Years ago, while worrying about climate change, I took both comfort and alarm from the idea that there would come a point where everything climate scientists had been predicting for decades would come to pass, and no one would be able to ignore climate science or dismiss climate change anymore. At that point, surely, we would act, and act fast. That, if nothing else, would be our tipping point.
So here we are. Parts of Southern California are enduring firestorms that would be extreme for summer, and it’s the middle of their winter. Meanwhile it’s been alternating floods and drought in San Francisco. We have extreme bushfires all over the world. The summer of 2019/2020 in Australia was the absolute definition of hell on earth. Fires so big they created their own weather. Rivers of smoke that literally circled the globe. Two hundred and forty three thousand square kilometres burnt (3.2% of the entire continent. The equivalent of 70% of Germany. Roughly the size of the United Kingdom). Entire ecosystems wiped out. Literally everything that climate scientists predicted climate change would do is happening to us all, right now.
- More and bigger storms
- More and hotter heatwaves
- More frequent and more intense bushfires
- More frequent, longer, more intense droughts
- More and bigger floods
- Catastrophic reduction in Arctic and Antarctic ice cover
- Permafrost melting
- Rapid Species Extinction
- Global temperature rising over 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels…
It’s happening. We’re there. The nightmare scenario is today.
And yet this morning I was one of a handful of protestors at the Australian Liberal Party Federal Campaign launch, and I was holding a sign reading “Climate Action now, Not Nuclear Delay”. More than one person exited the event, looked at my sign, and said “Climate Action? Well we don’t need that.”
Seriously?? What planet are they living on? We are living the impacts of climate change right now. It’s all happening. Rapidly getting worse. We have no rational choice but to decarbonise, and fast, and the fastest way to do that is renewables, plus reducing our energy use as much as possible, and planting a huge number of trees. Follow the science, follow the evidence, do everything we can, right now.
And yet. We are clearing land faster than ever before, and supporting developers to strip blocks of all vegetation and build concrete monstrosities with vast, paved forecourts. (We have three neighbouring ones, and they are sprouting like toxic mushrooms all over our suburb.) We continue to subsidise fossil fuels, and support delaying tactics like the nuclear power play the Liberal party is pushing.
The Science is in. The evidence is clear. The data is undeniable. I rarely say that. I am very rationally sceptical of data, always making sure we acknowledge the flaws in it, and the ways it can be misused. But this level of accumulated evidence cannot be denied. There’s no doubt.
Yet. Here we are. With political leaders denying it. Or, maybe worse, acknowledging it yet delaying and dodging meaningful action.
Folks. The danger is real. We can see it, feel it, breathe it, taste it.
The best time to act was decades ago. The second best time is now. Serious climate action is essential, wherever you are. It’s time for science and evidence rather than politics and lobbying!
***** For further reading, here are some really disturbing facts, figures, and references, with thanks to Dr James Driscoll of Monash University.
- Hurricane Milton and Climate Change
- How hotter oceans can fuel more intense Atlantic Hurricanes
- https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/attribution-studies/index.html
- For every degree centigrade that you raise the ocean temperature, the wind speed in the hurricane goes up between 5 and 7 percent.
- For every 1 Celsius increase in air temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water vapour