When was the last time you saw global warming?
We’ve all seen the charts and read the stats, but have you ever tripped over a pile of greenhouse emissions, got scalded by a drastically heated ocean, been sucker punched by rogue freons or needed to evict the unruly chlorofluorocarbons squatting in your garden shed? The answer, unless you have a penchant for handfuls of hallucinogens, is a resounding ‘no’ – and it is in this that our greatest climate problem exists.
Veterinarian and ecologist, Dr. Gary Tabor, is intensely focussed upon this intangible crisis, all too aware of the impending threat it poses and the desperate and immediate need to address climate change at every level. Gary is from Bozeman, Montana USA, which in his own words ‘is a small town of alternative thinkers’.
Recipient of the Fullbright Scholarship – an Australian-American commission “to promote mutual understanding through educational and cultural exchange between Australia and the United States” – his purpose was to learn from Australians, viewing their country as somewhat of a promised land for a sustainable future. But on arrival, a very different picture began to emerge.
“The reason I came here is because I thought I was going to the future,” Gary admits, heavy-heartedly. “You had a Minister for Climate Change, every state had some kind of climate change program, you had this progressive policy in terms of carbon tax and renewable energy, which we don’t have nationally yet [in the US]… climate change is an in-your-face issue here. You had millennial drought then Biblical floods – extreme weather is Australia and there was some sense that everybody got it.
Credit: Kirra Pendergast
“In the United States it has become a political issue to the degree that if you’re a republican, you’re a climate denier and if you’re a democrat you believe in it. So it has become a proxy for core values with nothing to do with science.
“When I came to Australia, I thought I was going to go ahead, until I found out that there’s been a huge retreat in all ways. How could a country that was so enlightened go so far backwards? The rest of the world, including myself, saw Australia as hope. It really makes me sad to see this retreat because I think it takes the wind out of everyone’s sails. In America, we had this mythical belief that Australia’s got its act together on this issue.”
1 Comment
Extreme weather (formerly known as ‘manmade global warming’, now known as just ‘climate change’) is in fact manmade, but the surfing world (like many other groups) is missing the target on this issue.
Two examples:
1. The massive container ships bringing Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, etc. products from China to the rest of the world spew more pollutants into the ecosystem in one day than all of the automobiles on the planet do in a whole year. And yet where does the blame lie? With you and I rather than NAFTA, GATT, the TPP, etc… hmmmm…
2. Geoengineering of the weather has exploded in the past 15 years. See the excellent expose “What in the World Are They Spraying?”. It was filmed in California and Hawaii and does an excellent job of explaining why California seems to be constantly blanketed in clouds(?) these days, despite a drop in precipitation.
We will know we have made real progress when exposing these real issues are the focus of our efforts, rather than continually chasing our tails trying to explain man’s role (backyard BBQs and fireplaces are surely NOT the cause) without acknowledging the above factors.