A Climate for Art chat to Dr. Linden Ashcroft, who explores the convergence of climate science, cultural memory, and Australian regional identity. She examines how extreme weather reshapes community narratives and stresses that effective climate communication must transcend data to resonate with lived experiences. Emphasizing storytelling and media literacy as vital tools for resilience, Linden advocates for diverse, multi-scale responses to the crisis, highlighting narrative’s power to bridge divides and inspire collective action.
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A supercharged world
Radio Climate with Dr Linden AshcroftLinden, can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do? How did you become a climate scientist?
My name's Linden Ashcroft, and I am a climate scientist. I grew up in country Victoria on the lands of the Yorta Yorta people, about two hours north of Melbourne in a little town called Tatura, where there are no traffic lights. It's known as water wheel country. I think there are about 4,000 people who live there now, and I lived there until I was 18.
When I was a kid, I never thought I'd be a scientist. I wanted to be a poet when I was younger, but then when I got to high school, I fell in love with maths, and I also realized that you could use that maths to understand the world around you. So I came down to the big smoke to do a science degree, and I studied atmospheric science.
And I thought thunderstorms would be what I wanted to do because when I was young, I remember looking up at the big sky and, you know, seeing thunderstorms off in the distance and just, just loving the drama that weather brings. Weather affects every aspect of our lives, and I wanted to understand that, right?
And I was really excited to use the physics and maths that I'd learnt to understand the real world. I just thought it was so amazing that you could use equations to figure out cloud behavior and all those kinds of things. But then when it came to choosing a project, I remember I had the option of spending a whole year studying one thunderstorm above Melbourne. It was a case study, and I could spend a whole year on that, or I could spend a year understanding the relationship between weather and ocean temperatures near South America and how that might affect really cold days in Australia. And that blew my mind, that the ocean temperatures halfway across the planet could determine whether or not it was gonna snow on the mountains here in Australia and I just, I couldn't believe it, you know?
So I came into this space with a love of weather and a love of climate and a love of how connected our planet is first, and then with a real sense of care and responsibility for that one planet as well. I grew up around nature.My parents would take us bushwalking when I was a kid. We would always go looking for native orchids and exploring the countryside. I remember going hiking. I remember going to the beach, not when it was hot, but when it was cold. I remember going up to the mountains in the summertime to look for the flowers, and I don't know, I had that sense of caring for the environment growing up.
And then as I learnt more about climate change, as I learnt more about human behavior and how that's affecting the planet, those two things, you know, merged together. So I often say I wish I could be a climate scientist without climate change. I would still be a climate scientist even if the climate wasn't changing because there are so many wonderful things to explore.
But the fact that I am where I am at this time also rests heavily on me, a responsibility to do what I can to understand how much we're changing the beautiful planet we live in.
You've known Tatura most of your life, and you grew up there, and you had all those beautiful experiences connecting to Country there, and you recently worked on a project there called Parched. Could you tell us more about that project? What was its focus, and what did you do there?
Parched is a truly interdisciplinary project, right? That's a word that gets thrown around a lot in academia, interdisciplinary. This one really was interdisciplinary because we had me, I was the token climate scientist, and then we have a literary, a couple of literary experts, a media professor, a few environmental historians, and somebody who's an expert in visual arts as well.So we were a team that were fortunate enough to receive some funding from the Australian Research Council. We were looking at the cultures of drought. Drought looms really large, right, in the history of Australia. It's a big part of our national psyche, and we were interested in understanding how different parts of Victoria, in particular, experienced big historical droughts.
What that looked like in four different places around the state, where the geography is different, where the annual rain totals are different, where the way the rain is delivered is different, where the agriculture is different, where the demographics are different. So this is a project we started in 2020. Not a great time to be doing remote work, field work when you're not allowed to leave the city of Melbourne. But we conducted a lot of interviews with people who live in four different areas. So there was Bendigo, Albury-Wodonga, Mildura, and Shepparton. So Tatura's about twenty minutes away from Shep.
And we conducted a lot of interviews with people. We did a lot of data analysis, looking at the rainfall patterns in the areas. We explored a lot of historical newspapers to see the different stories that were told around big droughts that have occurred since the turning of the twentieth century. So we looked at the Federation drought from about eighteen ninety-five to nineteen oh three; the World War II drought, which happened from about 1945, more or less; the Millennium drought, 1997 to 2009; and then the recent drought, which climate scientists have called the Tinder Box drought because that culminated in the big Black Summer bushfires.
So we kinda wanted to see if we could find similarities and differences about how different areas remember those droughts, how they coped, how different sections of society were sort of present or absent in the retelling of the stories of those droughts, and then what that all means for the future.
What we could learn from how different areas survived, how different areas thrived, different sections of communities who really rallied together or didn't rally together, and, and how those stories have kind of come through over a century of drought experience moving forward into an uncertain future, where one of the versions of the future that we're gonna get is a lot more drought, right?
So we're writing a book now, and I'm in charge of writing the future drought chapter. What happens in the next one, and what have we learned in the past that's gonna help us prepare for the next one or the next few. What we can do to be as prepared as we can.
And in that project, you were about to share some of the work at the Shepparton Art Museum, and then you weren't able to show the work. Do you wanna speak about that story?Yes. So one of the aspects of the project is that we had an artists in residence program. So at each of the four regional centers, we were able to get an artist to go and either stay at, at a museum or a residence. It was an amazing opportunity, right, for, for artists to engage with this concept of drought in different ways.
And we had an artist, Alvin Briggs, who did a residency at the Shepparton Art Museum. I don't know if you've been to, to SAM, the Shep Art Museum. It's a gorgeous building. Beautiful. You know, it was built after I had left the area. So every time I go, I'm just so excited for the Goulburn Valley to have a place like that.
But it's right on the lake, right? It's right on the lake. And we had this whole plan. All of us were gonna get there, right? So this is a project that started during COVID, and as a research team, we didn't get together in the same room for about three years because of various lockdowns and all these different kinds of things.
But we were all going to make it. We were all gonna make it up to Shep to go to this full day of activities with Alvin, and we were going to give different types of talks and engage with the community and have a wonderful day of activities. But about a week before we were planning to go, the whole region flooded.
The lake flooded, the Goulburn flooded. It was a terrifying collection of events. You know, the catchment was already sodden, and then there was a lot of rain. The Goulburn River separates Shepparton and Mooroopna, and that all flooded. So many houses were lost there.
My parents still live in Tatura, and the footy oval, which is quite close to where they live, became the area that the helicopters, the military helicopters, were sort of flying supplies in and out for people who were cut off during the floodwater. So of course, we couldn't go.
Of course, we couldn't go and have our event. It's been quite strange studying drought during a time of flood, basically. And as this project's wrapping up now, we've had a few small droughts that have emerged in different parts across Australia while we've been doing the project.
That was a really heartbreaking and ironic experience to have, you know, notwithstanding the terrible experiences that a lot of people have had in the Goulburn Valley area, and now they're in a situation where large parts of that city can't be insured, or the people who live there can't afford the insurance because it is a region that floods so devastatingly.
A lot of regions, a lot of houses in that area are kind of below the flood line. But it was quite an interesting thing to talk to people about drought during the time when a drought is just so far away in their brain. Do you know what I mean? I would be really interested if we could have done the project again during a time of drought, what sort of conversations we would have had, and what sort of reflections people would have had about what was helping them or what wasn't helping them, or decisions that they'd made.
So that was, that was quite a time. Yeah. It was quite a time.
Yeah. I'm really interested in how to conceptualize that. You know, you're speaking about drought as one of these climate symptoms, but then also we're seeing flooding as a climate symptom as well.
And one of the things we spoke about was that with all this accelerated impact, there's 1% more energy in the atmosphere, and so we're seeing these extremes come in and out. Could you explain, I mean, maybe on a broad level, but also specifically for Tatura how we're seeing these different climate effects?
Yeah. It's important to know that Australia's climate has droughts and floods in it, right? Before human-induced climate change started to emerge, and the research suggests that the time of emergence, that's what the scientists call it, when you start to see the signal of climate change separate from the noise, the sort of climate variability.If you imagine our temperature or rainfall kind of as a wiggly graph going up and down, when the trend starts to emerge, you know, and it starts to go up, the wiggles start to move up 'cause there are still wiggles. That's because there are still wiggles. Before human-induced climate change, we did have droughts, and we did have floods, and we did have heat waves.
But now we're living in a planet that has more energy in the system than at any other time in human history. So with increased greenhouse gases, those gas molecules can trap more of the outgoing long wave radiation, so more of the heat that the Earth sort of emits after it's warmed up from the sun.
More of that is trapped by our atmosphere. A little bit of trapping, excellent. That makes our planet livable, right? Without greenhouse gases, we'd be in a lot of trouble. But now what we've got is more greenhouse gases, and the changing rate of greenhouse gases happening so quickly that our planet just can't keep up, right?
So when we have extra energy in the system, which is manifesting as heat, and it's also manifesting in lots of other ways, when it comes to drought, that means that when it stops raining, when the sun's shining, it's hotter, right? And so the equations around evaporation versus transpiration, you know, plants losing their water more quickly, the soil becoming drier more quickly, that can make droughts much more impactful and can make them kick in a lot faster, right?
So in the last five or 10 years, there's been this term that's emerged in the climate literature called flash drought, where you're starting to see the impacts of a drought, plants suffering, other ecosystems really starting to struggle before standard metrics around drought, "Oh, it's been drier than average for a few months."
Before those metrics tell you it's a drought, other things are telling you it's a drought because it's hotter than it was before, and so the symptoms are kicking in quicker. Similarly, when it comes to flooding or extreme rainfall events, we have lots of data to show that short-term downpours, so sub-hourly intense rainfall events, even on the hourly scale, are getting more intense.
And this is quite a well-known physical concept or physical equation, I'll give you the technical terms, the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which means that for every degree of warming, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture because the atmosphere's warmer and so the air molecules, including water vapor, move around a bit faster.
So the more of them can be there before they stick together to fall as rain. So when they do stick together and fall as rain, there's more of them to fall as rain. And we're seeing that happen already, and when it comes to really severe downpours, that's actually happening. There's some records to suggest that the increase in heavy rainfalls happening even faster than that seven percent, up to fifteen percent.
So our heaviest downpours are getting up to fifteen percent heavier in some parts of Australia and some parts of the world. So that's on a small scale. When you think about the bigger scale, all of the various factors that lead to flooding in the Golden Valley, flooding in Australia, flooding around the world, you have that component, and then you have how our weather systems are moving around.
So whether we've got big clump of tropical moist air that is dragged down from northwestern Australia like a big cloud sash all the way down to northeastern Victoria where Tat is, like how that, how that's changing in a warmer world, that's still a really open question. But we do know that when there is a big blob of rain, that heavy rain is happening more and it's happening in a more intense way.
So we're getting an already extreme climate, right? Thinking about Tatura. I remember in the nineties when I was a kid, um, seeing our front yard full of water, right? Big 1993 flood, our whole front yard was water. I remember camping and, you know, it just pouring, pouring, pouring and pouring and pouring, and all of the grass areas just turning into puddles, turning into huge lakes, right?
And that happened then, and it's gonna keep happening, and when it does happen, it's gonna be more intense. And the other thing that we see is that the turnaround time, right, the return period for these kind of events are often getting shorter and shorter as well. Fires is a big area where we're seeing that.
Again, fire's a crucial part of the Australian climate, right? Lots of our plants need fire. First Nations agriculturists, they used fire extensively to take care of the land. We've got the mere existence of grasslands, someone told me recently the mere existence of grasslands in Victoria shows that this land's been managed beautifully with fire for a really long time.
It's a key part of Australia. But now we're getting bigger fires that are happening earlier, that are larger, and they're happening more frequently in the same place. And so some species that require fire to regenerate aren't getting a chance to do that because they're burning again before they have a chance to grow.
And so all of these different severe ingredients are adding up. And the one ingredient that I haven't spoken about so much, which plays a big role, I think, in that northern part of Victoria, is heat, like heat waves. You know, this summer just gone, mm, I can't remember the stats actually, but it was, it was an almost a record-breaking number of days above 40 or above high 30s.
You know, I was calling my parents every couple of days, "Are you okay? What are you doing? I hope you're not outside. I hope you're inside." And like, "Yeah, yeah, we're inside. We've gone outside and done the stuff before 10, and now we're just hunkering down." Like it was, it was COVID-esque in terms of being trapped in the house 'cause that was the only safe place to be.
And while there is some uncertainty about how extreme rainfalls is gonna change in the future in terms of those big blobs of moisture moving around the planet, the science is very clear and very loud about future heat waves. They are longer, they are hotter, they are more frequent. And that is, like that's screaming at us in the northern part of Victoria.
It's screaming about at us everywhere. But it's really clear, hotter days, generally warmer nights, um, which has big impacts on agriculture, on ecosystems, on human health, on infrastructure, on lots and lots of things. Yeah. And the culture that goes with all of those ecosystems as well. Yeah. So that's really...
Yeah. And that idea of summer not being a carefree time, you know? This is something that, I mean, maybe I'm just becoming an adult, but when I was a kid, summer was a time of fun. And more and more it's a time of preparation now, right? I remember the head of the Australian Fire Agency saying a few years ago, "Summer is a season to be respected in Australia."
And I think about that every summer because it is, you know? You make a plan to go out of the city, or you make a plan to go home and I think, "Right," like, "how hot's it gonna be up there? How are we gonna deal with that? How are we gonna manage that heat?" And yes, it was hot in the past, but it's hotter now, and that has big impacts.
Yeah. It sounds like when it's wet, it's wetter. When it's dry, it's drier. When it's hot, it's hotter. And all of these things are happening more frequently. Yeah. We're living in a, we're living in a supercharged planet now. With all of that, I guess, knowledge that you have and then the knowledge of this particular place we're talking about as well, how do you imagine Tatura into the future?I love Tat, it's my place. I was actually north of the Great Dividing Range just last weekend, and being in that big sky country, it settles something in my heart. Like, that is still my home to me. Although I don't know as many people, although the people I do see are older and greyer, you know that will always be a part of who I am.
And it's interesting to reflect on it now, thinking about what I know to be important and the decisions that I make as an adult, as a parent and the decisions that are made in that region, it's one of the most conservative regions in Australia. I think the electoral lines have been divided up recently, so I don't know the exact stats of how safe it is, but it's been a national seat for a really, really long time.
And I've done some community engagement work there, working with people who are very passionate about transitioning to renewable energies. They really care deeply about climate change and the environment in that place. But I don't know if it's a big area of support. Like even, even considering the flooding and the heatwaves and the changing climate that's staring us in the face, that it's there.
Climate change is happening today. It's happening everywhere. It's still an area that has, I think, although I'm not 100% sure, a lower acceptance rate of that climate science than other parts of the place, you know, other parts of the country. Yeah.
One of the interesting things you said in the lead-up to this interview is that the way that you vote is probably the biggest determinant of whether you believe in climate change or not. We try and think about these localized impacts in communities, but really we need to be thinking about these systems like politics and these different interconnecting forces as well. I'm wondering if you can speak about how you conceptualize that?Well, I conceptualize it in a few different ways. First of all, yes, the research has shown again and again that the biggest indicator... Well, there's two actually. There was a study published just a couple of years ago from researchers at ANU, and they found, supporting lots of other studies, that your voting preferences are quite a big indication of your acceptance around climate change statements and your support for climate action.
But this study also found that the biggest indicator of support for climate action, it wasn't whether you live in an urban area or whether you live in a regional area. It wasn't if you live in Brunswick or if you live in Tat. It was media consumption. People who regularly watch and listen to the ABC were generally more pro-climate action and accepting of, like the fact of climate change, basically, not they were accepting of the science of climate change, and people who watch Sky News.
That was the significant variable, ABC or Sky News, much more than do you live in the city or do you live in the country? And that, you know, that's quite a scary thing to see, given that Sky News After Dark is broadcast for free in many regional areas across Australia. So your question is around big picture thinking and climate action.
And to me, what I see in myself, what I see in my colleagues, what I see in my communities, what I see in my students, is that we obviously need everything everywhere all at once, right? We need global action, we need national action, we need state action, we need local council action. We need block-by-block action, and we need house-by-house action, right?
And what you need to do is find what sustains you. This is the marathon, right? This is the fight that we will be having our whole lives. It's easier, it's easy to tap out of that sometimes 'cause there's lots of other things going on, and, and maybe when you do live in a regional area, like you live in Tatura, like, it does get cold overnight.
In some ways, there's been a small increase in frost in that area because we've got higher air pressure than we're used to. When there's a big high pressure, it's bigger and stronger, and that can lead to cold overnight. And so it can be easy to disconnect yourself sometimes and think, "Oh, the climate's not changing."
But, you know, someone was just telling me the other day that they go down to the pub, and there are a bunch of people who were saying, "Oh, this weather's a bit weird. No, this weather's a bit weird." You ask them about climate change, "Oh, no, that's not happening." But you ask them about what's happening on their farm, and, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm changing the way I do this, and I'm getting different approaches to deal with that because this is changing and this is changing."
But I also think that you need to pick the place where you feel your action can have the most impact, and that impact can be for yourself, right? For some people, being in the political sphere is where they feel they can have impact, you know? Whether it's standing for office or supporting someone standing for office or talking to other people about having those political conversations.
For other people, they don't wanna do that, right? They want to have individual actions around reducing their own impact and footprint on the planet. For other people, it's community group action and, you know, I see that - my mom volunteers where she makes reusable bags every week, and I know lots of people who have found their people and found their source of hope and their source of action in that behavior or in those groups, and that allows you to keep going, right? We need everything, which is scary, but it's also great because whatever you do is going to be useful.
Yeah. I'm also really interested in that media conversation because that's something that you really do in your practice. You used to have a show on RRR, you have a show on 3CR now, and you work in science communication.
And I feel like from this love of the place that you grew up leading to this understanding of global weather systems and all the interconnection of that has led you to this piece of how do we best then communicate those messages? Do you wanna speak about that part of your practice as well?Yeah. It's so funny to reflect on where I grew up, right? You can just never separate that. Like, I don't know how different I would be if I grew up somewhere else. You don't know how different you would be if your childhood was different. Like, for me, that's just who I am, and I think a lot of people are like that.
But there always seems to be maybe a bit of a connection with country kids, country kids who maybe have had to move to learn a different thing or have experienced a different way of living before they've done something else. I don't know. I guess the way that I have grown up and where I was raised is an integral part of who I am, and that allows me, in some ways, to tell stories with and for different people. Personal experience, I'm sure you know, and research shows us time and time and time again, you know, going back 65,000 years, that stories are the most powerful thing that we have.
Stories connect people to each other. Our brains are hardwired for stories. They are privileged in our brain, right? They will stay with us. More than graphs, more than statistics, a story will stay with us. And in my practice now, I think about that a lot, right? In many ways in my communication, my role is as a scientist, but more and more, you know, I've been a climate scientist for 15 years or something like that and I've always been trained to just show the stats.
Don't tell the stories, just show the stats, just show the facts. But as I progress in my career, I see more and more that that's not enough. Obviously, that's not enough, and so we have to wrap that around with stories. And, and sometimes for me, that is telling a personal story. I grew up here when we used to have weather like this, and now we have weather like this.
That's what connects to me. I wanna hear what connects to you. Tell me about what you've noticed in your lifetime. Let's share stories with each other. And in my work, I look at past climate variability, old weather records, and there's so many stories in them as well, and those stories will engage people, a different demographic of people, who don't wanna maybe hear stories about the future.
They wanna hear stories of the past and, and that allows us to, to connect, right? As a communicator, you're always learning and growing and changing, right? Every, every conversation I have, this conversation I have, I will reflect on later and think, "Oh, how could I have said that better? And how can I do better next time?"
So I'm very privileged to be in an opportunity, to be in a position where I get to do so much practice in that way. But we all have that opportunity. Every conversation that you have with friends, with family, with strangers on the tram, you know, with a random person on the internet, like that's an opportunity for a conversation, for you to refine what matters to you and how you wanna talk about it, how you can engage with that to make yourself feel better or to make yourself more motivated to act, and hopefully help that person as well.
Does that sort of answer your question a bit?
Yeah, definitely. And you know, we're on the continent with the longest continuing culture who uses storytelling as the basis of how this land was shaped and is being shaped continually. Something we've been thinking about with Radio Climate is also that with radio, there's a carrier wave and a signal wave, and we have a lot of signal of what climate is, but we're not necessarily getting the message across sometimes.
And I think that type of work on the emotional level, the felt level, feels more important, and that's why we're trying to do projects like this where we can start to find the ways that really connect with people, and it feels like your connection with regional Victoria and Tatura feels really important in terms of doing that type of bridge-building work and really speaking and forming the languages we need between each other.So thanks so much for being part of Radio Climate.
That's all right. Radio is an intimate medium, isn't it? It's a conversation, right? That's what great radio is. You don't feel like you're alone, and I think that's really important when it comes to climate change with the choices and the decisions and the actions that we need to take.We are absolutely not alone, and so thank you so much for having me on.