The upcoming election added urgency to talk throughout the recent Byron Bay Writers Festival. I listened to writers of both nonfiction and fiction use their own works to counter the talk of political leaders and their policies. Media commentators brought in other perspectives. Between sessions, everyone around me had another story.

How to make sense of all the clamour? Separating the meaning from the spin is a good start. To help deflate any doublespeak, here’s a topical science crib sheet.

Climate change: the better word for this is ‘climate weirding’. Whatever the degrees up or down or the variations from place to place, expect the unexpected. The impact is not only on us and every other living being. It’s on all our interrelationships, including with our habitats.

Ocean acidification: A change in the pH of the seawater is already measurable. Relatively little movement in the direction of acidity is enough to hinder marine life in creating their shells and skeletons. Certain Antarctic shellfish already show a 30 per cent drop in the weight of their shells. Hardest hit will be the living coral reefs, particularly in the Coral Triangle north of Australia. Some 126 million people depend on these reefs.

Growth: a term often used in economics based on maths which describes the ‘doubling of doubling’. On paper, it looks ‘good’. The graph shows a line that rises sharply and heads way up.

In the real world, any application has problems. Consider a population of bacteria which can double every twenty minutes. When only half of their given food source is used up, they are deep in crisis. The next ‘doubling’ in the next twenty minutes means they will eat up everything.

Any exponential growth on Earth will meet limits. If anyone promotes this growth, how will they recognise the moment before reaching that halfway point in depleting the resources that sustained this same growth? How much growth can any habitat (or infrastructure or city) accommodate and still function? What point is clearly marked as too much? What decides that point?

Geoengineering: an old term with a new definition. Technological ‘fixes’ for effects of climate weirding. One plan is ‘marine cloud whitening’: unmanned ships travel the ocean pumping up seawater and spraying it up into the atmosphere, building up clouds which will also bounce back sun rays.
Another is dropping iron particles into the ocean or even shooting sulphur particles into the upper atmosphere. These might trigger natural cycles to create a haze to block the sunlight. The sky may not be blue anymore.
All of these are considered possible now, within the budgets of larger nations, corporations or individuals such as Bill Gates. But all of them are as predictable as Russian roulette. What do promoters of geoengineering really know? How are they able to predict how bacteria, marine algae and the weather itself will behave? That’s something marine specialists admit they cannot.

Nuclear power: Lifecycle studies of more than a hundred existing plants show that they produce on average twice as much carbon as solar panels and six times as much as onshore wind farms. For every dollar spent on nuclear, six times the savings can be made by spending on energy efficiency (ie applying strict standards for all vehicles, appliances and buildings, etc).
And twenty four years after the Chernobyl meltdown, 5,000 reports finally translated from Slavic languages reveal that a million people were killed by that radiation. The WHO, working without these reports, has reported only nine thousand deaths. Eighty per cent of children born to irradiated parents are disabled. Contrary to earlier findings, the wildlife is as badly affected.

Energy efficiency: WWF and other specialists say that 2014 is nature’s deadline for the shift to a low carbon economy in time to avoid runaway warming above two degrees. Going above two degrees is breaking with the entire history of climate variation of the planet.
What we can’t do at the level of world governments, we may be able to do at the state and local level. Top of the list are mandatory energy efficiency measures. In Australia, federal requirements may not start until 2020 but state local and household ones could be adopted much sooner. Up to 65 per cent of cuts in emissions required may be achieved this way. 

Northern Rivers Energy Strategy: It’s true that in March 2010, NSW government admitted it approved in principle two new coal fired power stations. But by July, injunctions against these projects were filed by student and activist Ned Houghton, using the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO).
Meanwhile, EDO with Simon Clough of Lismore Council are organising a Northern Rivers regional energy strategy. Early data shows many more solar panels throughout the area add up to a feasible alternative. 

Greening Australian Big Business: July also saw Australian Ethical Investments launch the world’s first climate advocacy fund. These investments include challenging Australia’s biggest companies to shareholder scrutiny about climate change policy. Manager James Thier says every investor can now be proactive, stepping ‘into the void left by the failure of the political ­process’.

Optimum Population Size: There is naught to say about this with respect to migrants or refugees. There’s a lot to say about the level of consumption per person as well as the level of carbon emissions. Presently, we rank near or at top in the world for both ­issues.

But we also have a fistful of changes we can help achieve in the next four years. Who’s voting for us?