Book review - "Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia"
by Joëlle Gergis

February 29, 2024

There has been a lot of discussion and controversy around Oberon lately concerning renewable energy. While there are legitimate concerns about the location and effect of renewable energy projects, in many cases the objectors seem to be working from a basis of climate change denial to deny any need for new sources of energy. "If we don't need it, we don't need it."

This book is by an expert in the field of climate, and is definitely worth a read.

I have been asked if I believe in climate change, but "believe" is the wrong word. I no more believe in it than I believe in evolution, the age of the universe, the effect of antibiotics or the value of vaccines. These are not matters for belief - they are matters where the science is almost as close to a fact as it possible to be. My response is always that I don't believe, I know with almost certainty. (I agree with Robert Anton Wilson: "Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence".) This book is the work of a scientist who has investigated changes in weather patterns and climate in Australia over the last few hundred years and guess what - things are getting worse. Weather events are now closer together and more damaging and the cause is clear - it's because humans have been doing things to change the climate.

Climate change deniers keep telling us that the weather has always been variable (they know the difference between climate and weather but it suits them to ignore it). They tell us that floods, droughts, forest fires and tidal surges have been recorded for as long as people have been keeping records (and remembered from before that in the stories of indigenous people). This is true, but it obscures the fact that conditions now are not like they were - they are getting worse. I first saw this book in January 2020 when my eyes were streaming from the effect of smoke from a fire that was 100 kilometres away and had burnt 123,000 hectares of bushland (it continued to burn for some time). This was just one of the many fires across New South Wales and Queensland and followed several months of the highest average temperatures ever recorded. The dam that supplies water to my town was then at 32% capacity - three years before it was spilling water at several hundred megalitres each day. In the middle of the drought we had the heaviest snowfall for many years. Things are not as they used to be.

As Dorothea Mackellar pointed out in the most famous Australian poem, the sweeping plains of Australia have always been subject to droughts and flooding rains. This book is an excellent history of Australia's variable and often terrifying weather patterns, and it is a warning that things are only going to get worse unless we do something about and do it soon.

My only criticism of the book, and it's one I brought up with the author at the launch of the book, is that it refers to "climate change skeptics". The correct term is "deniers". I know they don't like being called that but facts are facts, and while they might choose which facts to believe, belief doesn't change the truth.

Highly recommended.

You can ask the librarian to get a copy of this book through an inter-library loan. Bathurst Library has a copy.

See more from Joe Heller here

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About the author

Dr Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University, Australia. Her research focuses on reconstructing Southern Hemisphere climate variability over the past 200-1,000 years using annually-resolved tree rings, corals, ice cores and historical records.

Dr Gergis is a lead author on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on the Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report - a global, state-of-the art review of climate change science.

Her latest book, Humanity's Moment: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope, was shortlisted for a 2023 Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) and the 2023 Queensland Literary Non-Fiction Award, and won the 2023 Scholarly Book of the Year.

You can read the rest of her biography here.

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