Dr Tim Flannery - Sydney Futures Forum Tuesday, 18 May 2004

Thank you very much, Minister, and thank you to all of the staff of DIPNR who have helped me through the last few weeks trying to understand what you are about and trying to contribute in some sort of meaningful way.

I came here from Melbourne in May. Melbourne was already in a pretty full-blown winter. I came to this glorious, warm city by the harbour, went down to Hyde Park and saw five species of native parrots in the trees of Hyde Park. That is something I will never, ever forget - one of the great moments in my life. The flowering gums in the Melbourne I had just left were full of starlings, non-native birds, the only birds, feeding on our native eucalypts. A very special place.

The reason I am here this evening is that I want to contribute my little bit to make sure that Sydney stays the most beautiful and wondrous city on the planet. That planet is changing very quickly. Today as we sit here there are 6.3 billion people on the planet - a thousand million people. By 2050, if we are very lucky, that population growth will have reached its peak at 8.9 billion people - lots and lots of people on a very crowded planet. We passed the carrying capacity of this planet in the 1970s.

We are now using around 30 per cent more of the environmental services and resources than this planet can sustainably provide. They are the best figures we have available to us at the moment. And if you think about it, what that means, those few figures I have given you, is that our lifespans, the decision makers in this room, our lifespans are the critical period for the survival of our planet and our civilisation. It will never see as much stress as it will see through our lifetimes. The way we handle that stress, our innovation, ingenuity and our ability to cope with those changes will decide the future of the humanity for the foreseeable future.

That is why I am here. I think this is a very important meeting and we live in very difficult and challenging times. Australia, by the way, is worse off than most of the planet. We Australians use 60 per cent more of the environmental services and resources than our continent can provide. So we are worse off than the rest.

We have got a long way to go. Sydney is our largest city. It has arguably the greatest growth potential of any region of Australia, or at least that area you talk of from Port Stephens through to Nowra.

The pattern of growth that is set here will really shape patterns of growth throughout Australia. So what are the real challenges for us? Are they the sorts of housing that we have? Is it the transport infrastructure? What actually are they? Water, energy, biodiversity? From my perspective, the greatest challenge is a process which is now well advanced that we all know as global warming.

Global warming is sort of in the air; we all know a little bit about it, we all hear about it. But the last six months have brought a dramatic increase in the science that backs up our understanding of global warming, and that science is very, very disturbing.

Five years ago, I was a bit of a global warming skeptic. I thought it was just a trivial issue. There was biodiversity loss, destruction of the rainforests, pollution of the oceans, overpopulation and all the rest. They are really important threats without doubt, but they are waves on the ocean compared with the tsunami that is coming behind them that we know as global warming.

Just think for a minute why that might be so. If you imagine our earth as being about the size of an onion, the atmosphere that we breathe every moment of our lives is about as thick on that onion as the outermost onion skin. Very, very thin.

Everyone in this room pretty much has travelled outside the usable atmosphere. You have all been up in a jet, you have all gone from A to B at 30,000 feet, 11,000 metres. You have been outside the usable atmosphere. That atmosphere is gossamer thin, it is fragile, extremely dynamic and we are utterly dependent on it.

Just think of the number of holes we have punched into the earth's crust to dig up carbon that has remained under the surface of the earth for hundreds of millions of years. Think of the amount we are drawing out from the earth's crust and think of the expansion factor that goes into creating CO2 as we pump it into that gossamer-thin atmosphere and you will have some sense of the threat that we face.

The atmosphere has a nearly miraculous property about it. It is translucent, light passes through it without heating the atmosphere. Anyone who has been in a cold climate knows that. You feel the rays of the sun on your skin; the air will still be cold. But as the rays of sun heat your skin that light energy is turned into heat energy radiated back into the atmosphere, and there are certain molecules in the atmosphere that can capture that heat energy and radiate it back.

Those molecules are principally carbon dioxide and methane, and they are the things that we continue to put into the atmosphere in ever greater amounts. So you can see that the light comes in, the heat goes back out, increasingly reflected back down onto the surface of the earth.

There is now absolutely indisputable proof that since 1950 those greenhouse gases, as we call them, have raised the temperature of the surface of planet Earth by 0.6 of a degree Celsius. Trivial, is it not? What does it mean to any of us - 0.6 of a degree?

Most people could not feel it. I know that breast feeding mums try out the heat of milk on the back of their hand, but 0.6 of a degree hardly even figures even in an equation like that. But that trivial heating has caused two major phase shifts already in the global climate. Those phase shifts are known by climatologists as magic gates.

So what we see in terms of climate changes is not just a gradual change, just a graph that gradually decays from one point to another. What we see are very dramatic shifts that occur often within a single 12-month period from one steady state to another. So let's look at those magic gates and see what they have done.

The first one occurred in 1976. Enough time has now elapsed that we can understand fully the implications of the climate changes that occurred in 1976 - as fully as is reasonable to expect, I guess, at the moment. In 1976 a pool of warm oceanic water formed over the Western Pacific. The Western Pacific ocean is the powerhouse of the whole world's weather.

There were many, many impacts around the world. I don't know whether any of you were in the USA in 1977 and remember dramatically warm Canada, freezing eastern coast of the US, droughts in the west. All of that was a result of this very sudden shift. Similar patterns have come and gone, but the shift has been permanent in terms of that pool of warm water.

What happened in Australia? Changes that should be a very profound warning call for us all. In 1975 high pressure systems began forming through the winter over the south-west of Western Australia and they persisted for enough time to decrease rainfall over the south-west by between 10 per cent and 20 per cent. So not a big drop in rainfall even. Why would you worry about 10 per cent rainfall? After all, we were getting a bit more summer rainfall and a bit less winter rainfall.

But the Earth works in strange ways. That10 per cent to 20 per cent drop in rainfall was amplified by the living skin of the planet in such a way that the amount of water reaching Perth's catchments dropped by half, from 340 gigalitres of water per year to 160 gigalitres of water per year, and it has remained that way for the 22 years until we entered the second magic gate in 1998.

In the 1970s we began to see our biodiversity in the Wet Tropics disappear. Frog species on isolated mountains that mightn't have been visited by human beings for year after year suddenly vanished. Plants became much more restricted and failed to propagate. The proportions of tree species in remote forests rarely visited also started to change. Our biodiversity was under a very subtle but increasing threat.

What happened in 1998 was an amplification of those trends. So we went through the magic gate of 1976, dramatic change, and in 1998 things changed again. Flow into the catchments in the Perth area went from 160 gigalitres on average to 111 gigalitres on average, less than a third it was just 30 years before. Perth today survives on fossil water, pumping water out of the ground. No-one knows how much is there or how long that fossil water will last. But given the dire situation of agriculture in Western Australia, the increasing salinisation, the destruction of the western wheat belt, you have got to think that Perth might be the first metropolitan ghost town, if you want, of the 21st century. It is the most isolated city on the planet and is exquisitely vulnerable to the sorts of changes that global warming is bringing and amplifying every decade.

The other important thing about 1998 was that the high pressure system that was causing Perth's reduced rainfall shifted from Western Australia into the east. Ever since then we have experienced dramatic declines in the catchment filling rates right across south-eastern Australia. It is no accident that Melbourne's water catchments are at about 40 per cent to 50 per cent of their capacity; Sydney is in a similar state. It is no accident that drought has gripped western New South Wales for the last six or seven years. These are predictable results that we can understand very clearly through our experience of global warming.

1997 to 1998 marked the greatest El Nino ever on record. It was a huge event, bigger than any we have been able to measure for many thousands of years looking at the geological record. It sparked forest fires and loss of biodiversity from New Guinea through to Kalimantan on a scale that biologists have not even been able to calculate fully yet. People just are not there in the field looking at species of animals and trees in sufficient numbers to be able to measure that biodiversity loss. But to someone who spent 20 years of their life working in areas of Papua New Guinea that were affected by that El Nino, I can guarantee you that biodiversity losses are probably in the order of one per cent to 10 per cent from a single event. Huge impacts on what we think of as pristine parts of the world.

That same pool of warm water in the western Pacific that formed in 1998 reached about 30 degrees Celsius around 1998 as we entered the second magic gate and resulted in a die-off of 17 per cent of the world's coral reefs, primarily in the western Pacific. So the world you grew up in where you could go and see coral reefs in the warm central Pacific no longer exists. Twenty-five per cent of all oceanic diversity exists on coral reefs $30 billion in income is derived from the world's coral reefs. In the next 30 years we will lose 50 per cent of the world's coral reefs at the least.

2003, you might remember, was the hottest summer that Europe experienced in many a decade. 20,000 people died as a result of that heat. And statistically you would not expect a summer like that to occur more than once in every 50,000 years. What global warming has done is increase the unusual event. El Ninos have become stronger; cyclones have become stronger; extreme weather events of all sorts have become more frequent. We can tie this back very precisely to the 0.6-degree Celsius warming that our planet has experienced over the last century.

So what is to come? If nothing is done, the 21st century will see global warming of somewhere between 2 and 7 degrees Celsius. And those figures, I must warn you, are actually rather conservative. All of the latest figures we have seen, the latest CO2 levels, are suggesting that it is going to be the upper rather than the lower level. If we are towards the upper end of the range the world will face conditions it has not seen in 40 million years - conditions that existed long before there were any people, any proto-people, anything except monkeys on the planet.

So let us look at a very optimistic view. Let us think about two degrees warming. No more coral reefs that we can think of in the world. There will be no coral reefs at two degrees warming. Australia's Wet Tropics, our World Heritage area that Graham Richardson so proudly proclaimed in 1988, 90 per cent of all indigenous species gone. Straight physiology, not rocket science, not difficult to understand. Look at the temperature tolerances of the species, work out what two degrees does and you will get the story. Rainfall in south-eastern Australia, minus 20 per cent to minus 60 per cent of what it is today. We looked at what minus 20 per cent has done to Perth. Magnify that by three and you will understand where your children will be in 50 years time. More extreme weather, more powerful cyclones, greater El Ninos - all having profound impacts on south-eastern Australia. And we have not even mentioned rising sea levels, a great preoccupation, the spread of tropical diseases, the shutting down of the Gulfstream, which is a very real possibility as well, or any other disasters. We are just looking at the existing trajectories and seeing where they take us.

The tragedy is that it is all so easily avoidable. The technology needed to avoid that sort of terrible future is not rocket science, it is here right now. There are many examples in this city of houses and small urban units that do not use power, that do not use fossil fuel, that recycle their water, that actually really make a difference. So we are not talking about dramatic change here, we are talking about changing that little space that is between the left and right ears of the inhabitants of the people of Sydney and then the world, and not big changes.

I think that Sydney's future expansion that we heard about today - another four million people in 50 years - is a huge opportunity for the people of New South Wales and the world. If that expansion happens without you people building another dam, without you people digging up a single extra kilogram of fossil fuel, you have will have triumphed in a marvellous way; you will have spawned new industries that in a decade's time will be taken up by the developing world, places such as China and India, that will lead to a far better industry for all of us.

Those new industries will include solar, wind, water treatment, transport, urban design, engineering - all of the sorts of stuff that you are involved in. Maybe it will even involve a new automotive industry based on hybrid fuel vehicles. I cannot understand why you people in New South Wales are still buying six cylinder Holdens for your state fleet? Do people really need that? Why not buy hybrid vehicles? They cost as much as a Holden. The resale value will be fantastic, if you can get your hands on the vehicles, and you will be doing something for the city's problems in terms of its four-wheel-drive choked roads, and of course the future of all of us and our children.

Have you even thought about green slips for housing? Every time someone sells a house try to up the anti, try to retrofit it to make sure it is not chewing through as much energy - energy that is killing�our environment�- as it was before. After all, 90 per cent of this state's energy is coming from the fossil fuels that are destroying our future. Every kilogram that we dig up digs us into a bigger hole. Something need to be done about it.

What about just saying to developers: "No new developments unless you can do it without making us build another dam or another coal-fired power station?" What about putting out the big challenge. I have seen some of the stuff you have done so far, 40 per cent savings in energy and 25 per cent savings in water. I think it is great, but it is not good enough. You have to be much more ambitious than this. If the last six months of scientific research has taught us anything it is that we have to be on a war footing to preserve our future.

We also have to get this state to back its local industries. We need an aggressive sales program of new industries/new technologies into the Third World. Take a long-term view. Take a leaf out of the book of Denmark, which decades before wind power was competitive with traditional power was strongly backing wind and is reaping the profits today.

I really think this is our last chance; these sorts of meetings that we are having now will actually shape our future. If we don't grab this last chance, what will happen is that decades from now as the Chinese and Indian economies take off the decision will be out of your hands. They will be buying off-the-shelf cheapest technology they can buy to power their industries and their new economies and they will be highly polluting. If you can sell them the new technology, if we can use our advantage to invest in R&D, develop more sustainable technologies you will not only be making yourself rich, you will be saving your future. It is our last chance to, I believe, avoid truly catastrophic climate change.