'What could I have done?' The scientist who predicted the bushfire emergency four decades ago
Summary
“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. 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 Australia’s agriculture, ecology, insurance industry, hydrology, irrigation, farmers and power generators. “Graeme Pearman said to me, you do bushfires, and I clicked my heels and saluted, and just got on with it.” The task wasn’t simple, and Beer’s initial hopes that he would “just need to go and crank the computer handle” were challenged. “It would be wrong to say Tucker was holding [Pearman and Pittock] back, but he wasn’t advancing or promoting their research either.” Beer’s paper was one of more than 50 presented at the 1987 conference, and then in a book that was 745 pages long.