The apocalypse we forgot about (afterwards)

Two days ago, Labor Senator Darren Cheeseman was ridiculed in Parliament for a speech he wrote in 2009. This speech included the following warning about the impacts of carbon pollution:

“The Great Ocean Road, Mr. Speaker, an icon of Australia and the engine room of our local tourism economy, will be largely destroyed. It will be breached in place after place, if sea level rise is as expected. Huge swathes of the Bellarine Peninsula will be inundated. Current areas of the mainland will be cut off and become islands. Queenscliffe will become an island. The area from Barwon Heads to Breamlea will become an island. Many areas of heavy industry will be over-run and inundated. Key public infrastructure facilities, such as caravan parks in Ocean Grove and in other parts of the Bellarine Peninsula will be inundated and lost. Many private homes will also be lost.”

Cheeseman was mocked for his alarmist views, and it’s easy to see why. Of all the prophets who’ve predicted the apocalypse, how many have been proven right? Depending on how you define “apocalypse”, the answer ranges from “zero” to “zilch”.

Although this guy might be on to something.

And, as the Liberal senators were quick to point out, climate change is an inexact science, and the rising sea levels are decelerating (ah, the old “things are getting worse less quickly” defence). The proposed carbon tax, they say, will simply make goods more expensive for hardworking Australian families.

While writing The Lab as a teenager, I was aware of climate change, but I can’t say I was all that frightened by it. The novel contains a simple answer to the problem – put a big wall around the country. Who cares about the rising ocean when there’s sixteen metres of concrete between you and it? Australia’s surf culture will be obliterated, along with our much-loved bikini industry, but otherwise, life goes on as normal.

If someone had told me that carbon emissions could make the very air unbreathable, turn the seas to acid, and wipe out almost all life on Earth, I would have laughed. If someone had told me that this had actually already happened, well…

…someone (named Science Daily) did just tell me that, and it doesn’t feel funny anymore.

It’s called the Permian-Triassic Extinction event, and it was probably the worst thing to happen in our planet’s history. 251 million years ago, rising levels of carbon in our atmosphere started a chain reaction which wiped out 95% of all species. Some creatures couldn’t stand the heat. Others couldn’t breathe the air. Still others starved to death, because their prey was suddenly extinct - and then the animals who preyed on them died out in turn. For thousands of years, Earth was almost as lifeless as Venus. Scientists call this period “the Great Dying”.

Humans should be thankful that this happened; without it, we couldn’t have evolved from the surviving scraps. But we should be pretty terrified of it happening again. It’s easy to feel invincible, in this world of buildings and transport and central heating and refrigeration and the internet - but we are squishy, vulnerable creatures, and there’s little use for hairdressers and lawyers and programmers and novelists in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. How long could a modern man survive, sleeping on bare gravel, once the last can of spaghetti was scraped dry and the only remaining food was the flies that circle our withering remains? (But enough about my time at university.)

With temperatures going up and the Liberals still banging on about jobs, we might soon find out what the end of world feels like first hand. Tony Abbott is the Mayor of Amity Island, keeping the beaches open despite all the evidence that there’s a hungry shark in the water. But perhaps something even smarter than us will evolve from the ashes. (Something smart enough to vote against its own extinction.) And hey, at least petrol will be cheap for the rest of our lives. Right?



MITIFOTIT: (Most Interesting Thing I Found On The Internet Today)

I always try to be relatively polite when I’m discussing politics – but it’s a lot of fun to read articles by those who don’t bother. If you can handle a bit of coarse language, please enjoy “You Shut Your Goddamn Carbon Taxin’ Mouth” by Heathen Scripture.