Nigel Tomlin and his Platypus Power Station at Ellendale

It seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. In 1878 the world’s first hydro-electric plant near Rothbury, England, started producing power, and here in the Antipodes were all these rivers cascading from the high country to the sea. If it worked for England, why not Tasmania?

Mt Bischoff tin mines kicked off hydro power in Tasmania in 1883, only five years after Rothbury, followed within a decade by Launceston’s Waverley Woollen Mill and the Hobart Electric Tramway Company.

Australia’s first municipal hydro-electric plant opened for business in 1895 at Duck Reach on Cataract Gorge, providing power for street lights in Launceston. It continued to serve the city until 1956, when the Launceston City Council decided the turbines should stop, for good.

Thus began a unique enterprise for Australia’s island state. Unlike the rest of the country, which came to rely almost exclusively on heat energy from burning coal to generate electricity, Tasmania opted for the kinetic energy of running water — hydro power.

In the beginning, hydro power was distributed among many centres, generated close to where it was needed. But in 1914 the Tasmanian government’s new Hydro-Electric Department (a semi-autonomous commission from 1929) began a long process of centralising control of water power.

And so it continued, through to the era of governments building big dams and multi-megawatt power stations, churning out electricity for distant cities, towns and industries via many kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines. The era we came to call hydro-industrialisation.

The dam-builders had vision and energy, and much to be proud of, but from the flooding of Lake Pedder in 1972 to the Gordon-below-Franklin furore a decade later, Tasmanians came to see limits to large-scale hydro-electric systems. With that, hydro power slipped off the radar.

It shouldn’t have. Running water is still a valuable carbon-free source of renewable energy, and in addition to our substantial existing system there remains a large reservoir of untapped energy in Tasmanian streams. The problem seems to lie in the way power is delivered and administered.

In the early Hydro years Tasmanians were prepared to pay for a secure state-wide electricity supply with a centralised system of power stations fed by large impoundments behind expensive concrete dams, long-distance transmission lines and a large bureaucracy to administer it all.

Now, faced with new cost imposts to cover hardware and software renewal — on top of continuing interest bills on the borrowings to build the original system — this doesn’t seem such a good deal. The thinking has begun to shift from large-scale centralised to smaller-scale distributed energy, where electricity is generated close to where it’s needed.

Since he ended his career as a Hydro engineer and resumed farming his family property at Ellendale in the Derwent Valley, Nigel Tomlin has done a lot of thinking about what a future hydro power system in Tasmania might look like. More than that — he’s put his ideas into practice.

In 1988 he bought a small second-hand turbine with the idea of supplying power to his farm from nearby Jones River and selling excess power to the Tasmanian grid, but was told by the then Hydro-Electric Commission that his scheme was too small to justify putting it on the grid.

Tomlin refused to take no for an answer. While badgering the Tasmanian government to open up the market, he added a third jet input to his turbine to increase its generating capacity

He finally got lucky. As soon as the government announced more generous tariffs for supply of energy to the grid in 2009, he got to work, bringing the river water to a new house for his turbine via a 500-metre pipeline with a 30-metre drop.

The completed “Platypus Power Station”, opened in 2010, now supplies on average around 11 kilowatts to the grid — enough to meet the needs of 20 or so Ellendale homes.

For Tomlin, this is just the beginning for small-scale hydro power in Tasmania. It’s cheaper than wind power and there are hundreds of suitable locations for power plants from Platypus-size right up to half a megawatt or more.

Whether (or when) this happens depend on how much Tasmania wants it, but Tomlin isn’t sitting around waiting to find out. He has plans for a 400-kilowatt system, enough to power over 500 homes, on a larger Derwent Valley stream, and looks forward to managing his new company, River Power Tasmania.

With increasing pressure on government to find long-term solutions to the cost of operating Tasmania’s energy grid, Tomlin believes that run-of-the-river hydro (using minimal or no water storage) is the way of the future for Tasmania.

“This is not rocket science,” he says “We have the rivers and streams, and all the skills needed to design, build and install the turbines. It’s just a matter of government thinking smaller and being more flexible.”

As for Duck Reach, it may yet enjoy a reprise. In March Launceston City Council, which still owns the historic riverside building and its turbines, voted to seek Hydro Tasmania’s agreement to maintain enough flow out of Trevallyn Dam to allow Duck Reach to produce electricity again.

If things progress as the council would like, one day Duck Reach will again generate power for the city, with double the capacity of the original 2 megawatt station. And if Launceston City Council can do it, why not local administrations everywhere?

Carl Sagan the science teacher, as he appeared on his 1978 television show “Cosmos”

Flickering black and white reception made it hard to be enthusiastic about television in rural Tasmania in 1982. But for 13 wonderful weeks that winter, I was transfixed by a show about pretty well everything, featuring a cheerful, irrepressible American astronomer named Carl Sagan.

Sagan’s masterly Cosmos, 13 one-hour episodes about life, the universe and everything, was America’s most watched television series of its time. It quickly became a global success, and now rates as the most successful science documentary ever made. Who says science is boring?

A child of poor immigrants with a stock-standard public school education, Sagan was a world-leading astronomer who wrote many highly-regarded scientific papers. But his greatest gift was as a teacher, communicating to the public at large his personal feelings of wonder at the world about him and the importance of sceptical thought in making sense of it all.

Sagan’s reputation would have been secure had Cosmos been his only achievement, but he penned another masterpiece, published in the year of his untimely death in 1996 at the age of 62.

The Demon-Haunted World is a cry to America and the world to protect and strengthen the hard-won system of learning and knowledge that we call science against the ever-present threat of ignorance and superstition. Its subtitle says it all: “Science as a candle in the dark”.

Except for the rise of scientific thought, the 20th century world described by Sagan is a world little different from ages past. It is a world in which pseudoscience constantly presents as a threat because, as Sagan says, it avoids “distracting confrontations with reality”.

Pseudoscience in its modern guise comes in many forms, from UFOs and alien abductions to spoon-bending, astrology, clairvoyance, ghostly visitations and voices from the dead. To some people such things are just a diversion, but to many others they are very real and very serious.

What separates this from real science, said Sagan, is that “the standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed”. Yet many people know nothing of such distinctions — that their belief system may be based on fallacy.

Science has come under attack in large part because, as it sees the world, everything is up for scrutiny and nothing is sacred. “We cannot have science in bits and pieces,” said Sagan, “applying it where we feel safe and ignoring it when we feel threatened.”

Unless we seal our brains into rigidly separated compartments, he asked, “how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?” How indeed?

Whatever we might have been taught about observed evidence and the scientific method, and despite the powerful successes of scientific knowledge, the fact is, as Sagan put it, we continue to allow ourselves to be haunted by demons. What’s happening here?

In ignoring the real human needs addressed by pseudoscience, scientists themselves must take some blame. “Scientific scepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic, heartless and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of others,” said Sagan.

Pseudoscience can’t tell us what we need to know about how and where our food is produced, which medical treatment best meets our need, and more broadly, what’s in store for our planet’s climate and life systems. For all this and much more, we need to be able to discriminate between good and bad information.

These skills are best learned early in our lives, when our brains are in their most critical stages of development. By the time they leave primary school, all our children should have the skill of critical, sceptical thinking — the basis of the scientific method.

I remember my own primary education telling me nothing of what I wanted to know about mountains, clouds, planets and the cosmos. The new Australian schools curriculum, by contrast, is a blueprint for a well-integrated, solidly-based science education from foundation onward.

Having high-quality curricula and support materials are a good start, but it’s another thing altogether to get teachers to use them effectively and to instil into their students something of the wonder and excitement that made Sagan’s Cosmos such an unforgettable experience.

CSIRO provides admirable support for primary science education with an Australia-wide program that includes “Scientists in Schools”, in which scientists have direct contact with school groups, but the program is limited by a diminishing budget and other calls on scientists’ time.

In a program called Primary Connections, the Australian Academy of Science has taken another tack, providing teachers with resources and professional learning to enhance their confidence and competence in encouraging a stronger scientific focus among students.

Primary Connections suffered a big setback with the ending of federal government support late last year, but a $100,000 donation from astronomer and 2011 Nobel laureate Dr Brian Schmidt (the money was part of his prize), has given the program a new lease on life.

AAS President Professor Suzanne Cory said the donation was “an unequivocal and highly symbolic message that supporting science and science education is vital to the nation’s future.”

Schmidt’s exceptional vision and generosity needs to strike a chord among both administrators and teachers, encouraging them to keep a focus on early science education. Nothing is more important.

(L to R) Climate activists Alice McGushin, Kimball Johnston and Rose Rimon-Kerr view coastal erosion near Bambra Reef, Roches Beach

Since time immemorial, using whatever intellectual tools are available to them, people have struggled to make sense of what they see around them.

At first we put the toughest puzzles into the too-hard basket, explaining them in magical or religious terms, but we gradually came to see that many, perhaps all of these mysteries could be cracked open with careful observation and some good hard thinking.

But never easily, and never completely. There are no pat answers, no reassuring certainties in science — just questions upon questions interspersed with the odd illuminating insight. It’s not sexy or charismatic, as religion and politics can be, but it’s second to none in its openness and dogged dedication to finding the truth.

Of all the thorny questions science has wrestled with, there can’t be any thornier than climate change. Daily weather is one thing — we can see how science and technology can help us see what tomorrow will bring — but the long-term patterns that make up climate are much less tangible.

One of the hard lessons learned over the past few years is that when people don’t see around them evidence of the consequences of rising carbon dioxide levels and a warming atmosphere, they’ll put it aside and focus on things they can see, like weekly income and expenses. There are enough difficulties in life already.

But in the meantime our global warming predicament hasn’t gone away. Far from it. Whatever challenge we perceived a decade ago when we were deciding how to respond to the Kyoto Protocol, it’s now at least twice as big.

Carbon emissions have continued unabated while deadlines have passed. We’re now over two years into what has been called “the critical decade” with still no effective international agreement in place.

It may well be that some sort of economic collapse leading to a long-term drop in carbon emissions will be the only thing to stop us drifting into some sort of end-game, where all the thresholds have been reached, all the triggers set off, all the tipping points passed. What a prospect!

In the meantime we’ve had to endure unsubstantiated claims that the whole thing is a hoax dreamed up by misguided or malevolent scientists and their acolytes. Amid all the distraction it’s been very difficult for people to remain focused on what science has continued to say.

This is the backdrop to a move by the international climate advocacy group, “350.org”, to seek the help of communities facing special threats from climate change by staging multiple events next Saturday.

In the global warming scheme of things, Tasmania is relatively fortunate. Our location south of the Australian continent subjects us to the moderating influence of the Southern Ocean, which will keep temperature increases to a minimum.

But some parts of our island will feel the impact of a changing climate, none more so than exposed coasts like Roches Beach in south-eastern Tasmania, whose vulnerability to sea level rise and storm surge is among the highest in the state.

Tasmanian coastal geomorphologist Chris Sharples has spent many years getting to know how different shorelines around Australia react to changing sea conditions, and has identified the exposed, erodible shorelines most vulnerable to storms, shifting currents and a rising sea level.

Many beaches such as Sydney’s Bondi and Clifton Beach in Tasmania’s south show little if any impact of erosion because their shape, enclosed by rocky headlands, keeps their sand enclosed so that it can be restored to the shore by fair weather swells.

But as Sharples points out, Roches Beach lacks such protection. When a stormy southerly strikes, the sand of Roches Beach is pushed northward towards Seven Mile Beach. Once lost, it cannot be regained.

Coastal storms have become more frequent in south-eastern Tasmania in the past few decades, resulting in steady erosion along the length of Roches Beach. The culmination of all this was a two-day storm last July that washed away more than 10 metres of land behind a rocky coastal outcrop known as Bambra Reef.

The vulnerability of this and other coastal lands in Tasmania, and the need to plan ahead to minimise losses to communities and landowners, are being highlighted by a coalition of groups seeking strong public policies to mitigate both the cause and the impact of climate change.

On Saturday, “Climate Impacts Day”, members of Environment Tasmania, Climate Action Hobart and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition will join hundreds of groups aiming to demonstrate how climate change is affecting people now, in many placed around the world.

The Hobart contribution to this global event will involve people forming a “human shoreline” at Roches Beach, at 11 am on Saturday morning, aiming to highlight current damage and show how the combination of storms and rising sea levels will affect the beach and its hinterland over the next few decades.

The Hobart action will be among the first of hundreds of “join the dots” global events. For more information on Climate Impacts Day, click here.