An Australian engineer who paddled a kayak to Paris says, while the trip was very difficult, it gave him first hand experience of the effect people are having on the environment, and engineers and scientists need to speak up about the importance of the issue.
Steve Posselt is a water engineer for whom water is a passion as well as a career. In 2007, he paddled his kayak from Brisbane to Adelaide along the Murray-Darling to draw attention to the state of the river and the impact people are having on the environment.
Three years ago, he decided to do a bigger trip with legs in Australia, the United States, Britain and France with the goal to reach Paris in time for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (also known as COP21) last December.
His craft was a plastic sea kayak with wheels attached so he could drag it from one river to the next or around areas where rivers where unnavigable. It was as gruelling as you would imagine.
"It was a surprise how much it hurt when I walked out of Canberra, because I walked to Wollongong. Some of those hills are pretty long," Posselt said.
"The Mississippi with its flooding was harder than I thought it was going to be. The locks in the UK were harder than I thought it was going to be. You've got to drag your kayak up a set of steps a couple of storeys high, and round bends and over fences and that sort of stuff."
He believes he is the first person to paddle up the Mississippi during a flood.
"The normal rules of a river don't apply on the Mississippi. The big shock to me was that there were no banks to go to to get out of the current because the Mississippi is probably the most engineered river in the world," he said.
"There are levy banks all the way up the lower Mississippi and between the river banks and the levy are big trees, so you paddle along the edge of the big trees and hope that you find a hill to camp on that night. The other thing is that the Mississippi has what they call dikes. Which are angled walls of about 45° to direct flow to the center of the river to scour the stream bed in low flow times. They create all sorts of whirlpools and difficulties."
As a water engineer, he found it interesting looking at how rivers like the Mississippi had been engineered and the effect that engineering had.
"We have turned our rivers everywhere into drains so that if you apply your engineering equations you get a lot more power in the rivers these days because we've sped up the flow. Even on the Mississippi, they have channels in the farms that are lined with pavers or concrete to get the water to run away faster. That's fine for the farm, but when the water runs away faster it gets to the other end quicker, so the floods are bigger."
Posselt made it to Paris on October 10, well before the COP21 conference, then returned to England with the intention of returning to Paris with the kayak in time for the conference. Unfortunately, following the terror attacks in Paris on November 13, security was increased for the conference and he wasn't allowed to take the kayak into the city.
Nevertheless, he feels his trip was a success and the outcome of the conference was a good start in addressing climate change.
"It's obviously nowhere near what we need to do. We have some promises by countries to do enough to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees or maybe 3 degrees depending on which way you look at it," Posselt said.
"We've got one degree warming now and it's accelerating so unless we act and soon then it's not going to be very good for our children and grandchildren. I mean, I've got five grandkids and that's what this trip was about."