spinofflive
Left: climate scientist Joëlle Gergis. Right: the view from my flat in Canberra as a cloud of bushfire smoke descended on the city in late 2019.
Left: climate scientist Joëlle Gergis. Right: the view from my flat in Canberra as a cloud of bushfire smoke descended on the city in late 2019.

ScienceSeptember 13, 2024

What one climate scientist wants everyone to know

Left: climate scientist Joëlle Gergis. Right: the view from my flat in Canberra as a cloud of bushfire smoke descended on the city in late 2019.
Left: climate scientist Joëlle Gergis. Right: the view from my flat in Canberra as a cloud of bushfire smoke descended on the city in late 2019.

‘The fight for a habitable planet is on right now, and we need everyone to show up.’ Ellen Rykers gets a reality check from climate scientist Joëlle Gergis.

This is an excerpt from our environmental newsletter Future Proof. Sign up here.

In the summer of 2019, an acrid fug of smoke cloaked the city of Canberra, where I was living at the time. The heat was oppressive – pushing 40 °C – and a bushfire haze turned the sun into an angry red orb. I tried not to leave my air-conditioned office: the air outside was choked with specks of incinerated eucalypt. I googled where I could buy an air pollution mask.

It was the beginning of the Black Summer, when catastrophic bushfires raged through 243,000 square kilometres of Australia. That’s a mind-boggling number equivalent to 90% of New Zealand’s landmass. Infernos killed 34 people and an estimated three billion animals. The iconic koala was pushed onto the endangered species list.

“I never imagined I’d live to see the day when the koala has the potential to become extinct in our country,” says Joëlle Gergis, an Australian climate scientist.

Gergis, too, was in Canberra that Black Summer. She was deep in the throes of writing for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th assessment report – a comprehensive synthesis of everything we know about the science of climate change.

“These things we were writing about in the report were literally happening outside my window,” she says. A lot of scientists, people just like her, assumed that the big, meaty reports, the science, would speak for itself. But this was a wake-up call: “In fact, no, it doesn’t speak for itself. And unless you get out there and say something, people will fill the gap.” Gergis wanted to tell the true, scientific climate story and help everyone connect the dots.

The scientific reality

In an impassioned address at the Climate Change and Business Conference on Monday, she laid bare the scientific reality we’re experiencing – not just what’s coming 20, 30 years down the track, but what’s happening now.

The record-breaking heat of 2023, both on land and in the oceans, that’s likely to be surpassed again in 2024. The 2022 coral bleaching that dealt the “death blow” to the Great Barrier Reef. The signs of abrupt change in Antarctica, where the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet could raise sea levels by four metres, shift ocean circulation, and fundamentally alter global weather patterns.

“I just can’t believe that we are going to literally destabilise the Earth’s climate and, yet, we are making excuses, trying to rationalise the use of fossil fuels,” Gergis tells me.

About 80% of the excess carbon in the atmosphere has come from us burning fossil fuels, she points out. The rest comes from the destruction of carbon-storing ecosystems like wetlands and forests. “No matter which way you want to look at it, it’s the burning of coal, oil and gas that’s really cooking the planet,” she says.

About half of all of that planet-heating carbon accumulating in the atmosphere has been pumped out since 1990 – the year the very first IPCC report was released.

Joëlle Gergis speaks at the 2024 Climate Change and Business Conference in Auckland.

‘Policy failure of colossal proportions’

Having studied, taught and researched climate change for close to 30 years, Gergis thought we’d be just a bit closer to an adequate political response to this existential threat. Instead, she describes what we have as “a policy failure of colossal proportions”.

At the Cop28 climate summit last year, a “global stocktake” assessed where we’re at collectively with our global climate goals. It was sobering: the world is on track to reduce emissions by 2%, not the 43% we need by 2030 to limit warming to as close to 1.5°C as possible.

Instead of effective policies, decision-makers have been reeled in by fossil fuel talking points. Gergis is scathing of Australia’s approach to using gas as a “transition fuel”, likening switching from coal to gas to swapping cigarettes for vapes. New Zealand’s imminent reversal of its oil and gas exploration ban is “a step backwards” too: “It’s clear that Australia’s lack of genuine leadership on climate change is influencing New Zealand’s energy policy and encouraging us to turn our back on our Pacific Island neighbours,” she told the conference audience.

And we can’t rely on as-yet-unproven carbon capture tech, either. Currently deployed carbon capture technology – which sucks carbon out of the atmosphere and stores it – can only offset about 0.01% of global emissions. Gergis labels it “a reckless gamble with our planet’s future” – especially when safe alternatives already exist.

“We could actually reduce global emissions between 50 to 80% by 2030 with existing technology. So we don’t actually need to wait for anything to materialise. We can do it right now,” she says.

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

Rage and hope in the age of consequences

In 2022, Gergis published a book called Humanity’s Moment: A climate scientist’s case for hope. The “hope” subtitle is “a little bit funny if you know me really well,” she says. (Her recent essay, Highway to hell, might seem more on-brand.) But Gergis is adamant that hope is essential, an active choice we should all make in the face of this confronting reality.

You can give yourself permission to feel emotional about climate change too. Gergis says she’s been “getting in touch with her rage”. Likewise, despair is an appropriate emotional response to “very distressing information.” But we can’t leave ourselves wallowing in doom.

“We need to use that despair, that care for the planet, as our fuel for rage and anger and action. This is not the age of apathy. This is the age of consequences. We will look back at the 2020s and say, ‘Well, where were you? What did you do? How did you show up?’

“The fight for a habitable planet is on right now, and we need everyone to show up.”

Keep going!
Image: The Spinoff
Image: The Spinoff

OPINIONScienceSeptember 9, 2024

Some home truths about gene technologies

Image: The Spinoff
Image: The Spinoff

In response to criticism of proposed changes to our GM settings, scientist Revel Drummond says we should discuss the issue of regulatory change from a position of educated debate, not fear-mongering.

New technologies often get pushback from sectors of society. In the 19th century people feared the unknown effects on the body from the speed of train travel. Public health technologies such as vaccination and fluoridation have been the subject of counter-technological rhetoric and misinformation. Those peddling such messages frequently purport to be an “independent voice” and the only ones with the answers. Gene technologies have been no different. The anti-science strategies used are familiar but still, unfortunately, effective. 

I think Aotearoa New Zealand should discuss the issue of regulatory change from a position of educated debate, not fear-mongering. To aid the discussion, here are some facts, all readily verifiable (not from my work, but from many, many other scientists). 

We have genetically modified our food for millennia

Humanity has been altering our food plants and animals for at least the last 10,000 years. We have artificially selected the plants that suit our needs and spread that seed. This selective pressure altered genomes at broad scale – good variants (mutations) were spread quickly, altering the genetic landscape of many species. The domestication of wheat, maize and rice created plants with genomes far removed from the original wild plants. More recently we deliberately selected for useful variants, producing plants like pinot gris from pinot noir and royal gala apples from gala, but this was slow and relied on random chance creating the necessary changes to the DNA. 

And it didn’t just happen in plants – just look at the difference between a chihuahua and a wolf, or a buffalo and a dairy cow.

When we discovered in the 1950s that DNA was the source of the instructions for how each plant or animal was made, new avenues to producing variants opened up. We induced many mutations very quickly (but randomly) and the plants were screened for the “best” ones, in a manner similar to what our ancestors did, but now with more knowledge and purpose. Ruby grapefruit and some nashi pears came into being this way, and the list goes far beyond these.

Royal gala apples (Image: Shanti Mathias)

Not all genetic modification is the same

What you might generally think of as genetic modification has, until recently, involved adding DNA from an external source – whether from the same species or a completely different organism. However, the advent of more modern gene technologies, such as gene editing, has fine-tuned the process so we can now make precise changes to the existing DNA of an organism, potentially without adding anything new. 

Gene editing, ie changing a single letter in the DNA code out of 372 million letters (in the case of papaya) or 14.5 billion letters (in the case of wheat) is clearly different from adding several thousand letters in the form of a new gene from a different species. Those opposed to genetic modification have chosen to consider these the same, but science does not.

Different types of change and different applications of the technology have different risks. The change of one DNA letter to another or the loss and addition of small pieces of DNA is a very common and natural occurrence from parents to progeny of any species (including humans). The risks are well quantified, so we don’t subject every new seedling or kitten to rigorous genetic screening before it’s allowed into the world. Gene editing is capable of making these exact sorts of changes. A mutation in the DNA sequence is chemically identical whether caused by, for example, a UV ray, or by gene editing – there is no way to tell which method caused it. In New Zealand, the first of these is subject to no regulation, the second to stringent risk and safety assessment and public consultation before contained trials. Recognising that there are substantive differences in risk, many countries have chosen to regulate GMOs and gene-edited organisms differently. 

Modern biotechnology is difficult, just not as difficult as it once was

People are currently imagining some weird and wonderful uses of modern biotechnology. But despite having created more genetically modified organisms than you’ve had hot lunches, I still find it quite a difficult process. I have worked for nearly 20 years in a high-complexity molecular biology laboratory with the resources of a scientific research institute with more than 1,000 employees. Sure, bacteria are pretty easy to modify, mostly consisting of one cell with one set of DNA to modify, but plants are fairly hard, and I don’t have any ability to genetically modify an animal at all. So, hearing that someone imagines I will shortly be spraying gene-editing enzymes on fields of crops and making GMOs makes me shake my head in disbelief. This is impossible and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Under the proposed new regulations, schools will be able to teach the basics of modern biotech. In simple science laboratories the students may be able to make a genetically modified bacteria, for example, that glows green when under UV light or that comes in four shades of orange/red. However, genetically modifying plants and animals requires expertise, time and resources not available to any school or garage enthusiast.

Photo: Getty Images

We are missing out

The use of gene technology in agriculture has one of the fastest uptakes of any technology. In the countries that have embraced the tool, the adoption is now at greater than 90% for the most popular crops. But that has led to it being a victim of its own success. Uptake by farmers was far faster than consumers were comfortable with. The benefits were significant, but they were also only felt by the farmers.

Our farmers have missed out, but what about consumers? It’s fair to say that the development of consumer-focused products has lagged behind, but that is changing. The examples of the tomato that helps with hypertension and the pink pineapple with its healthy antioxidants are only the tip of the iceberg. Watch this space.

Our exporters will also miss out. Soon we will have to compete with apples that don’t go brown and need fewer pesticides during the growing season. New Zealand’s reputation for growing the best food with the least environmental impact is at risk from outdated production methods, some of which could be improved by gene technology. Tying one hand behind our back will make staying relevant increasingly more difficult. 

Precision fermentation technologies is another area where we could be a world leader but our current regulations are holding us back. There has been some great writing on this topic from New Zealanders describing the development of everything from bioplastics to cow-less dairy products and lab-grown meat.

The United States has both the largest organics sector and the largest gene technology agricultural sector in the world. The use is not all or nothing. Careful regulation and stewardship means that these production systems co-exist and both make excellent returns in the market by providing the consumer with the benefits that they demand. This could easily be win-win if we do it right.

New Zealand will still have stringent regulations for the use of GM

The new regulator for gene technology in New Zealand will be closely based on the Australian model. However, we will learn from their experience to develop an even better system with the unique characteristics of Aotearoa. The Royal Society Te Apārangi has already done an extensive analysis on why this is necessary.

Australia, like many other countries (US, UK, Japan, Argentina, China, Philippines, India, Canada, and soon the EU) has taken the view that not all genetic modification is equal and regulates simple gene editing differently. But their system is unable to cope with some of the most modern forms of gene editing technology and lacks the ability to tease apart some of the more nuanced outcomes. Our system could be less prescriptive and more flexible and future-proof, while still providing excellent protection for the people and environment of Aotearoa. 

But wait there's more!