In the last week of October, Scott Morrison got more involved with the Prime Minister’s XI match than most who have held the office. While the home team took on a touring Sri Lankan side, Morrison spent a Canberra evening running out drink bottles to the players for some good wholesome everyman sporting photo opportunities.
Before the season’s first Test in November he was back at the cricket again, shaking hands with Test players at training in Brisbane and posting some new snaps with a musing: “For our firefighters and fire-impacted communities, I’m sure our boys will give them something to cheer for.”
However debatable the national morale value of David Warner towelling up teenage bowlers on debut, by early December, “our boys” were feeling the impact of fire themselves. Players for New South Wales and Queensland went about a state match cloaked in thick bushfire smoke.
The images from the Sydney Cricket Ground were bizarre: the familiar scene of a cricket match blurred out through a monochromatic haze, somewhere between static and a fade to black. Recognisable figures like Trent Copeland and Steve O’Keefe reduced to silhouettes, dim shapes celebrating wickets through the fug. They were running in to bowl while air pollution in the city topped out at a dozen times the official threshold for hazardous.
While people questioned whether the Melbourne Test might be unplayable because of the quality of the pitch, more salient was whether the Sydney Test might be unplayable because of the quality of the air. The smoke-out had been going on for weeks as NSW burned.
In a cricket context it brought to mind matches in Delhi, where industrial fumes and agricultural burning create a thick haze at certain times of year, especially when adding the after-effects of Diwali fireworks. This hasn’t stopped Indian authorities scheduling matches in the city – the Sri Lanka team played in face masks and had players vomiting in the change rooms during a Test in 2017.
In other cricket countries we have shrugged this off as an India problem, chalking it up to corruption and poor governance. But it is global practice for leaders to ignore pollution that is created by the financial interests of the rich and a lack of alternatives for everyone else. Call Delhi an India problem, but here was Sydney looking the same, with federal and state governments just as keen to avoid talking about causes or solutions.
Morrison’s posing with cricketers came to look even more flimsy. Cricket was supposed to be the vehicle for escapism from bushfire season, but became subject to the same problem. Even as the country burns, Australia has a government and an opposition that stay cosy with the coal and oil industries to avoid a powerful electoral enemy, and to keep the campaign donations coming in. ABC political correspondent Barrie Cassidy wrote: “I don’t think we’ve ever had a government so out of touch with a national concern and an opposition so incapable of putting the pressure on them.”
Admitting the scientific reality of our collective problem has been tagged as a political position rather than basic sanity. The supposed measures being taken and emissions reduced are largely illusions or creative accounting from a regime for whom meaningful change would be viewed as some abstract defeat.
So this week we had a prime minister in a city choked by smoke addressing the media about a religious discrimination bill, another pointless artefact of a culture war that interests approximately 12 columnists and one former rugby winger. We have members of cabinet saying it’s insensitive to discuss the cause of fires while they are still burning. A fire season spanning half the year will be quite the brake on conversation.
That same prime minister wouldn’t meet with emergency chiefs months ago who were urging him to lease extra water bombers for the season ahead. He rejected calls this week to assist volunteer firefighters who are crowdfunding for supplies. He responded to Australia’s ranking as the worst-performing developed country on the climate crisis by saying “We don’t accept that report.” You can do that now, apparently, with anything you don’t like.
Perhaps the most striking line from his government came from minister Paul Fletcher when asked about the clear link between climate and fires. “I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area,” he replied. With respect Paul – become one. You could start by taking briefings from experts. It’s your job, and it’s kind of important.
No sport is more vulnerable to climate breakdown than cricket. Its whole spiritual core – the grass pitch that changes organically over the days of a match – depends on the right amounts of watering and sunshine, of soil acidity and not too much heat. Its great enemy is drought, turning lushness to dust. Sports fields are among the first expendable items when the water dries up. That’s before we come to players, strapping on heavy kit for full days of exertion in the sun. Each degree makes a difference; a rising average means irreversible change.
Cricket does not have a plan for this. No ICC agreement, little action from most member boards. Cricket Australia is just now starting to move with urgency, putting together a thorough policy to be voted on in 2020. Environmental changes have been minor and piecemeal: plastic bottles banned at one ground, renewable energy installed at another. Worthwhile, but not co-ordinated. Hundreds of parts per million short of enough.
Quick GuideClimate change and bushfires
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Does climate change cause bushfires?
The link between rising greenhouse gas emissions and increased bushfire risk is complex but, according to major science agencies, clear. Climate change does not create bushfires, but it can and does make them worse. A number of factors contribute to bushfire risk, including temperature, fuel load, dryness, wind speed and humidity.
What is the evidence on rising temperatures?
The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO say Australia has warmed by 1C since 1910 and temperatures will increase in the future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is extremely likely increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases since the mid-20th century is the main reason it is getting hotter. The Bushfire and Natural Hazards research centre says the variability of normal events sits on top of that. Warmer weather increases the number of days each year on which there is high or extreme bushfire risk.
What other effects do carbon emissions have?
Dry fuel load - the amount of forest and scrub available to burn - has been linked to rising emissions. Under the right conditions, carbon dioxide acts as a kind of fertiliser that increases plant growth.
So is climate change making everything dryer?
Dryness is more complicated. Complex computer models have not found a consistent climate change signal linked to rising CO2 in the decline in rain that has produced the current eastern Australian drought. But higher temperatures accelerate evaporation. They also extend the growing season for vegetation in many regions, leading to greater transpiration (the process by which water is drawn from the soil and evaporated from plant leaves and flowers). The result is that soils, vegetation and the air may be drier than they would have been with the same amount of rainfall in the past.
What do recent weather patterns show?
The year coming into the 2019-20 summer has been unusually warm and dry for large parts of Australia. Above average temperatures now occur most years and 2019 has been the fifth driest start to the year on record, and the driest since 1970.
Is arson a factor in this year's extreme bushfires?
Not a significant one. Two pieces of disinformation, that an “arson emergency”, rather than climate change, is behind the bushfires, and that “greenies” are preventing firefighters from reducing fuel loads in the Australian bush have spread across social media. They have found their way into major news outlets, the mouths of government MPs, and across the globe to Donald Trump Jr and prominent right-wing conspiracy theorists.
NSW’s Rural Fire Service has said the major cause of ignition during the crisis has been dry lightning. Victoria police say they do not believe arson had a role in any of the destructive fires this summer. The RFS has also contradicted claims that environmentalists have been holding up hazard reduction work.
In the meantime, the sport keeps churning through resources. Not just the water for grounds or willow for bats or power for floodlights. The mountains of garbage left at stadiums. The thousands of cars ferrying people to watch. The hundreds of thousands of domestic and international flights carrying teams and families and support staff between series, players between the multitude of leagues, press boxes full of media and bays full of supporters along on tours.
Cricket officialdom is rich with people from Morrison’s Liberal and National political type. This is the sport that tried to nominate former prime minister John Howard to lead the ICC, and decided that former NSW premier Mike Baird did such a fine job with Sydney’s cultural life that he should join the state’s cricket board. Yet these contacts aren’t delivering. A game that needs leadership is getting none federally, and a game that can provide its own has barely moved on its most pressing issue.
Now we’re halfway through a Test in Perth, but that doesn’t mean the show has gone on. The forecast for the entire match is over 40, as it was for the 2013 Ashes. The smokebombed match at the SCG is over, but moving on to the next thing doesn’t mean we’re done. The last decade has been a consistent parade of hottest months on record, hottest years, hottest daily highs, adding new colours to heat charts, longer fire seasons overlapping California to Australia while droughts ravage both. The numbers are clear and irrefutable.
When anyone in this area raises their eyes from the playing arena, there are those who will tell them to stick to sport. But sport is not an island, and even if it were the tide is rising. Sport exists in the world around it. Cricket is affected by, and is affecting the climate crisis, a basic truth. The past few weeks have only served to demonstrate it more graphically than before.
Cricket exists alongside the smoke that chokes cities and the fires threatening towns, the same world as the firefighters arrayed against them. The same world as a prime minister who likes to run out the drink bottles and smile for the photos, and gesture vaguely at the problem without acknowledging its existence. But it does exist. It’s not going away. And cricket is just one small part of our lives that deserves better.