Disaster as usual in the face of the eye of the storm

THE LONG queues of Esky-clutching ice-desperate people outside the very few service-stations with power in the wake of Category 5 Cyclone Marcia should have delivered a pertinent message. Instead, so much of it was disaster-as-usual coverage. Stoicism, good neighbourliness, miraculous escapes; raging torrents; fallen trees; mud in houses; boats floating in main streets and so on.

It was practically bereft of any coverage of climate change; rising sea levels; weather extremes; or the increasing population of towns and cities expanding into low-lying areas.

About 100,000 people lost electricity supply in the cyclone. Many of them will have to wait up to four weeks to get the power on.

The very fossil-fuel-reliant power grid was being hammered by the very climate change it is causing.

Yes, we know that climate change is supposed to result in fewer cyclones, but it also means more severe ones and ones that hit further south. And that is what is happening

Cyclone Marcia was a record southerly crossing of the Australian coast for a Category 5 cyclone.

Climate sceptics always point to freak weather and say we have always had freak weather. The trouble with that is that the trend is hugely towards getting records in the direction of climate-change predictions, not in random directions and certainly not in the direction away from climate-change predictions. We have not had nine of the 10 COLDEST years on record the past 20 years.

No scientist will link a particular cyclone, fire or flood with climate change. Rather they will only point to a trend. Cyclone Marcia certainly fitted the trend predicted by climate scientists.

An interesting thing about this cyclone is that so many of those affected related stories of how that had only just recovered from a previous flood or fire.

Attitudes may slowly change. People are less likely to buy the “freak weather” argument when they get battered by “freak” weather regularly. It indicates the harsh weather events are no longer “freak” but a new normal – a frightening prospect.

Those Esky-clutching queue-formers might also change their attitude to solar power. There have been some interesting developments here. Hitherto, solar power has been mainly for the well-to-do, urban-dwelling, chardonnay sippers.

But recently your rugged rural and regional dweller has taken an interest, especially the four-wheel-drive camping set who go to remote places where the power grid will never go.

They can buy a suitcase-sized solar panel for a few hundred dollars and bolt it on to the camping trailer, or even unfold it on the ground. It will easily charge a 12-volt battery to run an electric car fridge. No more queuing for ice. The solar set-up pays for itself after a time – no more buying ice and spending time and fuel going to get it.

The solar-panel technology is improving and getting cheaper all the time. So is wind-generation technology. The stumbling block is the battery technology.

Batteries are like canning food. The basic inventions were in place in the early 19th century, but progress since then has been slow and incremental.

Both technologies store energy – one electrical and the other food. Both have alternatives but not for every circumstance.

But batteries are expensive whereas canning is cheap.

In its early days, canning saved millions of lives in delivering reliable supplies of germ-free food.

Batteries might ultimately save more lives. If they get light enough and cheap enough to store the energy generated by solar and wind they might save the planet from the effects of fossil-fuel-induced climate change.

In the week since Cyclone Marcia, those affected have seen how the alternatives to batteries and canned food can be hopelessly inadequate.

Even those “lucky enough” to have a generator were struggling. TV reporters interviewed people with generators but no fuel and people whose generators had been rendered useless by floodwaters.

Slowly attitudes are changing. The “we’ve always had cyclones, bushfires, droughts and flooding rains” attitude is being challenged. You could sense this when people told the cameras how they were just recovering from the last flood or fire when this one hit.

It is not a question of, to use the Prime Minister’s phrase in a different context, “shit happens”. Maybe it is a case of we are causing it to happen.

The attitude of both political parties to climate change ultimately may become irrelevant. It might have been better and quicker to have had strong government action across the world to deal with climate change, but ultimately, there are equally powerful forces. Here a half a dozen:

People queuing for ice seeing their four-wheel-drive mates with solar powered fridges.

People copping huge electricity bills while their neighbours with solar panels pay little, nothing, or even get a rebate.

People in developing countries, especially India, seeing that it is better to have some electricity while it is sunny or windy than having no power at all while waiting for the power lines to come to the village to connect to the fossil-fuel grid.

Scientists and financiers seeing the value in improving battery technology because cheap solar and wind generation has created a huge untapped market for it.

People generally seeing the moral cause of green energy, in much the same way that they buy free-range eggs.

People getting sceptical of political parties saying they are doing the best for the nation and its people, but when it comes to the crunch they will not upset their donors.

Political parties beginning to realise that more voters are recognising that a nation like Australia has to join the global effort to combat global warming, otherwise the Esky queues will get longer and the weather batterings more frequent.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and Fairfax Media on 28 February 2015.

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