Attitudes to Climate

Miller, Julia

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76141-1_1

Julia Miller²

166 Accesses

Abstract

Australians have an intimate relationship with climate. In the most arid settled continent in the world, the environment, including climate, has been central to forging national identity. Australians now have a new challenge—human-induced climate change. Australia is already seeing its impact in the form of prolonged fire seasons and more intense high-rainfall events. This chapter looks at attitudes to climate. It shows that while Australians are concerned about political inaction on the environment, there is still confusion about the cause of human-induced climate change. It introduces the concept of climate optimism as it is linked to the cycles of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, as well as the longer cycles of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, or IPO. It relates climate optimism to a lack of political will in twenty-first-century Australia to combat human-induced climate change.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic

€34.99 /Month

Get 10 units per month
Download Article/Chapter or eBook
1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
Cancel anytime

Buy Now

Chapter: EUR 29.95; Price includes VAT (Germany)

eBook: EUR 71.68; Price includes VAT (Germany)

Hardcover Book: EUR 90.94; Price includes VAT (Germany)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

') var buybox = document.querySelector("[data-id=id_"+ timestamp +"]").parentNode var buyingOptions = buybox.querySelectorAll(".buying-option") ;[].slice.call(buyingOptions).forEach(initCollapsibles) var buyboxMaxSingleColumnWidth = 480 function initCollapsibles(subscription, index) { var toggle = subscription.querySelector(".buying-option-price") subscription.classList.remove("expanded") var form = subscription.querySelector(".buying-option-form") var priceInfo = subscription.querySelector(".price-info") var buyingOption = toggle.parentElement if (toggle && form && priceInfo) { toggle.setAttribute("role", "button") toggle.setAttribute("tabindex", "0") toggle.addEventListener("click", function (event) { var expandedBuyingOptions = buybox.querySelectorAll(".buying-option.expanded") var buyboxWidth = buybox.offsetWidth ;[].slice.call(expandedBuyingOptions).forEach(function(option) { if (buyboxWidth buyboxMaxSingleColumnWidth) { toggle.click() } else { if (index === 0) { toggle.click() } else { toggle.setAttribute("aria-expanded", "false") form.hidden = "hidden" priceInfo.hidden = "hidden" } } }) } initialStateOpen() if (window.buyboxInitialised) return window.buyboxInitialised = true initKeyControls() })()

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
The Climate Institute, “Climate of the Nation 2015: Australian Attitudes on Climate Change”, www.climateinstitute.org.au.
2.
Matt Wade, “A Record Share of Australians Say Humans Cause Climate Change: Poll”, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 1, 2019.
3.
Simon Evans, “Mapped: Climate Change Laws around the World”, CarbonBrief, May 11, 2017, https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-climate-change-laws-around-world.
4.
Mark Diesendorf, Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change, Sydney, New South Publishing, 2014, xi.
5.
“Australia’s Changing Climate”, State of the Climate 2018, Canberra and Melbourne, CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, 2018.
6.
“Reef Health: Summer 2018–2019”, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/the-reef/reef-health. Joshua Robertson, “Great Barrier Reef Tourism: Caught between Commerce and Conservation Alarm”, The Guardian, April 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/17/great-barrier-reef-tourism-caught-between-commerce-and-conservation-alarm.
7.
Megan Palin, “NSW Wakes to Hailstorm Havoc as Insurance Council Declares Damage ‘A Catastrophe’”, December 22, 2018, https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/nsw-coast-weather-warning-very-dangerous-destructive-winds-and-giant-hail/news-story/0eb9a907832e9375dab7385d1fbf4.
8.
Z. Leviston, M. Greenhill, and I. Walker, Australian Attitudes to Climate Change and Adaptation: 2010–2014, Canberra, CSIRO, 2015.
9.
Brinsley Marlay, Climate of the Nation 2017: Australian Attitudes on Climate Change, Sydney, The Climate Institute, 2017.
10.
Matt Wade, “A Record Share of Australians Say Humans Cause Climate Change: Poll”, op cit.
11.
Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds, A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, 2005, 4.
12.
See, for example, Michael McKernan, Drought the Red Marauder, Allen & Unwin, 2005. Don Garden, Droughts, Floods and Cyclones: El Niños That Shaped Our Colonial Past, North Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009. William Lines, Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature, University of California Press, 1991.
13.
Deb Anderson, Endurance: Australian Stories of Drought, Collingwood, CSIRO Publishing, 2014.
14.
Katie Holmes and Kylie Mirmohamadi, “Howling Wilderness and Promised Land: Imagining the Victorian Mallee, 1840–1914”, Australian Historical Studies, 46, 2015, 191–213.
15.
Cameron Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History, London and New York, Routledge, 5.
16.
James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 10.
17.
Richard H. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000, xvii.
18.
See Greg Bankoff, Cultures of Disaster: Society and Natural Hazard in the Philippines, London, Routledge, 2003, and Greg Bankoff, “Constructing Vulnerability: The Historical, Natural and Social Generation of Flooding in Metropolitan Manila”, Disasters, 27, no. 3, 2003, 224–38.
19.
James Beattie and Ruth Morgan, “Engineering Edens on This ‘Rivered Earth’? A Review Article on Water Management and Hydro-Resilience in the British Empire, 1860s–1940s”, Environment and History, 23, 2017, 39–63.
20.
Bruce Davidson, “Development of Australian Agriculture, 2. Developments since 1914”, Agriculture and Environment, 2, no. 4, 1975, 357–377.
21.
R.L. Heathcote, Back of Bourke: A Study of Land Appraisal and Settlement in Semi-arid Australia, Carlton South, Melbourne University Press, 1965, 166, 196–197.
22.
J.M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, 59.
23.
Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism , 1600–1860, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
24.
Roderick Home, “Rainmaking in CSIRO: The Science and Politics of Climate Modification”, in A Change in the Weather, 656–679.
25.
Emily O’Gorman, Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin, Collingwood, CSIRO Publishing, 2012.
26.
Libby Robin, “Battling the Land and Global Anxiety: Science, Environment and Identity in Settler Australia”, Philosophy, Activism, Nature, 7, 2010, 3–9.
27.
For a discussion of Australian exceptionalism see, Keith Dowding, “Australian Exceptionalism Reconsidered”, Australian Journal of Political Science, 52, no. 2, 165–182, https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2016.1267111.
28.
Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Carlton South, Melbourne University Press, 2000, 2.
29.
Libby Robin, “Migrants and Nomads: Seasoning Zoological Knowledge in Australia”, in Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds, A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, 2005, 42–53.
30.
Rangeland scientist R. Perry commenting on his April 1962 field observations following rains in January of that year following the 1960–1961 drought. R.A. Perry, “Notes on the Alice Springs Area Following Rain in Early 1962”, Arid Zone Newsletter, 1962, 85–91.
31.
Greg McKeon, Wayne Hall, Beverley Henry, Grant Stone, and Ian Watson, eds, Pasture Degradation and Recovery in Australia’s Rangelands: Learning from history, Indooropilly, Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy, 21.
32.
Mike Hulme, “Climate Change and Memory”, in Sebastian Groes, ed, Memory in the Twenty-First Century, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 159–162.
33.
For a discussion of conceptual nature as the product of culture, see William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York, W.W. Norton, 1996.
34.
George Seddon, Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, xv.
35.
Christian Pfister, “History of Climate”, in The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, ScienceDirect, 2015, 2nd edition, 3, 865–872. On this point, see also Mark Carey, “Climate and History: A Critical Review of Historical Climatology and Climate Change Historiography”, WIREs Climate Change, 3, 2012, 233–249, and Stephen Daniels and Georgina H. Endfield, “Narratives of Climate Change: Introduction”, Journal of Historical Geography, 35, 2009, 215–222.
36.
Greg McKeon, Wayne Hall, Beverley Henry, Grant Stone, and Ian Watson, eds, Pasture Degradation and Recovery in Australia’s Rangelands: Learning from History, Indooropilly, Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy, 28.
37.
Tom Griffiths, “How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates about Vegetation Change in Australia”, Australian Journal of Botany, 50, 2002, 375–389.
38.
Julia Miller, “The Fall of an Angel: Gendering and Demonizing El Niño”, World History Connected, 4, no. 3, 2007.
39.
Michael H. Glantz, Currents of Change: El Niño’s Impact on Climate and Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, 68.
40.
Thomas Y. Canby, “El Niño’s Ill Wind”, National Geographic, 165, no. 2, 1984, 144–183.
41.
Such works by scientists include: Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilisations, London, Pilmico, 2000. Michael H. Glantz, Currents of Change: El Niño’s Impact on Climate and Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. S. George Philander, Our Affair with El Niño: How We Transformed an Enchanting Peruvian Current Into a Global Climatic Hazard, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004. Stanley A. Changnon and Gerald D. Bell, eds, El Niño, 1997–1998: The Climate Event of the Century, New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000. César N. Caviedes, El Niño in History: Storming Through the Ages, Gainesville, FL, Florida University Press, 2002.
42.
Richard H. Grove and John Chappell, eds, El Niño: History and Crisis, Cambridge, White Horse Press, 2000. Richard Grove, “Revolutionary Weather: The Climatic and Economic Crisis of 1788–1795 and the Discovery of El Niño”, in Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds, A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, Canberra, National Museum of Australia Press, 2005. Grove wrote earlier of El Niño in Richard Grove, The East Indian Company, the Australians and the El Niño; Colonial Scientists and the Emergence of an Awareness of Global Teleconnections. Discussion Paper 231, Department of Economic History, Australian National University, Canberra, 1997.
43.
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, New York, Verson, 2001.
44.
Richard Grove and George Adamson, El Niño in World History, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
45.
Don Garden, Droughts, Floods and Cyclones: El Niños that Shaped Our Colonial Past, North Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009.
46.
Garden, Droughts, Floods and Cyclones, 22.
47.
Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds, A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, Canberra, National Museum of Australia Press, 2005, 2.
48.
Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation, Sydney, University of NSW Press, 2007.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Director Academic Affairs, CAPA The Global Education Network, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Julia Miller

Authors

Julia Miller
View author publications
Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Miller, J. (2019). Attitudes to Climate. In: La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76141-1_1

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76141-1_1
Published: 13 July 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76140-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76141-1
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics