Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Miracle of Science" with Tim Flannery

Transcript

"The Miracle of Science" with Tim Flannery · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans! Welcome to your refuge from everyday squabbles.
• 0:05
  This is the place where we can lift our heads and think about things from a more enlightened perspective than we might in the normal everyday course of events.
• 0:13
  There are certainly no taboos on this show.
• 0:15
  We can go beyond the echo chambers of social media feeds and simply talk about good arguments and bad arguments.
• 0:21
  I am here to sniff out the difference.
• 0:24
  A lot of the things we talk about will be wise, a lot will be deeply unwise, some will be funny, some scientific, some of them ugly,
• 0:31
  but all of these conversations I hope will make some of it just a little uncomfortable.
• 0:37
  What a bloody treasure today's guest is.
• 0:50
  Tim Flannery is a household name in Australia, probably one of the most popular, beloved, controversial and respected scientists in the country.
• 0:59
  He won the most prestigious award that Australia ever offers the Australian of the Year Award. He was the Australian of the Year in 2007.
• 1:07
  Having been named the Australian Humanist of the Year in 2005, he is a mammalogist. What's a person who studies mammals?
• 1:19
  Whatever that is, a paleontologist by training and started out working looking into the incredible animals who used to exist in ancient times on this vast continent of ours,
• 1:30
  and he's an environmentalist and conservationist and an explorer, and now a public science figure.
• 1:37
  He was the head of the Climate Commission, which the federal government established to provide information on climate change to the public.
• 1:46
  That was then abolished by a conservative government run by Tony Abbott, one of the first things that the Abbott government did.
• 1:54
  Tim Flannery went on to join a bunch of his other sacked climate fire and emergency commissioners to form an independent body called the Climate Council,
• 2:06
  which is now funded totally by the community, including myself, I'm a supporter, and they provide independent climate science to the Australian public.
• 2:15
  He started out running the Australian Museum, well he didn't start out there, that's a pretty big geek to start out with, but that was where he first came to national prominence.
• 2:23
  He was a principal research scientist there doing incredible work, discovering dozens of different species of native kangaroos, saving the bandicoot population on North Head in Sydney.
• 2:36
  He went to Harvard University for a year, not as a student, as a professor, he was the chair of Australian studies at Harvard University in 1999,
• 2:47
  which is a rotating position that is prestigious for Australians to hold, obviously.
• 2:52
  But beyond all of that, he's just a person who has big thoughts about the biggest issues that face us.
• 3:01
  So this is less of a conversation narrowly about science or about climate, we talk a bit about climate, but this is, don't worry, this is not us complaining about how terrible things are going to be in the future.
• 3:11
  This is us drilling into the mind of someone who has spent his life inhaling and ingesting the majesty of science.
• 3:18
  I hope you enjoy this dance as much as I did with the one and only Tim Flannery.
• 3:32
  When we go out on excursions to the Hawksbury, there was no radius that you couldn't go to, you just weren't really allowed to see anybody.
• 3:43
  So we'd go up and we'd do day trips to Danger Island and go out to a great Mackle Beach, and it's very close to my heart.
• 3:52
  I think when we can afford to, we'll get a weekender on the Hawksbury.
• 3:57
  Well, we're further west, we're at a Cobra Point in Ombarara Creek, just the mouth of Barara.
• 4:02
  Beautiful. And it's very cheap up here still, because we've got no services, whatever, to all stand alone, electricity, stand alone.
• 4:09
  That would be great.
• 4:10
  All the rest. Yeah, it's nice. It takes a while a bit of getting used to, but we're 15 kilometers from the nearest road, so the boat is pretty essential.
• 4:18
  Well, I mean, I'm just thinking about the kids. Once the kids are five or six, that's going to be great.
• 4:24
  Having no massive adventure. Yeah, it's lovely. A little boy who's eight, he just adore the pizza.
• 4:30
  That's one of the most interesting.
• 4:32
  What interested, I won't do a big intro here. Tim, we can just, I'll just pick this up wherever we want to, but I'm interested in what interested you as a kid.
• 4:41
  Oh, gee, I was always interested in nature. Josh, you know, I grew up in Melbourne.
• 4:48
  I was then out of suburbs in Melbourne, but was very quickly being urbanized.
• 4:52
  And I remember the environment being trashed, you know, really thoughtlessly.
• 4:56
  And that had a big impact on me. So I love nature. I love the bay, you know, fishing, snorkeling, swimming, looking for fossils that was kind of my life really.
• 5:05
  When you say nature was being trashed, in what form?
• 5:08
  Well, the suburbs were expanding very quickly, so there was massive housing development in our area that was massive industrialization.
• 5:16
  So there was a huge area of swamp land that was converted to factories and, you know, highly politic factories.
• 5:22
  We had, we had some of the most beautiful cliffs on port for the bay, actually, just near our house.
• 5:27
  And they were turned into a garbage dump. People just don't dump in car bodies, accounts are actually, and refrigerators and all sorts of crap into the bay.
• 5:36
  So off those cliffs just covering them up. So it was kind of tragic, really.
• 5:41
  Were you angry?
• 5:42
  Yeah, I was. I was very angry. I think that anger still with me, really, about what was called development.
• 5:49
  Did you progress? So I'll never mind calling it progress.
• 5:53
  So did you, were you, I'm just trying to get a feel for what your sort of emotion was as you started to develop your sense of what you wanted to do with your life?
• 6:00
  Were you, were you trying to fight back, were you trying to use your anger to fight back against that?
• 6:03
  Or were you trying to use your passion for the natural world in a, in a positive way or was it a bit of both?
• 6:09
  Look, I think, um, that's a really good question. I mean, the reality was that I, I think I took, took refuge at a fairly early age in the past because there was this unbelievable richness of fossils all around Victoria.
• 6:24
  And you could see a Victoria that was grand and wonderful, you know, through these fossil deposits.
• 6:30
  So I was, I became a, a kind of an absolute kind of freak. I wanted to be a paleontologist, which is what I became eventually.
• 6:38
  But I didn't have much of a way of fighting back, you know, when you're a teenager or whatever.
• 6:42
  So, um, that anger stayed with me and I guess that environmental streak as I've gained a voice has, you know, found an outlet.
• 6:50
  So, yeah. That's interesting. And paleontology connected you to something that was longer and more distant and kind of made those worries about the, the trashed car bodies in Victoria seemed like they were transient.
• 7:04
  Yeah, I think so. It sort of, you know, I've very much lived in an imaginary world for a little while as a teenager and then imaginary world was the lost world of pork full of bares.
• 7:14
  It was six million years ago, you know, you could dive into the bay and find the, you know, a meter long length of a jawbone of a fossilized whale.
• 7:22
  Really?
• 7:23
  Yeah, or teeth from these enormous sharks, you know, were there and fish bones and shells and all sorts of things. So, it was kind of, it was, you know, when I was diving, it was like I was back there in the past.
• 7:35
  I was in the modern bay, but my imagination was really back in this distant lost pork full of bares, you know.
• 7:41
  I'm hopeful that my three-year-old will follow in your footsteps because he's completely obsessed with dinosaurs in a way that seems to even transcend the, the infatuation that most toddlers have towards dinosaurs.
• 7:51
  But what, since you talk about the imagination of what Port Phillip Bay was like six million years ago, what was Australia like six million years ago?
• 7:59
  Oh, well, it was a somewhat different place.
• 8:03
  You know, the inland was wetter, although it was still a very open environment, you know, grasslands and so forth.
• 8:11
  There was lots of herds of large marshal bills, gigantic birds, you know, lizard goanas, the size of crocodiles on land, I mean, it was a rich place.
• 8:22
  And the east coast, of course, was different. We, in Victoria, for example, you know, in the waters of the bay or the ancient bay, there was right whales, smaller than modern ones, but not so different.
• 8:36
  There was gigantic sharks bigger than anything that's alive today. There were huge penguins as tall as a person.
• 8:44
  And on land, it was probably be able to suggest that the sharks might have been megalodons.
• 8:48
  Yeah, were megalodons and various other species as well, yes. So, you know, I found some megalodon shark teeth as a teenager, which was one of the great experiences of my life, you know.
• 8:59
  Fantastic.
• 9:00
  And yeah, yeah, sorry.
• 9:02
  But on land, it was kind of rainforesty and probably somewhat similar to parts of New Guinea today, you know.
• 9:10
  What do you do with all this? Like, once you become a paleontologist and you're researching all of this stuff, where does your future, what in your future is beckoning to you?
• 9:23
  For me now.
• 9:24
  No, no, sorry, at the time, you know, at the time that you're sort of becoming a paleontologist, you're exploring all this stuff.
• 9:29
  You're kind of thinking, I want to live in this fantastical universe of six million years ago.
• 9:35
  Like, what do you do with it?
• 9:37
  Well, I look, I went to a Catholic boys school that I absolutely hated and did poorly academically.
• 9:45
  And so poorly, in fact, I couldn't enroll in a science course when I left school and went to university.
• 9:51
  But I was still mad, keen, I was desperate to become a paleontologist.
• 9:56
  But I studied English and history, which I've absolutely loved.
• 10:01
  I came to really deeply appreciate it and particularly drama.
• 10:06
  You know, I loved that Shakespeare and the ancient Greek plays and medieval mystery plays and all that stuff.
• 10:13
  At the end of it, though, realised I, you know, the only path open to me really is to be a school teacher.
• 10:18
  And I just didn't have the guts to be a school teacher.
• 10:20
  I was just out of school myself.
• 10:22
  So I was at the museum doing volunteer work.
• 10:25
  And the curator of fossils at the museum said to me, you know, there's a real shortage of geologists at the moment.
• 10:31
  There's a company called Poseidon, there's a massive boom.
• 10:34
  They want all of the geologists for exploration.
• 10:36
  Why don't you go to Monash, where my wife teaches and see if you can enroll in a master's prelim, you know, to do geology.
• 10:42
  So I did that and I was astonished they accepted me.
• 10:45
  There must have been truly desperate for geologists, but they didn't accept me.
• 10:48
  By the time I'd finished my masters, though, the boom had turned into a massive bust and all the geologists were driving taxis.
• 10:55
  So I ended up coming to the University of New South Wales and doing a PhD in biological sciences.
• 11:02
  I love the idea that you'd get in the cab instead of the cabie giving you political opinions about immigration.
• 11:08
  They'd be talking to you about the different strata of geological influences.
• 11:13
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 11:14
  Yeah, mineral deposits and all the rest of it.
• 11:16
  Yeah, metamorphism.
• 11:18
  So that was the world.
• 11:21
  So I ended up enrolling in this PhD, studied the evolution of kangaroos, actually.
• 11:28
  Named a lot of kangaroos, made my first trip to New Guinea.
• 11:31
  Yeah, just on kangaroos, sorry to interrupt you.
• 11:34
  Did you discover a new and never before discovered species of tree kangaroos?
• 11:39
  I've discovered five different species of tree kangaroos, actually.
• 11:42
  There's only 17 known, but I've found five of them, which you know, that was in New Guinea,
• 11:49
  because they're large rare mammals.
• 11:51
  You know, you've got to spend a lot of time with local people and local tribes and communities to find them.
• 11:56
  And I just put in the time, I guess, it was lucky, very lucky.
• 11:59
  Amazing.
• 12:00
  And you found them in New Guinea?
• 12:01
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 12:03
  Are they in New Guinea or to Australia or both?
• 12:06
  There's two species in Australia.
• 12:09
  There's a lot of fossil species in Australia.
• 12:11
  But the New Guinea has 15 species still.
• 12:14
  And is that because they were connected from when New Guinea was part of the same landmass?
• 12:21
  That's right.
• 12:22
  Yeah, a long time ago.
• 12:23
  They've probably been there five, six million years.
• 12:25
  And you know, in the high Alpine mountains of West Papa, where they're still glaciers.
• 12:29
  You know, there's one species of tree kangaroos that's only found up like above the tree line.
• 12:34
  You know, in the Alpine environments.
• 12:36
  And I discovered that one.
• 12:37
  It looks like a little panda, most amazing thing.
• 12:39
  So, yeah, it was kind of, that was a highlight, really.
• 12:42
  I guess it was my life as a biologist.
• 12:44
  Wow.
• 12:45
  So, sorry, I interrupted you there.
• 12:46
  So, yeah, you went to Papa New Guinea.
• 12:48
  What happened next?
• 12:49
  Yeah, and I saw I ended up finishing the PhD.
• 12:53
  And what did you do for a job?
• 12:56
  You know, so I went down to the local unemployment department to figure out what it was called back then.
• 13:00
  You know, I had a baby on the way.
• 13:02
  It was my oldest summer's born three weeks after I finished.
• 13:06
  And, you know, enrolled for my unemployment.
• 13:09
  And the guy I remember interview me said, what do you do?
• 13:11
  I said, oh, I've studied the evolution of kangaroos.
• 13:13
  And he sort of face failure, you know.
• 13:15
  So, I was on the doll for a little while.
• 13:18
  But this job opened up at the Australian Museum in Sydney.
• 13:22
  They wanted a curator of mammals.
• 13:24
  Or a curator of birds.
• 13:26
  And there was like hundreds of applicants, I remember.
• 13:28
  And so, I applied for that.
• 13:30
  And, long and behold, I got the job.
• 13:32
  You know, it was freakish because at the job interview,
• 13:35
  one of the people who was interviewing me asked me about a very obscure rat from New Guinea.
• 13:41
  And I got to the interview early.
• 13:43
  And I'd gone into the mammal collection just to spend some time, really.
• 13:47
  But, was looking at this rat.
• 13:49
  And so, I came up with the absolutely right answer about this rat.
• 13:53
  What it was.
• 13:54
  And he kind of looked impressed, you know.
• 13:56
  So, anyway, I got this job.
• 13:58
  And it was never hurt to get there early.
• 14:00
  Never hurt to get there early.
• 14:02
  That's right.
• 14:03
  Josh is true.
• 14:04
  So, it was like a gift from the gods.
• 14:06
  And I remember, you know, I was sitting at a desk.
• 14:10
  I think I was being paid like 27,000 bucks a year or something.
• 14:14
  It seemed like an absolute fortune to me, you know.
• 14:17
  No money to do any research.
• 14:19
  I'd have to raise all of that myself.
• 14:20
  But I could go anywhere in the world.
• 14:22
  You know, if I wanted to study dolphins off Antarctica,
• 14:25
  man, I could do it.
• 14:26
  If I wanted to study polar bears, if I wanted to study red kangaroos, I could do it.
• 14:29
  I knew what I wanted to do, which was study the mammals of the islands
• 14:32
  of the southwest Pacific in New Guinea, you know.
• 14:35
  So, I spent the most wonderful 15 years of my life climbing almost every high mountain in that region,
• 14:40
  describing, you know, discovering about 30 mammal species, meeting uncontacted tribes.
• 14:46
  It was like, it was just incredible experience.
• 14:50
  What do you think that the layperson doesn't get about the natural world that you wish they would?
• 14:57
  Well, Josh, I'd say if there's any music lovers listening to this,
• 15:02
  you know, and you're listening to an opera, you know, the story of the opera,
• 15:06
  you know, the history of the singers, you know, the music, you know, the composer,
• 15:10
  and that brings a richness, doesn't it, to the experience of listening to the opera?
• 15:14
  Well, when I look at a forest, I just don't see green, right?
• 15:18
  It's like, I know this tree, I know it's history, I know how it evolved,
• 15:22
  I know what pollinates it, I know why it grows in that very spot,
• 15:25
  not the little spot next door.
• 15:27
  And there's a richness that's symphonic in the natural world,
• 15:30
  if you think keen to the evolutionary history and to the diversity of that world.
• 15:35
  So, to me, it's a massively deep and engaging experience.
• 15:40
  And it's interesting.
• 15:42
  Yeah, it's interesting you say that, you know,
• 15:44
  because one of my best mates is a scuba diver, as am I,
• 15:48
  and he's a scientist.
• 15:50
  He's one of Australia's leading water scientists.
• 15:53
  And I remember asking him why he didn't become a marine biologist,
• 15:57
  since he loves absolute doors scuba diving and the underwater environment.
• 16:01
  And he said, I wanted it to remain mysterious.
• 16:04
  I wanted it to stay at arm's length.
• 16:07
  I didn't want to understand it all.
• 16:09
  I wanted it to still seem fantastical and magical,
• 16:12
  because I know so much about this other field of science.
• 16:16
  I didn't want to sort of almost contaminate it.
• 16:18
  And I don't know how I feel about that attitude,
• 16:21
  but what do you make of it?
• 16:23
  I can really understand it.
• 16:26
  I guess, though, Josh, you know, for me,
• 16:29
  the environment that I've been working in and the paleontology,
• 16:33
  I mean, they're so diverse and so cryptic
• 16:36
  that you could study them for a lifetime and still be an underwizer.
• 16:39
  We're still just opening the door to it.
• 16:42
  So yes, I can understand, but I think in my experience,
• 16:46
  I haven't minded studying it and diving in deep to certain little areas,
• 16:50
  getting a greater understanding, but there's still plenty of mystery out there for me.
• 16:54
  But when you look at a jungle, the fact that you understand more than the layperson does,
• 17:00
  is something that you find enriching and fulfilling,
• 17:02
  not something that you find reductionist.
• 17:05
  It's totally, it is like listening to a symphony, you know,
• 17:09
  it's listening. The complexity of it is marvellous and the pieces.
• 17:14
  You know, people think of jungles as being sort of random or haphazard
• 17:17
  and of gardens as being ordered.
• 17:19
  But the opposite is true.
• 17:21
  jungles are unbelievably ordered.
• 17:23
  Every leaf is growing exactly where it is for very, very good reasons.
• 17:27
  A garden is this forced thing where we force a kind of a view on nature
• 17:33
  and everything is out of place.
• 17:35
  So, so if once you understand that incredible order of nature,
• 17:40
  it opens the door to an understanding of the beauty, I think,
• 17:43
  and complexity of those, those rainforests or other environments.
• 17:47
  How is it ordered?
• 17:49
  It's ordered by the laws of physics and by the climate, you know.
• 17:53
  So light is incredibly important.
• 17:56
  The chemistry of the plants growing around that plant is astonishingly important.
• 18:00
  The predators that are present.
• 18:02
  The predators of the predators.
• 18:04
  The predators of the herbivores might eat that leaf at all,
• 18:07
  determining why things grow where they do.
• 18:10
  And once you understand that and kind of look at it,
• 18:13
  you do see this amazing complex and wondrous world.
• 18:17
  And what can knock that order out of equilibrium, Tim?
• 18:22
  I mean, we're dealing at the moment with the looming reality of climate chaos.
• 18:27
  But let's just, before we get there, let's just talk about more localized effects,
• 18:31
  because I'm really struck by it.
• 18:33
  I'd never thought about gardens that way and jungles that way.
• 18:36
  There, presumably, that order is in a constant state of disequilibrium
• 18:41
  being buffeted around by the, I don't know,
• 18:44
  the evolutionary imperatives of each species trying to propagate
• 18:47
  and trying to get ahead.
• 18:49
  Is it in a state of, of either decline
• 18:56
  or ascendance and never perfect equilibrium?
• 19:02
  Yes, look, it never reaches a perfect equilibrium.
• 19:05
  That's for sure.
• 19:06
  It is always changing and ever-adapting.
• 19:10
  But, you know, by and large,
• 19:12
  if you take a long view of earth history,
• 19:16
  I guess new species evolve.
• 19:18
  They may move in, new species invade,
• 19:21
  and add to that complexity.
• 19:23
  But that's a very, very slow process.
• 19:25
  So what we see more is like it's fluctuations within bounds.
• 19:31
  But when you start adding a human impact,
• 19:34
  whether it's through rapidly changing climate,
• 19:37
  or through deforestation,
• 19:39
  or over hunting, bush meat, or whatever,
• 19:42
  you start to see an impoverishment of those ecosystems.
• 19:47
  And it's like seeing triggering cascades of extinction,
• 19:51
  because the interrelationship of the parts is so intricate,
• 19:55
  you start seeing species into dependent species vanished.
• 20:01
  So you might remove one,
• 20:03
  but that species then has a knock-on effect.
• 20:05
  The loss of that species has a knock-on effect to many others.
• 20:08
  Look, I'll give you some examples of this not from New Guinea,
• 20:11
  but from South America,
• 20:12
  where it's been studied very well,
• 20:14
  where, you know, people,
• 20:15
  there's a native pig-like animal in the South American rainforest
• 20:18
  called a peckery.
• 20:19
  And peckery's used wallows,
• 20:21
  so they dig holes and holes full with water.
• 20:24
  And it turns out the thumb.
• 20:26
  If you hunt out the peckeries,
• 20:28
  there's no more wallows,
• 20:30
  and therefore the frogs that really knows wallows also will vanish.
• 20:34
  And those frogs prey on insects,
• 20:36
  including mosquitoes.
• 20:37
  So the mosquitoes and other species,
• 20:39
  the frogs would normally eat,
• 20:40
  tend to erupt in numbers.
• 20:43
  And among those species,
• 20:44
  some eat the leaves of certain trees.
• 20:46
  So those trees then start to become overwhelmed by the volume of herbivores
• 20:51
  eating their leaves.
• 20:52
  And then the species that depend upon those trees is impacted,
• 20:56
  and so forth.
• 20:57
  It can't be the case we made that any new predator
• 21:02
  who enters that ecosystem can have that kind of an impact.
• 21:06
  That's what I'm trying to get a handle on.
• 21:08
  Like, there is no stasis.
• 21:12
  What is different about homo sapiens than other predators?
• 21:15
  Is it just that we're such good tool makers that we're much better at getting rid of these?
• 21:19
  These pig-like mammals?
• 21:21
  Yeah, we can drive them into extinction.
• 21:24
  Of course, the numbers always fluctuate.
• 21:26
  So jaguars may, locally, depress that species,
• 21:29
  but by and large,
• 21:31
  other species don't drive,
• 21:34
  special circumstances they can,
• 21:36
  but by and large species that co-evolve,
• 21:38
  don't drive each other into extinction.
• 21:40
  But we are very, very capable hunters.
• 21:43
  Do you know the way I think about it?
• 21:45
  Josh, it kind of like,
• 21:47
  if you take Einstein's theory of general relativity,
• 21:51
  that there's no such thing as gravity,
• 21:53
  but that what causes the appearance of gravity
• 21:57
  is this distortion of the space-time equilibrium,
• 22:02
  the space-time thing.
• 22:04
  If you think about that in ecological terms,
• 22:06
  species have a tangible impact on each other
• 22:10
  through a similar sort of distortion of the,
• 22:13
  if you want to call it ecological space-time.
• 22:16
  And humans are just so much more massive
• 22:20
  than anything else on a planet that the distortion we create
• 22:23
  is absolutely, it's like a black hole.
• 22:25
  Yeah, right.
• 22:26
  Compared with other species.
• 22:28
  That's one I think you're about.
• 22:30
  That's interesting.
• 22:31
  There's that old metaphor of gravity
• 22:33
  as being a ball on a trampoline.
• 22:35
  If you put a bowling ball on a trampoline,
• 22:38
  you just sit there and you have other balls around it,
• 22:41
  then they're going to roll towards it.
• 22:43
  And I suppose you could imagine that if there was a perfectly calibrated trampoline
• 22:47
  with lots of balls kind of perched all over it
• 22:50
  in a perfect equilibrium,
• 22:52
  and then you threw a massive bowling ball onto it
• 22:55
  that would disrupt everything.
• 22:57
  So let's talk about climate chaos
• 23:00
  because that's the obvious single way
• 23:03
  in which we're having an impact
• 23:05
  so many other cascading consequences for us.
• 23:09
  I feel like we're in a strange spot
• 23:11
  in terms of the public's,
• 23:13
  where the public's head is.
• 23:15
  I think one is either a catastrophist
• 23:18
  and deeply depressed,
• 23:20
  or one is at the other end of the pole
• 23:23
  and just feels like,
• 23:25
  you know what?
• 23:26
  Capitalism and technology is going to fix this
• 23:28
  the way that it has fixed everything,
• 23:30
  and we're going to have to think our way out of it.
• 23:33
  And at the end of the day,
• 23:35
  lots of the naysayers have been wrong about lots of things,
• 23:38
  so we can't necessarily trust the specificity of their predictions
• 23:42
  and let's just see how we all go.
• 23:45
  What's wrong with those two poles?
• 23:48
  No, wow.
• 23:51
  Can I start a step back to trying to answer this?
• 23:54
  Josh, just to link the discussion
• 23:56
  with what we've talked about in terms of ecology.
• 23:59
  So I need to ask you a question.
• 24:01
  And what do you think has created the Earth's climate system
• 24:04
  that is that we've enjoyed in a relatively stable state
• 24:07
  for so much of our evolutionary history?
• 24:09
  I mean, I guess some kind of interplay
• 24:11
  of animal and plant life together,
• 24:16
  because it was very different before there was life, right?
• 24:19
  That's right.
• 24:20
  So life has given stability to the Earth system, in a sense.
• 24:24
  And you know, scientists have come up with a name for that,
• 24:27
  which we call Gaia.
• 24:29
  And Gaia tends towards equilibrium.
• 24:32
  So it's an outcome, an emergent property
• 24:35
  of extremely complex ecosystems and a dynamic Earth.
• 24:40
  So I understand Gaia as being, this is Jim Lovelock's idea.
• 24:45
  I read the book when I was in my teens,
• 24:47
  but I regarded as being more of a spiritual ode
• 24:51
  to the idea that the combination of life on Earth
• 24:56
  and the planet itself, and even its non-living geology
• 25:00
  all came together to form some kind of a god,
• 25:04
  almost, or some kind of a conscious god-like pantheistic entity.
• 25:09
  Am I overreading into that?
• 25:11
  I think maybe, Joshua,
• 25:14
  at the basis of the hypothesis is the physical reality
• 25:17
  of the world.
• 25:19
  And people call it the Earth's climate system,
• 25:23
  you know, if you're a scientist and a physicist.
• 25:25
  But Gaia is a way of referring to the emergent properties
• 25:29
  that come out of this highly complex system, I think,
• 25:32
  which is a kind of useful way of thinking about it.
• 25:36
  But if we just go back to that system,
• 25:39
  and you think about the stability it's created,
• 25:42
  despite a whole lot of perturbations,
• 25:45
  and it's by no means perfect.
• 25:47
  We've had asteroids knock into the planet causing massive extinctions,
• 25:50
  we've had ice ages and so forth,
• 25:52
  but changes generally have been slow.
• 25:54
  So what we've done as humans is to upset that balance,
• 25:58
  that emergent property of Gaia by clearing forests,
• 26:02
  digging up fossil fuels,
• 26:04
  and overfishing the oceans, destroying the oceans.
• 26:07
  So that's the starting point.
• 26:11
  So what will happen in the next decade or two
• 26:16
  is kind of, I guess, we could focus on that,
• 26:19
  and we could ask about the future of our civilization and so forth.
• 26:22
  But really, the sort of the long-term solutions,
• 26:26
  they're dependent upon a recognition of the role of the Earth climate system
• 26:33
  in creating and stabilizing life on our planet.
• 26:38
  So I know that might seem like a tangential thing.
• 26:42
  No, it's interesting. It's useful.
• 26:44
  And it's also useful that you throw in the dispoiling of the oceans
• 26:48
  and the cutting down of forests into that,
• 26:50
  because those two things don't just have implications for the climate.
• 26:54
  I mean, it sounds like you're pointing to a bigger problem,
• 26:59
  to an even bigger problem than climate change.
• 27:02
  Well, yes, it is. It's the distortion of the ecological
• 27:06
  space-time equilibrium by this massive black hole of a species
• 27:11
  that's led to all of these.
• 27:13
  And we don't have to be that way.
• 27:15
  And there are some reasons for...
• 27:17
  No, we don't. No, I don't think so.
• 27:20
  There are many ways of living and many ways of being.
• 27:26
  I mean, the pessimist in me or the devil's advocate in me
• 27:30
  thinks humans are always going to want to be more comfortable than they are.
• 27:35
  And lots and lots of humans have gone from lives of poverty and drudgery
• 27:42
  and toil and disease throughout most of human history in most places
• 27:47
  to increasingly comfortable lives of pleasure and plenty
• 27:50
  over the past century or two since the Industrial Revolution.
• 27:53
  And now more and more people want that life in the developing world.
• 27:57
  And so even if you were to click your fingers and transition immediately
• 28:02
  from carbon, from burning fossil fuels to renewable energy,
• 28:08
  people are going to want to eat fish instead of rice if they can
• 28:13
  and beef instead of lentils.
• 28:18
  And that's going to have consequences.
• 28:20
  And that bowling ball is just going to be as heavy as we can possibly
• 28:23
  make it until the earth pushes back and says,
• 28:26
  you can't make it anymore.
• 28:28
  Well, look, that's one interpretation, Josh, for sure.
• 28:32
  I see it a little bit differently.
• 28:36
  How would I start?
• 28:38
  Look, let's look at that population issue because this seems pretty central
• 28:44
  to what you're talking about there.
• 28:47
  Human population growth is now entering a phase where we are starting to see
• 28:53
  a tapering off and indeed in many countries the reduction in terms of population.
• 28:58
  And I find this absolutely astonishing.
• 29:02
  Every other species that's ever existed on our planet as Thomas Malthus knew
• 29:08
  was regulated by the four horsemen of the apocalypse by drought, famine,
• 29:14
  disease and warfare or whatever it happens to be, a bit of population.
• 29:19
  We seem not to be.
• 29:22
  Despite going through a period of very rapid growth, we're now entering a period of stability
• 29:27
  which looks like it will be followed by a period of slow decline.
• 29:31
  And I find that it's kind of like, it's so miraculous, Josh,
• 29:35
  it reminds me of the fact that the moon, during an eclipse,
• 29:39
  precisely fits over the sun.
• 29:42
  And without that, we would never have been able to test Einstein's theory of general relativity
• 29:47
  without any unbelievable coincidence if it is.
• 29:51
  But this is a very interesting stuff, this unique phenomena that we see
• 29:56
  that give you pause for deep thought.
• 29:59
  So because you mean it was an eclipse that enabled us to see the star
• 30:03
  behind the sun that was actually hidden behind the sun,
• 30:07
  but the light bent around the sun because of the sun by the sun's gravitational.
• 30:11
  Imagine if the moon was a bit closer or further away or you know,
• 30:15
  as it has been in the past.
• 30:17
  But just at this moment, we're interested in exploring the universe.
• 30:20
  The moon shadow fits precisely over the sun.
• 30:24
  Creating enough shadow that we can see the bent from a distance star behind.
• 30:27
  Yeah, okay, cool. So how does your analogy now map on to my previous point?
• 30:35
  So here we are as a species which is self-regulating.
• 30:38
  The only species in the history of life on Earth ever that is self-regulating.
• 30:42
  And not through any conscious decision about, oh, there's too many people on the planet,
• 30:46
  but just through a series of emergent forces that have a reason.
• 30:53
  And that is sense of individual well-being, a sense of wanting.
• 30:57
  Some of those things you were talking about, Josh, you know, wanting a better life.
• 31:01
  Right? So instead of having 15 kids, I'm only going to have one or two.
• 31:05
  So there are interesting, complex phenomena going on here which I find really interesting.
• 31:12
  And just think about how those people live.
• 31:15
  If you were a hunter-gatherer, 18 elephants or whatever you might eat,
• 31:20
  you could put large mammals in a forest.
• 31:23
  The world can only support a tiny number of people.
• 31:26
  If you're an agriculturalist, you've moved down in the trophic cascade to the point of eating plants
• 31:32
  and those plants, you know, there's a hundred times as much energy as there would be in the large mammals.
• 31:40
  So you can have a larger population.
• 31:42
  We're now moving into a phase where we are looking at development,
• 31:46
  of artificial meats.
• 31:48
  We're looking at the development of products using bacteria, archaea and hydrogen that will replace spread.
• 31:58
  You know, this is where we're moving further down the trophic, further down the food pyramid,
• 32:04
  towards very base, you see.
• 32:06
  And can you imagine a world, Josh, where we are sourcing our wheat requirements
• 32:12
  from giant vats of archaea fed by wind turbines and solar panels.
• 32:16
  Sorry, what's archaea?
• 32:18
  Oh, archaea, they're little bacteria-like entities.
• 32:23
  They're the most primitive forms of life we know about.
• 32:25
  But they have an unbelievably complex chemical pathways within them.
• 32:30
  They're sort of like the swiss army knife of life.
• 32:33
  They can do everything, whereas we can only do one thing.
• 32:36
  We can only use oxygen, but they can do everything.
• 32:38
  And can we farm them?
• 32:40
  Yes, there's people at the moment in Finland, a group called our solar food.
• 32:46
  So we're looking at how we use archaea to create all of the basic starches and proteins that are present in wheat.
• 32:52
  I mean, I love to hear you say that, because I'm a very conflicted eater of organic meat,
• 33:00
  but conflicted about eating meat at all, both for environmental reasons,
• 33:04
  but actually mainly just for moral reasons.
• 33:07
  But I'm very bullish on lab-grown meat and the possibility of creating animal protein flesh without sentience,
• 33:16
  without animal sentience.
• 33:18
  And I like the idea of eating insects and things like that instead of farming animals,
• 33:23
  and I loathe industrialized farming.
• 33:26
  But all of that seems to me to run a little bit counter to the sort of goddess temple guy,
• 33:34
  I am the world sort of talk that you seem to be pointing to a little earlier.
• 33:40
  That, to me, seems to be part of the kind of bullish Silicon Valley tech nerd,
• 33:47
  we can think our way out of all of our problems, strain of humankind.
• 33:52
  And I'm not sure which one to put my face in.
• 33:55
  Yeah. Well, look, I don't know whether we can think our way out of our problems,
• 34:02
  but what other way out is there?
• 34:04
  Well, I suppose some would say,
• 34:08
  you know, return to a much simpler way of life,
• 34:11
  try to have a revolution in our consciousness,
• 34:14
  so that we're not constantly fucking around with nature.
• 34:17
  Instead, we're obeying, you know, the dictates of nature
• 34:22
  and live just much more humbly and in tune with the cosmos than we currently do.
• 34:28
  And that might not be the type, that type of person might not be the type of person
• 34:32
  who's tinkering around with Finnish, you know, microbes to produce vast oceans of wheat.
• 34:39
  Well, exactly. And look, I'm very sympathetic to that view.
• 34:43
  And I think that ultimately it's probably quite a fulfilling lifestyle to live that way.
• 34:48
  But the difficulty we face at the moment is that the people of China and India are so far from thinking about that.
• 34:56
  And Sub-Saharan Africa, that we can try,
• 35:00
  and I think it's good the more people live like that, the better.
• 35:02
  But with doubt, we're going to need to think our way out of the problem as well.
• 35:05
  There's already too much CO2 in India, exactly.
• 35:08
  Yeah, we don't have a sphere.
• 35:10
  So we both, but the interesting thing is, Josh, with all of this,
• 35:14
  once you reach a certain level of affluence,
• 35:17
  and we talked about the impact of that on population growth,
• 35:20
  the desire to have lots of children or not.
• 35:23
  The question arises, what is life really all about?
• 35:27
  And that fundamental question, I think, what are we about?
• 35:31
  Why are we here? That question will start driving human evolution and development
• 35:37
  at a later stage, I think, in our journey.
• 35:41
  But at the moment, you know, my grandparents, you know,
• 35:45
  they live through the Great Depression.
• 35:47
  My parents were born during the Depression.
• 35:49
  The Second World War was fought in their lifetime.
• 35:52
  So they were a shell-shock generation.
• 35:55
  We're just emerging from that now,
• 35:57
  and that this kind of obsession with accumulating material wealth
• 36:02
  is sort of symptomatic of that generation in a way that's just emerged
• 36:06
  out of dire poverty and trauma.
• 36:09
  So I think we can't expect to go straight from that into this more deeply questioning,
• 36:15
  kind of human, that I think will be more common in future.
• 36:19
  You think it will?
• 36:20
  Yeah, I do, because once you've got time and leisure,
• 36:24
  what is there that you do think about that?
• 36:28
  Why are we here? What are we for?
• 36:30
  What's life really about?
• 36:32
  Do you think that I think there's a common misconception
• 36:36
  that if we do something aggressive about climate,
• 36:39
  that'll make us poorer?
• 36:41
  Is that a misconception?
• 36:43
  It's a total misconception.
• 36:46
  The most expensive energy at the moment is the most polluting energy.
• 36:50
  Yeah.
• 36:51
  And just think of...
• 36:52
  Is that hidden coal still cheap?
• 36:54
  No, it's not.
• 36:55
  No, no, no.
• 36:56
  Wind and solar for most of the world, way cheaper than coal.
• 37:00
  So that wasn't true five years ago, but it's true now,
• 37:03
  because wind and solar, they result from a manufacturing process
• 37:08
  that produces goods ever more efficiently and more cheaply
• 37:12
  the more they make of them.
• 37:14
  So once you've made a billion solar panels and a million wind turbines,
• 37:18
  you know, a fair bit about how to make those things efficient and cheap.
• 37:22
  Yeah, right.
• 37:23
  And just lastly on climate, before we move on to more positive things,
• 37:28
  I think there's a part of people...
• 37:30
  I get the sense from people that may be part of their skepticism towards
• 37:34
  aggressive action on climate,
• 37:36
  is that they don't quite believe the most catastrophic predictions,
• 37:41
  and so they think that if the most catastrophic ones aren't going to come true,
• 37:45
  then we shouldn't do anything.
• 37:47
  And this frustrates me.
• 37:49
  And I feel like sometimes maybe people on our side of the fence
• 37:53
  who do care about action on this have done ourselves a disservice
• 37:56
  by catastrophizing a bit too much and arguing that everyone's going to die
• 38:01
  in a fireball and humanity is going to face extinction.
• 38:05
  Whereas it might just be the case that things are going to get
• 38:09
  much more unstable, much more expensive,
• 38:12
  and just much more generally a pain in the ass in the future,
• 38:16
  because populations are going to be destabilized,
• 38:19
  there are going to be more refugees, more famines,
• 38:21
  there's going to be more bushfires and more droughts.
• 38:23
  And it might just sort of vaguely suck.
• 38:27
  Like that for me is enough of a reason to do something.
• 38:30
  I don't need to believe Sydney is going to be engulfed in a fireball.
• 38:34
  Do you have any thoughts about that messaging critique?
• 38:38
  Yeah, look, I do.
• 38:40
  Josh, I think, look, I don't believe anything.
• 38:44
  Yeah, as a scientist.
• 38:46
  I don't believe things.
• 38:48
  I know that I can falsify things.
• 38:50
  I can prove things wrong.
• 38:52
  But I can't, I don't believe anything as such.
• 38:55
  But what I can do is work on the basis of probabilities.
• 38:59
  So if it's probable or highly probable that an outcome
• 39:04
  will occur, then it concerns me.
• 39:07
  Particularly if it's a big, you know, immediate thing
• 39:10
  that we're talking about.
• 39:12
  And, you know, can I just tell you a personal story, Josh,
• 39:15
  about the climate council and the mega fires.
• 39:17
  You know, like some are mega fires.
• 39:19
  You know, we had experts on the climate council
• 39:21
  who were almost tearing their hair out in April 2019,
• 39:25
  saying the conditions we're seeing on the ground
• 39:27
  are absolutely unprecedented.
• 39:29
  My father before me and me who spent 50 years firefighting
• 39:32
  have never seen anything like it.
• 39:34
  This is a catastrophe in the making.
• 39:36
  You know, we could not get a meeting with the Prime Minister
• 39:39
  to discuss how dire this was.
• 39:41
  And yet that guy, those experts were right.
• 39:44
  You know, they were absolutely right.
• 39:46
  So the experts can see things sometimes we can't.
• 39:49
  I would still work on the basis of probabilities.
• 39:52
  And the other thing we have to throw into the balance here
• 39:55
  is the fragility of our civilization.
• 39:58
  Like, I don't know how you feel.
• 40:00
  Josh, but I think a lot of people just assume it's going to go on.
• 40:03
  You know, as it is, no matter what.
• 40:06
  But when I look at the stresses that our society is facing
• 40:10
  just from COVID and the lockdowns,
• 40:13
  I can see a fragility there that, you know,
• 40:16
  as if our food production systems are disrupted,
• 40:19
  if our water supplies disrupted,
• 40:21
  if we end up being financially challenged
• 40:23
  because of infrastructure damage
• 40:25
  or as societal fabric is challenged by mass refugee migration
• 40:31
  and so forth,
• 40:32
  you can see it having a big impact upon our civilization.
• 40:35
  Our civilization is simply an unwritten agreement between all of us
• 40:39
  that will act civilly towards each other.
• 40:42
  And that is fragile, I think.
• 40:45
  And we need to give it our best chance.
• 40:47
  That's horrifying, Tim.
• 40:48
  I hadn't really consciously made that final leap.
• 40:52
  Yeah, I hadn't put that final piece of the jigsaw puzzle in place.
• 40:55
  But you're totally right.
• 40:57
  If you look at the consequences of, you know,
• 41:01
  even just the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe leading arguably
• 41:05
  to the extra percentage point that you needed in the UK
• 41:08
  to get Brexit over the line,
• 41:10
  as it was in the wake of huge billboards
• 41:13
  with images of people of color kind of swarming the UK,
• 41:17
  saying breaking point and so on.
• 41:19
  Kind of just stirring up that sort of xenophobia
• 41:22
  to get it across the line.
• 41:23
  Or you think about the misinformation from Russia
• 41:27
  and misinformation on Facebook
• 41:30
  that helped lead to Donald Trump's election.
• 41:34
  And so far all of the systems of democracy have held.
• 41:38
  But you can imagine a self reinforcing downward spiral
• 41:43
  of crises that batter us into a scenario
• 41:46
  in which our democracy is not so robust to withstand them.
• 41:49
  And you can imagine, yeah, things.
• 41:52
  Yeah, it's pretty, you know,
• 41:55
  the basic underlying condition would have to be simply
• 41:58
  that we get poorer each year,
• 41:59
  rather than wealthier or stay the same.
• 42:01
  That would probably be enough.
• 42:03
  Right.
• 42:04
  And you know, and if food prices go up,
• 42:06
  if infrastructure is being destroyed and we can't afford it,
• 42:09
  you can imagine how that might happen.
• 42:11
  And in the UK, you know, partly that was what was to blame.
• 42:14
  People in the north in the regions were losing jobs
• 42:18
  and losing opportunity as a result of various restructuring,
• 42:22
  you know, economic changes that led to that.
• 42:25
  So I just think that, you know, we have to balance the scale
• 42:29
  of the threat against the fragility of the system
• 42:31
  we're trying to defend and protect.
• 42:33
  And not to mention, I mean, why are you talking about,
• 42:35
  I mentioned Syria and the refugee crisis playing into Brexit.
• 42:39
  But of course, the refugee crisis itself was partly caused
• 42:44
  actually by a big drought and famine in Syria.
• 42:48
  I got into some hot water in the States when I was living
• 42:51
  over there, I interviewed Bill Nye,
• 42:53
  the science guy who's a famous popularizer of science
• 42:57
  in the States, and this was during the Arab Spring.
• 43:00
  And he was saying, look, the thing we're not talking about
• 43:02
  about the Arab Spring is that, you know, to a large extent,
• 43:04
  these revolutions came out of massive spikes in food prices
• 43:08
  that were caused by droughts linked to climate change.
• 43:12
  And of course, then the sort of murder up tabloid rags
• 43:17
  or went in and said, oh, you know, Bill Nye and Josh F.
• 43:19
  are saying that climate change caused the Arab Spring.
• 43:22
  That's an oversimplification.
• 43:24
  But the stresses that climate change puts on ecosystems
• 43:27
  can lead to stresses and fractures in economic
• 43:30
  and political systems as well.
• 43:32
  And it's interesting that you mentioned the April 2019
• 43:35
  attempts to meet with the government about fire.
• 43:38
  I've forgotten about that until you just mentioned it,
• 43:42
  because Greg Mullins, who I'm sure you know,
• 43:44
  the form of boss of emergency services in New South Wales,
• 43:48
  I was on the air on ABC Radio Sydney during the fires.
• 43:52
  And he did an iconic interview, I think for about half an hour.
• 43:59
  It may have been short, but it felt like half an hour.
• 44:01
  In the first few days of January in 2020,
• 44:05
  in which the frustration in his voice
• 44:10
  and the emotion, I mean, we were all,
• 44:12
  I'm getting choked up just remembering how stressed out
• 44:15
  I was being on the air,
• 44:17
  feeling all the calls from people whose houses were burning down,
• 44:20
  who had lost loved ones.
• 44:22
  And to talk to Greg, who had been the person,
• 44:25
  along with you, banging on the prime minister's door
• 44:28
  eight months previously,
• 44:30
  saying the conditions are perfect for a, you know,
• 44:34
  a super storm, a confluence of factors coming together
• 44:38
  create once in a century bushfires.
• 44:41
  And then they happen.
• 44:43
  I mean, it was like, it was depressing
• 44:46
  and it was also like being in a disaster movie.
• 44:49
  Well, look, it was, it wasn't a once in a century fire,
• 44:52
  Josh, that was a, absolutely unprecedented.
• 44:55
  You know, we'd had the driest two years in a row back to back
• 45:00
  in the Murray Daling Basin, nothing like that had ever been seen
• 45:03
  in the country before.
• 45:04
  We had unprecedented hot conditions.
• 45:08
  You know, everything was pointing to this being an extraordinary fire season.
• 45:12
  And when it's, when it was over, we realised, you know,
• 45:15
  21% of the nation's temperate broadly forest had been burned.
• 45:19
  In previous bushfire seasons, the maximum area burnt was 2%.
• 45:24
  So it was like an order of magnitude greater in its extent
• 45:28
  than anything we'd ever seen before.
• 45:30
  So, you know, the conditions were all there pointing to this horrific outcome.
• 45:35
  And we could have done so much better, Josh, if we'd been prepared.
• 45:39
  This was what was frustrating for Greg and the rest of the climate counsellors and myself.
• 45:43
  You know, we simply wanted the federal government, the states
• 45:47
  and all the people in the regions to recognise that this was absolutely unprecedented.
• 45:52
  And we needed to be prepared at a level we'd never been prepared before.
• 45:57
  In fact, I'm going to put in the audio of my conversation with Greg
• 46:01
  into the episode here, so the listener can enjoy it.
• 46:05
  Right.
• 46:06
  If a foreign country had inflicted this scale of damage,
• 46:09
  I mean, Lord only knows how many bombs you'd need to inflict this level of carnage.
• 46:13
  Or if terrorists had incinerated an area of the size of Belgium in New South Wales,
• 46:17
  we would be all in.
• 46:18
  Every airstrip would be common deed.
• 46:20
  Every ally would be engaged.
• 46:21
  Every available aircraft would be flying sorties to help.
• 46:27
  And I'm just wondering if you think we're serious.
• 46:32
  No.
• 46:33
  So what worked with multiple Prime Ministers through my career?
• 46:38
  Prime Minister Howard, Abbott Rudd Gillard.
• 46:43
  We had disasters like the New Zealand earthquake, the Japan earthquake and tsunami.
• 46:49
  The Indian Ocean tsunami sending aid overseas.
• 46:53
  We had the link cafe siege and I watched Prime Minister step up into leadership roles
• 46:58
  and they were asking constantly what's needed, what can we do?
• 47:01
  And there was no political partisanship.
• 47:03
  They were working with the opposition leader.
• 47:06
  I'm just not seeing it.
• 47:09
  I don't understand it.
• 47:11
  And you did right now.
• 47:14
  Our Prime Minister should be on the phone to Justin Trudeau from Canada right now saying,
• 47:19
  Justin, we need 20 or more of your water scooping purpose-built water bombers
• 47:25
  that are in mothballs during your winter.
• 47:27
  Get them down here.
• 47:28
  Can you get them here in five days?
• 47:31
  With at Bateman's Bay the other day.
• 47:36
  And this is no criticism of the fire agencies.
• 47:38
  All we have is seven large air tankers in Australia.
• 47:42
  I was in California in November at the Kincaid fire up at Sonoma County.
• 47:47
  They had, was 23.
• 47:51
  It would have been 35 large air tankers working that fire plus dozens of helicopters.
• 47:57
  Now we have lots of helicopters.
• 47:59
  I heard the Prime Minister speak yesterday and I found it very odd.
• 48:04
  So he quoted numbers of aircraft but they're little helicopters and little crop dusting aircraft.
• 48:10
  The big ones, we've got seven.
• 48:12
  We need more but the fire chiefs frankly have the hands full dealing with this.
• 48:18
  They don't want to ask because the political masters will not like it.
• 48:22
  And I know from being in government sometimes treasuries get square after the after the event.
• 48:29
  So they're just trying to deal with what they're dealing with.
• 48:32
  They're not going to say, oh yes, we need more.
• 48:36
  The government should be proactive.
• 48:38
  I believe that's what our Prime Minister should be doing.
• 48:41
  He's ringing around countries like France, Portugal, Spain, Canada,
• 48:45
  that have all these purpose built water scooping aircraft that don't need to land or fill up.
• 48:50
  So they've got rapid turn around the 6,000 litres.
• 48:53
  That's the practical sort of thing.
• 48:56
  Now the ADF are dying to help but the national government kept saying, oh they're not needed.
• 49:02
  They have so many capabilities that can be applied.
• 49:05
  And we're seeing it now. They can do base camps for firefighters.
• 49:10
  They can refuel trucks in the field. They can carry bulk water.
• 49:13
  They can transport firefighters. They can do evacuations.
• 49:17
  They can do sensing technologies.
• 49:20
  They need to be integrated as part of the effort.
• 49:23
  And my group and I were not criticising because the paradigm of how we fought fires
• 49:31
  with coal on the military when we needed them.
• 49:34
  But we could see that this was just getting out of control.
• 49:38
  Just yesterday what really got me was the Prime Minister set a couple of times.
• 49:43
  These are natural disasters. They're natural.
• 49:46
  Sorry Prime Minister, they're not.
• 49:49
  We've lost 600% more homes in New South Wales than our worst ever fire season since European settlement.
• 49:57
  We've lost 600% more and we're going to lose so many more tomorrow.
• 50:01
  I'll probably be down there again.
• 50:04
  When is the penny going to drop with this guy?
• 50:08
  Greg to be fair to the PM.
• 50:10
  He could say that even if we had transitioned to a zero carbon economy many years ago
• 50:14
  and even if not a single ounce of coal was being exported from Australia,
• 50:18
  it would still be possible for devastating bushfires to occur.
• 50:22
  One of the refrains that you hear coming out of the right and conservative talk media
• 50:26
  at the moment is about fuel management and about back burning.
• 50:29
  There's been a push by greenies not to manage fuel and to do proper back burns.
• 50:34
  And that's to blame for this. Is there any credibility in that?
• 50:38
  None whatsoever. So I was watching fires run across people's lawns in Bateman's Bay
• 50:44
  with one metre high flames. So in extreme conditions, in an extreme drought.
• 50:48
  Now this is a drought that's underpinned by 20 years of drying.
• 50:53
  So 15 to 20% reduction in rainfall on the south coast of New South Wales.
• 50:58
  The eastern coast of New South Wales over 20 years.
• 51:02
  So when the drought hits, it's that more intense.
• 51:05
  Now everything burns.
• 51:07
  I won't go into the chemistry and the physics of this but it's actually very simple.
• 51:11
  So there's more available fuel.
• 51:14
  Now I saw a fire up near Rapville at Grafton. We were called to a fire.
• 51:19
  And the locals said it burnt through two weeks ago.
• 51:22
  We got there and the leaves, the burnt leaves from the trees had dropped on the ground.
• 51:26
  And they were burning again. One metre flames. We had a hectare of leaf droplets.
• 51:31
  So in extreme conditions like this.
• 51:35
  And there's been lots of hazard reductions down over the years.
• 51:38
  More done by national parks than in previous years.
• 51:42
  But the fires have burnt through those hazard reduced areas.
• 51:46
  So this is the blame game.
• 51:49
  So blame arsonists will blame greenies.
• 51:52
  It's a holistic thing.
• 51:54
  There's a whole lot of different things that need to come into the picture.
• 51:57
  Is there a logistical impediment why that is impossible?
• 52:01
  Do we not have enough?
• 52:03
  Pilots, they're not enough.
• 52:05
  Air strips are the...
• 52:07
  That's ridiculous.
• 52:09
  So there was a prime minister made an agreement with us in $2,300 for dollar to lease aircraft.
• 52:20
  That amount was never increased.
• 52:22
  So the states and territories now pay ten times what the federal government pay.
• 52:27
  So the fire chiefs pleaded while I was still the head of our peak body AFAC.
• 52:35
  So full fires of foreign emergency services in Australia and New Zealand.
• 52:39
  We were pleading with the federal government to just kick that in a bit more.
• 52:43
  A detailed business case is languished in Canberra for two years.
• 52:47
  And then, belatedly, a couple of weeks ago, I think, to get the government off the hook.
• 52:52
  They said I look would give a one-off payment of 11 million.
• 52:56
  Well, two late guys.
• 52:58
  We weren't able to negotiate the leases.
• 53:01
  But more is needed.
• 53:03
  Exactly what we predicted.
• 53:05
  All states are starting to burn.
• 53:07
  When they burn simultaneously, we can't share firefighters, we can't share trucks.
• 53:12
  And we're going to have, you know, we'll have one major aircraft in each state.
• 53:18
  And that's not going to do any good when you've got a hundred fires alone in New South Wales.
• 53:22
  I mean, if you're right that it is a financial impediment, then that is absolutely and totally shameful.
• 53:27
  And also not just shameful, but a political non-starter as well.
• 53:30
  I mean, I hope that you're wrong. I hope that that's overly cynical.
• 53:33
  Because I haven't done a poll in the field, Greg.
• 53:35
  But I am absolutely certain that if you poll Australians about whether or not we should be taking financial considerations into account in our response to these fires,
• 53:43
  there would be very, very few people who would say that we should allow these fires to burn a second longer than necessary
• 53:50
  and burn an additional one single square kilometre as a result of the fact that we don't want to spend money on it.
• 53:56
  Well, I can hear you being a bit angry. I'm furious because that is the case.
• 54:01
  And you keep hearing the government saying it's a state and territory responsibility.
• 54:06
  This is a national disaster. Every state is starting to burn.
• 54:10
  We don't have enough large aircraft. By the way, large aircraft don't put out fires.
• 54:14
  They can just give the firefighters on the ground an edge.
• 54:17
  But if you had 20, 30 of these medium sized aircraft that have rapid turnaround,
• 54:24
  you could make a material difference. We called on the Prime Minister to have a bipartisan approach.
• 54:29
  And he said, it's not needed. It's fine. Now he said he'll have a coag process as Anthony Albanese had requested in November.
• 54:36
  He has to be forced every inch of the way.
• 54:39
  I remember going to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and talking to the fire chief.
• 54:45
  And they were just appalled at President Bush how he sat in Washington and just sat on his hands.
• 54:51
  And this is reminiscent of that to me. Greg, good on you.
• 54:55
  We appreciate everything that you're doing. I know you're exhausted.
• 54:58
  We're all a bit exhausted, but not as exhausted as you. Thanks for filling us in.
• 55:03
  Thanks, Josh.
• 55:04
  You got it. That's Greg Mullins, who's the former New South Wales Fire and Rescue Commissioner.
• 55:08
  Let's move on from climate change and bushfires and all of that darkness.
• 55:13
  Are you a vegetarian, Tim?
• 55:16
  No, no, I'm not. I've probably, I eat less meat than I ever used to, but I still do eat some meat.
• 55:22
  And your part of the problem is, Josh, a lot of the vegetable food that's produced is unsustainable.
• 55:27
  Like wheat products, you know, the mass clearing that goes on in the soil degradation and the loss of carbon,
• 55:33
  the fossil fuels burned to make wheat is like, you know, that's huge.
• 55:38
  So, so, you know, I'm not getting many options to feel good about myself, Tim.
• 55:43
  Well, look, it's not easy. We live in a system where, you know, polluting energy has been the main source.
• 55:49
  And we need to move on from that, but there are no easy solutions.
• 55:52
  I mean, instead of thinking about the impact on the environment and on the climate,
• 55:56
  just thinking about the experience of what it's like to be a sentient creature,
• 56:00
  like as a former paleontologist, and as, what, not former, as a paleontologist,
• 56:04
  there's someone who has been deeply interested in the evolution of animal life.
• 56:11
  Do you, like, how do you rationalize the slaughter of a sentient creature just because it's flesh taste nice?
• 56:21
  I don't know how.
• 56:22
  Well, look, we are carnivores.
• 56:25
  You know, and I think as long as an animal's had a good life,
• 56:30
  it's death is not, is not the most important thing.
• 56:35
  Yeah. And as long as it's death is humane.
• 56:38
  And, you know, the thing, you know, Samuel Johnson said it in the 18th century, you know,
• 56:42
  dogs are essentially immortal because they know nothing of death.
• 56:46
  Yeah.
• 56:47
  And so, and so we argue that we immortal because we'll never know death.
• 56:50
  We'll only know life.
• 56:51
  And this is true. And for animals like us in New Guinea, I've seen lots of animals kill.
• 56:56
  I've had to kill animals myself.
• 56:58
  And I know that, that lack of awareness of death, if you can be humane about it,
• 57:04
  for the animal if it's had a good life, that's the most important thing.
• 57:08
  So I, I did test, you know, caged birds and pigs in crates and all this sort of stuff.
• 57:14
  But I don't mind eating meat as long as I know it's, the animals been humanly killed.
• 57:19
  And so, you know, I fish still and, and, and kill my own fish and eat them.
• 57:23
  And, you know, that's, that's fine with me.
• 57:26
  So I guess I've got a bit of a different view, Josh from, from you about the,
• 57:31
  about life and death for animals.
• 57:33
  The death's inevitable. It's part of the cycle. We'll all die.
• 57:36
  Yeah.
• 57:37
  Let's hope we can die as humanly as many of the animals that we kill.
• 57:40
  And now, now you're making me wonder whether or not there's something fundamentally detached about veganism.
• 57:48
  You know, or that there's a basic misunderstanding at the root of it that we are
• 57:52
  other for other than the natural environment.
• 57:55
  When, in fact, we are part of a natural environment.
• 57:57
  You know, I'd love to be sitting up on the Hawksbury River on a boat, near where you are,
• 58:01
  fishing some of my warmest memories of my childhood are going to New Zealand to my mum's a Kiwi
• 58:06
  and fishing with her brother and sister on their boat.
• 58:11
  Yeah, maybe there is no, no guilt in that.
• 58:14
  I don't know.
• 58:15
  And it's got to be a cycle, you know, Josh, one of the things I dislike about our modern society
• 58:20
  is the way we deal with death and with bodies, you know, like in traditional African societies
• 58:25
  and some New Guinea societies.
• 58:27
  A body of a dead person is, well, in Africa, they're thrown over the Thornbush fence, you know.
• 58:33
  And in the morning, there is literally nothing there.
• 58:36
  They have been transformed into hyenas and lions and other wonderful creatures
• 58:41
  and are part of the great cycle of life.
• 58:43
  We don't do that and I find that problematic, you know.
• 58:48
  That's interesting.
• 58:49
  Yeah.
• 58:50
  How do you think animals become sentient?
• 58:53
  What do you think, you know, to get towards a more spiritual conversation?
• 58:57
  What is going on with atoms arranging themselves in such a way that sentience arises?
• 59:05
  Well, this is the great question, isn't it?
• 59:08
  That goes back to that idea of Gaia and that we were talking about earlier.
• 59:15
  What I can say is that, you know, information organizers matter.
• 59:21
  It's axiomatic in the world we live in, you know, from the very subatomic particles
• 59:26
  through to where we are information organizers matter.
• 59:29
  So there's always a trend towards increasing complexity of organizational units, I think,
• 59:36
  in the universe and we're part of that.
• 59:39
  You know, our human brains are the most complex computational and, you know,
• 59:43
  organizational entities we know of in the entire universe.
• 59:48
  And that has come about through a long, long co-evolution.
• 59:53
  And you can see it as information has tried to organize matter within the Gaia system.
• 1:00:00
  You know, we've had an increase in brain size over time.
• 1:00:04
  Until, you know, today we've reached this position where our species has
• 1:00:09
  where we have a sense of time and history that is very different from any other species
• 1:00:16
  and have a sense of the individual context, the individual place within that history
• 1:00:21
  that's very different from any other species.
• 1:00:24
  And we have a reach where the only part really of the Gaian system that looks at the Gaian hole
• 1:00:29
  and sees it, you know, Gaia knows itself through us and knows the universe through us.
• 1:00:36
  So it's one of the great mysteries inside that issue of why does the Moon fit just over the Sun?
• 1:00:44
  I'll tell you what, this is a bigger mystery than the Moon fitting over the Sun.
• 1:00:47
  I can handle it. I can, I can, I can, I can ascribe the Moon fitting over the Sun perfectly to chance.
• 1:00:52
  But I can't ascribe the evolution of the human mind to chance.
• 1:00:57
  And I'm not saying that I'm invoking a God, but there is a, there are underlying principles
• 1:01:02
  that are completely gobsmacking. I mean, you know, natural selection is gobsmacking.
• 1:01:08
  The constants gobsmacking, you know, I mean, Einstein's discoveries are gobsmacking.
• 1:01:14
  That the whole thing works is beyond belief.
• 1:01:20
  When you're talking about Gaia, though, are you, are you invoking a kind of order or a kind of intelligence doing the ordering?
• 1:01:28
  Are you a spiritual person?
• 1:01:31
  Well, am I a spiritual person?
• 1:01:33
  Well, no, that's, that's a bad question.
• 1:01:35
  That's too vague.
• 1:01:36
  Are you, are you invoking an intelligence?
• 1:01:39
  I don't believe in an old man with a beard in the sky, put it that way.
• 1:01:44
  But there are things about the way the universe is ordered and, you know, that big picture that do make me wonder deeply about the origins of the universe and about purpose and all the rest of it.
• 1:01:56
  And because I'm a paleontologist, Josh, I mean, I think about the long term, you know, I think about the emergence of self-awareness and human toolmaking, you know, in a so recent past.
• 1:02:07
  And I think, well, what will it be like five million years from now?
• 1:02:10
  How far will we have passed from our solar system in the next five million years?
• 1:02:15
  You know, time is, is long.
• 1:02:18
  And, and it's an unimaginable amount of time.
• 1:02:21
  But will we be the piece of information system which will be organizing matter in distant galaxies five million years from now?
• 1:02:30
  I don't know.
• 1:02:31
  But these are, these are profound questions.
• 1:02:34
  Josh and I, we're just at the beginning of a journey, a very big journey.
• 1:02:39
  Do you think that artificial systems could do that?
• 1:02:42
  Do you think that there will be sentience or self-awareness in computers?
• 1:02:47
  It may well be. Maybe the next deseration of that intelligence will come from us building systems which can travel much more robustly and much further than we can.
• 1:02:59
  And that may be the case, but we still will be part of a chain as, you know, leading from those first archaea, those very primitive organisms right through to ourselves and onto a different future.
• 1:03:12
  I don't know the answer to that.
• 1:03:14
  I don't think we should have ego in it either as individuals or as species.
• 1:03:19
  But we can see the grand trajectory, perhaps, of this system that we don't understand doing marvelous things.
• 1:03:27
  I love you and your archaea, Tim. I'm going to have to go and read up about archaea.
• 1:03:31
  I feel inadequate for not knowing what they are.
• 1:03:35
  I don't want to keep you too long, but I do want to wrap with just picking your brain a little bit about coronavirus and about the pandemic and maybe getting your advice to people about how to think like the greatest scientist in Australia, which is a mantle that I'm giving you.
• 1:03:51
  Because I've been worried about what to make of people's rationality during the pandemic.
• 1:03:58
  The arguments about epidemiology, about lockdowns, about comparing it to the flu, now arguments about vaccines, vaccine hesitancy.
• 1:04:08
  I used to kind of think that people who were hesitant about vaccines or who were deniers of climate science were anti-scientific.
• 1:04:21
  And it's very easy to say, oh, they're anti-scientific. But when I actually talk to them, they have a certain almost scrupulously scientific skepticism towards authority.
• 1:04:34
  A kind of hyperscepticism, like do your research, do your own research.
• 1:04:39
  And they're hunting around in all the wrong places, namely social media and alternative fact websites for dissident opinions about the mainstream opinions.
• 1:04:51
  And I've gotten worried that the noble sort of instinct in humans to not follow the pack, to not be sheep, to not just swallow whatever your authority figures and leaders tell you to believe.
• 1:05:09
  I mean, this is the instinct that has motivated many a scientist over the millennia.
• 1:05:15
  This is Galileo, this is Copernicus, this is Darwin, all bucking what they were told to believe.
• 1:05:21
  But that instinct is now a fear being perverted and twisted maybe by social media into avenues that are leading people down rabbit holes,
• 1:05:31
  where it's no longer sufficient for us to say, oh, these people are just anti-scientific.
• 1:05:36
  They're taking a sort of a scientific investigatory approach. And my only conclusion is, well, maybe the world's too complicated and social media is too interconnected for us to be able to take that approach.
• 1:05:49
  And I should just listen to authorities now when it comes to big complicated things like epidemiology, infectious disease and the climate.
• 1:05:58
  What do you make of that? Do you have any advice?
• 1:06:01
  Yeah, look, I know exactly what you mean, Josh, by those people who are informed by their own inquiries into things.
• 1:06:08
  I mean, climate science is ridden with them wherever I go, speaking about this, there'll be an engineer who has looked at modeling or looked at something and has his own view.
• 1:06:18
  Usually it's a him, it's an older guy, you know.
• 1:06:21
  But what is lacking in that mindset is the dispassionate view of the scientist that you go where the data leads you and you listen right across the board,
• 1:06:38
  even to things that may seem nonsensical. You know, this is, it's part of that scientific protocol that you actually do the full due diligence, don't just do your bit, but talk to others who might know more.
• 1:06:51
  And, you know, there's a, it's almost like a relic of the sort of frontier, you know, we all used to be able to fix our cars.
• 1:06:58
  Do you remember that Josh, fix our cars?
• 1:07:01
  No, but I'm told there was such a time.
• 1:07:04
  There was such a time, right? And a lot of these guys have grown up in that time, right? So they can fix their car, they can fix a climate system.
• 1:07:10
  So that's a sort of general belief. But today, you know, my cars are black box on me. I wouldn't know where to begin.
• 1:07:16
  Even I used to have a motorbike that I could maintain. I do everything, change the diff, change everything. But, you know, that was, that was a different age.
• 1:07:25
  So I kind of, I can hear exactly what you're saying, but I do think we need a more humble, less certain, more engaged approach for both things.
• 1:07:37
  People forget so quickly. I mean, I'm interested to know with the adivaxis, for example, how many of them had childhood vaccinations that spared them from, you know, everything from polio to measles to whatever else.
• 1:07:49
  Well, I mean, almost all of them would have, and many of them will say, we don't object, we're not anti-vaxxers, we don't object to vaccines. We know that vaccines work.
• 1:07:58
  But what, there are lots of questions about this vaccine, you know, it was rushed through, it's very fast, it's new, it's mRNA, it changes your DNA.
• 1:08:06
  I heard that it can make you infertile. You know, there's all these rumors that are going around that have absolutely no basis in fact.
• 1:08:13
  But they sound close enough to the truth that if you're an inquiring mind and you think of yourself as not being a follower, then maybe they're just enough to, to make you not, not get this vaccine.
• 1:08:26
  I mean, I, the only thing that I can come back to saying to those people is, I will grant you that drug companies are manipulative, profit-hung, profit-making entities that you shouldn't trust.
• 1:08:38
  But that doesn't mean that the data isn't true, and that doesn't mean that the real world results of having given this product to billions of people so far are worth heating.
• 1:08:53
  Like, there are no big side effects, there is no big problem, but I mean, that doesn't seem to cut much, much mustard.
• 1:09:00
  No, it's also, I mean, the issue is as well that they people with that mindset, I mean, they don't look at the other side.
• 1:09:07
  So the other side, we talked about with climate, the fragility of our civilization, the other side of the, you know, vaccination story is the danger that COVID presents to us.
• 1:09:18
  Yeah. So we've got to balance and weigh risks, and that's, that's kind of important, I think.
• 1:09:25
  Tim, it's great to talk to you. Thank you for your time, and thank you for, for all your work, and enjoy fishing up on the Hawksbury on jealous.
• 1:09:33
  Thanks so much, Josh, thank you, please.