We can do some terrific climate forecasting that my colleagues and I never thought was possible 50 years ago.

Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations and thank you so much for joining us. I’d like to start by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which we’re recording today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Today is number 85 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. Now the series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We are recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. And before it was the museum, this space was the Ultimo Power Station. It was built in 1899 and supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system then that went through into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus away from that coal-powered past forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. My name’s Nate Byrne. I am a meteorologist, oceanographer, science communicator, former naval officer and current ABC News Breakfast weather presenter. Neville Nicholls has been studying the El Niño Southern oscillation cycle. Cyclic weather pattern that causes droughts and flooding in Australia and elsewhere. He’s been doing it for over 40 years. Now Emeritus Professor based in the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment at Monash University he continues to research how and why the climate is changing, as well as designing systems to improve our ability to forecast and to cope with droughts, bushfires, heatwaves and other climate events. We are so thrilled, I am so thrilled to have him here today. Please join me in making Neville very welcome. I can’t wait to get a little nerdy with you. Let’s set the scene though. You’ve been, what, 50 years plus working in weather and climate. What sparked for you what would become a lifelong interest and dedication to science?

It was pretty random. One of my aunts gave me a book about British animals for my eighth birthday. And it was full of stuff that scientists, biologists and ecologists had found about British animals. Seems a bizarre thing to be reading in Melbourne, but that sparked my interest. So, from then on I always wanted to be a scientist. I went to high school, decided I didn’t want to be a biologist because that involved, in those days, cutting up things and a bit too much blood. And I got attracted to physics and maths. Went to Monash University, did a physics degree, and then even more randomly I realised, what am I going to do with my life? I like physics, I like maths. And meteorology is something you do with physics and maths. So, I applied, became a– went to the Bureau of Meteorology to do the forecasting course and at the end of that year they put me into research and so I’ve never done a weather forecast, despite being a trained forecaster for which my family thinks Australia should be grateful. Because they still don’t think that I’m a good forecaster after 50 years of it.

I think that’s interesting, I very similarly, less maths, more physics in my start. Even though I did biophysics to start, squishy science, I didn’t really like it much. I like the hard stuff. But then when you get into whether it’s very squishy isn’t it? There’s a lot of fuzz around the edges. Okay, so they put you in research. Talk to me about your earliest research. I’m thinking Papua New Guinea and drought.

Yes, 1972. Papua New Guinea, which had been a protectorate of Australia, was about to become fully independent and was hit by a severe drought in 1972. And I was the youngest member of this very small team of meteorologist in research who was told, find out what’s causing it, what’s going on. And we wrote a report, it was published at the end of that year which basically said, is it drought? Because it’s not raining. It’s not raining because there’s no clouds. We don’t know much else. The following year — and it’s interesting that it took me a long, six months or more to find this out — I realised it had been an El Niño that year, and there’d been a lot of research about El Niños, and this phenomenon called the Southern Oscillation at that stage. So, I went back and looked and realised that most, nearly all, Papua New Guinea droughts are associated with El Niño, occur in El Niños. It’s incredibly strong relationship. It’s much stronger than a relationship with Australian droughts, for instance, and I wrote a report on that. That was in 1973. That was my first El Niño paper. So, that’s 50 years ago and I’m still researching El Niño now. It’s a wonderful phenomena, causes a lot of distress. But from a scientific, nerdy point of view, it’s a wonderful phenomenon to research.

Can you explain to us what the El Niño Southern oOscillation cycle actually is? What is it El Niño and La Niña?

Okay, it’s a natural climate phenomenon. It’s been going on for many, many hundreds, probably many thousands of years at least. It’s a phenomenon where you get– it is an oscillation. It’s not a very strict oscillation, like a clock or anything like that. But a year that we call an El Niño, the El Niño would typically start in March and April builds to a peak around the end of the calendar year, and then generally it will collapse around March or April, the following year. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes it’s followed by the opposite phase for La Niña. So, the El Niño phase has warmer-than-normal temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. A La Niña has cooler-than-normal temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific. Australia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia have droughts and the El Niño your part of the cycle and we tend to have flooding rains in the La Niña cycle. As a result of the El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomena, the countries that, like Australia, that are affected by it really are all land of droughts and flooding rains. Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains because of El Niño Southern Oscillation, which I’m going to call ENSO from now on, ‘cause I could run out of time in this interview. So, ENSO amplifies rainfall variability in areas that it has a major impact on. There are some essential parts to the ENSO, which I started looking at back in the 1970s. One is, there’s some predictability associated with it. So, you’ve probably heard that through this year, 2023, from several months ago, people have been suggesting we’re building into an El Niño. So, there’s predictability already and it has started to increase in amplitude the El Niño as we’ve gone over the last few months, and that’s fairly typical from about March, April, May, June. You can predict how it’s going to evolve, and that means we can predict things that are associated with it later in the year. So, that’s a really critical part. But from a scientific point of view, as well as from a societal point of view, why is that predictability there at that time of year, from about May through to about February, the following year? And why doesn’t that occur at the other time of the year? Why can’t we predict in January what’s going to happen in July? But in July, we can predict what’s going to happen in the following January? It’s a fascinating scientific problem, which I spent several years in the ’70s and early ’80s thinking about and modelling. We can do some terrific climate forecasting that my colleagues and I never thought was possible 50 years ago, 60 years ago. We can forecast how active a tropical cyclone season is going to be months in advance. And not with perfect skill, but pretty good skill. And it’s useful. And that’s an amazing thing. We can forecast how wet the wet season is going to be. We can say when the wet season in northern Australia will actually start, with useful skill that’s useful for graziers, useful for anybody who relies on rainfall.

I think very few people understand how big a problem, as in a mathematical problem, it is to solve the atmosphere as a whole. The fact that we can do a few days is incredible, months in advance. When it comes to El Niño, what’s the driving force? I know how to describe what El Niño looks like and what La Niña looks like and what effects it’s going to have,. But what’s causing, driving that oscillation?

It’s interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere. And I think that the drivers are mainly north of Australia. But the effect you see is mainly over in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. That’s because there’s a phenomenon called Kelvin waves, which are not like waves you see on the beach, but they’re waves in the ocean that are triggered by changes in wind. And they travel from the west Pacific to the east Pacific, and they affect the upwelling of cold water from below, which tends to keep that part of the ocean cooler than normal. The Kelvin waves go over and disrupt that and the ocean warms. So, that’s the essential part is– and so the whole thing is driven by this tightly knit interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere. So, it’s different to the day-to-day weather that we see. And as a result, the predictability is vastly different. To do a five-day forecast for you to get up and talk about the weather five days ahead, we basically need weather information across the entire world in incredible detail to get that sort of forecast. To forecast things associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation we basically only need one number. Darwin pressure alone, averaged over a month, gives us a terrific predictor of how the climate is going to evolve. Similarly, we could just use the sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific. Again, a terrific predictor of this large-scale, sort of how much rainfall are we going to get in Papua New Guinea and eastern Australia? Just with one number, it’s such a mind-blowing difference that meteorologists — and you and I are both meteorologists, even though I’ve evolved into a climate scientist — it’s really hard to get our head around. And that was one of the reasons it’s taken so long to actually start doing forecasts based on El Niño, because none of us believed it could be at all possible. But it’s just a different system.

You attended one of, if not the first conference exploring climate change in Australia in 1987. What was discussed there and also how was it received in the world of meteorology?

Yes, it was the first attempt anywhere in the world to actually get a whole lot of people, not just strict climate scientists, but a lot of other scientists to try to get them to work out for their particular speciality how much is climate change likely to affect that particular area? People from water resources, people from agriculture, from human health. So, it was arranged by Dr Graeme Pearman of CSIRO and his colleague Barrie Pittock, also from CSIRO, and they came up with a scenario of what climate change, driven by fossil fuel burning based might look like by about 2030, something like that. And just asked these other specialists, ‘Is that going to be a big issue for you?’ And it’s interesting that many of the people thought we can probably handle that sort of climate change. Some people can’t. There were some specialties that there was considerable concern about. But it was the first, I think it was the first one that really set a whole lot of people working on the problem, not just a handful of climate scientists, but people across all sorts of specialties. There was a conference at more than a decade earlier at Monash in 1975, and it was about climate. At the time,the climate, if anything, had been cooling. But at that time also the first models of what emissions of carbon dioxide would do to the climate had started to appear. And again, Graeme Pearman was at that conference and this 1975 conference said we’re likely to get half a degree warming by the end of the century. That is by the end of last century, by the year 2000. What did we get, we got half a degree warming in global temperature and we’ve got another half a degree ever since. So, the predictions that were being made of climate change back in 1970-1975 have been spot on. And that, as you know of this, how do you check science? You check science by, and hypotheses by, making predictions and checking whether those predictions come true, basically. And a forecast like that at a time that the world, if anything, was cooling. It was a brave forecast and it’s proven to be right. And that’s one of the big reasons why we’re so certain that fossil fuel burning, and carbon dioxide emissions and methane emissions are driving the climate change that we see.

Especially since now we have so much more information to inform that prediction than you had available then. So, climate is changing. We’ve got this climatological cycle of El Niño and La Niña. How is one influencing the other?

I ran an international workshop in 1994 on exactly that question. How will the El Niño be affected by global warming? I think we still don’t know the answer. It certainly is affecting it. It’s probably disrupting the predictability we’ve got in the natural El Niño, La Niña cycle. It’s probably disrupting it. And I can give an example from this year. The snow season has been quite bad thus far in 2023 in Australia. It’s been warm all over the world, extremely warm. The oceans are warm. Now during an El Niño at this time of year and in an El Niño, the oceans around Australia are normally quite cold, but they’re warm and some of that is just due to the long, slow warming heating of the world that we’ve seen due to fossil fuel burning. So, that disrupts at least the way we would predict things associated with El Niño. We think it’s also disrupting the climate and weather impact of the El Niño, but it needs a lot more work to nut that out.

When we came up with our understanding of the atmosphere and how it interacts and the maths behind it all that allows us to forecast, that was based on an idea of this is what the atmosphere looks like in a relatively stable state, a bit of natural variability in the background but yes, cool. But now we’ve got this big change pushing everything in a certain direction. How is climate change affecting our ability to forecast?

Yes. One really important way is if the predictability, at least of the natural climate variability, is related — we were talking about using single indices of that, and one of the obvious ones is the sea surface temperature in the central and eastern Pacific. If it’s cold, it’s the La Niña. If it’s warm, it’s an El Niño. But if on top of that sort of natural variability, you’ve got this unstoppable warming, then every year is warm, and you’ve got to take that into account when you come up with your definition of what the threshold to be an El Niño. If everything is now warm, you’re likely to say that every year is an El Niño if you’re not careful, which doesn’t help us at all. So, that’s a really crudest point, it’s just us diagnosing what’s going on. But global warming is affecting every aspect of the weather and climate now. We may not know exactly how it’s happening, but it has to be. Like warming of a degree in the last 50 years is significant. And you plot that, and you look at the natural variations. The natural variations are about 0.2 degrees, and the warming is about 1 degree. So, the natural variations now look tiny compared to the warming that we’ve imposed on the situation. It has to be having an effect on storms that bring rain and storms that bring snow. How hot it’s going to be in Sydney today. Everything has to be being affected by that progressive continuous warming that we’re seeing because it’s now quite big in terms of natural variability.

Are we missing the ability to predict things because we haven’t taken this change into account so far? Or are we staying up to date?

I think it’s causing us problems. I don’t think they’re insurmountable. And I think, with the predictability in the system, is still going to be there. A natural variability, I’m pretty sure will continue to operate pretty much in the way it has in the past. As long as we can get over this problem, that even just the threshold problem and there will be disruption due to the global warming, but in our predictability, – in the way we can predict things, but I don’t think it’s going to stop it completely. It’s not going to swamp it completely. It’ll still be useful in the future. And I hope it will, because I think that’s one of the things that gives me hope that we can deal with the climate change problem.

I find often talking to people about climate, people get down and get depressed and feel like we’re not doing enough, and we haven’t got a trajectory where we can get out of this with our skins. But I guess there are two different versions of that world, right? There’s one where life doesn’t look that much different from now and then, another where it looks wildly different, where we’re alive and surviving. But maybe not everything else is. And maybe the summer becomes– and increasingly, in fact, is already becoming increasingly a time to survive around large parts of the world. And, actually on heatwaves, the bureau is always saying that the heatwaves are the most deadly extreme weather or severe weather in Australia, but a lot of that’s hidden. And you’ve done work with heatwave warning systems. How important is that going to be going on into the future?

Yes, I think those sort of systems are really critical, particularly in cities like Sydney and Melbourne, where we get a few days of really extreme temperatures. Knowing that, because the Bureau of Meteorology makes such wonderful forecasts nowadays, their forecasts — I’m not sure everybody knows this, a forecast on Melbourne temperature for instance, by the Bureau of Meteorology, seven days in advance now are better than the one day-ahead forecast was when I started my career. Now, none of that has anything to do with me. It has not been my influence, possibly not even your influence. But it’s an amazing change and it means that we can get people to prepare. So, we built this first heat alert system for Melbourne back in 2008. And it was there for that heatwave where 500 people died. It was very rudimentary and became very obvious that the big missing link was not so much a science. The science is very easy to do really nowadays, and took us not too many days to actually do the science, but it’s the translation of that science to make sure people react the right way. So, we know the vulnerable people, we know the elderly people who are immunocompromised, people on various drugs, people who are homeless, and we know that they’re the people we go to get the message to, and we’ve got to get them to do certain things, but they shouldn’t die of a heatwave in a country like Australia. Because if you keep people hydrated and cool for just those couple of days, then they’re fine and they will be fine, and you will avoid premature deaths. So, systems like that are really important and most cities around the world now have some sort of system. But there are ways we can do it. I was just reading about the guy who does this in Phoenix, in Arizona, and he maintains that they will be able to stop all heat-related deaths by re-engineering the city in various ways, greening it, doing all sorts of things. So, again, it’s something that needs to be done and needs to be done in many parts of world, some parts of world it’s harder to do than others. And if we can do that, then life would look different in summer. You were talking before about would it look– it would look very different. Could be, but it could still be good. But again, I don’t want to minimise the problems. Like, we’ve started acting on it too late, we’re not acting strongly enough. As a result of that we are going to lose parts of the environment. We wouldn’t have if, for instance, Australia had been more upfront and more accepting of a science 25 years ago, when Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated, if we’d been a bit more aggressive and say to the world, we have to do this and we will do this and take a lead. We would be in a better position now. And, at various times, I’ve become really quite depressed. During the fire season of 2019–20, I was extremely depressed because we knew what was coming. We knew what was coming on because of a natural cycle, but also because the warming had done things already that we knew, and we still couldn’t get politicians to do anything. The emergency managers were on board. They knew what was coming. We still didn’t do that. So, the source of my depression, apart from the magnitude of that issue itself was, was it my fault? Did I not do enough? But when Black Saturday hit in 2009, I wrote a report for the royal commission saying the weather and climate was unprecedented that led to those fires. The commission dismissed that description of it, ‘unprecedented’. They said we’d had fires before, we’d had hot days before, but we’d had droughts before. But my point was that we had not seen anything like we had. So, it was unprecedented. Sure, I’ve jumped up and down more and complained and gone to more out to the media if I’d done that. So, yeah, so 2019–20 was during the fire season was pretty depressing time for me. And I don’t want to pretend that its impact on me was in any way important compared to the people who were physically and emotionally really affected by the direct impact of the fires. I just say, to point out that I’ve not always been optimistic about climate, but I think the tide has turned and I think we can do this. And I think everybody’s on– nearly everybody’s on board. And we will do it. And we have to do it.

It is obviously a global situation we’re talking about. But let’s talk globally about your work with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. You’ve been involved since the mid ’90s-nineties –

Since 1990.

Oh, since 1990.

Since the first report, I was a contributing author on the first report and that’s how I got dragged into it is because the people writing it wanted someone to talk about how El Niño might be affected by global warming. And I was about the only person who’d actually thought about it at that stage, I think. And so, I wrote a paragraph which got cut down to a sentence or something like that. And then in 1992, they updated that report. And by that time, I was the lead author, so I was one of five people looking at how the climate had been observed to change. And then by the second assessment, which was in the middle ’90s, I was the coordinating lead author of that chapter. So, I had five lead authors and 100 contributing authors, and I had to write a chapter within strict page limits with all of those and make sure they were all happy with the result. And it was a fascinating time because you think– nowadays you think that’s a pretty easy thing to do, isn’t it? Let’s get 100 people to get together, 105 people to get together and write a chapter. And we’ll just do lots and lots of Zoom meetings and lots of interactions. Well, this was way, way, way back. And we communicated by fax. And at one stage, one of my lead authors disappeared for a couple of months because he got malaria, and he went home to his home village to be cared for by his family. And we couldn’t communicate with him at all. Just impossible. And you think, times have changed, but it was an interesting situation. And we were paper-driven scientific society, organisations as well. So, my lounge room for a whole year was taken over by piles of scientific papers because I couldn’t fit them all into my office at work. And while we worked on these. So again, we don’t do things like that now. In some ways, it’s a lot easier than it was back then.

We’ve all done group projects with five people, but here you’re talking about 100, triple digits, and all with slightly different ideas and maybe motivations.

Yes, and the IPCC process itself is fascinating process because not only do we have to get all of the scientists to agree, we eventually go to an approval meeting and there are representatives of typically 140 nations there, they are diplomats and all sorts of people who were there. And politicians. We have to get consensus amongst them. They’re happy with what we have said. We can’t stray from the science. So, you’re in there and you’ve got diplomats and politicians here and in the back of your mind, you’ve got all of the scientists you’ve worked with for the last two, three years to get this report together. You don’t want to break anything that they’ve said, but you have to express it in such a way that the politicians and diplomats will sign off on it. And it’s a fascinating process and it’s very time consuming, very stressful. But most of the time it works. And I think the IPCC has contributed a lot, which is lucky because it’s taken a lot of our time.

How has that that process changed over the years? Is it easier now? Because I kind of get the feeling that maybe the scientists have a louder voice in the room.

I think the acceptance of a report once it spread out is a lot better than it used to be. People just didn’t even know its existence. But it’s become much more bureaucratic and there are many, many more rules about how to put together. And that’s changed dramatically since 1990, where it was basically a group of scientists got together, wrote a report. They never thought there’s going to be a second one. They thought this is just a one off. It’s actually– I go back, and I look at it now, I think it’s a really good report that I had very little influence on at all, the first one in 1990. It’s a very good, succinct report. They are now huge. Three working groups, each of them produce a report. Each is a million words long, and it’s a lot. They are big to digest. They have a technical summary, then a summary for policy makers. It’s difficult to get everything and to be certain that you’ve got everything right. And the ticking off to make sure you can see a line of sight from the summary that goes to policy makers right back to the chapters that the scientists themselves wrote. It’s part of a process which is quite challenging.

Every time there’s a release, I think this is the one I’m going to read in entirety. I think this is probably how I’m going to burn my long service leave one day. Just sit down and just read one of these reports. Have you seen the work actually being translated into real policy and action on climate?

I think I have. I have a particular perspective on climate change as a problem and a societal issue. And what I say next, I don’t want people to misunderstand. But climate change is serious. It’s caused by us, it’s challenging to deal with. So, I don’t want to in any way let anybody think that what I’m going to say minimises that. But despite that, despite 50 years as a climate scientist, through most of my career, climate scientists have been either ignored, abused or just told to go away and laughed at. But despite that, and despite the seriousness of a problem, I’m actually an optimist. I think we will deal with this problem and there are strong reasons why I think that I’ve got very strong reasons. One is just a general belief that modern humans deal with very challenging problems. When I was born in 1950, globally, life expectancy was 46 years, globally. Now it’s over 71 years. So, in my lifetime, I’ve seen global life expectancy increase by more than 50%. That’s pretty spectacular. Again, in 1950 20% of all babies born globally would die before their fifth birthday. Now that number is down to 4%, which is still too high in Australia. I think it’s 0.4%, but that’s from 20% to 4% in my lifetime. Again, sensational. Smallpox has been eradicated. We are that close to eradicating wild polio and no one back — they were terrible diseases when I was a young boy — no one at that stage would have thought either of those things would happen. So, first reason why I’m an optimist, we’ve done difficult things in the past, in the recent past. I suspect climate change is not much more difficult, perhaps not even more difficult than any of those. Same reason is we’ve developed tools, meteorologists and climate scientists, particularly to help us handle some of these fluctuations and some of the problems. And one example is a tropical cyclone hit the area we now call Bangladesh in 1970, 50-odd years ago. It killed 300,000 people [approximate figure]. If that cyclone hit Bangladesh tomorrow, there would be some deaths, absolutely. It’s a flat country. It’s difficult to do anything. But they would get much more warning because of much better observations of tropical cyclones, much better forecast models, but also some simple adaptations so people can evacuate vertically. It’s a very flat country. So, if you build concrete bunkers or about three floors up, you can avoid being affected by the storm surge. So, it would still have dire consequences, but you’re not going to have 300,000 people die. Heatwaves is another thing. Heatwaves kill lots of people. And they are always underestimated how many people are killed in heatwaves. Many more people, 500* people died in a heatwave in 2009, in south-east Australia that weekend before Black Saturday, before the fires. Fires killed 174*. The heatwave a weekend before, killed 500* people. So, they kill a lot of people. But nearly every major city in the world now has a heatwave alert system and we know they save lives. So, if the same heatwave hit now, probably only a third of the mortality. Again, too much and we’re thinking there are ways you can actually even reduce that even more. So, there are systems now in place, better weather forecasts, better climate forecasts that help us deal with some of the stuff which is going to hit us. Third thing is, we are dealing, we are starting to deal — it may not feel like it because the progress is very slow — but we are starting to deal with emissions. So, emissions are lower than we could have expected 40 or 50 years ago by now. So, they were going exponentially at that stage and it’s not as bad now. So, it is slowing a bit. And one of the big drivers of that, there are two big drivers, one is population growth is starting to slow. And so, that will take a lot of pressure off our systems and what’s called carbon intensity, the amount of carbon dioxide you produce for every dollar of GDP that’s halved in the last 50 years and will continue to halve as renewables come on. The International Energy Agency, IEA, just a couple of days ago predicted that by 2025, two years hence, renewables will produce more electricity than coal. And I couldn’t have predicted that 10 years ago, possibly not even five years ago, perhaps not even two years ago. But they are confident and because the price of solar PV, for instance, used to be 10 years ago it was three times more expensive than coal to produce power. It’s now half the cost of coal. So, the economics are there. And there’s also– so that’s three reasons, fourth reason is this is a global movement now. So, it’s very hard to find someone who, back in the old days, we used to call climate denier, very few who don’t accept that we have some influence on what we’re doing with global heating and that we need to do something about it. People like Greta Thunberg, for instance, a major difference compared to nerdy scientists, naively thinking that all we have to do is write these facts down and give them to politicians and everything would be terrific. It’s not happened. But the involvement of young activists and older activists as well and across society has made a big, big difference. So, for those four reasons I’m optimistic. I think it can be done. I think it has to be done. So, I’m reasonably confident and I wouldn’t have said that five years ago, but I am now. I think the tide has turned.

Please join me in a very warm thank you for Neville Nicholls.

Thank you.

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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.

* According to the Victorian Department of Human Services, “there were 374 excess deaths over what would be expected”.

* According to the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, “a total of 173 people died in the fires”.

* According to the Victorian Department of Human Services, “there were 374 excess deaths over what would be expected”.