Last week you might have noticed a devasating new report that critical ocean currents that stop the northern parts of the world freezing and we in the south from boiling, face a 50-50 per cent chance of failing.
Some of us might have filed the piece mentally under T for terror, along with the much easier to digest Scandi noir crime shows to be consumed after dark and after dinner, as pretty much the only way to fully engage the brain and allow a proper disconnection from the ADHD-ness of the daily grind.
Except that this little bit of terror is unlikely to get another look in, here at least.
Way too challenging. Way too much gloom.
Because to rely on a 50-50 chance is to be no better than a gambling addict hoping to win at two-up. Not worth the investment, if you value your sleep.
As an engineer once told us, many people don’t realise that the ocean is the Earth’s refrigerator. When it fails, we actually have nothing else to rely on to cool us down.
With just days to go before the giant ARBS conference in Melbourne starting on Tuesday next week that will bring together a cavalcade of engineers and their nerdy cohorts it’s not a bad time to think about cause and effect – the thing that engineers are so good at understanding.
That ARBS has a predominant focus on airconditioning is timely, given the latest science on our ocean aircon.
So what are these currents?
In brief it’s the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc). As The Guardian’s George Monbiot put it, this system:
delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.
Temperatures in the Antarctic will likely rise by 6 degrees.
An Australian government website says its own research published in Nature Climate Change, looked at what would happen if this “Atlantic conveyor” collapses entirely.
“It would shift the Earth’s climate to a more La Niña-like state. This would mean more flooding rains over eastern Australia and worse droughts and bushfire seasons over southwest United States.”
Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said “I now am increasingly worried that we may well pass that Amoc shutdown tipping point, where it becomes inevitable, in the middle of this century, which is quite close.”
And yet we have so much potential for massive disruptive, saving change.
Right now we have the biggest fossil fuel crisis since 1973 – bigger than 1973 in fact.
It’s powerful because it’s hitting the most sensitive pain point in history – the hip pocket. You’d think that switching off our fossil fuels before the Amroc switches off – and us with it – would be more than enough motivation.
We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
And yet, and yet… the cognitive dissonance lives on.
What’s stopping progress?
In a briefing with the incredible panel that The Fifth Estate will be so honoured to moderate on Tuesday morning at ARBS it was clear that this is an industry that is not only highly sensitive to its responsibilities and contributions to greenhouse gasses, but that also has a lot of answers.
The skills are there in abundance. Though not the numbers. Engineers and anything related to electrical rollouts are in short supply.
The money is also there, or could be, in abundance, if you look at the squillions that global giants splash around when they want to. In the midst of the war in the Middle East for instance, the US share market is booming, even as we face a global financial “pandemic” that will most affect the poorest and most vulnerable, again.
What is in incredibly short supply is time. If the scientists now say these critical Amoc currents look like slowing down and upending our world by mid century, we have a mere flicker of time to act.
Do we get a sense of this urgency?
The entire built environment industry is still hellbent on voluntary genteel progress. While we celebrate the leadership of the top tier of property companies it’s getting harder to pull our gaze away from the 80 per cent who decades after this movement started, still “don’t know, don’t’ care”.
For some reason we are still expecting people who are not motivated, who are sitting on their asset waiting for capital gains and who have no intention of investing in better operations, to help this country get out of its net zero jam.
In 2007 it was the federal government under Liberal Prime Minister John Howard who mandated that any government offices, owned or leased must have a minimum 4.5 star NABERS rating.
It kicked off the green building movement, transformed the market.
When the Feds mandated even disclosure of NABERS ratings – never mind minimum performance standards – it still transformed the market.
At the top end.
But below those people who care – whose assets are aligned to quality and premium tenants – the vast majority are like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind – they just don’t give a damn.
If the rating is just 1 or 2 stars their tenants probably don’t care either as long as the rent is cheap.
So here we have a crisis with unimaginable consequences.
We have an industry raring to go and get stuck into true transformation.
We have examples around the world where governments put a price on carbon, or a carbon budget for buildings, and the sky does not fall in.
We have templates, we have models.
We have policy nerds poised and ready to explain exactly how it could work in Australia.
And yet we still have massive resistance to any mandatory transformation.
But as we face what’s ahead, is it time to give up on the kumbaya and say, we’re done with voluntary?