Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

Teaching climate from patterns to details 

Permaculture Design Courses (PDCs) by their nature are a crash course in climate, landscape, hydrology, ecology, agriculture, horticulture, forestry, water harvesting and earthworks, building and appropriate technology, intentional communities and alternative economics amongst other subjects, all viewed through the lens of ethics, design principles and processes. To cover such a range in a two-week intensive course can induce intellectual indigestion if not approached systemically. 

I started contributing to this amazing adult education experience after a decade of critically observing the process that Mollison initiated for spreading permaculture thinking and action around the world. By that time, permaculture teachers had adopted a range of creative and interactive adult learning techniques to assist the learning beyond the talk-and-chalk style, peppered with storytelling, that Mollison used. In addition, most realised that trying to cover such a range of subjects singlehandedly was a fool’s mission, not just because listening to the one person for two weeks can be painful, no matter how brilliant they and the subject material are. It can also be very embarrassing when you have several participants who are experts in some of the subjects you are trying to cover. 

After guest and co-teaching with other permaculture facilitators including Lea Harrison, one of Mollison’ original and most experienced teachers, I set about a retrofitting process for our own PDCs, in which I worked with a team of co-teachers, caterers and site visit hosts to present a comprehensive integrated immersion in permaculture theory, practise and living. In the process I never taught more than 50% of a course myself but, in addition to ethics and design principles, climates and landscapes was always one of my subjects. On PDCs and in his encyclopaedic Permaculture: a designer’s manual published in 1988, Mollison focused on classic landscapes and climates ranging from the monsoon tropics and coral atolls, to arid plains and coastal dunes, continental cold regions and maritime coastal ones. He had visions of permaculture designers in all corners of the globe designing sustainable systems, so they needed a taste of the diversity of situations and prospective solutions they might encounter.

I took a much stronger bioregional focus on my home territory, allowing a coherent pattern of design solutions to be illustrated, mitigating the risk I saw of practitioners and designers attempting to apply a mishmash of design solutions that may or may not be appropriate to the landscape, climate or cultural context.

While I concentrated on the bioregional, I provided a simplified big-picture framework to make sense of other sources of information and knowledge, including any subject expertise the course participants might bring to permaculture. Rather than convincing others that all they had learnt was useless or worse, my aim was to stimulate everyone to reinterpret what they knew, using the lens of permaculture ethics, design principles and processes. To give a big-picture overview of landscapes, I developed a slide show comparing geological young and old landscapes, with each pair from a similar climate so as to focus on land shape, geology, hydrology and other aspects of landscape that were important to understand before attempting to think about permaculture design responses. 

Similarly with climate, I used contrasting pairs of slides illustrating arid in contrast to moist climates in different bioregional climatic contexts providing a global framework. Beyond that, I used a simplified Australian climate schema that leaves out all the strongly continental climates, mostly in the northern hemisphere, even though huge numbers of people live there and that’s where many of our food plants, including tree crops, come from. 

In my teaching, I would explain that with Australia being the driest continent on average (apart from Antarctica), this is often highlighted as a reason for its low carrying capacity for humans (along with ancient soils of the geologically oldest landscapes in the world). However I emphasised it is the erratic nature of Australian climates, without consistent seasonal patterns from one year to the next, and one decade to the next, more than lack of average rainfall, that make agriculture such a problematic project in this country. 

Downunder climates breaking the northern hemisphere patterns

To this framework I would add an interpretation that I have never seen made in any geography texts and appears missing in the northern hemisphere-centric teaching of climate. That is the simple observation that the northern hemisphere is dominated by land while the southern is dominated by ocean. This makes for much greater seasonality in the northern hemisphere temperate climate belt with cold winters and hot summers compared with the southern hemisphere. The reason for this dramatic difference is that water has twice the thermal mass of continental bedrock, so it both slows the natural increase in heat during the summer season and slows the cooling during winter. Water as ice, liquid and in the atmosphere is the shock absorber in the global climate system, and the vast majority of that water is of course in the oceans

While seasonal differences being moderated by the oceans is recognised in climate classification as maritime rather than continental, the difference between the northern and southern hemispheres is mostly ignored. For example, while places with cool wet winters and hot dry summers are classified as Mediterranean and generally as maritime climates moderated by the influence of the sea, that influence in the Mediterranean is much weaker than in southern Australia for example. The Mediterranean Sea is really just a very large lake between the land masses of Europe, Africa and Arabia. Consequently, the winters tend to be colder, and the summers warmer than southern Australia, which is a large island surrounded by oceans. While this might seem like a geographic curiosity, it is essential to understanding what might be grown where, right through to how changing climates might stress ecosystems, land use and infrastructure systems.

Most people think southern Australia is hot in the summer because we get some hot days but the ripening of Mediterranean tree crops such as figs tells the truth about the on/off nature of our summers. For example, the difference in reliable heat for ripening figs, and other crops such as eggplant, between Palermo in Sicily and Melbourne (at the same latitude north and south of the equator) is significant even though Sicily is surrounded by moderating sea while Melbourne is on a deeply indented coast almost central to Victoria. Even greater contrast can be found with Haifa on the north coast of Israel where dates are grown commercially. The average temperature in the hottest month of the year is 30˚C while Melbourne, at the equivalent latitude, is 20˚C in the hottest month of the year. To ripen dates in Victoria you have to go to Mildura in the extreme north west of the state to get enough heat units. 

Another interesting example showing how horticulturalists in Australia were misled by northern hemisphere-centric teaching about climate is the avocado. In the northern hemisphere, to grow sub-tropical tree crops such as avocado, you have to be so far south to avoid the damage in cold winters that the summers are very warm. In North America, for example, you have to be in Florida and still, in a bad winter, avocado and even citrus, can be damaged by frost some years. It never occurred to north American horticulturalists that the avocado, like most subtropical fruits, don’t need much heat to ripen. However if you think about the plateau edge forests in Mexico where they are native, the weather is mild all year round. In the southern Pacific, some islands have such mild summers that there are not enough heat units to ripen peaches while avocados bear abundant crops.

I often emphasise my point by claiming that the only reason there are large old seedling avocados bearing crops in Melbourne gardens is because in the 1960s, when people started consuming avocados, they planted the seeds in their gardens, whereas if they had learnt from the experts at Burnley School of Horticulture then they would not have been so ‘foolish’ as to try.

In my childhood, the Western Australia Agriculture department was almost Stalinist in their central planning with Carnarvon in the arid mid-north being the district for growing bananas and any subtropical crops. Never did those bureaucrat planners imagine that half a century later the cool wet southwest of the state, which in my youth was all dairy farms, would be exporting avocados, macadamias and other subtropical crops to Asia.

While the ocean of the southern hemisphere makes for much milder seasonal difference, the ocean is also the breeding ground for weather changes in the temperate latitudes and gives southern Australia our on/off seasons, especially in spring, which is very disconcerting for both northern hemisphere people and plants. In northern hemisphere continental climates, the word ‘spring’ accurately describes the thaw and warming after which there is rarely a reversal back to frost or cold wind that damages the delicate new leaves and flowers of deciduous trees. By contrast, in southern Australia, the winters are mild often with warm days of ‘false spring’ that lure deciduous fruit and nut trees into budburst followed by cold southerly winds and then still, clear nights leading to frost damage. In central Victoria, on all but the most favourable sites, apricots are damaged by both frost and cold wet spring weather while in Ladakh, where they come from, at a similar a latitude, they thrive and ripen fruit regularly at altitudes higher than Mt Kosciusko in Australia.

The reliability of the spring melt from frozen winter in much of the northern hemisphere temperate zone has allowed deciduous trees to dominate the landscape, while in the southern hemisphere, harder-leafed evergreens predominate. These can take advantage of mild and variable winters for some active growth, as well as not needing to invest in a new canopy of vulnerable leaves right in the wilds of a southern hemisphere spring. To emphasise this extraordinary difference between the northern and southern hemisphere temperate zones I would point to the various species of Tasmanian alpine eucalypts that have leaves like vinyl plastic and survive a glazing storm in the middle of summer but when planted in the northern hemisphere are immediately killed by a continental winter. 

Snow in Hobart at sea level is a relatively uncommon event, without any most winters, yet on five occasions since European settlement there has been snow in Hobart on Christmas day –in the middle of summer! To any experienced farmer or gardener across the northern hemisphere temperate zone in north America, Europe or Asia, such weather is unimaginable, let alone a climate where it’s a relatively regular occurrence. 

Ironically, if there is one place in the northern hemisphere that partly matches the patterns of southern Australia, New Zealand and especially Tasmania, it is the British Isles. These are so far north they should have a winter with floating icebergs. It’s well known that the Gulf Stream of warm water moderates the winter by strongly enhancing the normal moderating effect of the ocean, and that this effect extends to a lesser degree into Western European and Scandinavian countries. Because this part of the world is the primary cultural reference point for Australia, there is a tendency to think the seasonal pattern created by the Gulf Stream is normal for the northern hemisphere and thus our crops that colonists brought with them.

The British summer, and to a lesser extent that of the maritime European countries, is very weak because the warmest points of southern England are about 50o north of the equator, which is further from the equator than Stewart Is at the southern tip of New Zealand (47o south). The extreme north of the Scotland mainland, further north at 58o, is further from the equator than Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. Other places at these latitudes, such as Poland and Russia, have a short but steady summer capable of growing many annual and even some tree crops while the maritime influences on the British Isles expose it to even more oceanic generated cold fronts in summer than Tasmania or South Island New Zealand. 

Potatoes are a southern hemisphere crop evolved to grow in weak on/off summers but without freezing temperatures. The humble spud hails from two centres of origin. The best known is the Altiplano of Peru, 18o south of the equator in the tropics, but nearly 4000m above sea level where it’s cool-to-cold all year round. The second is much further south at sea level in Chiloé, Chile, where the climate is very like Tasmania. Consequently, it is not surprising that potatoes succeeded so wonderfully in Britain and especially Ireland (until the Potato Blight triggered the Irish famine).

On the other hand, tree crops from continental Eurasia introduced to Britain by the Romans had mixed success. While apples from Kazakhstan adapted to the cooler but somewhat longer growing season, walnuts from Eastern Europe and chestnuts from higher altitudes in the Mediterranean lacked the heat units needed to reliably produce nuts outside of the southern coast.

Reading the Mediterranean landscapes and climates

Another difference between the Mediterranean and the equivalent climates in southern Australia is air humidity and its effects. These include reducing drought stress in plants right through to bushfire risk. In my first week in Israel in 1994, I was introduced to some Australian horticulturists running a tree crop nursery closer to the coast than Tel Aviv. They were from my home town of Fremantle and in reply to my comment about how the climate must seem like home, they were emphatic how different it was. Apart from the heat units and rainfall being more like Geraldton in the far north of the Western Australia (WA) wheat belt with 450mm average rainfall, the humidity was far greater, more like the moist south coast of WA and the wind was a lot less. Nearby to their nursery I saw a well-irrigated papaya plantation with their upright flower spikes completely unprotected from the near-coastal onshore winds. Back in WA, such an exposed crop would never produce, no matter how well-irrigated, because the delicate flowers would shrivel in the dry salty onshore wind.

Further south in Israel at Be’er-Sheva, the landscape, crops, weeds and planted trees, including grey box (E. microcarpa), all reminded me of the Wimmera grain growing region of western Victoria with about 450mm of average rainfall whereas Be’er-Sheva gets a meagre 200mm a year and is considered the edge of the Negev desert. 

By European standards, including no doubt for my maternal grandmother’s family who emigrated from eastern Europe to Israel in the 19th century, the climate must have seemed a harsh growing environment. However by Australian standards, Israeli summers, like most of the Mediterranean, despite the relentless heat, have a touch of humidity. While this is difficult for human comfort it is mostly good for plants and, along with less wind, reduces fire hazard significantly compared with Australia. 

Nevertheless, I remember being horrified seeing the vegetation along the main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Extensive tree planting was part of the heritage of the Zionist settlers and after the nation state of Israel was founded in 1948. Returning trees to the holy land included Australian eucalypts and acacias but also other non-food indigenous trees that have progressively been lost over ravages of the centuries including the Ottoman Empire’s thirst for fuel. 

The Palestinian farmers over those centuries had naturally prioritised their indigenous food trees such as fig, olive, carob and date palm over fuel and fodder trees such as pines and oaks. For the early Israeli foresters, revegetation with indigenous species of oaks was a painstakingly slow process but the local Aleppo pine Pinus halepensis, grew fast, wasn’t eaten by animals and coped with the highly alkaline limestone soils. Early on they imagined the forests might yield timber but the poor form of the trees and cheap industrial construction materials because of abundant fossil fuel left these forests unmanaged for decades without anyone even bothering to collect wood or cones for branches, other than perhaps the Bedouin semi-nomadic minority. 

I told my hosts these unmanaged forests were some of the most fire hazardous I had ever seen. They assured me that there was no history of forest fires in Israel or its precursor states. I asserted, somewhat arrogantly, that they would soon have them. The next year there were extensive fires through those very same forests that fringed the main highway.

Rewilding the modern Mediterranean

Moving from Israel to Greece, Italy, Corsica and southern France, everywhere we saw evidence of rewilding and ecosynthesis as people moved from marginal hill farming country to the city and increasing affluence and age by those remaining led to a radical reduction in harvesting of both animal fodder and fuel for cooking, heating and other processes including charcoal production for sale in towns as smoke-free high-quality fuel. These processes accelerated soil humus development but in a Mediterranean climate also pushed wildfire hazard to levels not seen previously. While arsonists were frequently the source of ignition, many with an environmental bent often blamed the Australians (trees that is) especially the ubiquitous red and blue gums (E. camaldulensis and globulus) that were more than 90% of the eucalypts we saw in the Mediterranean, most of it as unmanaged as the pines in Israel or regrowth forest in Australia. 

In some places, folk very clued into the climate change discourse suggested this increase in wildfire could already be due to greenhouse gas induced climate change. I disagreed, suggesting land use change was by far the dominant factor in my observation of the patterns across all these countries where we were hosted by people close to nature in these marginal landscapes.

A decade later, while on a teaching and study tour of Japan in 2004, and the following year in Eastern Europe and North America, I saw the same rewilding and ecosynthesis processes I had witnessed across the world as affluence and aging impacted land management.

When asked what the climate was like where I live, I would reply that it had winters like Kyushu in the far south of Japan and summers like Hokaido in the far north. My Japanese colleagues were as perplexed as students in Australia when I explain that Japan is on a continental east coast so, like the Australian east coast, has rain in summer more than winter but that Tokyo at the same latitude as Sydney can have snow in the winter and is as hot as Brisbane in the summer.

Hydrologic extremes at Fryers Forest 

In 1995 Su Dennett and I joined forces with Samantha and Haridas Fairchild to become the developers of the Fryers Forest Ecovillage in Box Forest country 12 kilometres south east of Castlemaine. After a decade living in Djaara Country, I saw the Box-Ironbark country as beautiful, as well as producing some of the world’s strongest engineering timbers, dense slow-burning firewood, honey, and healthy and ethical meat from abundant kangaroos and other wildlife. All this from soils that, even before the degradation created by the gold mining of the 19th century, were so poor that our highly experienced agronomist had never seen agricultural soil tests with such extreme deficiencies. 

Elsewhere in the world in Mediterranean climates with less than 600mm annual rainfall and soils that poor, the prevailing vegetation is dominated by stunted shrubs. In the best of the Box-Ironbark ecosystems, trees more than thirty metres tall and many hundreds of years in age can dominate over a diverse flora of shrubs, heath, grasses and herbaceous ground covers holding together soils where the severe structural vulnerability to sheet, gully and tunnel erosion rivals the lack of nutrients in limiting what could be sustainable. 

The infrastructure, including roads, services and, most importantly, water storage dams for a fire-safe community with at least the capacity to grow nutritionally balanced food from modest areas of garden farming around houses and on some better alluvial soils, was a challenge that we took on but I suppose my reputation as the co-originator of permaculture was most on the line. Was this really a sensible place to live, especially in the context of bushfire? 

This is not the place to talk about the whole story of developing Fryers Forest from those initial years, but I do have an important anecdote in my journey with climate change. Active forest management and earthworks to harvest, store and recharge what water otherwise might run off the land, causing erosion in the process, were the big strategic responses to the doubts of others about whether Fryers Forest was a place for an eco-village. It felt like my two decades of intensive practical learning, design and communication had been the perfect preparation for this challenging task that I found myself taking on. I was intently focused on designing, and implemented the earthworks in ways that minimised clay and silt clogging and contamination of the Fryers Creek, which had a relatively intact bed of sand gravel and boulders, sometimes with no surface water other than where reef rock forced the underground flow to the surface. 

I designed the dams on the side valleys, especially the spillways, to hopefully cope with at least one-in-100 year flood events. When we started the project, the creek flowed most of the year, perhaps from those wet years in the early 1990s. By 2000 when we finished the earthworks for the largest dam, Lake Haridas, the flow in the creek seemed to have declined dramatically. Later on during the millennial drought, some locals downstream blamed the Fryers Forest dams for the declining flow even though they only impounded a few percent of the creek’s annual flow. The declining flow appeared to be a rather dramatic result of a rainfall pattern that had reduced somewhat compared to long term averages going back to the 1870s.

In addition to this progressive reduction in rainfall, there were many extreme rain events that created peak runoffs. Because of my obsession with designing, building and maintaining the infrastructure in those years to the turn of the millennium, I remember recording that we had three one-in-5 year flood events, a one-in-15 year event and a one-in-80 year event, that caused significant damage to the newly constructed lake wall. I was more sanguine about this “failure” than I had with the dam at Venie’s place (see Part 2 of this essay series), partly because the repair was easier and sooner, but also because in that same flood, the newly designed and constructed multimillion dollar bridge over the Loddon River on the Midland Highway at Guilford moved slightly on its foundations and was closed for a while before engineers certified it as safe to use.

It seemed to me we were being challenged by reduced annual rainfall, massive reductions in stream flows and yet substantial increases in extreme events. I took this as confirmation of what the climate models were predicting and the progressive IPCC reports that the climate change signals were accelerating. 

Ignoring nativism with immersion in deep time

After the intensive work to create the ecovillage concluded, including dealing with lots of red and green tape, I found more time for writing. However I abandoned my manuscript on the ‘weeds or wild nature’ subject to work on the manuscript that became Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. I figured the nativist paradigm that had taken over conservation biology and land management would be swept away by the emerging global challenges including peak oil and climate change. I reasoned that peak oil would dry up the funds available in rich countries to use Monsanto’s Roundup to destroy natural abundances in favour of husbanding those abundances. I also heard suggestions that climate change would force species to move and that the old conservation paradigm based on reserves and national parks would fail. Consequently, humanity might need to facilitate the migration of plants and animals, an anathema under the nativist paradigm. In this way, climate change was forcing a longer timescale on the field of Conservation Biology, even as it seemed that most in the field were unaware how silly nativism was regarded in the field of Paleoecology that studied ecological changes over multiple orders of magnitude of Deep Time. 

In 2007, Kale Sniderman’s PhD studying preserved plant pollen from the Daylesford Speedway volcanic maar showed alternating sequences of local pollen from 2.8 to 1.8 million years ago. Each dry ice age cycle was characterised as a grassy woodland dominated by casuarinas while eucalypts were yet to colonise the continent. In the warm, wet interglacials analogous to our current climate, a closed canopy of rainforest vegetation was the norm. Some of the pollens were of species currently in warm and cool temperate rainforests of Victoria and Tasmania, while others were of genera that have since become extinct after the more recent domination of the eucalypts and fire ecology around 100,000 years ago. 

One exciting discovery was Ilex, a Gondwanan genus that still had one Australian species at the other end of the continent but was better known for its European relative: the holly of Christmas fame, and, more recently for nativist landcare groups in the Dandenong Ranges, known as an environmental weed to be poisoned. We had been monitoring the gradual spread of holly in Spring Creek for a number of years, noting its characteristics, uses and ecological associations, including pollination by local native species of moths on warm summer nights. Initially we noted this as another example of ecosynthesis between foreign plants and native fauna, but after Kale found Ilex in his microscope slide sections, we wondered if those moths used to pollinate the local Ilex a couple of million years ago. 

While Kale’s discovery didn’t force a re-evaluation of holly’s status by the Landcare crews, even if they had known its ancient Gondwanan heritage, another encounter between evolutionary biologists and geomorphologists did throw a spanner in the biological science works. 

Geomorphologists studying the New Zealand Alps, the fastest growing mountain spine on Earth, had come to the conclusion that the whole of New Zealand, which had rafted free of Australia about 80 million years ago with its cargo of Gondwanan flora and fauna, had sunk below sea level and only re-emerged about 20 millions years ago. The biologists said it was impossible for the flora and fauna of New Zealand to have arrived there across the sea and/or evolved in that time. The geomorphologists took the expertise of the biologists seriously but soon came back strengthened in their assertion by having found the marks of sea wave cut cliffs on the highest peaks of the Southern Alps reliably aged at around 20 million years. I am not sure whether evolutionary biology has recovered from that challenge to strongly held beliefs.

While none of this or other evidence of creative destruction cycles being part of life on Earth undermine the observation of how dependant the rise of agriculture and civilisation have been on a stable climate, it did in my mind discredit the wilder claims that anthropogenic climate change could extinguish life on Earth, or even simplify it back to the cockroaches. On PDCs I would tell the above stories, and others more ancient, about the paleoclimatic record showing life had been through some massive upheavals, as well as more recent changes following the end of the last ice age, which humans had seen, including ones recorded in myth and legend. The problem is not really the survival of humanity or human culture but that ‘industrial modernity’ might perhaps be just a ‘flash in the pan’ in a much longer human story. 

Climate models

While I continued to pick up on all these and other ignored outcomes and consequences of climate change, I left the arcane subject of the climate models to the experts. My understandings of climate were informed by reading and study, as well as interactions with knowledgeable mentors, but were mostly gleaned from my own focus on permaculture design creating human habits and ecosystems adapted to climate and landscape, which in turn ameliorate the local mesoclimate and site microclimate, along with soil building, to support growing and diverse abundance.

In any case, in the late 1990s as I began to distil two decades of articulating and teaching permaculture principles from the big picture perspective in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, I was also beginning a deep dive that lasted a decade into the geology, logistics and geopolitics of oil as the king resource that created the modern world. It wasn’t possible for me to do the same with climate at the same time. Focus on what is being ignored has been a lifelong personal strategy that, amongst other things, led me to focus my design consultancy on farming and landscape, given that others seemed to be doing creative things in the field of ecological architecture. So I left others to follow the technical details of how the global climate models were constructed and the evidence that the climate was changing as a result of human activity, including land use change and, most dramatically, the burning of millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight in coal, oil and gas.

I assumed that the top-down modelling approach that I understood had been so insightful in Limits to Growth and fundamental to Odum’s energy circuit models of ecosystems would at least have had a role in balancing the limitation of massive banks of climatic data for juggernaut reductionist models. In Modelling for all Scales: An introduction to system simulation (2000, pp. 14-15) Odum said: 

Modelling that starts by identifying and studying parts first and then connecting them into a system is sometimes called bottom-up modelling. Because of the analytic (take apart) emphasis in science education, many people tend to approach models from the bottom up. Sometimes this approach includes too many parts, not aggregated enough, so that the system becomes too complex for easy simulation or understanding.

Top-down modelling first defines the scale of space and time that is of interest because of the problems, questions and purposes of the study. After the systems attention frame is defined, a limited number of symbols is added, each representing aggregation of many smaller parts. When this approach is used, the models do not get lost in detail. A model is finished and running sooner. On the other hand, the aggregation may not bring out everything that is important in that system.

Odum’s top-down systems modelling of the New Zealand environment and economy were potent in making sense of my landscape learnings and readings during my first visit there working with Haikai Tane back in 1979. A decade later, Odum’s ‘transformity’ conversion calculations in his global macro-models, documented in his Environmental Accounting (1996), deepened my big-picture view of Gaia as a powerful and ancient self-regulating living system. In 1994, connecting to students of Odum at Uppsala University in Sweden modelling willow biomass energy production confirmed the practical value of eMergy accounting in understanding renewable energy options. 

In Australia, it wasn’t until 1999 in the remote Kimberly region of Western Australia that I met ‘Odumites’ involved in running an innovative cattle station/rangeland biome research centre, and connecting with Ted Lefroy, the only Australian ecologist I had met who seemed to understand the potential of Odum’s top-down approach to systems modelling. All those continuing influences of Odum’s work found expression in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability written over the follow two years before the psyops effects of 9/11 appeared to derail the emerging third wave of modern environmentalism. 

Reflection 

As ongoing IPCC reports collated vast troves of reductionist climate science, the third wave did get going. But after Odum’s death, the various groups of eMergy accounting researchers around the world again failed get a slice of the research funding to even show how top-down modelling might act as a rough check on whether the juggernaut bottom-up climate models were in the right ballpark.  

While most scientists seem to view climate from a reductionist perspective of being the aggradation of weather data collected at a place over time to show the repeating patterns, I saw it more from the holistic top-down perspective of the larger climatic forces that reveal themselves in the enduring patterns of landscape, soil, ecosystems and, most especially, the sentinels of the past: long lived trees. We can read these trees and record both the enduring patterns, and the scars of the extremes of weather that occurred over centuries and extending back through their genetic heritage centuries, millennia and even into deep geological time. In human culture, from indigenous and other long-enduring cultures of place and life, we find the imprint of the climate. Is it any wonder the word ‘climate’ is used as an all-encompassing term to describe the conceptual environment in which we breathe and live? 

From this perspective, and immersion in climate, I found the scientific communication and public policy discourse around climate change frustrating, and generally simplistic, in the conclusions reached. On the other hand, it seemed that only a limited elite of scientific specialists were in a position to understand, let alone critique, the climate models due to their incredible complexity of detail. The possibility that the models had failed to establish a big picture framework of understanding to make sense of the complexity was left to the sceptics who in turn mostly pointed to this or that unreliable detail in the input data. Larger-scale problems such as the modelling of atmospheric water vapour didn’t surface into the mainstream debates about the subject even though there were hydrologists and meteorologists who did understand and articulate these weaknesses.