My son and I hired jet skis for a trip out to the ocean off Noosa National Park in Queensland. It was a partly cloudy winter day in July and we went out in the late afternoon. The interplay of sunlight, clouds and water was spectacular. Here are a few photos I took that day with a small waterproof handheld Nikon Coolpix.
I returned to Australia with my son in late June this year. Our first trip back since the pandemic started. We stayed with my sister, who lives in Noosa on the Queensland Sunshine Coast. It was winter there, but Queensland winters are mild by European standards. We surfed at Sunshine Beach a number of times and thoroughly enjoyed it. Ocean temperature was on the cool side at 19-20 degrees C, but it was colder out of the water with air temperatures around 15-17 degrees and usually with a sea breeze.
Most days there were a handful of people in the surf. On the day the photo above was taken, there were only two others in the water. The lifeguard was sitting in the truck. He did use his loudhailer twice to chastise my son, who was outside the flags and too far out.
I recently came across a headline referring to a 2016 survey in Iceland which found that 0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world. My immediate impression was that this implied a zero per cent prevalence of atheism in this age group. When I read the article, I found that the relevant question gave respondents four options: the world was created in the big bang, the world was created by God, the world was created by other means, or no opinion. Outside of countries dominated by fundamentalist religious groups, most religious people would likely choose “created in the big bang”. The survey actually found that 40.5% of respondents aged 25 years and younger said they were atheist, and 42% said they were Christians.
It is certainly the case that the prevalence of atheism is higher in younger ages in the developed countries where religiosity has been declining for decades. So I thought I would take a look at the prevalence of atheism in younger adults aged 15-34 years from the Integrated Values Surveys [1-3] that took place in the last wave, in the period 2017-2020. See my earlier posts (see here and here), which examined global, regional and country-level trends in religious belief and practice, for more details on the data and definitions of atheism and religiosity categories.
Countries with the highest prevalence of atheism and non-religion in 2017-2020
The following plot shows the prevalence of religious and irreligious adults for the 31 countries with the highest irreligious prevalence (atheists plus non-religious). China and South Korea lead these countries with irreligious prevalences over 80%, followed by Sweden, Czechia, New Zealand and Japan, with prevalences in the 70’s. In terms of atheism, there are 18 countries with prevalences over 50% in the 15-34 year age group, including Australia at 53%.
In these countries, the prevalence of practicing religious generally increases with age and the prevalence of atheists generally decreases with age. The plot for the USA 2017 survey data below illustrates this.
Are these prevalence patterns predominantly due to ageing, time period or birth cohort? Since period = birth year (cohort identifier) + age it is not possible to determine the separate effects of all three factors. Ageing as a driver of religiosity would imply that people become more religious as they get older, and this seems the least likely of the three factors to fit observed age patterns over time.
Relative contribution of cohort and period to the overall trends in religiosity
I’ve attempted to estimate the relative contributions of birth cohort and period to the evolution of religiosity in the USA using a cohort projection model. I first used the data from all waves of the US surveys to impute religiosity prevalences for years 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020. I then projected religiosity prevalences for each age group in 2020 assuming that those prevalences remained constant at the values that age group would have had in the past when it was aged 15-24. Comparing this with the actual prevalences for 2020 allows estimation of the proportion of the change in prevalence over time that is attributable to cohort effects.
For practicing religious, non-religious and atheists, the cohort projection explains around 25% of the overall change, the other 75% is attributable to period. For the non-practicing religious, these proportions are reversed with 25% explained by period and 75% by cohort.
Projecting religiosity prevalences to 2030
My previous projections of religiosity to year 2020 were carried out using trends in all-ages-both sexes prevalences. I thought it would be interesting to explore projections at age-sex level for selected countries, given the likely variations in trends across age groups. I experimented with several statistical models including a period-cohort projection model, and a model that projected all four prevalences simultaneously, using seemingly unrelated regression techniques to constrain the prevalences to add to 100%. It proved difficult to get sensible results from these models when not tailored to specific country data. The disaggregation of survey data to 7 age groups for each sex resulted in highly variable prevalences across cells. The years for which surveys were available varied across countries in ways that made it difficult to develop generalized projection methods that were not sensitive to small number issues and outlier trends.
I eventually decided to do some quite simplistic projections for each age-sex category as follows:
I carried out these projections for five high income countries with rising prevalence of atheism: USA, Australia, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Sweden. The following plots illustrate the observed and projected prevalences for the four religiosity categories. The dashed lines denotes the projected trend for irreligion (non-religious plus atheist).
The nonreligious category includes people who state that they believe in God, but that they are non-religious and rate the importance of God as 8-10 at the not important end of a 10-point scale. In the table below, I summarize the projected prevalence of irreligion (nonreligious or atheist) in 2030 for the five countries for all ages combined and for the young adult age group 15-34 years. The irreligion prevalence is generally higher in the younger age groups, and the 2030 value gives an indication of likely future trend for all ages.
Is irreligion likely to continue increase in the future? If the economies of high income countries continue to grow, with decreasing levels of poverty, and education levels continue to improve, it is likely that religiosity in these countries will decline in the longer term. The joint global crises of global warming and the pandemic, with rising populism and rejection of global institutions and actions, may on the other hand result in economic downturns that result in a stalling or reversal of the current religiosity trends. The situation in the USA where a religious minority is actively seeking to impose its values on the entire population, and undermining the democratic system to achieve that, may likely accelerate the turning away from religion of the young adult population. The USA already has one of the fastest rates of increase of irreligion in the last decade.
References
Today Switzerland became the country with the highest rate of confirmed cases of corona virus per million population. Well, that is if you ignore some micro-populations such as the Vatican City, San Marino, Andorra and Faeroe Islands. Why? It is landlocked with Italy, France and Germany around it. It did not close the border between Ticino and Italy for cross-border workers and many live in Italy were the virus spread rapidly. Also, it was the height of the ski season and alpine resorts were crowded with skiers from all over Europe, Britain and beyond. Here is a graph I did yesterday comparing confirmed cases per million population for the thirty leading countries (excluding small countries with population less than one million. Data are from worldometers.com at 13.11 GMT on March 24. A this point Switzerland had not yet overtaken Italy.
Media across the world have been publishing articles and photos on the catastrophic bushfires in Australia. Richard Flanagan, a well-known Australian author, published an opinion piece in the New York Times two days ago, which fairly accurately summarized the impact of the fires and the complete inadequacy of the government and political response (Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide).
Mogo, a town on the NSW south coast has been devastated by bushfires. One Mogo resident watched his 92 year old father’s house burning next door. At the time of taking this photo, he wasn’t sure where his father was. Credit: James Brickwood
Here are some quotes from the article:
“Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen. …….
“The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.
“Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more. …..”
A deceased horse on a property on the outskirts of Cobargo, a town on the NSW south coast that was devastated by bushfires at New Year. Credit: James Brickwood
At the beginning of December, 118 forest fires were burning in NSW, 48 of them out of control. The bushfire season started much earlier this year, with more than 140 fires in northern New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland, which destroyed over 600 homes and killed six people. One of these fires destroyed the Binna Burra resort in the Lamington National Park, as well as surrounding rainforest. This was followed by another outbreak of bushfires in November, with more than 129 bushfires in NSW and Queensland. At least 200 houses were destroyed and four people killed.
By the end of November, around 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of bushland had been burnt, and all this before the start of summer and the traditional bushfire season According to the Climate Council of Australia, the catastrophic, unprecedented fire conditions currently affecting NSW and Queensland have been aggravated by climate change. Bushfire risk was exacerbated by record breaking drought, very dry fuels and soils, and record breaking heat. Since the mid-1990s, southeast Australia has experienced a 15% decline in late autumn and early winter rainfall and a 25% decline in average rainfall in April and May. Across Australia average temperature has increased leading to more record breaking hot weather. Extreme fire danger days have increased.
Extensive fires currently burning in the Blue Mountains
I was in Australia in November to visit family at Noosa. A couple of days before my trip, I was stunned to read on the web that Tewantin, the suburb next to Noosaville where I was headed, was being evacuated because of the threatening bushfire.
While I was in Noosa, the residents of Noosa North Shore were evacuated because of another fire, as were the people who lived around Lake Cooroibah, about 10 km upstream on the Noosa River. Some days later, I drove up to Cooroibah where I saw extensive burnt areas of bush. The photos below show the fire damage. Most of the trees are evergreen eucalypts (gum trees) and the dead leaves from the heat are orange or brown. Though it may look like autumn colours to those from the Northern Hemisphere, it is actually dead leaves. Most of the larger trees will regenerate, as the ecucalypt forests of Australia have evolved to adapt to fire, with thick bark, an ability to resprout along their entire trunks, and in some cases depend on fire to open their seed pods. Animals such as the koala bear and other threatened species do not do so well, particularly when the fires are widespread and have significant impact on populations.
Bushland near Lake Cooroiba
Around 2,500 people were evacuated from about 440 homes in this area, but only one house and some sheds were destroyed. A teenage boy on his own in the house that was destroyed managed to make it into the nearby lake as the fire came over.
Burnt forest on the shore of Lake Cooroiba
The fire came quite close to this house.
There is a small housing development here, and the fire came within 50 metres of the houses. I spoke to one resident who told me he and his dog stayed, and hid when the police came to evacuate everyone.
Years ago when I lived in Sydney, there were regularly bushfires in the nearby Blue Mountains where increasing numbers of people were living. Those who stayed with their homes were able to put out spot fires, fill gutters with water, and deal with floating embers. Those who left their houses often returned to find the houses burnt down. Of course, those who underestimated the intensity of the fire and stayed sometimes paid with their lives.
So it’s a difficult call whether to stay or leave. One time in the 1980s, I went up to the Blue Mountains to help some friends during a bushfire. We stayed with the house and fought the spot fires successfully. The house was on a ridge and the wind drove the fire up the side of the ridge and over the house. As the fire approached, the heat increased and it became very difficult to breathe due to smoke. We all wrapped ourselves in wet towels and lay flat in the gutter of the road where the air was clearer. The fire passed over us and we were OK, though somewhat terrified. Australian eucalypts have a lot of eucalyptus oil in the leaves, and the heat vaporises this into the air, so that fires will spread at tree height, and in the most intense fires will leap across the tops of the trees as the eucalyptus oil above the trees ignites.
Fire damaged bark on a tree trunk
Returning to 2019, although Australia has always had devastating bushfires in some years, scientists and fire service chiefs have stated that the fire risk this year is the highest ever. Back in August, the The Bushfire and Natural Hazard Cooperative Research Centre (BNHCR) warned that New South Wales and Queensland and some other parts of Australia faced higher than normal fire potential. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology publishes a Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) which combines measurement of temperature, humidity, rainfall, evaporation and wind speel. Their cumulative winter index for 2019 (BOM), published in September, shows the overwhelming majority of the country, with a few exceptions in Victoria, central Queensland and western Tasmania, is experiencing between “above average” and “highest on record” fire conditions when compared with the average since 1950 (see map below). The measured FFDI values were in the extreme category (over 75) across large areas, reaching the catastrophic category (FFDI values of 100 or above) at some locations in New South Wales.
In line with the measured rise in average annual surface temperature over recent decades, the FFDI has been increasing across most of eastern Australia. Projections by Bureau of Meteorology Scientists recently published in Nature (ref), continue to show an increase in FFDI values due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the century. This result is robust across a range of climate projection models, methods and metrics. This means that the number of days in the year where the FFDI value represents “Very High” fire danger will increase substantially over the next 50 years.
What is the political response to all this? The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is a climate denialist and stated that there was no evidence to link the increased bushfire risk to climate change. He went further and stole a line from US poliiticians, telling the nation “Now is not the time to discuss possible causes of the fires, instead we must pray for the victims.”
Extinction Rebellion and other forms of climate protest have become more vocal recently, and Morrison recently announced hi intention to outlaw and criminalize protest by climate activists. The Queensland government is also fast-tracking laws to crack down on climate protesters.
The Australian government is also discussing how to outlaw consumer boycotts of businesses such as coal miners. They have a bit of a problem figuring out how to do that as some of the major banks and investment companies are also avoiding investment in fossil fuels.
Bushland burnt in September near Peregian Beach
While in Australia recently, I took my boys on a trip up the Maroochy River into the Maroochy wetlands. We had all enjoyed our canoe trip into the Noosa Everglades the previous year (https://mountainsrivers.com/2018/09/06/canoeing-in-the-noosa-everglades/) but this time we had a solar-powered canoe. The solar panel charges a battery that runs an electric outboard motor. It produces a reasonable speed and is very quiet. And we certainly appreciated the ease of gliding upriver without effort.
Australia recently held a Federal election in which all the opinion polls for months had shown that the Labor Party was going to win by 52% to 48% and the Liberal National Party (LNP – the coalition of conservative parties in Australia) would lose government. Over the last 6 years, the LNP government has abandoned the country’s policy for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, and effectively dropped its commitment to the 2015 Paris climate agreement (although it is pretending it will still meet the emissions-reduction target by use of misleading statistics). The urgency of addressing climate change became a major issue, particularly for younger people, in the recent election campaign, and The Labor party ran with a much stronger set of policies to address climate change in the recent election campaign, and this issue was a principal issue for many urban and younger voters.
The Labor party also ran with a very detailed list of policies including getting rid of some tax breaks which predominantly favoured relatively rich investors, and some tax policies on ownership of second houses which had the impact of raising house prices to the disadvantage of first house buyers. The LPNP ran scare campaigns about Labor taxes (that were largely false) and together with the concern of working class voters particularly in rural areas where coal and other mining were important, this resulted in the loss for Labor.
Seeing Free Solo (mountainsrivers.com/free-solo-inspiring-and-disturbing/) reminded me of my “free solo” on Federation Peak years ago. Barely a rock climb, but the exposure was similar to that on El Cap. In Dec 1980- Jan1981, I did a three week traverse of the Eastern and Western Arthur Range in southern Tasmania with my then wife. One of our objectives was to climb Federation Peak (1,224 metres or 4,016 ft), whose spectacular summit rises like a spike in the middle of the Eastern Arthur Range (see photo below).
Looking towards Federation Peak from the Four Peaks.
I returned to Noosa in Queensland, Australia for Christmas with my sister and mother. While there I walked from the southern end of Noosa National Park along the coastal track to Alexandria Bay where I had a swim with the jellyfish and enjoyed the relative solitude of a beautiful beach on the Pacific Ocean.
Northern end of Sunshine Beach
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