Original subtitles

Climate change is not only

affecting the health of the planet.

It's also affecting human health.

Planet Earth.

We have a problem.

Absolutely. We're in a climate emergency.

Climate change is doing more than just melting

ice caps and bleaching coral.

It's making us sick.

Everybody is being impacted. You name it.

Everything is changing.

The number one threat to humans.

Hi, my name is Dr. Dara O'Carroll

and I'm an emergency and disaster physician.

And I've seen the effects of climate change firsthand.

We're getting more extremes, not less.

Chronic fatigue of all of us.

That's when all hell is going to break loose.

Join me as I travel the global

eating world experts as they sound the alarm,

seeking solutions to some of the world's

most pressing health issues.

Even going beyond two degrees is going to be catastrophic.

We still have a fighting chance,

but we've got to move fast now

and in today's

program, we

head down under to the Great Barrier

Reef to see how climate change is affecting

one of the natural wonders of the world

and what it means for human health.

We'll follow the deadly Irukandji jellyfish,

one of the world's most venomous creatures

as it trek south directly into the path of populated areas.

We investigate

the role climate change

is playing on the rising number of fatal shark attacks.

Before I go into total meltdown

during a debilitating heat chamber experiment

and finally will confront a mega bushfire,

one so catastrophic it will transform the way

people view climate change forever.

Nowhere in the world is climate change

having more of an effect than here in Australia.

The early 20th century poet Dorothea McKellar once wrote

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,

of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.

You see, Australia has always been a land of extremes.

But today, things are getting much worse.

More than any other developed nation in the world.

Australia is rapidly changing.

Climate is impacting the health of its own citizens

and doctors around the country are sounding the alarm.

Temperature of the planet is changing

in a way that it hasn't

changed for thousands, if not millions of years.

That's being driven by greenhouse gases

which are coming from human activities mainly.

And that the prognosis

for the future on our current trajectory is pretty grim.

Despite the bad news, there is a way out of this,

but we've got to act decisively now.

Projections I've seen show that

if we don't get climate change

under control, in other words,

if global average temperatures go to three degrees or more,

there will be large swaths of Australia

which will simply be uninhabitable.

I see climate change not as a planetary issue, but

as a human issue, one that's impacting public health today

and that threatens to impact the very future of our kids.

The single greatest health challenge that health care

workers globally will have to face is climate change.

One of the

consequences of climate change is the loss of biodiversity.

Ground zero for this loss is our world to reefs,

and nowhere is experiencing it

faster than the Great Barrier Reef,

which supports the richest,

most complex natural ecosystem on the planet.

Dying coral is not just an esthetic loss.

It also jeopardizes

the discovery of future medicines

and threatens the livelihood of coastal

populations who rely on reefs for food and habitat.

So I just arrived in Cairns here in the tropical north

of Australia at the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef.

This is one of the only

places in the world where lush rainforest meets

coral and sustain such a high degree of biodiversity.

What a lot of people aren't realizing, though,

is that climate change is affecting this area

but also having tremendous consequences for human health.

About 40% of non therapeutic drugs come from nature.

We're going to miss some major opportunities

if we let climate change escalate

and continue to decimate our biodiversity.

I mean, Australia is one of 17 negative worst countries

in the world.

We want to protect more than just Australia.

We want to protect all of those 17 countries.

But climate change is causing some major problems there

and we're losing medicines of the future.

I've arranged to meet up

with marine biologist Richard Fitzpatrick,

who's offered to

take biochemists Rowan Davis and I out on an exploratory

dive on the Great Barrier Reef

Institute.

Hey, Paul, this is Darren with Rich Scots.

We're heading down to you now.

We're going to Marlin Marino.

Is that correct?

That's correct.

It's not long before we leave the port city of Cairns

and make our way out

into the vast expanse of the Coral Sea.

From the surface, everything appears is normal.

But due to recent changes in the climate,

the water temperature in this part of the world

has been rapidly increasing, resulting

in a disastrous series of coral bleaching events.

All right, Richard, these are these are your waters

or where exactly we are.

This is textured reef,

so it's what we call a mitchell freak.

So they had to race another hour at that way.

Just travel 2 hours to get here.

But these Mitchell freaks are the ones

that really got hammered by the coral bleaching events.

And so what you're going to see today is a recovering

from those events.

There were a couple of years ago

near it, and the Barrier Reef actually had a barrier.

We've got this back lagoon area and that's

where the thermal load just increased.

And there's just mass bleaching.

How long does it take for that bleaching to happen

and how long does it take to recover?

Well, for a reef to really fully recover

after a destructive event takes about 15 to 20 years.

Well,

so destructive

around the events on the reef you have cyclones.

Crown of thorns. And now we have bleaching.

But destruction is part of construction.

You know, you do need corals to get reduced to rubble

that can fill in the spaces for a reef to grow.

But it's that balance between growth in and destruction

at the moment

with the climate change, it's all out of whack.

It's too much destruction.

Yeah, and the destructive events are now too frequent.

So the corals can recover.

But if the stress

from the temperature last too long,

those corals will just starve and die.

But the issue

that the Barrier Reef is facing is the right of change,

is too fast for

natural evolutionary processes to keep up with.

It's the rate of climate change.

It's just unprecedented.

So literally the longer

we wait, the worse it's going to be,

because at the moment us doing nothing is kicking

the can down the road for future generations.

I'd heard

so much about the Great Barrier

Reef, the largest living structure on earth,

and I was just excited to see it

and experience it for myself with everything in order.

Rohan Richardson I set off to explore.

What immediately struck me was the contrast

between healthy, vibrant coral

and the skeletal remains of dead and bleached coral,

which look more like a pile of rubbish.

If anyone has any doubts that the reef is in trouble,

I'm here to tell you that the threat is serious

and is very real.

To me it looks I know not a reef expert, but

I saw a lot of say my health healthy coral, some not.

Sounds like you're a reef expert.

It's exactly what it was.

It's a recovering reef.

There's a lot of death.

So we went over that big rubble bit,

and I was pointing to an ongoing, you know, no good.

Then right at the end of it,

we saw that big, beautiful candelabra of staghorn coral.

Right.

That's what that whole area would have been like

if we don't have any more destructive events in another.

So ten years, you go in there and go, it's amazing.

But what you're seeing is, is a recent recovery, right?

Personally, I'm like, how does that make you feel?

Or somebody who's been,

you know, diving these waters for how long?

You have both mixed emotions like sadness,

because you can see in your mind's eye

what it was, how great it would have been.

But then you see bits of hope with all these new recruits

coming in

and that have weathered

all these storms that are hanging in there and

and they are trying to recolonize.

So it's the yin and the yang. Right.

And I find

that nearly everywhere I go now, diving on the reef alone.

What do you think when you see that

as that's your territory into grabbing

and getting future pharmaceuticals?

I could definitely see

a lot of harm destruction there and a lot of, you know,

loss of biodiversity, especially on

top of the Coral bombing, where a lot of that

that marine life was essentially dead.

But I saw snippets of,

you know, optimism as well

as life as we moved around the whole me, there was

some sponges in the city and that caught my eye.

And these are two marine organisms that we know

produce interesting compounds

that might one day developed into medicines.

It's a real race against time for you

then to get this stuff in the can.

Well, it's really we've already lost

a magnitude of those before they're even destroyed.

You know, that's what's really sad is like,

you know, marine biology is a relatively new science.

You know,

it's only since we've been able to blow bubbles

carrying these things on our back.

For the last 40 years, we've been sticking

our heads under the sink.

We lose that before we even get a chance to collect.

Describe it, analyze it.

It's tragic.

We are playing catch up

and we're we're running out of time.

Really.

These these new species

could be sources of medicines, of the future.

And much of our science has been biased

in the shallow water, you know, the top 20 meters.

The stuff below that

hasn't been touched at all.

We've only just had our first ever full

comprehensive deep sea survey on the inside of the reef.

There's stuff down there that will never be known.

It'll be gone before, you know.

So who knows what we're losing, right?

Exactly where it's got to be, to our detriment.

Great Barrier Reef.

How well it's going to hold up

as the canary in the coal mine.

It's all ecosystems, right?

But yeah, you lose the reef.

You know, most of the world's populations live

on the edge of the water in the tropics.

Every part of their life comes from the reef that goes.

And you've got

literally billions of people will start starving.

The reef guys erodes away, The mangroves go at heart.

More high energy storms, erosion storms.

We just

I can see as a physician, that's extremely frustrating.

So I can appreciate

as you guys, people ignoring the science

and seeing the consequences down there.

Like that's going to be incredibly frustrating. Yeah.

So so what is the solution to all this?

I think humanity has to be

faced with absolute crises sometimes before we react.

But the crisis is happening now.

It's just hidden because it's, you know, below the water.

And that's why it's so important

for the science and even the media

to get the stories out.

It just to mobilize people.

But I think, you know, humanity, we're pretty smart,

You know, in science and engineering.

It's not like we don't have

the components out there to start fixing things.

It's just the will, right?

You don't appreciate good health until you lose it.

And so this hopefully not get to the point where we lose

everything is the key to the game.

Alarmed at how much destruction

I saw while diving out on the reef,

I wanted to speak further with Roland Davis

about the medicines we could potentially

be losing in the future.

What is it about Queensland?

I know we've got rainforest right on top of the huge

Great Barrier Reef.

What is it about this state that has such a wealth

of potential? This area

is just it's one of the most

biodiverse regions in in Australia.

We've got so many different ecosystems

and those ecosystems

hold this unique biodiversity

that as a natural products chemist I want to go and study

and I have high hopes that in the future

we're going to find new drugs from these unique locations.

So how much of our new pharmaceuticals

are coming from nature?

About 40% of non-therapeutic drugs come from nature.

They're either natural products or derivatives.

There's some wonderful examples out there.

Probably most people know about morphine from the opium

poppy, which has pain control, controlling properties

as a way to safeguard flora and fauna.

Rowan established a nature bank

to develop medicines into the future.

So nature banks, a collection of the biota,

biota, meaning plants and marine organisms

that we've gone and collected

over the last two decades here in the state of Queensland.

And they're set aside for future generations

of scientists to work on.

So if I don't make the big discovery in the future,

I hope that someone else does from these natural resources.

We've had some really interesting

discoveries over the last couple of years

with this nature bang collection

when climate change is threatening our biodiversity.

Are you telling me that it's threatening

our potential pharmaceutical and future medicines?

Well, and truly, yeah.

Every time we lose a species, we could be losing

a potential drug or therapy of the future.

So how do you personally feel that your work

is being compromised by our changing climate?

It's upsetting.

It spurs us on to to make sure we we collect these samples

while we still can for future generations of scientists.

These samples, while we may not get to use them,

our future scientists will

and they'll make the new discoveries

that are needed

to treat certain human diseases in the world.

Another powerful example of the threat posed

by climate change in this part of the world

is the Irukandji jellyfish,

one of the most venomous creatures on the planet.

As a water gets warmer here in the tropical north,

the Irukandji are not only appearing for longer periods,

they're also pushing

further south directly into the path of major cities.

It's a recipe for disaster.

All right, big red warning.

These are tropical waters.

We're presence of dangerous jellyfish as possible.

Calm seas, northerly winds

and high temperatures favor the presence of stingers,

but other conditions do not guarantee their absence.

Persons entering these waters do so at their own risk.

I mean, this is one of the major

tourist areas of northern Australia.

This is Palm Cove.

I've seen this sign and many other

signs up and down this beach

to find out more.

I had to visit Dr.

Jamie Seymour,

the world's leading expert in Irukandji jellyfish.

For a creature with such a fearsome reputation.

I was immediately surprised at just how small they are.

But that's a full grown animal.

This is it. Let's see. They're tiny.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that's.

I mean, that's the first thing that catches most people.

And I mean, yes,

they're on the bottom of the evolutionary tree,

but these things are seriously sophisticated animals.

From a pain point of view.

It's probably up there with the world's worst venom.

Full stop.

And to give you some idea.

Zero. No pain. Ten. The most you can imagine.

My last trip with one of these guys

I had the pain of that for. So you were stunned.

I've been down that trip 11 times.

Never, ever want to go there, ever. In the beginning.

It's horrific.

If someone had given me a gun at that point in time,

I was a seriously debilitating pain.

It's it's hard to get it across to people

to physically be me.

But the world's worst pain.

You're getting close in Cairns.

On average,

we put 30 to 50 people

in hospital a year from Irukandji stings.

That's just Queensland.

The problem is if you're stung,

you're going to hospital.

It doesn't matter whether it's a millimeter

tentacle or 20 centimeters.

If you're off the hospital, end of story.

I've had to personally warn people

and they have their babies in the,

you know, on the shoreline and waiting in those waters.

So there's a real, real risk and threat to loss of life

from that.

But the problems that you have is that we've got an idea

in Cairns, but this is geographic specific.

There's now a direct link

between warming water and both the length

of the Irukandji season and their movement.

Further south

we found was the season back in 1960 was about one

or two months long.

So the jellyfish would turn up in November

and the last thing you got was the back end of December.

You look at it in 2000 and that season, now

still starting in around about November,

the seasons are dragging out to April, May, possibly June.

Bubble length.

Increasing the season

beautifully correlates with the increase

in water temperature.

These animals have got all

white and just north of Brisbane.

That's right down the east coast of Australia,

who has a water got warmer,

they've got further and further south.

Water temperatures, particularly in the ocean,

generally are rising at a much lower rate.

But up on the northern Australian coast

are rising almost as fast as their temperatures,

that about one degree Celsius hotter than pre-industrial

and that is what is leading to the massive bleaching

of the Great Barrier Reef.

It's leading to changes in behavior of marine organisms

like sharks.

It's leading to changes in the ranges of marine organisms.

If you continue to increase the water temperature

and it gets warmer and warmer as we get further south,

these animals will go further and further south.

Not if,

but when they arrive on the major beaches

down in Brisbane and places like that.

That's when all hell is going to

break loose because we have no way

of alleviating the problem at this moment.

Apart from going

the beaches closed,

is it possible they could get all the way to Sydney

if the water gets warmer?

Absolutely.

You know, our lifestyle is based

around the ocean and to have

a danger like that moving,

I think a lot of the southern Queenslanders

wouldn't be able to comprehend it.

We live with it here in north Queensland.

We now have two.

But yeah,

I think there'll be a

long learning curve down there

which will involve a lot of hospital visits.

We don't go out in the water without

some sort of protection.

A stinger suit most of the year

now, especially here along the coastline,

not only those little ones,

but there's some big box jellies

that also can do some some serious damage.

And as if to highlight the severity of the problem,

while I was in Queensland, a young boy died

while swimming in the coastal town of Mackay

after being brushed by a box jellyfish.

You mentioned that we can fix this.

How do we fix it?

Look, I think the answer is really simple.

It's one of those problems

that the more money you throw at it,

the quicker you find a solution.

But we're not there yet.

We're not even close.

We still don't know how the venom operates.

And we've been working on these

for probably 15 or 20 years and it's

there's just so many unknowns in the whole situation.

So it's either going to be one of two things.

We're either gonna have to do something

specific to remove those animals.

That's not possible,

but people are have to stop using the ocean.

It's going to come down somewhere.

We know climate change is out there yet.

Let's not get into an argument who calls it

whatever it is that we know it is.

There somebody come up with a conclusion how we fix it?

One person who's trying to find solutions

to the climate crisis here on the reef is Dean Miller,

who heads up the Great Barrier Reef Legacy,

a nonprofit organization

trying to preserve coral in a living biobank.

This is the holding facility of Cairns Marine,

which is an industry leader really in collecting corals

and fish

and holding them

and distributing to the world's

public and private aquariums.

Right now there'd be,

you know, over 10,000 coral fragments in here.

So we could effectively have in this space

the entire collection of the world's fault.

How big is the problem that we have

in my mind, potentially catastrophic, right?

We're losing pulse at an alarming rate

and we're we're losing them very, very quickly.

We've had three mass bleaching events

in six years now, and over 50% of Great

Barrier Reef cover has already been lost.

WHITE So we don't have coral reefs anymore.

Where are those billion people going to go?

What are they going to eat?

These are

potentially catastrophic issues

that we're going to have to face, right,

I feel in the next 20, 30, 40 years.

And so these are the biobank corals.

And each one of these little fragments represents a space.

And so they're sitting on the little acrylic plugs.

And within that acrylic plug is a microchip.

So from the moment they come out of the water,

all the data is collected on

everything about the race that they came from,

the temperature, the depth, the water chemistry.

They've had millions of years to adapt

to different temperatures around the world.

And we're trying to push them

through that evolution process in a much faster timeframe.

So they're struggling.

Some corals can do it,

but majority are showing signs of stress.

And we need to acknowledge that this is a global problem.

Now, other reef systems are completely collapsed.

We're in a unique position in

that this is an opportunity to bank

the biodiversity of Coles

now, whereas in other places of the world

it's either happening right now or it's too late

Because I was speaking with Professor Roland Davis,

he was saying that we're losing biodiversity

and his ability to find different chemicals

that can be applicable for medicines

that I could be using in the emergency department.

We're losing. Absolutely.

So it's really an untapped resource.

And when you think that

there's 800 to 1000 coral species around the world

that we really know

very little about in terms of their genetic,

I guess, bio prospecting potential.

So one of the things this project does

is collect a living sample.

Then we run the genetics

and we'll have the full genetic sequence

for each one of these coral fragments.

And someone like a pharmaceutical or medical

research lab will have access to that

full genetic information.

So this could be the cure to prostate cancer,

or this one could be the one

that fights COVID or something like that.

We just don't know what's out there yet.

We don't know what's out

and what gives you hope for the future.

The biggest hope is that we can do something right now

collecting the calls

and keeping them alive in a biobank scenario

allows us to at least maintain that biodiversity.

But there's lots of other stuff

we need to be doing.

So that's one piece of the puzzle

really needs to address. Climate change head on.

And I think as a global community,

unless we start to make radical changes, we're

going to lose the race at the end of the day.

And I feel like people

will do the right thing at the end of day.

A warming planet not only threatens

the health of coral, it's also causing extreme

drought and oppressive heat the world over.

In fact, heat

waves kill more people across the world

than any other weather phenomena.

In Australia alone,

an average of over 500 Australians die of heat

illness every year.

So I would say that extreme heat

probably is the number one factor

that's driving change in our climate

and driving health Health impacts.

One of the biggest and most immediate challenges

across the world is heat stress.

Basically, as the weather gets more extreme and hotter,

we are anticipating many more 100 plus degrees

in the United States, specifically in the Southeast.

To learn more about the problem,

I travel to Sydney to visit Professor

Ali Jae, a leading heat and health

expert at the University of Sydney.

We're facing

pretty dire consequences potentially in certain

parts of the world, particularly areas

of northern India, for example.

They already experience very high temperatures

alongside quite high humidities as well.

Here in Australia, of course, we might expect

temperatures to increase quite substantially as well.

Also the humidity that's associated with that

for a long time,

people, we're not really taking the health impacts,

which with the seriousness

that the expert community was talking about.

They were talking about the fact that

we could get to temperatures

where it's impossible to live outside without an

air conditioner.

This is when, you know, things are so humid

and so hot that you literally can't keep yourself cool.

And you, don.

And so we can expect that heat stress will will continue

to cost thousands of lives every year.

For some reason, people aren't embracing

that threat as much as they should

to get a taste of heat stress in a simulated environment.

Dr. J invited me to exercise in a heat chamber,

something I must say I wasn't looking forward to.

And if that wasn't bad enough,

I had to swallow a thermometer pills

so they could measure my core body temperature.

What we see at the moment is that heat waves,

we definitely get heat waves with 45 degrees Celsius

or even warmer.

But the challenge in this particular case

will be the higher humidity.

So when you're indoors, it's pretty difficult

to simulate an outdoor environment.

You can simulate the temperature and you

can simulate the humidity.

But what we can do with this facility

as well as up to an extent,

we can simulate the extra thermal radiation that comes

from being in an outdoor sunny environment.

So it's very what it's doing is is monitoring

what your breathing in and what you're breathing

every six.

Growing up in Hawaii,

I was used to working and exercising in tropical heat,

but nothing could have prepared me for this.

The future is

very long

from now on.

Screening service drifting off me.

I'll do that at the moment,

I can feel myself returning

from one degree Celsius.

Your heart rate

to 141.

The level definitely feeling ceiling increase

15 minutes into the exercise and I was in a pool of sweat

and I was so hot I felt my head was about to explode.

The future was definitely really hot.

I mean, I wasn't even doing much work.

You guys saw me like a slow jog

and I felt like I was sort of suffocating

and I'm not an unfit guy, you know, that's not possible

to live with in the future.

I mean, that was only 20 minutes or less,

some around 20 minutes for some reason that all day

I mean, you're talking about chronic dehydration or even

heat stroke or heat exhaustion before 3 hours are done.

I hope it's not what's coming because that's not bearable.

It's hard

to imagine how people

can function and work in such debilitating conditions.

And it just gave me a small insight

into what life could be like in a warmer future.

So once we surpassed the age of 65 or 70 years old,

you start getting age related reductions

in the ability to sweat.

So the other group of people that we're also concerned

about are people who are physically active.

So if because of your job

or because of the sport that you participate

in or something like that,

so in that situation,

you be

more likely to experience

something called exertional heat stroke.

Whereas the other situation, I would describe

older individuals

who just simply at home can't keep cool.

That would be something called classic heat stroke,

heat stress.

I can now feel it now

personally that it's the number one

killer going forward when it comes to climate change.

More people are going to die

of heat, stress and everything else.

Every year,

thousands of people die as a result of heat stress.

This is not a unique to the developing world.

It's in the developed world as well.

At the end of the day, we've got to be making sure

that we turn that create those greenhouse gases off,

because if you don't turn them off, then all of this unique

and innovative science will be found.

I think

rising temperatures

are not only affecting the health of humans,

they're also affecting shark behavior.

In the last few years, the east coast of Australia

has experienced

an unusually high number of fatal shark attacks.

To find out more about the problem,

I caught up with leading shark researcher Dr.

Daryl McPhee on North Stradbroke Island,

the scene of a horrific, fatal attack.

So Daryl, what makes this

area prone to shark attacks and having to have that sign

up there?

The environmental conditions here are perfect for bull

sharks in particular.

We have an extremely deep

channel roaring close to the beach

and we have all the water coming in and out of water

by that large,

large environment which sits next to Brisbane.

And most of the fish that come in and out,

lots of scalding fish like sea mullet,

which are really preferred food in this area

for bull sharks hugging the beach and the sharks

can fight back in 2006 in this very spot.

A 21 year old girl suffered a terrifying fatal attack

when she was mauled just meters away

from the beach by a number of sharks.

And it's an encounter that still haunts this area today.

What was so bad about that shark attack was

was that it occurred in the late afternoon,

quite a hot day when there was

a lot of families here was multiple bites

from multiple bull shops.

And it really just shattered the community.

And that shocked blood is still etched indelibly

on people's memories.

Daryl, there's been a recent record

number of fatal great white shark attacks

here on the East coast of Australia.

What's the role climate change may be having?

There's never one reason for a trend in unprovoked

shark bites,

but certainly on the Australian east coast,

with changing currents and warming water,

there's a correlation

between those factors and the occurrence of sharks

on beaches where people are swimming and surfing.

What's been unusual, particularly

the last couple of years, is a high number of fatalities.

In 2020, the east coast of Australia

experienced 22 unprovoked shark attacks, including

eight fatalities, making it the worst year on record.

If we're seeing an influx of sharks

or really high numbers,

lots of sightings of sharks in one area,

we have to kind of wonder what's bringing them in there.

Are they falling prey

or is there something in the environment

that's telling them this is where they should be?

So when we were talking about what could be changing

shark movement, shark behavior,

we have to look at those environmental cues.

The sharks are moving around

in relation to food and where their food goes,

where they go.

And so

what we find with climate change

is that their prey is being affected.

So therefore, ultimately sharks are being affected.

We know that their migratory patterns

are getting pushed by climate change as well.

Warming seas are changing

where and where those currents occur.

We all have theories as to why we see more sharks now.

And I've had a dozen encounters

in the last ten years at least.

Do you foresee

more attacks

due to the changing climate and the changing ecology

of the ocean?

Again, it's very difficult to predict,

but I certainly wouldn't be surprised.

With increasing warmer water, you actually expect to see

mobile sharks spending longer in the greater Sydney region

and even pushing further south.

The other climate change trigger was bull.

Sharks respond and move to beaches during rain,

particularly flooding rain.

So the more flooding rain you get, the more overlap

you expect a bull.

Sharks with surface, the seasons are going longer.

That means people will be spending more

and more time in the water.

So therefore, the chance of a negative shark,

human interaction also increases.

Australia's population is going to continue to increase.

A lot of people are going to go to the beaches

just to try and cool off.

More people in the water

equals the potential for more shark bites.

Incredibly, just a day prior to meeting with Dr.

McPhee,

my producer shocked me with the news of another fatal

shark attack of

this time in Sydney and the first in 60 years.

Dara, you are not going to believe this

fatal shark attack in Sydney who dies,

but they are first time in 60 years

mauled to death by a man eaters,

Great White, the three of great

white celebrities in a video, someone caught on film

got pretty full on having worked in the E.R..

I've seen all sorts of trauma,

but nothing could have prepared me

for the horrific scenes

as a five meter great White mauled a swimmer.

So I've just seen a really horrific video

of a fatal shark attack in Sydney.

It's all over the newspapers as well.

What's your take on that absolutely horrific video?

It really puts things in a context

that was clearly a shark intent

on killing that particular person.

It was a very sustained attack.

And it just continued.

So there was obviously motivation there.

We don't

tend to see that predatory motivation that often from

great white sharks in every sense of it.

It was an absolutely horrific example of what can happen.

I guess the whole world

got to see the brutality of a shark attack.

That's

I know that

I don't need to see that tonight,

that having survived

a brutal attack himself while out surfing,

Dave Pearson understands the problem as well as anyone.

We got down the beach and just the beach

that we always surf at.

When I was paddling out

after the third wave, then just bang.

It was just

totally not expected to hit me like a freight train

and it's bottom

jaw got stuck in my surfboard on the way through.

All I remember was tons of bubbles

and then something big in front of me.

I was semi-conscious, like I was so dazed.

I was looking down on my arm and all of these muscles

was just hanging over and the blood was squirting

probably 6 to 8 foot from the city.

The activity back over and squeezing

as hard as I could to just try and stem it

and ASM squeezing it, squirting through my fingers.

And I'm thinking, well, this isn't that good at all.

Just as I was looking in the water,

I seen the shot directly under me.

It was still probably only

two foot under the water and it was like,

you know, five foot that way and fight for that way.

It was big fish. shit, I'm going to die today.

I was in a ton of pain, but if you're in pain,

you're alive.

And I was pretty happy about that.

Alarmed

at the rising number of attacks

and the lack of post-traumatic support,

Dave Pearson founded a support group called the Fight Club.

The first year out of,

you know, after a year attack,

it's a mental mess that you don't need to get into.

And I searched to see if there was any support

network and slating

got in touch with a few people

and it was really nice to be able

to help people through some really tough times.

And and they've helped me just as much.

Most of the climate predictions I've been hearing

are that

Waters are just going to continue

to get warmer and warmer and warmer.

How problematic can this be for surfers and people

who are in the ocean?

Potentially extremely problematic.

We do know that

in amongst the information on unprovoked shark bite,

there is a climate change signal in that

there are some correlations at times

concentrating some white sharks

closer to that shoreline and overlapping

more with people will expect to see bites in Australia from

bull sharks and tiger sharks to extend further south.

And likewise, in the US mainland, we expect to see

bull sharks and tiger shark bites moving further north.

As the water gets warmer, sharks are going to be moving.

We're seeing that distribution is changing.

We're seeing it in bull sharks.

We're seeing in tiger sharks in Australia

and in other places around the world.

So we will have to understand

that these sharks are going to be popping up in places

that we haven't seen them before.

The difference from when I was younger to now,

it wasn't as many attacks, that's for sure.

But now

there's a lot more awareness about what's out there.

And we should be shark smart,

We should be smarter about what we do

and not put ourselves in a situation

could lead to us being attacked too

as humans to change their behavior is a big ask.

But I think that what people just need to to do

is to be aware, to educate themselves, to know the risk

and to do whatever they can to mitigate against that risk.

We want to alter an entire ecosystem

by calling sharks, removing sharks.

So then we have a safer environment for recreation.

It's kind of a bit the height of human arrogance,

I think, for us to

think that, let's change a whole ecosystem

for our pleasure.

So for that extra peace of mind

and in fact extra risk reduction,

there are scientifically tested

shark deterrents that do actually work,

but none of them are 100% effective.

The risk of a shark bite is low.

It will remain low, but it will never be zero.

So now hitting south down to Canberra

to see Professor Will Steffen.

He's an expert in climate science.

It's amazing that just two years ago

Australia had its worst bushfire season on record.

Now we're driving through

what allegedly is a one in 1000 year flood.

Evacuation warnings have also been issued for

the environment

and a

danger if you are trying around

anywhere in the whole of an area.

This really is a land of climate extremes.

So climate change is basically a disruption

of the energy balance at the surface of the earth.

We are changing the energy balance

of the lower atmosphere

and of course it changes circulation, changes

how rainfall and where rainfall falls, it changes

extreme weather events and all sorts of things like that.

What are the general climate trends

that are happening here in Australia?

Well, probably the first and foremost

one is it's getting hot, really hot.

So extreme heat is going up.

That's still the number one

killer of climate related extreme.

And it's affecting all of our capital cities.

It's affecting the bush, affecting everything.

So it's this combination of our coasts are changing.

We're heating wood burning more.

When droughts come, they are much more severe.

They tend to be longer and they tend to be drier.

It's spreading around the rest of the world, too.

But I think there's nowhere like Australia

where climate change now is so pervasive

in so many different ways and to such extreme,

all the natural variability we have is getting worse.

When storms come, the packing more power,

when rain comes, it rains more,

more runoff, higher flooding, sea levels are coming

up, storm surges are coming in.

The other thing I think that makes Australia

so unique is we've put a lot of our people

and infrastructure in vulnerable places.

We love our coastlines.

So all of Australia's major cities

except the one we're in now, Canberra,

all the others are located on the coast.

People love to go down to the beach,

up to the houses on the coast, but sea level is coming up.

Storm surges are becoming stronger.

So we have a lot of infrastructure,

a lot of people at risk from rising sea levels.

So it's a combination of a very erratic climate

and just sort of by the way we live,

we've tended to put ourselves in harm's way

as the water continues to warm.

Professor Steffen also has real concerns for the

health of the Great Barrier Reef.

Coral reefs are really, really

in a very vulnerable position now, and I think my prognosis

is that not many of them are going to survive.

Remember also that the oceans absorb 90% of the extra heat

that we're generating with greenhouse gases.

Big ocean currents are going to start to change,

speeding up, slowing or whatever.

That's going to wreak havoc with climate around the world.

A lot of other continents, they haven't experienced it

like we're experiencing it, but it's going to come.

Are we in a climate emergency?

Absolutely. We're in a climate emergency.

Temperatures are accelerating.

Our emissions are increasing.

So not only do we have to reduce them,

we've got to learn

how slow them down really fast,

pick them and get them going now.

People don't appreciate their health until it's gone.

How do you personally feel about the inaction

that may be happening for many people?

Climate change was theoretical.

It was a science problem. Something for the future.

Exactly.

As you say,

it's only after you lose something

that you realize how much you valued it,

like your health, obviously.

And then when I tell them

that these major events don't just change

linearly as an even group, they go up sharply.

And so 1.5, it's going to be much more than 50%

worse than one

and two degrees is going to be far worse

than double what's happening at one.

And then I reminded

just remember the last couple of years

what was happening at one degree.

We still have a fighting chance,

but we've got to move fast.

Despite all the negativity,

Professor Stephan hasn't given up all hope

just yet and is encouraged

by the attitude of the world's youth.

We see all sorts of what I call

trusted voices now standing up.

It's hard for people to forget about what

the young people are saying, saying It's our future.

You older people are in charge of making sure

we have a future and you're failing us.

That's a strong message.

But medical people are speaking out like yourself.

Firies are speaking out.

Farmers speaking out.

Sportspeople are speaking out.

So this idea that we need to move and we need to move past

is permeating many aspects of our society.

And it's not unique to Australia.

It's happening in other parts of the world too.

Can we get to the social tipping point in time?

I don't have the answer, but every day

when I see someone else speaking out,

it gives me some hope that we might get there.

Greg Mullins

The son of a fireman and a fireman himself

with over 50 years of experience

fighting fires on the front line,

was so alarmed by climate change

and its effects on bushfire,

he felt compelled to write a book called Firestorm.

When I first became a firefighter,

nobody was talking about climate change.

It wasn't even on the radar.

And my father taught me about the fire seasons

and patterns of weather.

What I'm seeing across the world is

climate change is driving up

temperatures, it's drying out forests, even wet

rainforests never used to burn

for millions of years, couldn't burn.

Now they're burning.

So this problem is getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Wildfires get turned on by particular

types of conditions.

It's the increase in those conditions,

the dryness, the amount of tinder,

the temperature

that are driving this sort of cycle of fires.

In the summer of 2019 2020, climate change

came to a head in Australia

when the east

coast of the country literally went up in flames.

It was a fire so intense, so catastrophic

and so widespread it would change

Australia's view on climate change forever.

It was a fire so devastating

it would make the whole world stand up and take notice.

Stretching right along the east coast

of Australia and burning for over

six months, the fire would become known as Black Summer.

If you look up the Australian east coast from Victoria

up through to southern and central Queensland,

on average about two or 3% of those forests

burn every year. That is a normal bushfire.

Some were equipped to handle it.

Firefighters couldn't go out and deal

with a wildlife can deal with it.

That's the way ecology works.

While 2019 and 2020 came along, we jumped

from two or three or 4% to 21% burnt in one year.

We had our hottest, driest year ever

recorded in Australia,

so it was far more severe than any previous drought.

So they're saying it was the worst drought on record.

The forest became critically dry

and the temperatures became

critically hot at the same time.

So it crossed the threshold in which

the fires were uncontrollable.

There was so much fire activity

going on over such a large area

from the top of the state

all the way down into Victoria

over such an extended period of time.

It was months and months,

consistent devastation, consistent destruction

on a scale that we hadn't seen ever before.

Not just the sheer scale of them,

but the length of time they went for rather

fighting fires. Over two or three months.

We were fighting fires

in some areas from August right through to the end

of February and the march.

I saw

kangaroos on dying on fire, coming out of blazing forests

and they know how to get away.

They know where the water is

and they fast that the fires at random.

What I heard was so loud that I turned around

and was confronted with a world flame

unlike I'd ever seen this enormous explosion of power.

And it was it was deafening.

People were trapped and had to make for the sea.

We're standing on the beaches.

As fires were bearing down, the Navy had to come in,

bring them out.

We had a pyro convective storm above us, which used to be

something of legend.

You know, all my time

fighting fires. I've never seen that now

so common during that fire season.

There was one instance during the fires

where an eight tonne fire truck was picked up

and dumped on its race and killed one firefighter.

I can show you

an image of flames that are 50, 60 meters high.

Within sight of Canberra,

we were within hours of having 40 and 50,000

people trapped.

I don't know

how many people realized the situation,

but I was really sweating that night.

In the time I've been in the fire service,

I've seen some really significant fires,

never to the scale of the amount of fires

and five and a half million hectares that were burnt here

in New South Wales by far and away exceeds

what we've ever dealt with before.

No firefighting organization on this planet

could have dealt with those fires.

We're now talking about mega-fires,

things that are going for for longer, hotter,

more intense, more threatening and so on.

We're seeing these things start to amplify.

We lost 2470 times, 11 times

more than any previous fires in history in this state.

Fires are now

appearing in ecosystems and regions of Australia

that they hadn't before.

So in addition to the intensity of huge fires

in the eucalypts, other force

which didn't burn are starting to burn.

Why? Because they're having extended dry periods

and then heat.

There's big parts of this state where there's nothing

there you go there, there's not even birds.

It's sterilized because it's the hundreds of kilometers.

It's just blackened and everything died.

So our scientists are saying there's

never been anything like this or as widespread

as this or as intense disease.

And so a firefighter who's been on the front lines

for 15 years, I've never seen anything like it.

There's now

very strong evidence that they wouldn't

have occurred without climate change.

Well, as you know, as I mentioned,

we're a fire prone continent anyway.

But normally that would be

maybe three or 4% of the force burned.

And you went back

three decades and you saw this oscillation

and then you saw over the last decade,

it kept creeping up, up and up.

And up.

And by the time 2019 came by,

it was probably at the 99th percentile.

In other words, above anything else

in terms of the combination of drought and heat.

It's easy to say, well, we've had fires before.

I definitely consider the fact that major fire events

are inevitable, but the climate change

is making it so much worse.

We haven't seen it on this scale before

and this is why we should be paying more attention to it.

Climate change

just shoved the temperature that much too high.

The drought

was that much to try and the whole thing took off.

Bushfires not only threaten ecosystems

and whole communities,

they also have a devastating effect on human health.

During our fires, 33

people were killed, including nine spots on us.

I was actually standing

because I thought there'd be thousand, but

450 people died from the effects of smoke.

So major capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra

were just covered in smiles.

I understand there was some studies done

that showed

once that got it up into the upper atmosphere,

that smoke was actually circling the planet.

We saw heavy, heavy effects of smoke impact on human health

for months on end.

So it was very much

not only that

immediate effect of how far the smoke would go,

but the cumulative effect as well.

One night I was delivering a baby

when little spotlight

and it was just running through smoke,

and we realized that the whole birth room was full of thick

smoke.

As people start to inhale more smoke.

And we saw massive increases in hospitalizations

during the bushfires

in Sydney delivered babies who ended up in the need

of UCERIS at rates that I had not experienced before.

Our health is being impacted across the globe yet

there doesn't seem to be the action that's needed yet.

It's impossible for the world to function in people

that it isn't a theoretical future

threat to people that people are living in now.

We are seeing heatwaves,

we see bushfire smoke affecting people

and people are very anxious about their children's health.

So it's really

been an extraordinary changing philosophy.

Was Black Summer a warning for the rest of the world

caught? Most definitely.

And soon after that

California burned yet again and tied together.

So there were big warnings and no human being

has fought fires in those conditions before.

We're heading for 2.7 degrees,

which is catastrophic for the human race.

Indigenous Australians

have been successfully managing the environment

with controlled burns

for thousands of years and it's a practice

that the Western world can learn from.

Europeans have been here for about 200 years

and for 60,000 years before that.

The Indigenous people

managed the land and healed

the land and we've screwed it up in just 200 years.

So what can

the indigenous of this land teach us about fires?

Well,

I believe there's a lot of buildup of fuel

and that's creating a lot of fires.

Once that fire goes, it's pretty hard to sort out

if you've got a lot of fuel around.

The cultural burning really does have a place.

The more we can

look at how it integrates

into our fire management practices.

Now I think the law wind from the bushfires

can be reduced If we do a lot of traditional banning.

We just don't go walking in and burning

the whole we burn certain areas, section

by section so we don't create a big mega bushfire.

Cultural burning has much deeper meaning

than a just been as simple as saying

it's a good way to do hazard reduction.

Why is it required?

What is the connection to country?

Climate change is having such an impact

on the severity of fires in Australia.

It's forced the authorities to extend the fire danger

rating from extreme to catastrophic.

It's an algorithm that takes maximum

temperature,

lowest relative humidity, the moisture in the air,

highest wind

speed and a drought factor number of days since rain

jumps it all up and comes up with a number

between one and 100.

The Fire Authorities council decided together

with the federal government, we need a new category.

Once it gets to catastrophic leave the day before.

I think more than any single incident,

that is the one that's got people realizing

that climate change is not only real,

it's not something for the future.

We continue to learn more

and hopefully we can implement those learnings

to better mitigate the risks

so we now know what the New West is

and we need to be getting ready to deal with that.

Or worse.

The thing that gives me hope for the future is

children are utterly focused

on the health of the planet in a way that never happened

when I was a kid.

They want ethical

and responsible environmental stewardship.

I see that fundamental to the way the watch work.

Watching my kids fire up about climate change

is really exciting.

This generation cares a lot about the climate.

It is quite an exciting time,

especially for kids coming through now

because the answers will be science and technology.

Everything's been looked at.

Nothing's off the table for climate change.

It's not something for the future.

This continent is probably the most vulnerable,

and we're feeling that right now.

There is a huge capacity for us to solve problems.

If we consider them to be problems we're solving.

We need to make sure that people realize that

this is a problem worth solving

because it's the planet

upon which we live on and there is no other planet.

But we have a moral responsibility

to take care of those most vulnerable

and to hand our kids a future that we want to be proud of.

Treat it as an emergency and go on a wartime footing

to turn this around.

Anyone who is involved in delivering babies

and delivering a new generation

has an interest in making sure the babies

we deliver their children have the healthiest possible

starting lives.

We must get on with the solutions

if only for the kids.

I mean, you think about children

and what we're leaving them.

That's the great moral argument.

Do you think as physicians, we should be leading

the charge in the climate emergency?

It is our absolute responsibility

to make sure that we are in the lead.

Both advocacy and in how we live our own lives

and how we treat patients.

We need people power.

Humans need to take responsibility,

and it'll come back in terms of the health benefits for us

because it's not all over.

But it is one of those grand

challenges that we must meet and we are staying away from.

The solutions is not an option.

I've learned a lot about climate change

in my time Down Under

and how it's affecting health

in ways I never thought possible.

I've also seen that now more than ever,

I'm hopeful we will act because when it's our health,

we can't afford to wait.