AAS | Events | Fenner Conference 2007

Dr Graeme Pearman Graeme Pearman was Chief of CSIRO Atmospheric Research, 1992–2002. He contributed over 150 scientific papers, primarily on aspects of the global carbon budget. He now operates a consultancy company contracting to Monash University and to private and public sector organisations.

Graeme is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (1988), the Royal Society of Victoria (1997) and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (2005). He was awarded the CSIRO Medal (1988), a United Nation's Environment Program Global 500 Award (1989), Australian Medal of the Order of Australia (1999) and a Federation Medal (2003). He was recently science adviser to Al Gore during his visit to Australia.

His current activities include energy futures; sustainability science; scientific capacity building; public communication of science; and the role of science in modern societies.

Paul Perkins in the last presentation mentioned what I think he called the portfolio approach. My main area of interest is in energy, and that's exactly what we have been recommending to governments at all levels, and it is because of the concept of resilience. We do not know all the things we need to know in order to make decisions now, and so we actually have to keep options open, maintaining diversity in the way we do things and the way we respond to the likely time scales for technological options to be realised. We're not sure about their economic costs and how they unfold in time, we're not sure about how quickly we can actually deliver the outcomes that we want from them. The only way of getting around that sensibly is to keep a number of options open as you go forward, and build in resilience.

I felt very comforted by that, because it is the way we have been thinking about trying to deal with the energy side of it as well.

In my keynote address yesterday there was a slide at the end that I skipped over. Bob Humphries might have noticed a line on the slide mentioning the 'non-reality' world. I also spoke about this yesterday.

I think this is a serious problem for science. There is a growing movement that says that we are so good at managing things that we don't have to take into account physical reality. There is growing support for this view in developed countries around the world. It can be seen here in Australia – we have seen it over the last few years exemplified in some of the decisions that have been taken nationally – but we have also seen it in the US. This is potentially a real threat for science (and indeed for other sources of expert advice within the community), because those of us engaged with science believe that what we are trying to do is to get closer to understanding what reality is, by using the rigours of the scientific approach. If there is a disregard for that, then to some extent it means that we have no relevance any more. I think that's a serious issue.

There are people in the community who prefer to operate on the notion that either they can guess at what to do or they can use their own personal experience. The climate-change issue exemplifies this. If you talk to a wide range of parliamentarians within all levels of government in Australia, you find that there is a significant proportion of them who, when they are pushed about this issue, resort to anecdotal evidence that leads them to the conclusion that the problem will go away. That is dangerous. It's dangerous even if we have only one member of a Cabinet doing that. This is not a partisan comment, because I believe it exists in all governments in Australia at the moment (and indeed on many company boards), and it would also exist in alternative governments. It is a statement about where I think we are at, and it creates problems for the way science can interact with problems like water.

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