Floods in Shepparton highlight climate dangers

Discussing disruptive weather, they wrote: “The interval between such events may be shrinking, allowing less recovery time. When flooding affected the region around Shepparton and other Goulburn River basin towns in Victoria in January 2024, some householders had not yet had time to clean up and rebuild after the previous floods in October 2022.”

The book, released this month, Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet, encourages Australians, and in this case, particularly Goulburn Valley people, to prepare for and adapt to a warmer world rather than simply focus on mitigation.

Arrangements had been made to speak with Prof Hamilton about his latest book, but sadly, he was ill, and the interview was postponed.

He is a professor of public ethics at Canberra’s Charles Sturt University and has been a prolific author. He founded the Australia Institute late last century, resigning as the executive director in 2008.

He is familiar with the science and impacts of climate change, having written about it for decades, and it was in 2015 that he wrote Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change.

Prof Hamilton and Mr Wilkenfeld argue that we have a moral responsibility to stop the export and sale of fossil fuels but point out that, in a broad and general sense, there is little Australians can do to avoid what they describe as a “heating planet”.

They point out that Australia, and nearly 200 other nations, signed up to the Paris Agreement in 2015 with the overarching goal to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”.

Prof Hamilton and Mr Wilkenfeld say the world, Australia and, of course, the Goulburn Valley, will blow past 1.5°C — and 2°C is equally at risk.

The idea that Australia can do little to help decarbonise the world is factually correct but morally, desperately wrong.

A few years ago, I raised the issue of Australia’s behaviour with former Federal Member for Nicholls Damian Drum, who quickly defended the then Coalition Government’s position, arguing Australia contributed little to the world’s carbon emissions and, therefore, there was nothing we could do.

Australia’s fossil fuel exports are among the largest in the world. Although the burning of them and the resultant emissions are attributed to the user’s country, if we take moral responsibility for them, that puts Australia among the world’s biggest emitters.

Meanwhile, a friend has argued that I have provided no evidence or material to help readers make a connection with the climate crisis and what is happening here in the Goulburn Valley and yet, earlier, damned me for boring readers with factual information about climate change.

He said most people were fully aware of the climate crisis and fearful of it, as were most farmers throughout the district, who were doing all they can.

However, it is likely that Prof Hamilton and Mr Wilkenfeld wouldn’t agree with that as, writing in Living Hot, they say: “Vague plans, deep listening and good intentions will not protect us from the inevitable. Things have to change.”

And in reference to change, consider the actions of noted climate scientist and author Joëlle Gergis, who said: ”With a heavy heart, I resigned from a permanent academic position at one of the most prestigious institutions in the country at the peak of my career. Walking away from what, I thought, was my dream job was the hardest decision I’ve ever made, something I never imagined I would do.”

In Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future, published in Quarterly Essay 94, Dr Gergis discussed the restrictions on what she could say and how that prompted her to resign to remove that yoke.

Pointing out the continued degradation of our natural environment and the weakening of social resilience that would eventually lead to the permanent displacement of people from their homes and ongoing impacts on our economy, she said, “We need you to stare into the abyss with us and not turn away.”

And so as Prof Hamilton calls on Australians, including those of us living on the riverine plains of the Goulburn Valley, to prepare for life in a warmer world, Dr Gergis points out that although 51 countries around the world have national climate adaptation plans, Australia is not one of them.

So, if we do nothing else, we could push our political decision-makers for a climate adaptation plan.

Robert McLean is a former editor of The News.