MICHAEL NORTHCOTT on Radio National’s Encounter. Michael Northcott is professor of ethics at Edinburgh University, an Anglican theologian and a leading author in environmental theology. This is an extract of an intervew:
Now a place I spent a bit of time in doing a bit of fieldwork was Tasmania. And I kind of fell in love with the trees in Tasmania. The trees I’m showing you are all trees in areas that Tasmanian Forestry, as they call themselves, a government agency, have slated for cutting down to be replaced by plantations. The size of these trees is just astonishing – I’m sure many of you have been there yourselves. And the beauty of the area which has been de-forested. What I like about this photograph is that when you see the mosaic of a tree, of the leaves towards the top of this very, very tall tree, hundreds of feet tall, these are the largest flowering plants on earth, these Eucalyptus regnans, they’re wonderful trees. You see a mosaic of leaves, and then beyond it you see a mosaic of cirrus clouds. And this is a rainforest. It makes rain. Old growth eucalypt makes rain. Here in Queensland and in Tasmania. If you cut it down and replace it with a plantation, the plantation doesn’t make rain.
Now the people that I met in one of the forests in the Upper Florentine that was threatened with logging, had put up this sign ‘Old Forests Store More Carbon’, and that is just true. Other than the soil, this is Australia’s biggest carbon store, the remains of your old-growth forest, the quickest hit for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that Kevin Rudd could do is to stop tomorrow, or to talk tomorrow to the State foresters, about no longer cutting down old growth. And so it isn’t true to say that there’s nothing we could do tomorrow that would actually significantly affect and improve the chances of people in Australia, and species in Australia, dealing with climate change. Australia could stop cutting down its old-growth forest tomorrow, and it isn’t just Tasmania. Queensland cuts down more old-growth in weight and tonnage than Tasmania.
So what I’m trying to show in this is that it isn’t just a long-run, distant problem. You already have locally-produced climate change in Australia. Leaving aside the long-run global warming, the biggest single moral priority for you in Queensland to address global warming is to stop local warming, by stopping any more old-growth logging.
The attitude of the forester is that an old-growth forest is a wasteful resource, it’s disorganised, it’s chaotic, you know, God made it maybe, but science and engineering haven’t had a chance to improve it, and therefore we’re not getting value out of it. And so you’ve got to turn that forest from a putatively ‘wasteful’ resource, full of course of myriad species and lots of opportunities for harvesting those species sustainably, and of course at the same time it’s a water source and a source of rainfall. You’ve got to turn it into a thing that you can count, with trees in serried ranks and an accountant and a spreadsheet and he can tell you that in ten years you’re going to make X from that bit of land.
You can’t do that with an old-growth forest.
Now you may say to me that we live our planet whose temperature has always been changing, the idea of a stable climate is a myth, we’ve had Ice Ages and all the rest of it. But we have for the last ten thousand years lived in a very, very remarkable period of climate stability.
This graph shows you the last thousand years only of that, and it shows you at the end, just how significant is the change we’re making. So for a thousand years, we’ve had above or below the average there of 0.5, very little movement. We had a little bit of movement in the mediaeval warm period. Between 1100 and 1200, there was a slight warming, and it was around a third of a degree centigrade, a quarter of a degree centigrade. But that was significant. It was enough in the mediaeval world to create crop surpluses. And you know what they did with those crop surpluses, as the principal form of cash, in that you make more than you need to eat and to trade? Well they were all good Catholic European Christians in those days, and so they thought they should give it to God. And so they built the great cathedrals of Europe with the surplus. That’s why we have so many great cathedrals dotted all over Europe, because of the mediaeval warm period. Not three degrees, but about a quarter of a degree. So temperature change does affect us.
Then you look at that period towards the end of the fifteenth century, and there you’ re looking at a time when the the plague broke out, and there were villages in Yorkshire which the combination of the plague and the cold just emptied out – completely emptied out, I mean massive de-population in parts of northern England and Scotland.
And then there’s another period, a little dip, 1600 or so, sometimes it’s called the Little Ice Age, the Thames froze over, there are some famous paintings by Breughel of similar events in Holland. So there have been changes before, but they’ve been modest.
What we’re looking at now, if you look to the right of the graph, we’re up to above 0.5, which is the kind of medium virtually, just below the medium, we’re up to averaging about 0.5, 0.6 degrees change, which is unprecedented across the last ten thousand years.
What we’re looking at, according to the most conservative estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a temperature change – if we carry on as we are in terms of burning the amount of fossil fuels we are – of between three and four and a half degrees centigrade, and in some places that would be magnified very significantly for various reasons. The speed and the size in temperature change we’re looking at – we’re not talking about going back to the time when the Romans grew grapes in Yorkshire, which is what you often hear – it’s unprecedented. What this though clearly shows is that in the last hundred years, we’ve been living through an era of significant temperature change and rapid and global, historical and in geological terms, of rapid temperature change of nearly a degree centigrade.
Earlier: The ethics of climate change
