A bushfire approaches Tenterfield, NSW in 2023 (Image: AAP/Tyr Liang) There has always been a sense of unreality about our climate change predicament, especially through the long years of denial, disputation and delay. More recently, Australia seems to have jumped from the delusions of denial to faith in increasingly implausible”solutions”, bypassing sober assessment of the seriousness of the reality we confront. It should be obvious by now that dangerous warming of the Earth is inevitable and irreversible, at least over a timescale of centuries.
The global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to avoid a continuing escalation of extreme weather events is lost. We are seeing the early signs of what it means to live on a different kind of Earth, one where the forces of nature have been disrupted by human activity. The climate we are accustomed to in Australia — the one that has shaped the way we live and work in cities, towns and the bush — will be transformed in the next decades into one more alien and chaotic.
Australians have always lived with heat, fire, flood and drought, but climate change is supercharging them to the point where they are overwhelming our usual ways of coping. The truth is that there is virtually nothing we in Australia can do to prevent this happening. Climate change will displace millions of people.
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