Living in Byron Shire I often encounter friends who believe climate change is a hoax – a deep state conspiracy (I wish!).
This can be a bit of a conversation-stopper. So rather than becoming disagreeable, I tend to drop the subject and talk about something else.
Over the years I researched a number of documentaries that included changes in the climate and learned a lot about the subject.
Five mass extinctions have occurred on Earth since life began. Four of the five were caused by too much carbon-based greenhouse gas in the atmosphere coming from volcanic activity, known as a ‘carbon spike’.
The Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago, in the Age of Amphibians, was caused by a 5 million square kilometre lava field known as ‘The Siberian Traps’ when thousands of active volcanoes filled the Earth’s atmosphere with billions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. The Permian temperature soared 16 degrees hotter than it is now and 95 per cent of all living things, plant and animal, died. Ironically, the rotting organic matter from the Permian extinction became the rich Australian coal seams we mine so profitably today.
We are now in the sixth mass extinction which science has named the Anthropocine, because it is human activity that is causing it. This should come as no surprise because we have been burning fossil fuels for the past few hundred years and have pumped hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon into our atmosphere. When we look up into the sky, it appears our atmosphere goes on forever. But this diaphanous life-supporting envelope is extremely thin. If the Earth was an apple, the atmosphere is as thin as the apple’s skin!
Science has known since the 1800s that increasing carbon dioxide levels cause increasing temperatures. This increase doesn’t just make the Earth hotter, it turbocharges the global climate, so we get devastating winds, colder winters, catastrophic floods, ferocious heat waves, and heart-breaking fires. Which in living memory, are all happening much more frequently than ever before.
Australia has a schizoid relationship with our abundant coal and gas deposits. On one hand we are aiming for ‘net zero’ and at the same time, go on endorsing new coal and gas leases for exploitation. Our Pacific neighbours just gave Albo a real roasting for his cognitive dissonance on this matter.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
