About
In November 2006, I had the privilege of representing Australia at two international meetings on global change research held in Beijing, China. They were a turning point in my view on the profound threat posed by global warming.
Climate change is very real, happening now, and the rate of change is accelerating. I was struck by the urgency for direct and immediate action needed - at every level, in every nation.
Currently, the planet is in what scientists term a ‘non-analogue’ state. That is, the environmental conditions being witnessed today have no historical counterpart any time in our geologic past. According to evidence from ice-core records drilled from Antarctica, the closest we get to finding global temperatures somewhat similar to present is close to 800,000 years ago (the Pleistocene). During that period, there were nowhere near the 6.6 billion people with the technology to alter the ecological systems the Earth houses today. Sobering stuff.
The first conference I attended was the International Young Scientists’ Global Change Conference (YSC). It brought together 100 young scientists from 35 countries around the world to discuss some of the key challenges facing our scientific discipline, and the implications it held for the future of global sustainability.There were only three Australians present at this meeting. I had the rare opportunity of being the only Australian (and palaeoclimatologist from our region) to address the congress.
I presented some of the highlights from my doctoral research; of the total number of extreme El Niño/La Niña event years reconstructed over the past 500 years, 43% occur in the twentieth century. Strikingly, 30% of all reconstructed ENSO event years occur post-1940 alone suggesting that recent ENSO variability appears anomalous in the context of the past five centuries. This is a significant finding with widespread societal repercussions.
Following the YSC, all the young scientists attended the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) Global Environmental Change Conference: Regional Challenges. The ESSP represents a collaboration between the four major international global change research programmes:
DIVERSITAS: an International programme of biodiversity science
IGBP: the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
IHDP: the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change
WCRP: the World Climate Research Programme
The meeting was attended by more than 1,000 global environmental change scientists, policy makers, practitioners, scholars, members of the private sector and journalists. Issues ranging from advances in climate science, global food security, human health, sustainable development and biodiversity loss were discussed. Take a look here for some highlights.
The results presented were disconcerting. In fact, it would be safe to say, they were downright shocking.
Global growth in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels was 4 times greater in the period between 2000 to 2005 than in the preceding 10 years. Despite efforts to reduce carbon emissions, the global growth rate in CO2 was 3.2% in the five years to 2005 compared to 0.8% in the period 1990 to 1999.
This indicates that recent efforts to reduce emissions have virtually no impact on emissions growth and that effective caps are urgently needed. On our current path, we will find it extremely difficult to rein in carbon emissions enough to stabilise the atmospheric CO2 concentration at 450 ppm and even 550 ppm will be a challenge.
Bottom line? we are fast heading down the worst case future planet scenario which is likely to be shaped by an increasingly frequent series of extreme climate episodes in a rapidly unstable (i.e. unpredictable) climate system.
Due to the phenomenon of environmental inertia, even when anthropogenic emissions do begin to decrease, atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise for up to as much as a century. Global temperatures will continue to increase for an even longer period, locking the world into continuous feedback of unforeseen climatic change. Effective management of Earth system under such conditions will depends on early and consistent actions. Action needed now, not in some vague, distant future.
At the close of the meeting, Conference Co-Chair Gordon McBean presented the statement of the Beijing Conference on Global Environmental Change which was formulated as an urgent call by the scientists to society and policy makers to collaborate in the face of an ever faster changing environment. They noted:
In this era of human activities modifying the planet on a global scale, we are concerned for the continuing adverse affects on the global environment and the resulting serious threats to sustainable development of human society.
The urgent need for improving communication between scientists with the broader public was identified, stating it was our role to:
Take responsibility to mobilise knowledge for action, and provide society with the scientific information to better meet present and future needs within the context of sustainable development.
This site is response to this call-to-action. I decided to begin sharing not only technical materials but my thoughts and experiences of being a young scientist engaged in global change research at this historic juncture in time.
This site is designed to give you an idea of the projects I’ve worked on and am currently involved with. There is a link to all my publications and details of my research interests and topics of potential collaboration.
I will also post links and discussion on relevant media stories. In particular, you will get an Australian scientist’s perspective on the global warming/climate change debate. I aim to provide you with material to make your own mind up about each of the issues. A better informed public may help turn the tide at our upcoming election in 2007.
This site is anything but definitive. It only seeks to contribute material that I have come across to the broader community interested in global change issues. In the spirit of peer-review, I welcome all comments from people out there. Please feel free to contribute suggestions or advice on any of the material posted here.
All the best
Joëlle