The Best Australian Science Writing 2012

by Elizabeth Finkel

  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.

  The apparent stability of the East Antarctic ice in modern history is either confounding or reassuring, depending on your attitude to the science. Sceptics and deniers have frequently pointed to it as evidence that bad things are not happening, but the first readings to emerge from ICECAP’s scrutiny, and from improved satellite systems, are fast eroding that comfort. The project’s mission is to get to the bedrock of the issue, metaphorically and practically. Working out of the American base of McMurdo, the French station of Dumont d’Urville, and Australia’s Casey, ICECAP is one of the most significant projects of the season.

  While the preoccupation of the other ICECAP scientists is the future of this planet, and Young’s work will contribute to that, over dinner it emerges that he has an ulterior motive for visiting Antarctica. He is using it as a dress rehearsal for a space mission to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. A whole new world. ‘Great,’ I reflect glumly. ‘Plan B.’

  Young is hauling down south an instrument the size of a suitcase which contains ice-penetrating radar which can see deep into the white. He hopes to send a refined version of this device – squashed to a fraction of the size – into space. His objective is not climate data but insight into the greatest of galactic mysteries: are we alone?

  The allure of Europa has been increasing ever since its surface was glimpsed by the Galileo space probe. Scientists began to suspect that beneath its thick ice crust there may be an ocean – just as great bodies of water lie deep beneath the Antarctic ice. Young’s radar will reveal where the ice is thinnest, so that ultimately a probe might collect water. ‘And where there is water, you expect some sort of life form – primitive life,’ he explains.

  Primitive life is the specialty of the third diner at the table, Mark Schultz, the young biologist. He studies tiny, almost invisible invertebrates. He’s not long finished his PhD, and is now on his way to assist in a field project probing the microscopic populations of wildlife living in the ‘Antarctic rainforest’ – the mosses and lichens which cling to exposed areas of rock, falling into hibernation if the ice sheet covers them, reviving when they feel the sun again.

  As Young Gim warms to speculation on the possibility of finding life under the ice of Europa – ‘We know from Antarctica, in water temperatures like –4ºC, even in the deep sea and with no light, you still have life’ – Schultz reveals that he had spent his day visiting the laboratory of a colleague at the university. His friend had pulled out of the freezer some Antarctic samples. They had been held there for five years. ‘And he put the sample in a petri dish and it just starts buzzing and moving about,’ Schultz enthuses. His studies have not dulled his wonder.

  I’m reassured by the stories of such resilience in nature. This is a theme which permeates much of the scientific debate on climate – have the doomsayers underestimated the capacity of nature to adapt and bounce back? It’s a comforting notion in the sense of highly adaptive broader biology, but I am not sure how well it applies to humans.

  Back at our apartment that evening, playing the Werner Herzog documentary Encounters at the End of the World for my two new friends, I am struck by the sequence when the director turns the camera on an American biologist – a rather hauntedlooking individual with a penchant for vintage science-fiction movies – who talks graphically about the brutality and awfulness of the invisible world of microbes, a place where tiny creatures tear one another apart. Our most distant biological ancestors had fled such horror all those aeons ago, he reflects.

  Really? The sight and sounds of the hospitalised victims of terrible human violence in Afghanistan and the wild high country of Papua New Guinea are still fresh, grotesque and vivid when I shut my eyes. As are the casualties of corruption in the Congo and invisibility in Mozambique or Mutitjulu, in Central Australia. And I ache for the purity of Antarctica, terra incognita. Unknown, untouched, unspoilt.

  I go to bed thinking that evolution hasn’t guaranteed escape from the most basic of our hard-wired urges. Meanwhile, our primitive reflexes struggle to recognise a threat which sneaks up on us slowly, which doesn’t snarl and bare its teeth, and so we miss the cue to act to save ourselves and our children.

  One of the questions I have for scientists is how they endure their knowledge, if it anticipates terrible danger. If their grasp of science brings an amorphous future into sharp, cataclysmic focus, how do they pursue ordinary lives, imagine a future, grow families? It is a question often asked of journalists who witness human suffering or atrocity. I was asked it by biologist Schultz. I confessed I didn’t know. I told him I was hoping the scientists might help answer that one for me.

  Plainly there is some mechanism which allows us to switch off what is too awful to bear. We cordon off our personal, intellectual and intimate lives from harsh reality; we summon up hope to obscure scenes too horrible to contemplate. Hope is our shield.

  Our capacity for hope has clearly served us well through human evolution, providing the momentum, vision and resilience to overcome obstacles with sheer obstinate intent. But Clive Hamilton argues that hope, in terms of the consequences of climate catastrophe, is a dangerous delusion, one of the human distractions which hogtied useful response in the lost window when it might have done some good. What we require, he argues, is not hope, but the courage to embrace hopelessness, and to be galvanised by that.

  A few years earlier, I had a long conversation about these issues with Graeme Pearman, arguably Australia’s foremost climate authority. Formerly CSIRO’s chief of atmospheric research, and the author of more than 150 scientific papers, he has devoted years to broadening his knowledge beyond his core expertise to earn international recognition for his capacity to speak across the scientific disciplines on climate. He had come to understand the planet probably as well as any one person ever might. But the people on it – the species he had watched become increasingly endangered – remained a riddle to him.

  As a scientist, he said, he once believed that his role would be to assemble the evidence, be as impartial and clear as possible, present it, and step back. Humanity would recognise what was at stake and act appropriately. It struck me that good scien
ce had much in common with the best journalism. Pearman devoted more than 25 years of his professional life, and much of his private energies, to precisely this task.

  But this thesis turned out to be horribly flawed. What it failed to take into account was human vagary, human psychology. He waited, he told me, with increasing distress and despair for humanity to act, feeling himself gradually consumed by bleakness and depression. He had, he realised, been ‘suffering under the delusion that as knowledge of the physical world improves, rationally based information would lead to rational responses to such threats as climate change’.

  But what a surprise: human rationality turns out to be highly individual, a unique expression of life and circumstances. This understanding came as something of a shock to a physical scientist. The clever modellers on whom we rely to divine our futures are sometimes gobsmackingly gauche in their appreciation of how people work and how the world turns.

  So with the assistance of some new colleagues expert in human behaviour, Pearman delved into dark new scientific territory, the human psyche. He learned that confronted with a truth too awful to contemplate, many people seek diversion, distraction, denial. There are so many coping mechanisms – the anxious might deny; the sad might avoid; the hopeless become resigned; the frustrated, cynical; the depressed, sceptical; the angry, just fed up. Pearman, ever the scientist, rescued himself from despair through immersion in this new field – turning his energies into the study of human responses to climate change, eventually publishing papers on the issue urging social, behavioural and organisational scientists to enter the fray, arguing that they had an essential role to play in shaping the attitudinal changes required to respond to the warming being forecast by physical scientists.