Climate science
History
Sea Level Rise (postglacial)
Based on oral traditions gathered at least 21 locations in mainland Australia, cross-referenced with geological data, Aboriginal transmissions of coastal drowning are likely to recall the effects of postglacial sea-level rise more than 7000 years ago.
The most compelling arguments for the authenticity of these 21 stories is that (1) they come from almost every part of the Australian coast; and (2) they tell essentially the same story, yet one that is specific to a particular coastal geography.
Postglacial sea-level rise must have had a massive impact on the social lives of Aboriginal coastal dwellers. Within 12 000 years, greater Australia lost 23 per cent of its landmass, most of which may have been occupied. Generation after generation would have had to renegotiate land tenure arrangements with inland neighbours, and make stay-or-go decisions about island/lowland clan estates. Though slow inexorable sea-level rise may seem to pale against sudden flooding events, postglacial civilizations must have lived with high levels of awareness that inundation was taking place, and for a long time.
After the sea level stabilised 6000–4000 years ago, what would be the motivation to continue telling sea-level-rise stories? In the formation of land sovereignty, complex land-naming and land-relating processes become inculcated in ritualised ways within a corpus of traditional knowledge, and are usually explicit in rite-of-passage ceremonies as evidence of claims to land. For example, one plausible explanation for the Indindji people of coastal Queensland continuing to tell the story of Mudaga, the island named after the pencil pines that once grew on it -- for thousands of years after it was no longer visible -- is if that story were part of an explicitly taught package of stories inherited through Indindji stewardship genealogy. For the existence of Mudaga, even submerged, constitutes evidence of knowing one’s country by spelling out one’s relationship to that country. Without such ritual ceremony, the transmission of such stories across perhaps over 100 generations would seem to be implausibly vulnerable to chance link-breaking.
Deforestation
In 1847, George Perkins Marsh delivered a now well-known speech in 1847 to the Agricultural Society of Rutland, Vermont, in which he claimed that
“Climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or deteriorated by human action... the draining of swamps and the clearing of forests perceptibly effect the evaporation from the earth, and of course the mean quantity of moisture suspended in the air. The same causes modify the electrical condition of the atmosphere and the power of the surface to reflect, absorb and radiate the rays of the sun, and consequently influence the distribution of light and heat, and the force and direction of the winds” [2]