when you when you start to pile a whole lot of them together31. And that’s not scientific evidence. But when you combine it with the scientific evidence that can say, yes, this is a problem, then it is. So…