An important TV discussion. If the owners want it taken down, then please ask….
See the original unabridged version at:
https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2020-03-02/11906192
HAMISH MACDONALD Compere
Let me bring in Michael Mann here. Was there sufficient warning to government in Australia, in your view, that something very different was going to happen this summer, enough perhaps to prompt them to act earlier than they did?
MICHAEL MANN, US Climate scientist
There are climate scientists who were telling us that because of the behaviour of something called the Indian Ocean Dipole – some of you may have heard about this – we can actually predict something about what’s likely to happen. It impacts the monsoon, rainfall patterns. It’s part of why it was so dry, why the winter was dry and the summer has been dry. So, yes, we knew this was coming. One would expect that policymakers should have used that information, used the information provided by the great scientists here in Australia…..
VICTOR STEFFENSON Indigenous fire expert
there’s been incredible awareness of Indigenous fire management for the general public of Australia – but not only in Australia, but the world. That is looking in now, that we need to have change. And we need change right across the board. This is not dissecting the problems with our environment or the disasters that we’re having now and going, “Well, it’s all about not managing the country. Oh, no, it’s not about climate change.” It’s everything above. It’s all about all of it.
And we need the scientists to help us to reduce the emissions and we need to get communities and people out on country and learning about the environment and reconnecting with landscapes again, just the way Aboriginal people have done for thousands of years…..
MICHAEL MANN
Look, Australia, this is a message to the rest of the world. Climate change has arrived. Dangerous climate change has arrived now. How bad are we willing to let it get?….
JIM MOLAN Coalition senator – ex-military
I certainly accept that the climate is changing. It has changed and it will change. And what it’s producing is hotter and drier weather and a hotter and drier country…. As to whether it is human-induced climate change, my mind is open. But this is… not the key question. The key question is, what are you going to do about it?
Michael might say that the science is settled. And I respect, very much respect, scientific opinion, but every day across my desk comes enough information for me to say that there are other opinions.
HAMISH MACDONALD
So what is that information? What’s the actual information you have?
JIM MOLAN
Oh, I see so much that… You know, I’m a very practical man, Hamish. I’m going to get out there and do things, which… You see, the one thing that…
HAMISH MACDONALD
Sorry, but… Could you answer the question…
JIM MOLAN
Hang on, wait till I answer. The one thing that I agree with, Hamish…
HAMISH MACDONALD
What’s the information… No, what’s the information?
JIM MOLAN
The one thing that I agree with Michael is that climate change, and our policies in relation to climate change, are designed to mitigate the risk. It’s very difficult to mitigate the risk. You can go back and look for the last 100 years how or why it started. If we can’t mitigate risk, then we’ve got to adapt. And that’s the key to what we’re doing. And we are adapting.
HAMISH MACDONALD
Senator, I’m sorry, but you haven’t answered the question, which is, you said you get information across your desk every day which leads you to doubt, or be open-minded about the science.
JIM MOLAN
Yes, I am open-minded about it.
HAMISH MACDONALD
What is that information?
JIM MOLAN
It’s a range of information, which goes… It’s a range of…
HAMISH MACDONALD
I’m just trying to get to the bottom of this. What is the evidence that you are relying on?
JIM MOLAN
I’m not relying on evidence, Hamish. I am saying…
MICHAEL MANN
You said it. You said it. You said it.
JIM MOLAN
But this is why my mind is open. I would love to be convinced one way or the other. But to be prudent, what the government is doing is it’s got a climate… an emissions reduction policy. And it is a good policy. And it will mitigate risk to the maximum that it can. And where risk cannot be mitigated, it will adapt. And that’s what we’ve got to work on, is the adaption.
MICHAEL MANN
Come on now, mate.
JIM MOLAN
And he’s an American.
MICHAEL MANN
Now, you know, you should keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. When it comes to this issue, when it comes to human-caused climate change, it’s literally the consensus of the world’s scientists that it’s caused by human activity. Now, you sometimes hear the talking point from contrarians, from the Murdoch media… that maybe it’s natural. Natural factors would be pushing us in the opposite direction right now.
JIM MOLAN
And we’re into name-calling already, Michael. Well done.
MICHAEL MANN
Well, no, I didn’t call you names…. I just made a point about open-mindedness….
Scepticism is an important thing in science. But there has to be scepticism on both sides. It can’t be one-sided scepticism, where you’re literally…
JIM MOLAN
Oh, absolutely agree.
MICHAEL MANN
…rejecting the overwhelming evidence, based on the flimsiest of ideas that you can’t even define…..
KRISTY McBAIN Mayor of Bega (which was affected by the fires)
Can I just bring it back to Serena’s question?…. Serena’s question was, is this the new norm? Jeez, I hope not. Serena lives in Brogo, a heavily timbered area in the Bega Valley. Her parents… And she’s got a number of brothers and sisters. She is a smart, intelligent, capable young woman, who is now the school captain of Bega High. And we have fabulous schoolkids right across the Bega Valley. Her point is, what is going to change into the future for us?
And what I see constantly is this generational debate or a political partisan debate on climate change. Most people I speak to are over it. They don’t care what one says and what the other one doesn’t say or, “The sky is blue,” “No, it’s pale blue.” Nobody cares. It’s now about what are the actions going to be? How do we mitigate? How do we adapt? How do we make ourselves resilient as communities to it?…
Melissa, your question earlier, about you being affected, your business being affected, everybody up and down the east coast can relate to you. Because we have evacuated 90,000 tourists from an area. There are flame-impacted businesses and there are flame-impacted farms and there are flame-impacted industries but there is not one person that isn’t affected by this disaster that’s unfolded.
ANDREW CONSTANCE NSW MP for Bega
…. God, I’m hoping that they can be unified in a response to how we get through this. So, to Serena’s point about this being the new norm, we can’t afford for this to be the new norm. Nobody can….
We can’t sort of have royal commissions and commissions of inquiry if we’re not engaging with those within community to understand exactly whether there is enough fire trucks in that community,… in our lane, there’s five homes that have been flattened by the fires, and one of them was a mate of mine, Steven Hillier, who… Three beautiful girls. He came home at five o’clock having fought fires in other communities to find his house gone. And Steven, to his credit, he threw his chooks in the front of the ute, we had a beer, and then he went and told Mandy. But guess what he did the next day – straight back out fighting fires. And so many of those RFS volunteers who did that, who did lose everything, did exactly that. So, I think there is a need to talk to those types of people within local communities to do that
KRISTY McBAIN
Yeah, look, over the darkest days of those fires, we had 40 hours of darkness. How do I explain to my kids that it’s actually 10:30 in the morning, and you should be out of bed and eating breakfast? And when I went there, they were all huddled around an iPad, and I said, “What are you doing?” And they were laughing, and they said, “Is it too early to be up?” And I had to say, “Oh, look, come on, I’ll make you breakfast,” and make a joke out of it, but it’s very difficult in those really, really dark days of the Bega Valley when there was 40 hours of darkness, or the skies were, you know, a red or a pink for days on end.
Or you’ve got smoke… My middle son is an asthmatic, carrying asthma puffers everywhere and making sure we had enough supplies when we knew we were going to be cut off… from every road access. It’s really hard as a parent to manage your kids through that. I hold hope that, after what we’ve been through over the last five, six, seven, eight months now, that genuine good debate will happen and the politicians and leaders of our country will come together in a consensus to actually move us forward, because if that doesn’t happen, then there’s probably going to be more days where we’re going to be grappling with red, dark skies, or 40 hours of darkness.
So, I hold hope that this starts… this is the start of a big conversation, good genuine debate where people aren’t in camps, that everybody comes to the table with an open mind, prepared to make sure that the future is much better.
Tags: climate change, Disinformation, politics
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