The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 by Ashley Hay Page B

social action. The well-educated, open-minded, environmentally conscious global citizens of Bygdaby recognise what global warming means, are disturbed by it, and yet are able to live in a parallel emotional universe where it is rarely mentioned or acted upon. In the words of Kjersti, a teacher in the town: ‘We live in one way, and we think in another. We learn to think in parallel. It’s a skill, an art of living.’ Climate change is both deeply disturbing and almost completely submerged; it is simultaneously common knowledge and unimaginable.
    What about the climate scientists themselves? How do they deal with the frightening revelations of their daily work? How do they sleep nights? What do they tell their children? These are the questions that shape Feeling the Heat , a fine book by the Walkley Award-winning Australian journalist Jo Chandler. She follows climate scientists to Antarctica, the tropical rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef, ‘traversing the frontiers of the climate story’. Early in her writing, Chandler is sipping a Christmas drink withfriends in an Australian backyard and finds herself confessing in public her worries about ‘drought and sea levels, monsoons, methane and the mysterious mechanics of the deep ocean’. ‘People drift away’, she writes, ‘as if I let slip a fart or a faux pas’.
    Chandler is trying to find a way to write about the revolution we are living in without people drifting away and without conducting trench warfare. Her solution is to communicate the passion and dedication of the scientists, these ‘explorers of extremity’. We see their excitement as they follow their curiosity and pursue puzzling questions; we see their resilience and optimism in the face of bleak findings; we see the dawning of sickening sense as scientific scepticism meets hard evidence; we also see the withering of hope as they experience the resistance and paralysis of social and political systems that should be activating change. Chandler’s book reveals the scientific method in rich detail, as fine minds struggle with complex systems, depressing outlooks and their responsibilities as citizens.
    I think she is right to take her readers into the hearts and minds of the scientists, for they are engaged in surely one of the most exciting and vertiginous intellectual endeavours in the history of humanity: to get a firm understanding, quickly if possible, of how climate change is playing out, and will continue to play out, in the ecosystems of the globe. It is the colossal story of our time and perhaps if we would allow ourselves to be more caught up in the exhilaration of it, we might also find the political will to do more about it.
    This is a quest that has secured my own urgent sense of wonder. In January 2012, I was fortunate to join Australia’s centenary voyage to Mawson’s huts in East Antarctica, which was also the major marine science expedition of the summer. On board Aurora Australis was an impressive team of oceanographers, biologists, glaciologists and climate scientists. Every day I benefited from conversations with passionate and dedicated researcherswho were both intrigued and disturbed by what they were discovering. Among other things, they were researching the consequences of a collision between a giant iceberg and the tongue of the Mertz Glacier, a fascinating natural experiment in ocean circulation and sea-ice production – and just how ‘natural’ was such an event now? One evening, as we sailed near the Mertz Glacier, a distinguished oceanographer confided to me that in 20 years’ time he thinks that climate scientists will regret that they did not speak out more forthrightly about the grim implications of their findings. He is a brilliant communicator himself, and his passion and sincerity are luminous. But a good scientist, he explained, is objective and therefore wary of politics. Where his science intersects