Extract from ABC News
In early February of this year, when the Perth heat really got going, my partner was 28 weeks pregnant.
On the day of the midwife appointment, we snuck to the car from the one air-conditioned room where we both worked, huddled in the cool. Windows up and A/C on full, we drove to the hospital.
The midwife told us all the usual pregnancy things to keep the baby safe, but it felt odd to be learning about diet and sleeping positions while outside the city baked and trees died.
We read scary studies showing the impact of extreme heat on pregnant women and unborn babies.
We read that extreme heat kills more people in Australia than all the other natural disasters combined.
This has been WA's hottest summer on record — and the hot weather isn't over yet.
Speaking as someone who grew up in WA, the recent heatwave was brutal and unprecedented. The cooling sea breeze stayed out to sea and some nights it was over 30 degrees Celsius at midnight.
For 24 hours in mid-February, the 15 hottest places in the world were in WA.
At an after-work drinks event I attended, a man fainted and collapsed. We gave him water and walked him to his car, through the city. The baking hot streets were utterly deserted.
As the month progressed, there appeared to be a growing disconnection with the way news outlets were generally covering the ongoing natural disaster.
News stories often showed people "beating the heat" by going to the beach. A prominent politician devoted one sentence of their weekly column to the weather: "Yes, it's summer, and yes, it's hot."
Richard Yin, a Perth GP and deputy chair of Doctors for the Environment, said the lack of acknowledgement in the media about the impact of heat and climate change was "vaguely terrifying".
"Everything is being normalised, as though it's just another heatwave ... What we see now is a harbinger of what's to come.
"This is not not even the new norm, it's the lowest level of the new norm. What we're expecting is much, much worse."
The perception that the media is downplaying climate change is more than a gut feeling. It's backed up by data.
Stories more likely to mention cricket than climate change
Detailed analysis of media coverage performed exclusively for the ABC by Monash University researchers, showed fewer than one-in-20 stories about the WA heatwaves mentioned climate change. About one in five referred to the health impacts of extreme heat.
The vast majority of the 172 stories about the WA heatwaves mentioned neither climate change nor heat-related health problems.
There were more than twice as many stories about how the heat could affect the result of a cricket match in Perth in mid-February than about how climate change was driving the heatwaves.
By comparison, about half of stories about the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires mentioned climate change, Tahnee Burgess, a researcher at Monash University's Climate Change Communication Research Hub, said.
"And if we are seeing discussion of climate change around the WA heatwaves, it's very infrequent and often in passing," she said.
"So you're not necessarily understanding the dangers and challenges of this warming world and the heatwaves that it can drive."
This trend wasn't only seen in WA, she added.
The analysis also found about 9 per cent of the 528 articles about heatwaves across Australia in February referred to climate change.
"We can say that, overall, the reporting of climate change and heatwaves for the month of February in Australia was significantly lower than we've seen for other extreme weather events," Ms Burgess said.
"These figures are really, really low, especially considering we also had a heatwave across massive parts of the country.
"February really was a month of extreme weather, so you'd think it would be a good month to be talking about climate change."
Report linking heatwaves to climate change totally ignored
Heatwaves are one of the most direct and well-observed consequences of a changing climate. Climate scientists in Australia and overseas have been repeating this point for more than a decade.
But despite the solid science, news outlets appear generally reluctant to communicate this to readers.
In early February, as WA was entering a four-day heatwave, the Climate Council published a report and a media release underlining the link between climate change and the summer's extreme weather, such as floods in the east, fires in the north, and heatwaves in the west.
Although the report made clear the hot weather in WA was a result of climate change, not a single news outlet published this information that month, the Monash analysis showed.
A second report, published the following week, warned about the health impacts of WA's extreme heat while reiterating the link between the heatwaves and climate change.
Of the seven stories that referred to this report, most completely stripped out the reference to climate change, Ms Burgess said.
So what is the link with climate change?
Simon Bradshaw, director of research at the Climate Council, said the Australian landmass as a whole has warmed by about 1.5C since 1910, making heatwaves worse and more frequent.
"Everything we see today is on a planet made hotter by the burning of coal, oil and gas."
Perth is warming faster than most other areas. The average summer temperature recorded at Perth airport has increased by about 3C since 1910, well above the national average.
"We see a particularly strong warming trend in some parts of WA, including around Perth," Dr Bradshaw said.
"That means longer, hotter, more intense heatwaves. And we clearly had a strong taste of this over the last summer."
Climate change is making parts of the city 'unliveable'
Growing up near the beach in Perth, I loved summer.
Yes it was hot, but I quickly learned to not complain about the heat.
Whingeing marked you as an outsider. The best strategy seemed to be stoic acceptance of plus-40C days, combined with giddy celebration of the beach and everything it offered.
Summer shades into autumn, the rain comes, and you soon forget the worst of it.
Six months later, the heat starts up again.
Heat is normal, but the orderly progression of hotter summers is now making parts of the city dangerous for some residents.
"The city is becoming unliveable for those who are vulnerable," Dr Yin said.
"I can understand the need to not scare people, but at the same time we need to be informing them."
By WA standards, Perth's outlook is relatively cool. A peer-reviewed study published last year found Broome and Port Hedland risked being generally uninhabitable within 70 years.
The northern Australian towns are on track to have more days per year over 35C than under by 2090, Climate Council modelling shows.
For Perth, the figure is closer to about 40 days per year by 2090 (up from an average of about 22 before 2010).
But even this relatively temperate climate may be too much for those who are most vulnerable to heat, including the elderly, children, babies, pregnant women, and people with chronic illnesses.
A project run by Better Renting found temperatures in many Perth rental properties exceeded the World Health Organization's guidelines during one of the heatwaves of the recent summer.
The Western Australian Council of Social Service (WACOSS) has begun mapping temperature variation across the city and plans to build public cool-space sanctuaries for residents.
"The dangers posed by extreme heat still aren't being adequately addressed," WACOSS CEO Rachel Siewert said.
"If you don't have access to air-conditioning and if your building [isn't] energy efficient, you're at risk of high heat.
"We've heard of people taking shelter in shopping centres and libraries."
'Insidious' heatwaves kill silently
Why do we routinely underestimate the danger of heatwaves?
One answer to this is the "insidious" nature of the events themselves, which makes it harder to precisely attribute mortality, Sarah Perkins-Fitzpatrick, a climate scientist at the Australian National University, said.
"We know heat kills but it's hard to quantify by how much.
"People might die of cardiac arrest or renal failure, so it's very hard to track the precise [mortality rate]."
Deaths are seldom attributed to the heatwave itself, and the immediate cause of death, such as diabetes or a heart attack, is usually reported as the reason for hospital admission.
It can takes months of combing through coronial records to determine how many people may have died from a specific heatwave.
Heatwaves are also invisible. Unlike a bushfire or a flooding river, extreme heat doesn't make good TV.
And perhaps along with these reasons, there may be another one.
Dr Yin, who's also president of the Conservation Council of WA, said the west was lagging behind other states in responding to climate change, despite being particularly exposed to its impacts.
"It's completely jarring," he said
"We're one of the most vulnerable places in the country for climate impacts."
Even as the north gets too hot, the supply of arable land shrinks, the forests of the south-west dry out at a record rate, and birds drop dead from the sky, WA has been slow to act, Dr Yin said.
It's the only state without an emissions reductions target for 2030 and the only state to have increased its emissions since 2005.
It's also one of the world's largest exporters of natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to climate change.
The WA government has, however, committed to achieving net zero by 2050 and last month released a plan outlining the steps it will take to reduce emissions and help communities adapt to climate impacts including extreme heat.
The climate adaptation strategy includes mapping heatwave risk areas across WA and building greater public awareness of climate risks and climate science.
Preparing for the next summer's heatwaves ... and the next
On the very hot days in February, as the temperature climbed, we cranked the air-con and hoped there'd be enough power.
Our unborn baby grew to the size of a sweet potato, according to a website. The next week it was a mango. The next, a coconut.
Towards the end of the month, yet another study came out showing extreme heat in the third trimester was strongly associated with increased pre-term birth risks. Heat-stressed mothers gave birth early.
Every morning we shut up the house and checked the weather for a cool change.
We ran the air-con so hard a weed grew in the pool of its condensate water.
When the cool change finally arrived, the feeling was blissful.
But the sea breeze also brought the scent of smoke from bushfires to the south.
Maybe a week later, we had rain.
And for the first time, I found myself dreading the next summer.
No comments:
Post a Comment