The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 (22 page)

In the past two centuries, CO
₂
concentrations have increased 30 per cent; methane concentrations have risen by 150 per cent (the major human-induced sources being cattle, agriculture, and leakages from natural gas production); and nitrous oxide has risen by 15 per cent, mostly connected to industrial processes, fertiliser use and farming. Stratospheric ozone – again due to human influence – has dropped, countering the warming effect with a bit of cooling. (But, as will be explained later, not for much longer.) Each greenhouse gas makes a different contribution to the warming of the Earth because of its molecular structure and the length of time it hangs around in the atmosphere before being dissolved in the oceans, or absorbed in the biosphere, or chemically transformed into another molecule. But these days – when the political discussion turns to talk of targets – the effect of each gas is generally expressed in the warming discussion as the CO
₂
equivalent (CO
₂
e), or the amount of CO
₂
that would cause the same amount of warming over a defined period, say a century.

At some point in the early 1980s, whispers of all this blew into the classrooms of my small-town high school in rural Victoria. The terms ‘global warming' and ‘greenhouse effect' crept into textbooks, newspapers and consciousness. I have a vivid recollection of a science teacher introducing the class to the Keeling Curve. I was fascinated by the jagged sawtooth line plotting the measurements, and by the explanation that this was the planet
breathing. But then global warming, as a concept, soon got crowded out by other cataclysmic concerns – the ozone hole, acid rain, boys, pollution and, of course, the background noise of nuclear annihilation. It was just something else to worry about.

It would not be until the sweltering American summer of 1988, which recorded the then highest temperatures on record, that the issue really caught alight. The warmth of that summer is seared on my memory, having spent much of it camping in north American national parks on a road trip to wind up a year of journalism studies. Loitering skunks, pilfering raccoons and inescapable, scorching heat signposted the journey. I was happily oblivious, deep in the college student's endless summer, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified to a US Congressional hearing ‘with 99 per cent confidence' that a long-term warming trend was underway, and that he strongly suspected that the greenhouse effect was to blame. The effects would be felt within 50 years, he said, anticipating more frequent storms and floods as well as heatwaves. It was time to ‘stop waffling, and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here', he told reporters. Hansen's whistle-blowing role is recognised today in his unofficial title as the granddaddy of greenhouse science. These days he can be found protesting mountaintop coal-mining sites in the US, getting arrested and being photographed in handcuffs. It's an emergency, he declares. ‘It is our responsibility to make sure our representatives feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is politically expedient,' he says of his activism. He is revered hero and reviled alarmist, depending on how you read the science.

Hansen's testimony back in 1988, coinciding with the devastating heatwave conditions, kindled increased international interest in the issues. A push emerged to set a goal to reduce CO
₂
release from fossil fuel combustion by 20 per cent by 2005. But it didn't happen, not least because his testimony also spurred
an emphatic chorus of denial. ‘An international meeting of scientists [in Toronto, in June 1988] warned that the world should take active steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions,' Weart explains at this point in his history. The response was vehement. Corporations and individuals who opposed all government regulation began to spend many millions of dollars on lobbying, advertising, and ‘reports' that mimicked scientific publications, in an effort to convince people that there was no problem at all.

The watershed year 1988 also saw the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a mechanism for conveying rapidly emerging, complex and technical scientific information about global warming to the makers of policy in governments and the private sector. A year later the Berlin Wall had fallen, but the hardliners of the market economy had a new enemy – environmentalism, and the contagion of global warming ‘alarmism'.

And so the scene was set for the next 20 years. Media interest would wax and wane, often according to the most mischievous and misleading of climate claims, or by equally fickle weather fluctuations. Meanwhile the trickle of published science grew, turning into a torrent, investigators gradually shifting from asking ‘Is it happening?' to ‘How/when will it hit?' Scepticism – in the honest, scientific sense – drove the investigation. Many eminent minds set out to prosecute the case against warming, only to find their conclusions supporting the emerging scientific consensus that warming was real, deeply worrying, and human-caused.

But there remained many questions, and these were exploited by the well-oiled machinery of denial, which cranked up alongside the scientific endeavour – a kind of trench warfare, players ferreting out weaknesses and lobbing grenades from the safety of another new realm, cyberspace. Scientists are competitive and sceptical beings by nature, the peer-review process providing mechanisms to scrutinise and expose flawed work. But this was
not scepticism they were encountering; this was something else.

The strategically peddled notion that climate science was highly uncertain, that scientists were at odds, endured in the media and policy circles, together with an implication that the powerful consensus statements of the world's scientific academies, the IPCC and the like, were the result of some kind of collusion or bullying or self-serving manipulation. Naomi Oreskes debunked this in a 2004
Science
essay, reviewing a decade of published studies to 2003, examining almost 1000 papers, and concluding ‘there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.'

Her reflection acknowledged that:

the scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Fast forward to February 2007 and publication of part one of the most considered, reviewed, second-guessed but still largely unassailed scientific documents in human history – delivered in four volumes over the course of the year, and dedicated to locking down the issues of climate change in unambiguous consensus terms. After five years sifting through thousands of published studies and contributions from 2500 scientists, a panel of 600 scientists, assembled under the banner of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC 4AR), concluded that: ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.'

Their forecast for the future was horrifying. Droughts would
be longer, flooding rains would be rarer but heavier, cyclones would carry more fury, violent storms and extreme heat would strike more frequently. Evaporation would suck up scarce inland water, sea levels would creep up, and oceans would become more acid and hostile to the formation of shells and coral reefs, imperilling marine ecosystems.

Even after all the caveats and the back-pedalling required to gain line-by-line consensus, it read as a bleak assessment of a besieged planet. On the question of what was driving the change, the final statement – wrung out of a tortuous down-to-the-wire round of closed-door deliberations in Paris – declared it was ‘very likely' that human activities led by burning fossil fuels account for most of the warming in the past 50 years.

* * * * *

Touchdown in Hobart – not the end of the world but yes, so close you might glimpse it. Its proximity to the ice may be felt in the sharp breath of the southerlies. Anticipation clicks up another notch as we taxi past the Antarctic Airbus. I recognise the chartered aircraft sitting at the far end of the tarmac in its discreet government livery, ready for takeoff – before dawn, all being well.

Hobart is headquarters to a huge Antarctic scientific enterprise built on its proximity to the high latitudes. Glaciologists, biologists, ship hands, field officers, statisticians, mechanics, meteorologists, pilots – all manner of specialists congregate around the port where, on 7 March 1912 – almost a century ago – a wild, whiskery Norwegian named Roald Amundsen slipped ashore by rowboat from his ship. He booked into Hadleys Hotel, a genteel establishment which endures today, and where his rough appearance won him only the sniffy offer of a ‘miserable little room'. He proceeded to the telegraph office to wire the news
to King Haaken of Norway that on Friday, 14 December 1911 he had won the race to the South Pole, stealing the prize from the doomed British expedition of Robert Falcon Scott.

The Heroic Era of Antarctic adventuring may have long since faded into history, but in the decades since the Scientific Era has continued to underwrite a busy schedule of Antarctic expeditions – from Hobart to the ice every summer for more than 60 years. Today the Climate Era feeds momentum and hunger to plunder the continent's treasure trove of secrets. The currency is knowledge now, but rumours of speculating nations positioning to claim its fabled mineral wealth abound – not without cause, as I will soon see for myself.

Every year, Hobart waves off the AAD's big red icebreaker
Aurora Australis
on its first voyage of the season. Usually by around late October the ship pushes south to Antarctica through the retreating winter pack ice with a load of expeditioners and supplies. There will be two or three more voyages until six months later, around mid April, when she will retrieve the last of the summer station crews and bring them home. The shipping schedule is notoriously fluid, subject to the whims of the Antarctic Factor – or ‘A Factor' – a kind of extreme manifestation of Murphy's Law: if it can stuff up, it will. Engine problems, pack ice, health emergencies, human error, broken equipment, blizzards, singly or in diabolical communion, can be relied upon to play havoc with the best-laid plans. Field science, for all its careful precision, must be an adaptable, seat-of-the-pants exercise to survive such conditions.

The flight program, still in its infancy, is particularly vulnerable to the devilry of the A Factor. Conditions which will allow the A319 Airbus to safely land and take off from Wilkins Aerodrome – the blue-ice runway carved into the interior about 70km from Casey station – are defined by a narrow weather window between mid December and mid February. Scientific teams can
spend years planning expeditions, only to see them vanish in the white haze of poor weather.

The air service – the first from Australia to Antarctica – aimed to dramatically ramp up the Antarctic science schedule, providing a quick shuttle of planeloads of scientists and support crew to and from the ice, opening up the continent to extended research efforts. The ideal may yet be realised, but its first seasons have been bogged down by teething problems, logistical bottlenecks and brutal weather. The flights placed a crippling load on tired Antarctic infrastructure. Isolated facilities and systems struggle to cope with the sudden increases in population and the rising tempo of operations. There's a fair bit of grumbling from the ranks about when, and whether, the promise of the air link to scientific schedules will be realised.

Before dawn, in Hobart, I find myself derailed by the A Factor. Arriving back at the airport for a scheduled 3am Antarctic pre-departure briefing, we are advised that the weather down south has turned foul, and we're going nowhere. We're installed in apartments on a hill above Hobart's pretty Sandy Bay, within the sprawling parkland of the University of Tasmania campus. Pleasant enough, but not where we wish to be.

One of my room mates for the duration is a Korean-born astrophysicist from NASA with a swag of Antarctic and Arctic trips under his belt. The other is a young evolutionary biologist from Darwin, heading south for the first time. I'm a bit daunted by the education and intelligence that has earned them both their tickets, so when they take an inordinate amount of time to figure out how to work the lock on our apartment door, I feel better.

The man from NASA, Dr Young Gim, is a soft-spoken radar systems engineer based in the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We enjoy what will be the first of many long conversations propped up on bar stools at a pizza joint in the hearty maritime precinct of Salamanca Place. It's a mild summer's night. The
broad footpath is crowded with the keeling overflow of office Christmas parties. We are both part of and apart from this company – aliens desperate to be beamed into a different dimension. At one point we dodge a pack of Hash House Harriers, who weave through the smokers and drinkers crowding the footpath, a flash of fleet feet, tinsel and Santa hats.

Young explains that he is on his way to Casey to join an international team of glaciologists who are spending the summer exploring Antarctica's deep interior aboard a modified World War II-vintage DC-3. It's the second season of a three-year effort – a collaboration of Australian, US, British and French glaciologists – flying under the banner of Operation ICECAP, or to use the longhand, ‘Investigating the Cryospheric Evolution of the Central Antarctic Plate'.

The aircraft provides a platform for a high-flying laboratory of radar instruments which can see deep within and under thousands of metres of ancient ice, providing new insights into the mysterious dynamics of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The information is critical to figuring out how the largest body of fresh water on Earth might behave in a warming world. This looms as arguably the biggest climate conundrum of the moment and has been one of the most fraught issues on the international scientific agenda, almost stymieing sign-off on the landmark fourth report of the IPCC back in 2007 and dividing experts ever since.