La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism: Remembering Rain

301 Pages·2019·4.935 MB·English

by  Julia Miller

La Niña and the Making
of Climate Optimism
Remembering Rain
Julia Miller
La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism
Julia Miller
La Niña and the
Making of Climate
Optimism
Remembering Rain
Julia Miller
Director Academic Affairs
CAPA The Global Education Network
Sydney, NSW, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-76140-4 ISBN 978-3-319-76141-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76141-1
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To my children, Madeleine, Chloe and Jack Miller—true islanders for whom
weather and climate are an integral part of their daily lives.
P
reface
Over the weekend of June 4–5, 2016, a severe storm inundated much of
the East Coast of Australia. Strong winds and high seas lashed coastal
settlements from Queensland to Tasmania. For that entire weekend I
didn’t move from my house in Pittwater, a beautiful inshore waterway in
the Northern Beaches area of Sydney. Apart from not wanting to get
drenched, it would have been difficult and perhaps a little foolhardy to
attempt the usually seven-minute crossing from my jetty to the marina
where I leave my 12-foot motorised open commuter boat. The winds
were gusting up to 50 knots, thankfully from the north to north-east.
With my house facing east, our jetty and boats were protected, to a degree,
by the lie of the island. Apart from the shrieking of the wind, it was a rela-
tively quiet day on Pittwater—there were few souls out on the water,
although the ferry kept up her reassuring hourly run during that wild
weekend around Scotland Island and the inhabited bays of the Western
Foreshores.
On Monday the winds had abated and I embarked on my regular com-
mute to the office in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Ultimo. As I drove to
the train station I could see the impact of the storm all around me. My
usual route was blocked by a fallen tree, my second choice by flooding and
it became apparent after encountering two more police road blocks that
there was only one way out of the Northern Beaches. A distance of two
kilometres took me 30 minutes as the early peak-hour traffic was chan-
nelled into one main road. Driving home that night I listened as ABC
Radio’s Richard Glover tried, but failed, to engage local politicians in a
discussion of the weekend storm and its association with climate change.
vii
viii PREFACE
It was too soon, too raw—there had been loss of life and extensive damage
to housing and infrastructure. Sydney and much of the East Coast of
Australia was mopping up and assessing the cost.
In the following days there was some disquiet about the battering the
coast had taken. In the Northern Beaches area of Sydney the Collaroy Surf
Club had lost its seafront deck, much of the beaches had disappeared and
multi-million dollar beachfront houses in Collaroy were damaged by the
action of wind, rain and surf as the land that separated them from the sea
edge disappeared.1
Politicians had shied away from associating this storm with climate
change. But for one climate scientist, who had been studying the transfor-
mation in Collaroy Beach and nearby Narrabeen for more than 40 years,
the association of storm damage with long-term changes in the climate
was obvious. Professor Ian Turner from the University of New South
Wales Water Research Laboratory commented that the impact of this
storm was exacerbated by sea level rises due to climate change. Moreover,
Australians should brace for more of the same.2
Professor Turner and other climate scientists have long been warning
Australians of the implications of human-induced climate change includ-
ing sea level rises which are particularly pronounced around the coast of
Northern Australia.3 Furthermore, although this storm was caused by an
1 The storm damage was headline news. See, for example, “Elderly Woman Found Dead
and Two Tasmanians Still Missing After Storms Lash East Coast”, Nine News, June 7, 2016,
http://www.9news.com.au/wild-weather/2016/06/02/18/38/gale-force-winds-and-
flash-flooding-expected-to-batter-south-east-queensland; “Sydney Wild Weather: Homes at
Risk as Collaroy, Narrabeen, Battered by Storm”, Daily Telegraph, June 6, 2016, http://
www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/sydney-wild-weather-homes-at-risk-as-collaroy-
narrabeen-battered-by-storm/news-story/45e63ecdca3e9678f51ac51270996781. David
Taylor, “As Many as Seven Collaroy Homes Under Threat as Crews Prepare for Rising Seas”,
The World Today, ABC Radio, June 7, 2016, http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2016/
s4477130.htm.
2 “This storm is having the impact it has because we’ve had high sea levels with king tides, we
had large waves come from unusual directions. Climate change is about higher sea levels and
storms coming from different directions. These sorts of events are what we should plan for and
expect, and us in the profession are expecting these events to occur more frequently.” Professor
Ian Turner, Water Research Laboratory at the University of New South Wales, quoted by Tracey
Bowden, “East Coast Storm: Scientists Want Erosion Monitoring to Deal with Impacts of
Climate Change”, 7.30, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, June 6, 2016, http://www.abc.
net.au/news/2016-06-06/coastal-monitoring-needed-to-protect-against-storms/7482716.
3 Marie Ekström, Chris Gerbing, Michael Grose, Jonas Bhend, Leanne Webb, and James
Risbey, eds, “Climate Change in Australia Information for Australia’s Natural Resource
PREFACE ix
East Coast Low, an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events
has been associated with the impact of climate change on the main climate
driver in Australia, El Niño Southern Oscillation or ENSO.
The ImPorTance of La nIña
Australians are most familiar with El Niño, the climate phenomenon that
brings hot, dry summers, clear winters and, worryingly, severe bushfire
weather. After a couple of very wet, coolish summers in 2010–11 and
2011–12 we heard a lot about La Niña. There was relief from the usual
relentless scorching sun but they were difficult summers. Instead of bush-
fires and heatwaves and cooling off at the beach, Australians endured
pounding rain week after week. It was as if tropical weather had descended
below the palm line, warming the air of the more temperate South. The
volume of rain saturated river catchments and walls of water flowed down
valleys, breaching embankments, flooding towns in southern Queensland,
New South Wales and north-western Victoria, taking homes, businesses,
fencing, cars and, heartbreakingly, people and livestock with them.
Residents in Queensland’s capital city Brisbane suffered through several
floods with the flood in January 2011 being the most notorious. As the
new year ticked over, the Brisbane River broke its banks, flooding the
central business district and several inner-city suburbs.
Floods and droughts have always been a part of the Australian climate
lottery. But La Niña gained special significance after those drenching sum-
mers. The Queensland floods sparked an official inquiry, there were inves-
tigations into the management of the Wivenhoe Dam, built originally for
flood mitigation, and new towns, such as New Grantham, replaced old to
ensure residents were no longer in harm’s way. Yet a disaster it was and it
appeared from the extensive nature of the inquiry and the length and
detail of its report that we aspired to be ready and to mitigate against the
impact of similar weather events in the future. The commission of inquiry
found the floods of 2010–11  in south-eastern Queensland were
unprecedented and, in many places, completely unexpected and that no
government could be ready for a disaster of that scale. After the floods 78
per cent of Queensland was declared a disaster zone which was the equiva-
lent of an area the size of Germany and France combined. The inquiry had
Management Regions: Technical Report”, CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, Australia, 2015,
http://www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au/en/publications-library/technical-report/.
x PREFACE
Map 1 The eastern and southern regions of Australia showing major rivers, cities
and towns in the area under study. Map by Rob Clemens, Action Group 2000
the benefit of an expert panel of hydrologists and engineers who drew up
a blueprint for a flood study of the Brisbane and Bremer river catchment.
They agreed the impact of climate change should be factored into any
future flood study.4
4 Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry, “Final Report”, March 2012, 30, 45,
http://www.floodcommission.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/11698/QFCI-
Final-Report-March-2012.pdf.
PREFACE xi
Climate scientists agree that La Niña brings heavier and prolonged
rains, milder temperatures, storms and floods.5 Some scientists are making
bold associations between ENSO, including La Niña and climate change,
arguing that the impact of El Niño and La Niña events is intensified.
Australian scientist Sarah Perry anticipates that global warming will put
about 20 per cent more land in Australia, South America and Equatorial
Africa in the firing line as ENSO ramps up. In addition, the changes to
rainfall patterns, already impacted by changes in the long-term climate,
will be more widespread.6 Yet the association of specific extreme weather
events with climate change seems harder. Although climate scientist Kevin
Trenberth went on record as drawing a link between the 2010–11 floods,
La Niña and climate change,7 the reporting of this link in the media high-
lighted that for some the science may not be as clear cut. Monash University
climate scientist and president of the Australian Meteorological and
Oceanographic Society Neville Nicholls commented: “It’s a natural
phenomena. We have no strong reason at the moment for saying this La
Niña is any stronger than it would be even without humans.”8
5 Scott B. Power and Jeff Callaghan, “Variability in Severe Coastal Flooding, Associated
Storms and Death Tolls in South-eastern Australia, Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century”,
Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, May 2016, https://doi.org/10.1175/
JAMC-D-15-0146.1.
6 S.J. Perry, S. McGregor, A.S. Gupta, and M.H. England, “Future changes to El Niño–
Southern Oscillation Temperature and Precipitation Teleconnections”, Geophysical Research
Letters, 44, 10608–10616, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL074509.
7 Trenberth argues that climate change overlaid on ENSO events intensifies those events.
Kevin E. Trenberth, “Climate Change Caused by Human Activities is Happening and It
Already has Major Consequences”, Journal of Energy and Natural Resources Law, 36, no. 4,
2018, 463–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/02646811.2018.1450895. Scott Power argues
that climate change can be expected to influence ENSO but precisely how is still unknown.
Scott Power, François Delage, Christine Chung, Greg Kociuba, and Kevin Keay, “Robust
Twenty-First Century Projections of El Niño and Related Precipitation Variability”, Nature,
502, no. 7472, 2013, 541–545.
8 David Fogarty, “Scientists See Climate Change Link to Australian floods”, Reuters,
January 12, 2011, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-australia-floods/scientists-
see-climate-change-link-to-australian-floods-idUSTRE70B1XF20110112. More recent
research has drawn a stronger link to climate change and the frequency and intensity of El
Niño and La Niña events. See Wenju Cai et al., “ENSO and Greenhouse Warming”, Nature
Climate Change, 5, 2015, 849–859, https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2743; and
the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website, “Climate Change in Australia” also draws a
link between the heavy rainfall during the 2010/11 La Niña and human activity. https://
www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au/en/.