Life in the eye of the storm

Age
Saturday 13/9/2008 Page: 10

As Australia's chief weatherman heads to Geneva to work for the UN, he leaves as his legacy an urgent message on climate change - your time starts now.

IF AUSTRALIA'S response to climate change could be likened to a marathon, here's how Geoff Love would call the race. John Howard's government had a dose of the pre-race jitters as it considered whether to get off the starting blocks. But the Rudd Government - with its efforts on emissions and water trading - has taken the nation over the starting line.

Love, who recently completed his term as Australia's chief weatherman, likes the marathon analogy because he sees the problem of climate change as long-term one. He says the outlook for the next two decades shows relatively similar outcomes regardless of the amount of greenhouse emissions. It's when the models reach 50 or 100-year time scales that the differences between a low and a high-emissions world blow out.

However, Love says, the only way to affect the long-term impact is to begin changing the way we live now. "You've got to run a marathon but you've got to get out of the blocks now, you can't stand around and discuss how far 42 kilometres is much longer. There is a bunch of urgency in starting to do things, in getting balls rolling." Love's time at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology could be dubbed a marathon in itself.

Like many of its employees, he was there a long time - more than three decades give or take a few absences - and speaking just after he finished at the bureau, he was still waiting for the reality of his departure to sink in. "I joined in '75, I've come and gone a few times, but it's been the main piece of my life for 33 years," he said. It still doesn't quite feel real (that I've left)." In a carefully worded manner typical of scientists and public servants the world over, Love says of his time at the bureau that he's "tried not to play on the policy edge". "I suspect I could do the policy work as well as anybody, but that's not my role and that's not what I'm paid for, so I do try and stay out of that, unless invited."

But the 57-year-old is not afraid to express some views that could be interpreted as political. He believes Australia is over governed for its population, that no one has shown the appropriate "statesman-like" leadership required to tackle climate change, and that despite the best intentions of those involved, an emissions trading scheme will bring unintended economic consequences.

And asked about his involvement in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report that gained so much global attention, he laments what it could have been. While describing it as "a good product" with "solid science", he says there was also plenty of good science that was left out due to the sensitivities of various governments.

"Sometimes there's a great euphoric feeling when you finish a big task like that, but there wasn't, there was just sort of disappointment and a bit of anger at all the compromises being struck with the really critical text at the end ... taking out things that some governments are sensitive to." Because it is governments that control the final shape of the documents, he says, and not the scientists, the result is "very conservative".

"The world is divided into political blocs, and there are a number of governments that are sensitive to all sorts of things in the greenhouse issue, and at the end of the day the IPCC reports are really compromised documents, the lowest common denominator." Already, it is apparent that warming, Arctic ice melts and emissions levels are ahead of the worst-case scenarios outlined in the previous report. And Love, a former secretary of the Geneva-based IPCC, predicts this trend will continue. Over the next 10 to 15 years, he believes people will come to realise how constrained the IPCC reports were.

"Just the measurements of what's happening will show that governments have forced a pretty conservative outcome." Love has just returned to Geneva, where he started a new role this week as a director of the World Meteorological Organisation, the United Nations agency that established the IPCC. A two-year appointment, his job will be to help countries improve responses to floods, cyclones and other natural disasters.

It's yet another foreign base to add to a list that already includes Tokyo and Colorado, and a long way front the leafy suburb of Ivanhoe where he was born and bred. He likes to joke that he was educated at Ivanhoe Primary and the former Heidelberg High - both on Waterdale Road and then La Trobe University, at the end of Waterdale Road. "I didn't go far." His family didn't have a background in academia or science - his father was a fitter and turner before finishing up in hospital administration, and his mother worked at a pharmacy before managing a doctor's surgery. But being a "Sputnik-era kid", he felt drawn to physics and the way it provided ways to understand the world.

"Physics just brought a whole lot of things together, and it was about explaining why things are like they are." After graduating from La Trobe, he taught at the physics department of the Ballarat Institute of Advanced Education, while trying to complete his master's thesis on upper-atmosphere disturbances. A couple of years later, he applied for the meteorology training course at the bureau, having decided research, not teaching, was his calling. His unfinished master's almost cost him the job - not because he had yet to complete it, but because he was doing it at all. Unofficial bureau policy then was not to recruit anyone with higher degrees, because they were looking for forecasters, not academics.

"They said if you'd actually finished and had your degree we probably wouldn't offer you a job." Meteorology training completed, he moved into the bureau's research branch with the task of investigating floods and tropical cyclones, in the aftermath of the 1974 Brisbane flood and cyclone Tracy. When the call came nine months later for forecasters to head to Darwin, he saw it as an opportunity to research tropical meteorology where it was. He was the only person to put his hand up for the job.

After two years living in the Northern Territory capital as it was slowly rebuilt after Tracy, Love and his first wife packed their bags for the US, where he completed his PhD at Colorado State University with tropical cyclone expert Bill Gray. Both his children were born in the US - son David the day after he submitted his thesis - and it was for them that the young family returned to Australia, where Love and his wife wanted to raise their children.

But they were only back at the Darwin's bureau office for about a year before they were on the move again. There was a speaking tour of China, followed by research at the Meteorological Satellite Centre in Tokyo. Then back to Darwin in 1985 in a new role as regional director.

Aged in his 30s, Love knew it was a job that could set him up for a comfortable life. "I thought, 'Gee, now I'm a regional director, now I can have a nice house overlooking Fannie Bay; I could sail and drink beer and play tennis for the rest of my life . . . but I'm probably more interested in trying to do more.' SO THE family returned to Melbourne, where Love ran the national meteorology centre for 10 years. He was made a deputy director in 1997, a role he filled for five years before becoming secretary of the IPCC in Geneva for 18 months. In 2003 he returned to Melbourne to take the top job at the bureau.

"I probably halved my pay, but I always wanted to run the bureau, and I don't regret a minute of it." Among his professional highlights at the bureau, lie lists developing strategies for supercomputing and helping to get radar images on the web. From his Collins Street office - which commanded views of the Docklands and the giant "Eagle" sculpture he also oversaw the establishment of a new collaboration between the bureau and CSIRO on weather and climate research, and began a review of the bureau's operations.

That review, published in October last year, found the bureau to be "an Australian icon" but said it faced challenges in the year ahead, and needed to modernise and broaden the experience of its staff. Love says many of the report's recommendations have been adopted, and he believes he has left the bureau in a good shape - despite the pressure to run a tighter financial ship.

"Because it's not a political organisation, it will never get a lot of largesse through the political system unless it's really in trouble,' he says. "Canberra keeps turning the screws so that you don't waste resources, and the question is at what point does that become counterproductive? It's hard for them to judge, and the community I hope will express an opinion." His decision to leave the bureau, he says, was not due to any dissatisfaction he applied for another terns as director before withdrawing his application. "I'm not leaving unhappy, disgruntled, cross with anybody," he says. "I've just got another opportunity."

The Geneva position will be a chance to have a greater global impact, and bring him and second wife Kathleen - an American - closer to her family. Love has left Australia as the nation grapples with some tough questions about how to deal with the changing climate. In the past week, Federal Government greenhouse adviser Professor Ross Garnaut has cone under fire from environmental leaders and some key UN scientific advisers over his recommendation to cut emissions by 10% below 2000 levels by 2020 as part of an achievable global deal - a reduction critics describe as not enough.

But Love says Garnaut is recognising that Australia is too small to be a global leader. We do play a significant role, but when the elephants such as the USA, China, Russia and India dance, the mice such as Australia have to position themselves carefully." Disagreement on the right path of action will continue as long as uncertainties remain about precisely how climate change will affect the environment and the economy.

As a nation, he says, the best thing to do is get behind whatever the Government's adopted strategy is "and give it a good go". "Because in the end any decision to reduce emissions is infinitely better than no decision." Looking ahead, he sees a need to integrate good science with good economics, something he says has yet to occur. "I think science rums its race out here. I think the economists run a different race; it's not quite blending together." Love also questions whether politicians, without the scientific background and with their focus on short-term electoral cycles, are the right leaders when it comes to climate change.

"Nobody has really stood up as being sufficiently statesman-like and above the problem," he says. "Until we can do that, I suspect a lot of our responses are a bit uncoordinated or fragmented ... the politicians have to take a step back and let somebody who has those skills stand up." With Australia's clearly drying landscape, particularly inland, Love - who is due to become a grandfather for the first time in October - says he is concerned about what the future may hold for his family. "I'm just not sure whether it's my grandchildren or my great-grandchildren who are really going to have to work pretty hard."

Nevertheless, he describes himself as an optimist. "The human species is pretty resilient, the world's pretty inventive, so I think we'll come through." Australia, with its small population and stable political system, has as good a chance as any to get things right. "We've got just 20 million people, we are a bright country and we're well resourced. If we can't solve it, nobody can. If we can't come up with a decent national response, nobody else has got a bloody hope in Bell."

Geoff Love
Born: Ivanhoe, Melbourne, December 1950.
Education: 1972 Bachelor of science (honours), La Trobe University.
1975 Meteorology-in-training course, Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
1976 Master of science, La Trobe University.
1982 PhD, Colorado State University.
1988 MBA, Deakin University.
Career: Includes positions in Melbourne and Darwin with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, most recently director in Melbourne (2003-08); secretary, United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva (2002-03); now director of World Meteorological Organisation, Geneva.
Achievements: One of the many IPCC contributors who shared in the 2007 Nobel peace prize.
Family: Married to Kathleen; two children, Sonya and David, from first marriage.
Interests: Tennis, sailing, music.