jobs ahead, and itʼs only going to get tougher,” says Beer.

“But I feel maybe I was not enough of a prophet crying in the

wilderness.”

Back in 1986, Beer was working as a CSIRO meteorologist looking at

bushfires when he was asked by his boss, Dr Graeme Pearman, to go
and find out what the greenhouse effect might mean for the future of
fires.

Beerʼs findings in 1987, published in 1988 as “Australian bushfire

danger under changing climatic regimes”, became the first study in the
world to ask what climate change was going to mean for wildfires.

“It seems obvious, but actually we found the correlation was not
temperature and fires, but relative humidity and fires. Temperature
goes up, it gets drier, and then the fires go up,” says Beer.

Australiaʼs bushfire season has started early this year, with fire chiefs
saying the length, extent and intensity of the fires is unprecedented.

More than a million hectares has been burned, entire towns and
communities have been decimated and lives have been lost. In just
one week in NSW, 259 homes have been destroyed.

With months of firefighting ahead of them, fire chiefs are starting to

worry about the fatigue and stress on volunteer firefighters. Now, as
more dangerous fire weather is forecast, Beer and Pearman are asking
what else they could have done as scientists who were sounding the
early warning bells for the current suffering. Why did the science not
lead to action?

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 “I would blame most of that on the lobbying”,” says Pearman, now 78.
“That lobbying has been extremely powerful in a country driven by the
resource sector that includes uranium, coal and gas.

“Thereʼs a huge reluctance to reign that part of our economy in with a

more strategic perspective.”

Picturing climate change scenario no simple

task
The story of Beerʼs paper starts with Pearman who, says Beer,
deserves credit for driving climate change research within CSIRO in
the 1980s.

Pearman had taken an early climate change scenario developed by

colleagues Barrie Pittock and Henry Nix, and handed it to scores of
specialist scientists across the country.

Pearman wanted to get a picture of how climate change might impact

issues including Australiaʼs agriculture, ecology, insurance industry,
hydrology, irrigation, farmers and power generators.

“We went to all these scientists and said, in a year, we want a paper
prepared to see what it means for your area. That was the basis for
Tom Beerʼs paper. That was a year before the Greenhouse ‘87 meeting
– a watershed. At the end of the day it was a risk assessment. ”

Beer recalls it this way. “Graeme Pearman said to me, you do

bushfires, and I clicked my heels and saluted, and just got on with it.”

The task wasnʼt simple, and Beerʼs initial hopes that he would “just

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