. recorded before a live audience in Katoomba, NSW in March and April 2006.

Charlie Veron, legendary research scientist from the Australian Institute of
Marine Sciences is Gregg Borschmann's guest in today's program. What do
coral reefs tell us about past and future worlds? Did Charles Darwin get
evolution wrong? Over the past three decades, Charlie Veron has unravelled
some of the answers as he's rewritten the scientific book and understanding
of corals. He has dived on reefs around the globe as he's discovered and
named a quarter of the world's coral species.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2006/1702863.htm

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Our guest today is marine biologist, John (Charlie) Veron. Did Charles
Darwin only get the evolutionary story half right? Are the earth's 1000
coral species canaries on our miner's helmet, pointers to worlds past and
future - worlds of great change and almost incomprehensible time scales?
And, perhaps most importantly, how much are we now tipping those scales?

These are the big questions posed by the career of one of Australia's great
scientists, Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Institute
of Marine Science. So let's join the audience in the grand dining room of
the Carrington Hotel, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, as they
welcome Charlie Veron.

[Applause]

Gregg Borschmann: As well as being a scientist, you're an author, you've
written definitive scientific books, even a biography. You're working on a
big one at the moment, one that's really been one of the hardest things
you've ever done, and when it's published some time next year by Harvard
University Press, you say the shit is going to hit the fan. Give us the bad
news, give us the bleak picture.

Charlie Veron: The bleak picture is that we're putting carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere at such a rate that if we stopped doing it now, we would have
an environment that existed around about when the Great Barrier Reef first
came into existence, half-way back through our era, about 25 million years.
If we continue on this trajectory, for only a few more decades, we will put
the environment back to the time of the so-called KT, the great mass
extinction event of the end of the Cretaceous.

That's how serious it is, it's horrible, it's frightening, it's made me very
miserable. I'm used to people saying, gosh, you get paid for diving all
around the world on coral reefs, and what a wonderful job. Well, it's the
other side of the coin now, it's a horrible job that I'm doing, because more
than most now, I'm realising how the different sciences link together, and
the story is just as clear as can be.

So what we can expect now, is massive changes, much, much more than the
inconveniences that are often mentioned in the press, it's going to be mega
change. This will happen, and it's already too late to reverse at least the
initial impacts.

Gregg Borschmann: You're saying that the models, the climate models, the
much debated climate models, are wrong, but only because they're too
conservative?

Charlie Veron: The next IPCC report, that is the International Climate
Change report will be coming out next year, [ 2007] it's the fourth edition,
and that is going to be substantially more gloomy. Now we are producing
carbon dioxide at a rate that we have never produced before, the earth has
never seen before, not even vaguely. We also have satellites up now that are
measuring the rate at which Greenland, the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic
Peninsula are melting, and that is worse than anybody ever predicted.

There has been a time when a lot of scientists, and quite well-meaning ones,
have been sceptical about some of these predictions, which have been around
for a long time. A few of the sceptical points, yep, they've been right, but
mostly, unfortunately the doom and gloom scenario is only too real.

Gregg Borschmann: You're using the reef as your ... in a sense your
flagship, your icon, you're saying 100 years, and the reef will be gone.

Charlie Veron: Yes. I think it's ... the reason for that is that corals are
unusual, and they're geared to the upper temperature limit, because they
have this relationship with the algae that lives in their tissues. And when
you get to that upper limit, and there's plenty of sunlight, which there is,
the algae produce too much oxygen, and they start becoming poisonous. The
corals one way or another, get rid of them or die. They have a symbiosis
which doesn't work, and they're dying in huge numbers.

What this means is ... roughly how it translates is that the worst year
we've ever had, the worst el nino year, will be an average year by 2030.
That will be a good year by 2050. So what is it going to be like by the end
of the century? You've got to look pretty hard and far to find joy in this
awful mess.

Gregg Borschmann: In many ways your science weighs heavily upon you, it's
almost like you know too much, and it's touched you in a very personal way.

Charlie Veron: It certainly has, that's for sure.

Gregg Borschmann: Are you angry or sad?

Charlie Veron: I'm very, very sad. It's real, day in, day out, and I work on
this day in, day out. It's like seeing a house on fire in slow motion. The
newspaper will say, "Well the dining room table hasn't caught fire yet", but
you know damned well that tomorrow, the floor's already alight, and you know
damned well the curtains are on fire, and the dining room table's next, and
the pictures on the wall. You see them catch fire one after the other, and
you sit there in slow motion. That's what I do, and it's awful, there's a
fire to end all fires, and you're watching it happening in slow motion, and
you have been for years.

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Gregg Borschmann: Coral bleaching, this change has been staggeringly quick.
You'd never heard of coral bleaching, there was perhaps one observation in
the scientific record. You were almost excited to discover a patch of
bleached coral off the Palm Islands in the early 1980s.

Charlie Veron: Yes, yes, I was very surprised, and photographed it, it's in
one of those volumes. It was a book I wrote on the corals of Australia, I
put that picture in, just as a curio, you know. It's like walking through
the bush and suddenly finding a white orchid, when they're all usually pink,
or green or whatever. I thought this is a very, very strange thing, I'd
never seen anything like it. It was only a little clump, it was very small,
about 10 centimetres across. And so I photographed it, and when I came back
a couple of years later, it was dead, and that was strange. Anyhow, I
thought it might have been a disease or something.

And then I saw a whammy, a mass bleaching event, and that is quite an
amazing sight, where everything turns white, and dies. Sometimes it's only
the fast growing branching corals, but some of these are ... horrible to see
corals that are four, five, six, seven hundred years old, they die too. It's
a very recent thing. It didn't occur in the 1970s, because I would have seen
it. It's quite a new thing, and when it's a new thing, we know where to look
at the culprit [human disturbance].

Gregg Borschmann: One of our problems is that we don't think in these
geological timeframes.

Charlie Veron: Yes, that is a big, big issue.

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Gregg Borschmann: It wouldn't be fair if we didn't have a discussion about
the Crown of Thorns. The Crown of Thorns starfish tells us a story about the
nature of science. In some ways it's a classic story of science buggered by
politics, because by the late-1970s we clearly needed science to tell us
more about the Crown of Thorns, and yet you've said that working on the
starfish then was a good way to jeopardise a career as a scientist. Was that
just because the project that needed to be done, the understandings that we
needed to have, was just too vast?

Charlie Veron: I think ... no, it wasn't too vast at all, no, compared with
my own field then, it was small. But what it was, was prone to failure, like
controlling rabbits on land ... you could study it all your life, and find
that at the end it was prone to failure, you could have failed.

Gregg Borschmann: But there were scientists were saying the problem was
adult starfish, you were one of the very early people to say, well hang on a
minute, these starfish, each female is producing millions of larvae and
they're spawning, maybe it's something to do with larvae and currents?

Charlie Veron: Yes, exactly.

Gregg Borschmann: You were laughed at.

Charlie Veron: Yes.

Gregg Borschmann: They thought you were mad.

Charlie Veron: Yes, that's right. Really I feel that that problem should
have been nailed a long, long time ago ... it was a victim of bureaucracy,
because as soon as you have bureaucrats in charge of a scientific program,
that program's had it.

Gregg Borschmann: But it shouldn't be a hard project now, why are we not
doing it now?

Charlie Veron: I don't know, it's unfashionable ... it's probably because
we've got used to putting up with the Crown of Thorns starfish, it's off the
headlines now, and no-one's ... newspapers don't print that yet another
reef's been chewed up. It's as bad now as it ever was, but I think the more
recent thing would be that bleaching is now so much more serious than the
Crown of Thorns starfish. But still, I do think it's right on the agenda,
because what hope we have for the Great Barrier Reef must lie in putting it
in as good as shape as possible, to get over the next century. We've got to
think beyond this century. To do that we need to keep the place in as good
shape as possible.

Gregg Borschmann: That was partly the job of the Australian Institute of
Marine Science (AIMS), it was a visionary dream by Australian politicians,
and scientists, to give Australia a leading edge in a very specific
scientific field - marine science. You've become in many ways, the eccentric
keeper of the flame at AIMS, the corporate memory of the institution. What's
happened to that dream?

Charlie Veron: I think it's gone the way of a lot of the science in
Australia. What we have now is a lot of intrusion from Canberra, who set the
agendas, set the questions, and that filters then down to the administrative
servants, and by the time it gets to the scientists, it's as if the
scientists are shuffled from one cattle yard to another, sort of, you belong
in this yard, and the boundaries of the cattle yard are described by
administrators.

The best science always, and history has shown this over and over again, is
that to get the best science done, you leave it to the scientists to pick
the questions and find the answers. That's been shown over and over again,
but that is not the modern way of so many things now. The modern way is
firstly, what can make money, and secondly, what looks to be making a
difference? So much science now looks to me like arranging the deck chairs
on the Titanic, the iceberg's ahead, we've seen it, and the captain's
saying, "Yeah, but I'm not too sure about that", and the bosun hasn't got a
clue. I'm afraid that's happening everywhere, it's not just Australia
either.