Hello and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations at the Powerhouse museum. Today is number 30 of 100 conversations happening every Friday at the museum. The series presents 100 visionary Australians who are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We’re recording live here in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right up until the 1960s. So, it’s fitting that in this Powerhouse museum we shift our focus forward to the solutions to the climate crisis. I’d like to acknowledge that we’re meeting on the traditional lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and future. My name is Marian Wilkinson. I have written and broadcast many stories about climate change. My latest book, The Carbon Club describes the fraught political battles over our climate policy that too often saw the advice of our scientists ignored or undermined. So, I’m delighted to have, sitting next to me today, leading climate scientist Dr Joëlle Gergis based at the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the Australian National University. Her first book, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia, looked at how human activities have changed unnatural climate patterns. Her latest book, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope, is a call for action to restore our relationship with our planet and each other. And we’re thrilled to have her join us today, so please welcome Joëlle.

Joëlle, you’re one of the few women I know who owned a chemistry set as a girl. So jealous. Who gave you that set?

That was actually something I went out and bought myself. I sort it out. I guess I was someone that was really fascinated in understanding things like science when I was a kid. So, as well as my real love of books, I really also was fascinated by things like chemistry.

Well, of course, your great love became geography. And I know a few people, especially school kids, might say, ‘Geography, how dull is that?’ But how you explain it is that you were learning how the world worked, and I wondered whether being a child of immigrants helped spark that love of the big, wide world.

Absolutely. I think, I mean firstly, I was just really lucky to have a very inspiring geography teacher and all of a sudden, things just started to spring to life. Just understanding not only things like how tropical rainforests work and things like that. We were also just learning about the cultures of different parts of the world, how they interacted with the natural environment and our place, and really understanding how humans are actually altering that relationship. And having an Egyptian heritage, sometimes we would go back to Egypt and I’d experience a really different perspective on the world. Obviously, Egypt is a developing country and I saw a lot of poverty quite close- up and my family weren’t particularly wealthy and they migrated to Australia in 1978, not too long after I was born and I grew up here. But I guess for me it informed my worldview of really understanding that although I was living in the Western Suburbs of Sydney when I was growing up and that’s where I went to school but there was a whole other reality out there that I think I became very aware of. And when I was studying geography at school, I realised that it isn’t just what’s happening in our own backyard, there is this big, wide world out there, and I was really fascinated by that and I wanted to get out and have a look at it.

Your father was a great believer in education. How much do you think he inspired your love of science as well as of learning?

My dad was amazing. He was one of seven children, he lost his father when he was six months old and their family went broke during the Great Depression. But he was really bright and he went on to study medicine at university. So, my dad was this incredibly driven person who really believed that education was the key to a better life and the way he used to talk about education made me feel like it was really a sacred privilege. So, my dad is a really, was a very important person in my life and I think very much encouraged me to think big, to never really be constrained in terms of what’s possible. And I think his life was very much an example of that.

Well, while you were still at school learning about geography, you had your first fierce encounter with extreme weather. And it was back in 1994, the bushfires were surrounding Sydney, threatening your neighborhood. Given your later career, I’m wondering what that experience had on you as a teenage girl.

It was amazing. I remember in 1994 the sky was just completely filled with smoke and there was ash falling in the neighborhood and burnt leaves and I was terrified and I really was starting to think, why is Australia’s climates just so ferocious? What is it that causes these extremes? And I was just amazed at how disrupted society could become. And so, I think, probably many young people right now would have experienced the Black Summer in that way and for me, the 1994 fires in Sydney, I guess were the equivalent for me, it was this awakening moment where I realised that the world could be really dangerous and that Australia has this extraordinary climate. And I think I, that was sort of really the beginning of me wanting to know more.

Well, wild weather follows you throughout your career, and I was fascinated that when you went on to university to study environmental science, that you were shaped really by these wild weather patterns. And while you were at university, something came along called the ‘El Nino of the Century’. Tell us, what was the El Nino of the Century and why did it influence you so much?

So, El Nino is effectively the largest source of year-to-year climate variability on the planet. So, aside from the seasons themselves, El Nino really dominates weather patterns over about 60 per cent of the Earth’s surface and in 1997 a really major El Nino event was happening. And when we get El Nino events in Australia we get below average rainfall, we tend to have our most severe drought periods, we have really bad bushfires, we even have dust storms and things like that. And on the other side of the Pacific, they experience enhanced cyclones, stormy conditions, heavy rainfall events. And so, this particular event was so destructive and it had so many different impacts and I had been learning about El Nino in my lectures and all of a sudden, once again, it sprung to life. But after that particular El Nino event, I saved up a lot of money and bought a round the world ticket, and I was travelling with my boyfriend at the time, and where we were going, we were on just like the holiday of a lifetime, I suppose, but it ended up being this real veil being lifted I suppose, and seeing places like in South America where villages had just been swept away by torrential rain and years later, they still hadn’t recovered. Seeing parts of the Amazon being destroyed for cash crops, you can sort of see that intersection between extreme weather and poverty overlaid on top of each other. And that’s when I decided I want to do a PhD, I want to know more about this thing, El Nino, because the more I, when I was studying, I realised that our records were really quite short. And so, understanding those natural cycles and how often they repeat was really limited. And most of the work had been done over in the South American region, not much had been done in our part of the world.

By doing that research on these natural weather patterns, you were able to really put your mind to what is climate change, what is the impact of climate change happening and what’s natural variation. This is a big issue for Australia. Why is it so important?

It’s absolutely fundamental. So, because we live in a country where we have such extreme climate variability, we are the land of drought and flooding rains, right. That’s, Dorothy McKellar said that all the way back, I think it was in 1904. And that is because, by and large, we’re influenced by these different climate patterns that originate in the Pacific, the Indian and the Southern Ocean. It’s a bit of a tug of war of tropical and sort of polar influences that that create Australia’s climate. So, it’s a really interesting place to be a climatologist actually, Australia, even colleagues around the world say that that is, is a really complex place to study extreme weather and climate. So, many people think that what we’re experiencing is just part of natural climate variability. So, whenever we get a drought or extreme rainfall, we’ve been through that before, so that’s not a big deal. But my whole research career has really been focused on trying to provide better estimates of natural or pre-industrial climate variability to get a sense of how a warming planet is actually shifting those changes in extremes. And that has been really, really interesting because the planet is changing so much now and it is one of these things that we can start to see the alteration of those natural cycles because we’re actually fundamentally shifting the thermodynamics. And so right now, that’s actually a really core area, research priority area, in climate science is to understand how this warming planet is altering natural variability. And as we’ve seen right now, if I can tell you a quick little story, everyone would be very aware that we’ve just gone through a very wet period, a La Nina period, so La Nina period is where we get above average rainfall in the Australian region. But when I’ve been looking at the numbers recently, the La Nina event was actually quite weak in comparison to the ones we’ve seen in the past. What has been interesting is there’s been this interaction between the Indian Ocean that’s locked in to cause and reinforce wet conditions. But what’s really interesting to me is that the impacts we’ve seen in 2022 along the east coast of Australia is the sort of iconic flood impacts that we saw in the 1950s and the 1970s when we had these really prolonged wet conditions that were very much characterised by extreme tropical cyclone variability and things like that, whereas we haven’t seen that in these current events. So, I’m really fascinated by things like that. So, if we’ve got a weak event playing out right now and we’re seeing very extreme impacts, that if you compare it to the past, it really starts to be a bit of a concern, to be honest, because what happens when you get a really strong La Nina event playing out on a warmer planet, then we start to see really unprecedented extremes.

I wanted to take you to your first book, Sunburnt Country, because you did a lot of work to try and unravel what was the natural weather patterns in Australia. And you obviously worked with a lot of other scientists on this. Was any of this motivated by trying to answer at that time, in the 2000s, the many climate sceptics who kept on saying to climate scientists like yourself, this is just natural variability?

Absolutely. I mean, at the time as well, we were in the grip of the Millennium Drought, which was a really severe, protracted drought in Australia. And at that time, again, people were coming out and saying, ‘Oh well it’s all just natural variability.’ And so, I decided to really take a good look at this. And then I realised that our drought history only really extended back to the start of the Bureau of Meteorology’s official rainfall records, which begin in 1910. But I’d sort of dipped into history and spoken to other scientists in different parts of the world that basically were telling me that if you looked back through historical records, in the case of Australia, old colonial records, old newspapers, and Government Gazettes and all sorts of Observatory records, I also worked with the Sydney Observatory record with the Powerhouse museum, and we decided to try and do a really big push and collate all of that information that was available back to 1788. And it was amazing actually, because it turns out that the very first weather records were kept by William Dawes and he came out on the First Fleet. He was on the Sirius, which was the flagship of the First Fleet and he basically kept this meticulous weather journal, which he recorded measurements four to six times every single day. And it turns out when the First Fleet actually arrived it was really wet, it was La Nina. They turned up in a wet period and they didn’t actually experience drought until 1791. And so that fascinated me, I published that material and that was a bit of a proof of concept to get a sense of, ‘I think we can do this.’ And then I ended up teaming up with a whole range of very eminent scientists, I worked with Professor David Karoly at the University of Melbourne, but we roped in a whole range of people to be involved, including the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, the State Library of Victoria, the Powerhouse museum, and also other organisations like the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the Bureau of Meteorology and I think there were 10 partner organisations, all in all. But I really loved working with the archivists who also showed us things like what was in the art collections in terms of watercolor paintings of flooding of the Hawkesbury in like 1803 and you could see all these incredible impacts or newspaper stories from the National Library of Australia digitised all the early Australian newspapers. And so, this was just a treasure trove for me. And so effectively it took about a decade really to piece all of that together. And it culminated in the book Sunburnt Country.

You mentioned your mentor, Professor David Karoly. He was one of the scientists that really copped it from the climate sceptics on these questions and I’m wondering how much those constant attacks on science at that time that affected David, did they affect you?

Absolutely. I mean, David has just been such a pioneer in our field and he’s one of the few people really in the world that’s been involved in every single IPCC assessment since 1990, in one way or another, whether it’s a contributing author, a lead author, a review editor, just the expertise that David holds in his mind is extraordinary. And yes, he would come into my office having gone and spoken to Alan Jones on the radio, and it would sort of debrief with me and tell me about these things. And there’d be times where he’d get the hate mail, the death threats, that sort of thing. I guess, as a young researcher, it was kind of scary. And then as I was working on this project that you just mentioned, one of the things that we did in that particular study is we drew together all of these natural climate records, these geologic records. So, things like ice core records and coral records, tree rings and we basically reconstructed Australia’s temperature variability year by year for the last thousand years. It was the first time that anyone had done this for the region and we basically showed that the most recent period was the warmest in the last thousand years. And we did some modeling comparisons where we saw that could not, that warming could not be explained without human-caused climate change. So, it was very clearly outside of the bounds of natural variability. And so, that study, when it came out, was seized upon by the climate change skeptics and they ended up really harassing me, to be honest. This was in 2012. I received several Freedom of Information requests for like hundreds of emails for correspondence between me and my scientific colleagues looking to see whether we’d reverse engineered the results, were we tried to just show warming to somehow manipulate the data sets. I was receiving hate mail and some, from some of the usual sort of commentators in some of the papers. And that was really difficult, actually, as an early career researcher. It was an assault on me and it felt like, I just thought that as a scientist, you do your work, you put it out there, that’s really the end of the story. But it turned out that no, actually at that time, because it was a really politically charged time in Australia that message was not welcomed. And I think I learned pretty quickly that there is a whole other public conversation that was going on outside of my research world. And I think that was very, very formative for me that time.

And yeah, I was curious about that because around the time you were doing that research, you did something that a lot of scientists never do, you did a professional writing course at RMIT in Melbourne, and I’m wondering if this was because you really felt that need to get that conversation out into the public?

Firstly, I was fascinated by science and writers like Tim Flannery were really inspiring for me because they were bringing just the fascination of the natural world alive for me in a way that felt really animated and felt like something that was really something that connected with me, I suppose, on an emotional level. But my work as a research scientist, I realised that a lot of people outside of the research community don’t really have a sort of deep understanding of the work that we do, they might only get little snippets or grabs from newspapers or various different places and for me, being able to tell our stories in our own voice became really, really important.

After this you became what I think is a relatively rare creature in Australia, a female climate scientist who also became a lead author with the IPCC. There’s been a few of you like Lesley Hughes, but it is still a rarity. Can you give our audience a little bit of an understanding, a brief understanding about what the Sixth Assessment Report was and what you do as a lead author?

Absolutely. So, every seven years, the United Nations undertake this extraordinary review of the state of climate change science. And so, the Sixth Assessment Report is obviously the sixth in a long line that began in 1990. And to be selected as an author, about a thousand nominations were put forward by different governments of the world, and about 240 of us got selected from about 66 different countries. And I was one of the 12 from Australia that was selected to be involved in the first volume of this report, because there are several volumes. Volume I deals with the physical science, so the nuts and bolts of how the climate system is actually changing.

And that’s your expertise.

That’s my area of expertise, exactly, because I had studied El Nino and rainfall variability and all sorts of things. So, it began in 2018 and we released our report in August 2021. And throughout that time, we are literally working around the clock in various different time zones to collate and synthesise, I think there were over 14,000 peer reviewed articles were read for this report, condensed down into these really condensed chapters. So, for the volume I was involved in, there are 13 chapters, and each of those chapters has about 80,000 words. So, you’re looking at a report of well in excess of a million words plus appendices, all of the lines of code and all of it, it is amazing. And, of course, being scientists, it all goes out to peer review. So, for our assessment report there were there were around about 75,000 review of comments that needed to be addressed, the text had to be revised and then our comments on how we revise the text, put in a database that’s been made publicly available so everyone can see exactly what has been changed in the text. And then that text then goes to a UN approval where the governments of the world go through it line by line. And that approval process can take days and sometimes you can get interventions by different nations, for instance, Saudi Arabia made over 100 different interventions into the approval process of the summary for policymakers, for Working Group One, wanting to weaken some of the language and take out the references to the direct contribution of fossil fuels to the warming planet. And so, all of a sudden, all this very, very careful scientific work has been put into the bunfight of political discourse and a completely different process. And so, I guess that’s all to say that scientists work incredibly hard to do this. And I should say, so if that sounds intense, it was intense, but this is all happening for free, we’re all volunteers, we didn’t get paid a single cent for the work that we do.

I want to take you to the process because I think it had a very profound effect on you. You talk about a meeting with your colleagues, this is before the pandemic hit in France, where it sounded to me like you were going through a very profound emotional crisis with the work you were doing. And you wrote at the time in your diary these words that really hit me. You said, ‘It’s an extraordinary time to realise that we are witnessing the great unravelling, the beginning of the end of things.’ As a climate scientist, intellectually, you knew this work, you knew these problems. Why do you think emotionally you were then struggling to come to grips with this?

When I wrote that, that was when the Black Summer fires had occurred. And in those Black Summer fires we saw 25 per cent of temperate forests in this country burn in a single bushfire season. That’s just an extraordinary thing in itself. It broke all sorts of records, which is a big deal for a country like Australia with such a ferocious history. We saw about 3 billion animals either killed or displaced. The koala has now become an endangered species on the east coast of this country as a result of habitat loss and in New South Wales, koalas could become extinct within 30 years. And so, I’d literally just got back from the third lead author meeting, IPCC lead author meeting, and come back to the Eastern seaboard on fire. And so, for me, there was this real intersection between what I was intellectually looking at in terms of the nuts and bolts of a warming world and how that was actually impacting my country, in real time. And another thing that was going on at that time as well was the Great Barrier Reef was experiencing this back-to-back bleaching where we saw 50 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef die off since 2015. So, for me, I was just watching all of this unfolding and I realised that most people don’t understand how bad this is. And I think as a scientist, we’re expected to be rational and logical and we are. But then I found myself breaking down in tears at my desk when I realised that there are certain things that you can break in nature. And that the numbers on a graph is not the same as, I guess, the people and places that you love. And for me, the Black Summer fires, they burned through an area that is really close to my heart in northern New South Wales, there’s this remnant subtropical rainforest, part of the Gondwana Rainforest Network, which are extraordinarily precious. And they are these relic rainforests that have been there really since the age of dinosaurs and for them to be, 53 per cent of those forests burnt that season and to be thinking that they’ve managed to last eons and here we are literally incinerating these areas that are usually like draped in mosses and just these lush, beautiful places that were just so dry that they would turn to fuel and starting to burn. And for me I never thought I would witness the burning of rainforests and my husband grew up in Lismore and the areas around there. And so, for us it was a really visceral response to the damage and realising that once these places go you really can’t get them back.

You talk about how important it is to face the reality of the climate crisis with other people. And this realisation, I think, hit you when you were giving a talk during the Black Summer bushfires in the Blue Mountains. Tell me about that night.

That was a really surreal night where it was the first time in Sydney’s history that catastrophic bushfire conditions had been declared. And I was driving up for an event at the Varuna Writers House as part of, I think it was the Blue Mountains Writers Festival or an associated event, and there was literally bushfire smoke that I had to drive through to get there. People had been evacuated out at the time. I wasn’t even sure if this event was going to go ahead or if indeed it was safe to be travelling on the roads at that time. But somehow, I got there and somehow the crowd turned up and it was a full house and I just got up there and I went through some of the highlights of my book, Sunburnt Country, and I was just joining the dots and I could just literally see pennies dropping all in the audience. And I remember by the time I got to the end of it, I kind of choked up because I realised that we live in this magnificent country, I mean, we are the most biodiverse country in the world. And I realised that we’re losing it and this sense of custodianship that Indigenous people feel, I can only imagine, I can only imagine the grief that they feel thinking about how we’re losing Country and how we’re really not doing enough to protect these precious places. And when I realised that these things can just be drastically altered in a single season, I think something was really galvanised in me as a scientist that it’s not enough for me to just publish in the literature, it’s not just enough for me to sort of continue on just doing what I do. I realised that I needed to be having a really public conversation.

The following year, you wrote a remarkable and deeply disturbing essay called The Terrible Truth About Climate Change. You say in that essay that part of your feelings of fear and alarm reminded you of the same feelings that you had when you saw your father gravely ill a few years earlier. It’s an incredibly confronting analogy. What prompted you to write that essay?

I think because of the similarity of the feelings that I was feeling, my dad was really unwell at the end of his life and it took a really long time for him to die. And I think when you see someone, it was this sort of agonising fits and starts of he’d rally a bit and then he, you know, deteriorated, he’d rally, deteriorate. And I think eventually you could see the inevitability of the outcome. Life wants to live and it was amazing how the life force in someone holds on. And I realised that we were seeing that in the natural world as well, that life is wanting to hold on but there’s a point after which it can’t. And something breaks and something fails and then we’re in a completely different system and you can lose things. As you mentioned right at the start of this conversation, my dad was a really important person for me and I think to just go through that grieving process and realise that things, precious things can be lost. There is an inevitability around that. But I think it made me realise that you can’t just think that life indefinitely goes on. We have to cherish the things we have here right now because it’s only finite and our time on this planet is finite. And so, while I did my best to make the most of my time with my dad, it made me sort of think about well what can I do that’s meaningful in terms of the career that I’ve chosen? How can I meaningfully contribute to helping create this sort of sense of protection and custodianship for the planet that we all love so much? So, I guess they were, that was the analogy and it was so raw for me at the time because I still processing my dad’s death but I could also see ecosystems collapsing. And I think as a natural scientist, it felt like it’s life. If you boil it all down, it’s just life trying to hold on. But there’s a concept of resilience, but there’s also a concept of things die.

And you quoted Rachel Carson, the famous American environmentalist, in that essay in a way that I thought was really interesting. You said that Carson had taught you or said, ‘It’s not half so important to know as to feel.’ What do you think she meant by that?

Oh, when I saw those words, it was just something really crystallised to me, because as a scientist, we seek knowledge out and we seek to intellectually understand things in the parameter of things and all that sort of stuff. But it’s one thing to understand things intellectually, and it’s an entirely other thing to feel it on this emotional level. And so, I think of it as this sort of connection between the head and the heart. And I think that we need to start to do that and really do need to start to feel that sense of what’s at stake and that we are living through this profound moment in human history where we are experiencing an incredible amount of loss and disruption. So, Rachel Carson’s words, are profoundly important words, that I think that it would be really terrific to see the scientific community starting to embrace this idea that you don’t have to be cold and detached from your work to be a credible scientist. I’m still very much a logical and rational person, I bring that full skill set to my work, but I’m also a human being with emotions, and I think it’s disingenuous to pretend that I don’t feel distressed when I think about the largest living organism on the planet, the Great Barrier Reef, dying on our watch. I mean, how could you not feel a sense of despair and distress around that? And so, I guess as a climate scientist, I can see these things around me. And so, I felt as a writer, the best thing I could do was write about how I was feeling and maybe that would give voice to those concerns. And maybe actually it would tap into something that other people were feeling or maybe weren’t able to articulate for various reasons, because we’re not really having much of a public conversation about this. And so firstly, it’s a bit of a taboo to talk about emotional things in the scientific realm. But I think that also shuts off a very important conversation for the public who aren’t just concerned about numbers on a graph, they want to know what does it mean to be a human at this moment in time? What can I do? I just poured myself into my writing at that point. And I’d write these little pieces that I’d just literally write them on a Sunday afternoon in just a couple of hours, and then file them because I had no more time to work on them. But then I realised that I’d start getting these email messages of people saying, ‘Thank you so much for putting that out there. I also dream about climate change. I also feel really concerned about this. I cry when I watch David Attenborough documentaries.’ And it made me realise there’s a whole public conversation that I think we need to have out there. And I think it’s really important to just acknowledge this sort of sense of loss and grief and process that as best we can collectively, so we don’t feel so isolated with that. And then it’s about where to from there. So, we can’t obviously stay in that state of paralysis, which is curling up in the fetal position, not being able to work. And there are certainly times and I write about them in my latest book Humanity’s Moment, I write about my own struggle with depression around, I guess, that knowledge of the work that I do and the reality of that. But I think that there’s also a way forward.

When the final volume of the IPCC Report came out this year, I think a lot of us were shocked by the finding that we may, in fact, break through the aim that we all hoped for of keeping the warming of the planet to 1.5, that this is now very borderline, that we’ll be able to do it. And so, you write a lot in your new book, Humanity’s Moment, about where we go from here, about building resilience. What do you think we need to do to build up the resilience of local communities and to make our politicians understand that that is absolutely crucial work on the ground amongst the grassroots?

The first thing I think we need to get to is just this awareness that we are currently on track to breach 1.5 in the early 2030s in all emissions scenarios. The currently implemented pledges under the Paris Agreement see us warm by two to four degrees, and if we implement all the net zero targets that sees us at around two degrees, that’s still overshooting the 1.5. And the difference between 1.5 and two is really quite drastic. And the next thing is realising that one of the take home messages of Volume II of the IPCC Assessment Report, which looks at impacts and vulnerabilities, says that beyond two degrees it becomes effectively impossible, if not extremely difficult, to be able to adapt to climate change. So, human societies being able to adapt to climate change and in terms of the disruption to ecosystems, that also elevates with the higher levels of warming. And so, with the IPCC Reports, there are several different emission pathways that we provide to show people the different scenarios that we can go down. So, I guess I want to say initially that where we are from the political response to the scientific urgency is woefully inadequate and it’s not enough. And so, right now we are on track to see some of those high levels of warming, which will quite literally reconfigure planetary conditions, because when you destabilise the ice sheets and there’s evidence that between sort of two and three degrees of warming, you see irreversible changes in the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets, and that unleashes several metres of sea level over hundreds of years. And that becomes irreversible. The reason why I’m sort of recapping the sort of where we are side of things is because I think most people maybe don’t fully appreciate that and what that means.

So if we are getting impacts like the Black Summer fires or the catastrophic flooding of the East Coast with just 1.2 degrees of warming, then what can we expect at 1.5, at 2, at 3 and 4 degrees of warming? I can assure you that just escalates, it compounds, and you start to see these back-to-back seasons just being played out that are just, communities don’t have enough time to respond. So, there are areas of the country that were impacted by the Black Summer bushfires and then they were flooded. There are still people living in caravans on the south coast of New South Wales, I still have family displaced in northern New South Wales. In terms of resilience of communities, I must say that there’s a limit to that as well. So, for the people of Lismore, when renewed flooding happened yet again after the big floods that happened at the end of February and at the start of March and when it happened again like a couple of, I think was about a month later, people had just rewired their businesses and cleaned up and then it all happened again. And so that’s broken people, people are now moving out of the area because they just don’t know what to expect. With the renewed seasonal forecasts for a third La Nina season to be playing out this summer, what that means is, I guess anyone’s guess, because in those Lismore floods we saw the historic flood level on the Wilson River that goes through Lismore be breached by a full two metres. Now, that’s a monstrous breaking of a record, usually you break records by sort of really incrementally, and so, scientists are struggling to keep up with just the breakdown of this natural variability, the alteration of it, what it means.

And so, coming back, I guess, to how do we get communities ready? Well, firstly we need to acknowledge that climate change is real, it’s happening right now and we’re extremely unprepared. So, you don’t need to tell anyone living in the Northern Rivers that this is happening. But in terms of the government response, giving people $1,000 once they’d lost everything isn’t really enough and I think people got extremely offended and very angry about that response from the Morrison Government. And I think then, we saw some of that rage translate into the Federal Election results and we finally got the climate election I think that the nation was waiting for where we’d literally lived through these back-to-back horrific events of our country being absolutely savaged by weather extremes. And I think, in a country like Australia, we saw a bit of a social tipping point. It really gives me hope that when we start to vote for people that reflect our values and whether or not we choose to remove or provide the social license for the destruction of our world to continue or not, I would say that is really empowering. And in Humanity’s Moment, after immersing in the horrific statistics of the IPCC, I got to read about history and politics and all these sorts of really fascinating things and the thing that I found a lot of solace in was realising that this is the story of human history. It is this tug of war for social justice and we have seen these great social movements throughout our history, whether it be through the gender equality, civil rights, all sorts of things. And we’re actually living through this great social movement right now. And sometimes people look back at the 1960s and say, ‘Oh, wow, what a revolutionary time.’ And it was, it changed the world. But I think we’re going to look back at the 2020s and say, ‘That was the moment where things changed.’ And I know that we have immense amount of work to do, but my feeling is that this social movement is happening, but it’s not happening quite fast enough. But the governments of the world and our political leaders and our business leaders will respond when we place pressure on them as individuals.

Thank you so much. Please join me in a round of applause to thank Dr Joëlle Gergis.

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This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.