In his Easter message, Cardinal George Pell said that Jesus did not preach about global warming. This is true. However, it is also true to say that he had said nothing of nuclear war, contraception or papal infallibility. The cardinal is not alone, of course, in calling the phenomenon of global warming into question. John Howard is a very recent convert to the reality of climate change, and he still has sceptics in his cabinet. Another doubter is Michael Duffy, who writes a Saturday column in the Sydney Morning Herald and graces the Radio National airwaves each week.
Some of the global warming sceptics, among them a few scientists, are just contrary types—people who love to upset the accepted orthodoxy—while some genuinely question the phenomenon of global warming. I’m not a global warming sceptic. I accept that the evidence is overwhelming and that we need to take drastic action to avert a catastrophe that will impact on the next couple of generations. We have a profound moral obligation to them to act to lessen the effects of our prodigious use of fossil fuels.
I don’t believe that it can be business as usual, that with a few adjustments we will be able to make it. The neo-rationalist economic model that we use is not sustainable into the future. It is this model that is responsible for the widespread destruction of the natural world, so to me it is inconceivable that we can somehow turn ourselves around while still operating out of the model which caused the destruction in the first place. We need a totally new approach.
However, we also need to be careful about rushing in and making predictions about what will happen in specific situations and places. If this was what the global warming sceptics were talking about we would take them more seriously. For instance, many people have predicted that the frequency and intensity of bushfires in south-eastern and south-western Australia will be exacerbated by the effects of global warming. The Council of Australian Government's bushfire inquiry and the CSIRO’s Climate Impact Group have accepted this scenario.
There is a widespread popular perception, re-enforced by the media as it tries to reduce complex scientific information to understandable language, that global warming inevitably means that everything will be drier, that there will be less rain, and with the vegetation drying out there will be more bushfires.
But this