A FRUSTRATED Sunshine Bay scientist says too many politicians are refusing to listen to overwhelming evidence of the threat to coastal communities from sea-level rise.
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Retired agricultural scientist Dr David White spent the latter part of his career researching drought, including its links to oceanic and atmospheric changes, and has spent his retirement investigating sea-level rise data.
He said his peers around the world were increasingly worried.
“On the whole climate change debate, the scientists are very frustrated and concerned,” he warned.
“We see a major problem and few politicians want to listen to it.
“It is in the too-hard basket.”
As a referee for the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr White said he personally became alarmed when he read the draft 2007 report, which showed the rate of global average sea-level rise had reached 3.2mm per year in the previous 20 years.
This was nearly double the average rise in the 20th century of 1.7mm per year.
“I thought, ‘my God, what is going on’,” Dr White said.
“I realised there was a problem.”
The systems analyst did not doubt the data.
“I have never seen such a rigorous process as in putting the IPCC reports together and they are also very conservative,” he said.
“Each has to go through leading scientists in each country and they then have to get it past their politicians.”
He said the Eurobodalla was at risk.
“There is a risk to infrastructure,” he said.
“Not only do you get these flooding events, but you can expect more of them. If you get flooding every five years and you raise the sea level a few millimetres, it becomes every year, or several times a year.”
That concern prompted him to join the Eurobodalla Shire Council’s coastal management advisory committee and to address councillors last month.
At stake, he said, was a dangerous assumption.
“I was aware that people were citing much lower rates of sea-level rise than I knew were true,” he said.
He has rejected the idea of setting planning policies based on a maximum sea-level rise of 1.4mm per year.
Those figures have been widely circulated online, but Dr White said the National Tidal Centre had told him they were based on an unofficial document and should not be cited.
“I received advice from the assistant manager of the National Tidal Centre that ‘the baseline gauge at Port Kembla has a rate of change in sea-level of 3.5mm a year, from July 1991 to January 2014, as listed in the latest Australian Baseline monthly data report’,” Dr White said.
“After converting for barometric (air pressure) effects on sea-level, he arrived at a corrected rate of 3.3mm a year. This is nearly identical to the prevailing global average sea-level rise per year and more than twice the proposed maximum of 1.4mm a year.
“So, at the nearest tide gauge, which is Port Kembla, the rate of change in sea-level is of 3.5mm per year for the past 12-and-a-half years.
“What some people fail to grasp is that having a long record with a low rate of sea-level rise throughout much of last century (as at Fort Denison), and shorter, more recent records with higher rates, is exactly what you would expect if the rate of rise is increasing with time.
“The trend in sea-level rise is often not linear but typically varies over time.”
Dr White decided to speak to the Bay Post/Moruya Examiner after reading online commentary.
“I keep my powder dry usually,” he said.
However, a comment that an agricultural scientist was not qualified to speak on sea-level rise and the use of his title “scientist” in inverted commas offended him.
“I found it insulting, because I would never give advice outside my area of knowledge, without checking, as I did in this case, with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and the National Tidal centre,” he said.
Dr White said his work on drought led to further work on adapting to climate change.
As the senior principal research scientist for what is now the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, he co-ordinated the scientific input into a national drought policy, and played a major role in its implementation.
“I had to look at satellite data, field data and model pasture growth in different locations to determine the effectiveness of rainfall, and whether the impact of drought was beyond normal business risk,” he said.
His role included analysing how to “manage climate variability and the impact of drought”.
He worked with meteorologists, climate scientists and marine scientists.
“What is happening on the land is clearly defined by what is going on in the ocean and in the atmosphere,” he said.