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When Jody Brown finished high school in 2001 and started working full-time on her family’s station outside Longreach, the weather itself seemed to turn on western Queensland, where a drought took hold that lasted, with a break of two or three seasons, for 20-odd years.
By the time it ended, she had become a student of regenerative agriculture, an advocate for Farmers for Climate Action and fearful for Australia’s future in a rapidly warming world.
When she tells stories of the dry years, you get the sense of a drawn-out ordeal punctuated by moments of resonant horror.
She recalls how at Latrobe Station, her family’s 45,000 hectares of savannah and dry cracking soils, Mitchell grass plains and gidgee scrub withered under superheated days that over the years hit with ever greater regularity. “It’s a slog. It’s a slow burn. You never know when it’s going to end,” she says.
Jody talks to Alejandro Carrillo, a rancher from the Chihuahan Desert in Mexico, who has advised her on building climate resilience.
But she also remembers the fleeting moments, such as when she realised the roos were ditching joeys from their pouches in order to cling on to their own lives a little longer. And she remembers listening to the radio as she made the long drive to Byron Bay for a conference in 2019.
According to news reports, half of NSW seemed to be on fire, while in southern Queensland, the drought was still biting hard. To the north, a biblical flood that would kill 600,000 head of cattle had set in.
She remembers speaking to the chopper pilots who were ferrying food and fodder to stranded stock in the north, country she knew well from her years in cattle camps, who spoke of the weird silence once they killed their engines.
The sounds of birds and insects that normally filled the warm air was gone.
Speaking at a Farmers for Climate Action conference in Canberra last week, Brown said her sense was that brutally hot days, the ones that kill off the grasses she has restored with new regenerative practices, were coming more regularly than ever before.
Also addressing the conference was Professor Mark Howden, director of the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions at the Australian National University, who also serves as a vice chair of the UN’s chief climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He confirmed Brown’s worst fears for the nation and her four-year-old daughter Violet. Last year, he said, the world had breached warming of 1.5 degrees for the first time. This was because, since leaders signed the Paris Agreement, nations had failed to arrest carbon emissions. Given the world’s so-called “carbon budget”, the amount of carbon dioxide we can emit into the atmosphere that is consistent with any given temperature, we have about three years left to halt our emissions before the 1.5 degree increase becomes locked in.
“We have to go cold turkey,” he told the audience of farmers who had gathered for the event. “That’s a big ask.”
He outlined a diabolic vision of the future with disconcertingly simple language. “The accumulation of carbon dioxide leads directly to the policy of net zero. The science and the policy are now linked. The problem is, we’re not enacting that policy anything like quickly enough. And, unfortunately, our commitment to fossil fuels, or our addiction to fossil fuels, continues.”
As though directly addressing Brown’s experience at Latrobe over the past two decades, Howden told how the increased greenhouse gases translated into higher average global temperatures and into hotter days across Australia.
Addressing a graph from the Copernicus Climate Group, Howden showed how year by year over the past few decades, the number of days in which temperatures exceeded the average had rapidly grown.
“You can see, if we go back to the 1990s, very few days even exceeded one degree. If you go to last year, three-quarters of the days of the year exceeded one and a half.
“So those extremes are changing incredibly quickly, and those extremes are in many times what actually matters to agriculture. That’s when it hits your crops hard, when it hits your grapevines hard, when it hits your animals hard. And the evidence about how these are impacting on systems right across the globe is accumulating very, very quickly, and most of it’s negative.”
Howden said that as temperatures soared in Australia, rainfall was retreating to the south and west, and when it did arrive, it was doing so increasingly in destructive torrents rather than in predictable, useful, fronts.
“Unfortunately, my job here today is to be the bad cop,” Howden said.
None of this was news to Brown, nor to Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who later addressed the conference, and whose department has faced criticism for not releasing a far more comprehensive outline on the threat Australia faces.
Parched earth at Latrobe station, Queensland.
The so-called National Climate Risk Assessment was expected to be released late last year. Its delay has led to fears in the climate movement that it has been caught up in increasingly complicated domestic and international climate politics.
For more than a year, Bowen and with somewhat less demonstrable enthusiasm, the broader government, have been seeking to secure hosting rights for next year’s UN COP climate talks. By now, Australia should be preparing for what is one of the world’s most significant annual diplomatic gatherings.
But despite broad UN support for Australia’s effort, Turkey has not yet ended its rival bid. It now appears possible the host will be announced during the UN General Assembly later this month.
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Australia’s credibility at the event rests upon its having delivered its 2035 emission reduction target, as it is obliged to do under the Paris Agreement. That target will be set by cabinet after it receives advice from the Climate Change Commission, whose chief, Matt Kean, has suggested that a range between a 65 and 75 per cent reduction would be achievable and responsible.
Last week, climate advocates and business groups ramped up their lobbying efforts over the figure.
At the Farmers for Climate Action conference in Canberra, Bowen said he would release the risk assessment before he announced Australia’s new target.
Those who have seen glimpses of the document describe the future it outlines for Australia as frightening.
Former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner Greg Mullins, now an advocate for climate change action and a founding member of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, has spoken at length about the report with a colleague who contributed to sections on emergency responses in a hotter world.
He understands it will include outlines of the risk Australia faces under the 1.5 degrees of warming that Howden believes is now all but inevitable, as well as at 2 degrees and 3 degrees.
“If I had to pick a word to describe what I’ve heard? Horrifying,” Mullins says, of his discussions of the assessment.
Greg Mullins says emergency services will not be able to cope under some of the scenarios detailed in the yet-to-be-released climate risk assessment.Credit: Nick Moir
At two degrees of warming, he says, emergency service responses of the sort Australians are used to become unsustainable.
“In terms of emergency services, there’s no way in the world they could cope. When I say cope, I mean, be able to actually beat bushfires and save people from floods.
“With the sort of scenarios we’re looking at, it’s wholesale retreat from coasts because of coastal land inundation; it’s thousands of homes [in] areas that aren’t flood plains now, but will be as flooding gets worse; it’s moving homes out of elevated bushfire prone areas.
“It’s a horror show.”
A second person briefed on the report recalls confronting detail about everything from ocean acidification to loss of biodiversity to the impact on supply chains, but the most shocking data she recalls was about prolonged drought in the nation’s southwest, and coastal inundation, especially around north Queensland.
Mullins says failing to release the full picture contained in the draft risk assessment will doom future generations like Brown’s daughter, Violet, 4.
“[Under one scenario in parts of north] Queensland by like 2070 or so, 25 per cent of land within five kilometres of the coast will be prone to coastal inundation.”
Bowen has denied the report has been delayed for political reasons, though he has signalled its contents will be grim.
“I wouldn’t call it scary,” he told the ABC on Thursday, “but it will be confronting.
“It’s a factual, scientific assessment. It will show Australia has a lot at stake, and that there’s a significant price for failing to act. Treasury modelling feeding into it will give a clearer picture of the costs of inaction. We’ve always known the cost of inaction is greater since the Stern Report nearly 20 years ago, but this will be a stark reminder.”
Mullins says he hopes the brutal sections of the report he understands to have been included in draft are seen by the public.
“It’s exactly what we need for two reasons. To wake people up, particularly those people who work in government or politicians around the world, and to make people realise that we’ve got to make major changes.
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“It’s going to be uncomfortable, but if we don’t, we’re dooming our kids and our grandkids.”
Brown, having returned to western Queensland from Canberra, has been watching the politics play out from afar. She hopes the government goes high with emissions cuts.
“To be honest, I want to see a target of at least 85 per cent. Anyone settling for mediocre targets is essentially kicking both agriculture and nature to the kerb, and with it the wellbeing of us all,” she says.
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