The longer you work on the climate change beat as a journalist, the less surprised you are when the very bad things scientists warned would happen, start to happen. Given we’re pumping carbon dioxide at record levels into the atmosphere, where it hangs around for a century or more, there’s a relentless inevitability to the whole thing.
It’s not so much that “shit happens” but that “physics happens”.
But this year has felt different. The physics has been kicking us up the arse – a parade of one climate catastrophe after another. Heatwaves, floods and fires marching in unison, trampling traumatised communities and ecosystems.
This year I’ve had scientists break down in tears during interviews after seeing the devastation that record ocean temperatures had wreaked on coral reefs in the Americas.
Since April, the temperature of the world’s ocean surface has been at record highs.
In Antarctica, the amount of sea ice around the vast continent has been far below anything seen before on the satellite record. Scientists have openly expressed fear to me that they “might have missed something” – that global heating is taking hold of the continent decades earlier than they thought possible.
“The year 2023 will almost certainly be the hottest year on record” is a sentence I could have written confidently as long ago as August. Over the last couple of decades, we’ve been living on a planet that hasn’t been this hot for at least 100,000 years.
Every human civilisation that ever existed has been on a planet that was cooler than the one we’re on right now.
Sometimes, it makes filing 650 words to a deadline seem a touch inadequate against the profoundness of the predicament we’re in.
I’ve caught myself feeling hopeless more and more often, and so a few months ago I started to wonder. If this is how I’m feeling, what is it like for the climate change scientists who knew what was coming decades ago? So I asked them.
Today Guardian Australia is launching a podcast, video and article series – Weight of the world – featuring in-depth and personal interviews with three pioneering Australian climate change scientists: Graeme Pearman, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and Lesley Hughes.
Pearman led climate change research at the CSIRO for 30 years and started working on the issue in 1971 when he was measuring how much CO2 there was in the air above a wheat field in regional Victoria. He briefed three consecutive prime ministers on climate science: Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard.
Hoegh-Guldberg’s pioneering research in the 1990s revealed the threat global heating poses to coral reefs, the ocean’s richest ecosystems and home to a third of all marine species.
Hughes was among the first scientists to publish research showing the risk that a heating planet would have for the world’s animals and plants. As many as a third of all species could be committed to extinction as early as 2050.
In the series, each scientist shares how they made their discoveries, how they came under attack and how the implications of their science changed their lives. Crucially, they tell us what gives them hope when the world seems to be barrelling into a crisis.
Their hope and optimism is far from unbridled. They are realistic about where we’re heading, but these veteran scientists have had a long time to work out how to keep going purposefully in life when the prognosis for our only home can feel so dire.
As Hughes told me, hope is not just an emotion. “I’ve come to the conclusion that hope has to be a strategy,” she said.
“Because if you don’t have hope for the future, then you give up. If I give up, if all of the other scientists give up, if all of the other advocates and people that care give up, then we are lost.”
In Weight of the world: a climate scientist’s burden, we hear how three pioneering scientists made their discoveries, the personal toll it took on them, and how, during the hottest year on record, they stay hopeful. Experience the full series here
