Australia is at the sharp end of the devastating impact of climate change and must urgently undergo an energy revolution if it is to survive, according to eminent scientist and author Tim Flannery.
Flannery, one of eight finalists for the Australian of the Year award marking the country's national day tomorrow, believes that if ever a textbook example of the impact of global warming was needed, Australia provides it.
Bushfires have raged for weeks in the country's alpine regions, water reserves in the major cities are drying up while a once-in-a-century drought has ravaged farming land, cutting into the nation's economic output.
"We are the worst, as a developed country. There is nowhere else that is getting the hammering that we are getting at the moment," Flannery said in an interview.
"It may be that other factors will be unleashed in the future which will make it much worse for places like Europe and North America, but at the moment every city in Australia with the exception probably of Darwin, has got water rations. That is not due to poor infrastructure planning or anything else. It's actually due to a natural cycle of water availability which is driven by greenhouse gas pollution," he said.
radical
To avert biological disaster, Flannery's suggestions are radical -- the coal industry should be shunted aside, traditional methods of producing power junked and a desert metropolis established and placed at the center of Australia's electricity grid.
"We need to decarbonize the economy extremely rapidly -- which we could do if we were on a raw footing. We could just close down the coal-fired power plants. We could. We could mandate we are going to have electricity rationing, we are going to close things down, we are going to build a new infrastructure as quick as we can," he said.
Asked whether this approach would cripple the country's economy, currently riding a commodities boom thanks to North Asia's hunger for Australian resources, Flannery is unmoved.
"Won't the Australian economy collapse if climate change continues? There are a lot of ways to make electricity. Burning coal is just one of the more antique and stupid ways of doing it. We've got solar [energy], we've got wind, we've got geothermal," he said.
Flannery explores these ideas in his latest book The Weather Makers, which explains how the build-up of greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels has damaged the atmosphere and is leading to global warming.
This has resulted in the melting of the polar ice-caps, rising sea levels and the extinction of some species -- incontrovertible evidence that mankind's pollution is heating up the earth, he said.
"It just makes the simple point that the atmosphere is very small -- it's about one-five-hundredth of the oceans. So it's very easy to pollute," he added.
Flannery has invited controversy from environmentalists for arguing that nuclear energy should be used to counter global electricity shortages, but his energy solution for Australia is even less conventional.
solution
The zoologist, biologist, explorer, conservationist and writer, who rose to prominence following the 1994 publication of the ecological history of Australasia The Future Eaters, believes the solution for this country lies in harnessing the heat contained in the earth's crust.
Geothermal energy is already used in Iceland, North America and New Zealand, and Flannery believes Australia has the best geothermal resource in the world in the Cooper Basin in the South Australian desert.
"One of the things I have suggested is that, if Australia is serious about this, we could build a major new city out there, link up with the north-south railway line, make it the center of our electricity grid and use that resource. It will provide enough electricity to run the entire Australian economy for 100 years," he said.
Flannery, who speaks quietly but intently, hopes that Australia will change from being one of the worst polluters on a per capita basis, to the best example of the responsible use of world resources.
"We could do that. We need a government to admit that it was wrong in ignoring this issue for so long and get on with a new vision," he said.
"Ultimately there is only one set of accounts that matters at all. It's not what [Prime Minister] John Howard says or what the current account balance in the Australian economy is -- it's the one held by the atmosphere, the greenhouse gases held by the atmosphere and that's the one we all need to keep our eye on," he added.
To the climate change sceptics, Flannery says the changes the world has recently witnessed provide clear evidence that the earth is heating up at an alarming rate.
"What has become evident over the last three years probably is that climate change is proceeding at a far more rapid rate than even the worst pessimist among the scientists imagined. We all underestimated the power of the greenhouse gases," he said.
predictions
Flannery, who later this year will take up a post at Sydney's Macquarie University researching climate change, has sobering predictions for the future.
"Let's project ourselves 50 years out and imagine that the rate of melt has continued so that the sea level has come up three or four meters. What that would mean is that there's barely a functioning port facility on the planet. So how do we go about international trade which is actually the center of our global civilization? Every coastal city is under enormous threat. People would be spending trillions just trying to keep their cities going. You've got refugees on a scale that is unimaginable. The stresses on peace would be enormous. Does that sound like a stable situation? That's just projecting what we've seen so far. That's just saying if we continue as we are, that's where we will end up," he said.
Flannery is not alone in his predictions. His voice joins growing calls from around the world for a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas pollution and equally dire visions of the future.
But while the amount of greenhouses gases already in the atmosphere is enough to cause disaster, Flannery believes this is no reason for inaction.
"This is about survival. The underlying conditions in the biosphere are getting worse and worse. The biggest danger with climate change is that it will go off the boil because it's got too big, too overwhelming. We've got to keep fighting against that," he said.
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