Author: Joëlle Gergis.
Publisher: Melbourne University Press, 2018.
Reviewed by: Sam Garrett-Jones and Graham Kelly, NPA Environmental Book Club
Australians are no strangers to ‘droughts and flooding rains’1. Joëlle Gergis charts a history of Australia’s climate since European settlement and before, with a focus on its high variability and the consequent disasters of flood, drought and fire. She uses written accounts of early colonists and ‘formal records’ of weather from William Dawes’ 1788 observations onwards.
She notes that, from the point of view of loss of human life, heat stress is the cause of our largest disasters. Many more people died in Melbourne from heat stress in the very hot week prior to the Black Saturday fires of February 2009 than the 173 deaths from the fires (Australia’s worst loss of life from bushfires). In the 19th century, the 1851 Victorian Fires were likely the worst Victorian fires ever experienced in terms of area burnt, and the 1893 Brisbane floods were so bad that Australia received international aid (perhaps the first example of countries helping each other out with natural disasters).
Gergis explains Australia’s climate of extremes in terms of wind belts and ocean currents with multiple acronyms: ENSO (El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation), IOD (Indian Ocean Dipole) and SAM (Southern Annular Mode, and the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). She is able, for example, to map written accounts of flooding of the Hawkesbury River in 1805-06 to wet La Niña conditions.
What sets Sunburnt Country apart is Gergis’s obvious authority as a climate scientist and recently a lead author of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. The book arises from an award-winning collaborative interdisciplinary research project to reconstruct the last millennium of Australia’s climate. Gergis also headed the Past Global Change (PAGES Regional 2k) team reconstructing the temperature record of the Australasian region for the last 2000 years.
Prior to European settlement the story relies on ‘annually-resolved’ proxies for the past climate, such as varved (banded) lake sediments, Antarctic ice cores, tree-rings, coral cores and speleothems. The work involved is enormous as vast amounts of data must be evaluated, compared, analysed and the results synthesised and matched statistically through climate ‘detection and attribution’ models to give scientifically rigorous results. This is Gergis’s own research and the most interesting part of the book. This approach does have limitations: there are very few annually-resolved proxy records for inland mainland Australia, for example. Discussion of paleoclimate proxies that can’t be tied to specific calendar years would merit a book in itself.
Gergis makes the point that the Southern hemisphere, having fewer scientists, measurements and proxy records, tends to be overlooked or treated as peripheral. But the Northern hemisphere is not an accurate representation of global climate. Whereas the ‘human fingerprint’ of warming in the Northern hemisphere is seen from the 1830s, warming in the Southern hemisphere emerges only from the early twentieth century, with the southern oceans perhaps providing a buffer.
No reader of Sunburnt Country could deny the realities of a warming global climate. Indeed, the planet ‘has never been hotter in human history’. From 1985-2014, ‘Australia, New Zealand and the surrounding oceans were warmer than in any other thirty-year period over the past 1000 years’.
Gergis examines the consequence on various aspects of our economy, society and civilization if the rise in temperature continues well beyond the 1.5 degrees implicit in the Paris Agreement. These range from critical issues such as health effects and the loss of land from sea level rises to impacts on tourism revenue and the sports we currently play in summer. By mid-century, extreme hot days could be expected 4-10 times more often.
Australia has learned from extreme weather events in the past. The Brisbane River floods of 1893 led to flood warning telegraph systems. The Federation drought of 1895-1902 highlighted the need to regulate water use in the Murray-Darling basin. Victoria’s 1939 Black Friday bushfires prompted changes in the management of forests.
The NPA book club briefly reviewed Sunburnt Country in 20192. It remains an engaging book which explains climate science in lay terms and makes clear the challenges ahead. Since then, heat records have continued to be broken and political responses gained speed, meriting an updated second edition. It deserves a wider audience. Gergis brings a very human approach to the subject, recounting the ‘vicious scrutiny’ of climate scientists by some media and her frustration at the delay in the development of renewable energy sources. These themes are expanded in her Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope (Black Inc., 2022).
Footnotes
1 Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country, which gives this quote and the book’s title, was inspired by the breaking of the Federation drought in the early 1900s.
2 See NPA website: Book Review: Sunburnt Country by Joëlle Gergis – National Parks Association of NSW (https://npansw.org.au/2019/08/28/book-review-sunburnt-country-by-joelle-gergis/ )