Drowning in a hothouse

AS A Queenslander by adoption, I have seen first-hand some of the flooding in the south-east. I feel great sympathy for the families and friends of those who have died or who are still missing in the Queensland floods. I also feel sorry for those who have lost possessions and face the prospect of a heart-breaking clean-up.

The Sunshine Coast, where I live, has suffered local flooding and has been isolated for a few days, with all roads south, north and west cut by floodwaters. Shops are displaying signs warning there will be no deliveries of bread, milk, fruit or vegetables for the foreseeable future. But that is a minor inconvenience compared with the problems people are facing in Rockhampton and towns like Gympie, St George, Dalby and Chinchilla. I watched with increasing concern the situation in Brisbane, where I lived for 25 years, as well as the devastating events in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley.

When I moved to Brisbane, the 1974 floods were a very recent memory. Every estate agent had a flood map, showing where the waters had reached. Nobody bought or rented property without checking the risk. When Wivenhoe Dam was built, the optimists said it would protect Brisbane against such extensive flooding. I reminded them it would only act as a buffer as long as it had spare capacity. As we are now seeing, once the dam is full it has to release water. The 2011 flood is about the same level as the 1974 event.

The Queensland floods are another reminder of what climate science has been telling us for 25 years, like the recent long-running drought, the 2009 heatwaves and the dreadful Victorian bushfires. As well as a general warming, increasing sea levels and altered rainfall patterns, climate modellers confidently predicted more frequent extreme events: floods, droughts, heatwaves and severe bushfires.

The decline in rainfall in Western Australia's south-west and the increasing rainfall in the tropics are exactly what the science has been telling us to expect.

It is still too early to say with certainty that climate change is responsible for the strong El Nino event that brought devastating drought to eastern Australia and the equally strong La Nina event that has produced the terrible floods.But they are exactly what climate science has been warning us about since the 1980s.

I wrote Living in the Greenhouse, a book about climate change, in 1989. The science then was predicting what we are now seeing, although it was not confident about the speed of change.

When I published an updated version as Living in the Hothouse in 2005, Scribe Books replaced the plain cover with a striking picture of the 2003 Canberra bushfires. When I questioned him, the editor reminded me that those fires were caused by a summer that was, by historical standards, unusually hot and dry.

Since the science is saying this will be a normal summer in the 2030s, he said, the cover is a reminder that doing nothing about climate change is accepting that we will see more tragedies of this kind. What had previously been 100-year events like the 1974 Brisbane floods or the 2003 Canberra fires will happen much more frequently.

It is appropriate to think about ways of making our towns and cities more resilient. I have been warning for decades about the policy of siting coastal airports in flood-prone areas. Rockhampton has been cut off for more than a week. Other coastal cities are equally vulnerable.

We should recognise that the traditional approach of planning for 100-year floods was only valid while the climate was stable. Now that we have set in train serious climate change, we need to plan much more cautiously.

After we have dealt with the immediate problems, we need to do something about the cause. Some have called for more dams, but that is seriously misguided. Most of the inundation is happening on relatively flat flood-plains.

There is no obvious place to dam the Fitzroy River to protect Rockhampton. The proposed Traveston Crossing dam would have been an ecological disaster and would not have protected Gympie, just as Brisbane was flooded despite the enormous amounts of water stored in the Wivenhoe and Somerset dams.

We need a concerted program of action to reduce greenhouse pollution urgently. It is irresponsible to be planning new coal mines or coal-fired power stations when we can see the tragic consequences of rapid climate change.

We must put a high enough price on carbon dioxide pollution to drive a rapid change from dirty fuels to clean energy. Whatever level that price is to begin with, we need to ensure that it can be scaled up to achieve changes demanded by the science.

Low-income households must be protected against increasing energy costs, whether driven by carbon pricing or the other factors that have recently inflated electricity and petrol prices. We must invest in public transport to reduce wasteful use of transport fuels and phase out the multibillion-dollar subsidies of fossil fuel production and use. Those funds should be driving the clean energy revolution. We should also support the retention of carbon in the landscape through protection of natural areas and incentives for farmers. And we must be pushing for rapid implementation of the Cancun agreement as a first step towards a global attack on climate change.