I had goosebumps watching surreal footage of the mass evacuation of people stranded on the south-east Australian coast.
Once again, catastrophic bushfire conditions are bearing down on communities during increasingly horrific summers in Australia. It has been an unprecedented continuation of the horrendous bushfires that started as early as spring in south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales.
As I write this, the Australian navy is evacuating over 800 people from the bushfire ravaged town of Mallacoota in eastern Victoria. Holiday makers are being forced to abandon their cars, complete with kids’ bikes strapped to the roof racks, ice melting in Eskies. People hoping for a carefree break over the new year are instead faced with the extraordinary position of having to flee for their lives.
Currently, there are tens of thousands of people in coastal NSW and Victoria stranded in towns where the highways are closed, supermarkets are running out of food, and queues for petrol snake down the streets of devastated towns. The scenes experienced by those caught up in the ordeal are being described as apocalyptic – rightly so.
Meanwhile, the locals face the infinitely more serious situation of returning to find their homes completely incinerated. Cars melted, pets killed, beloved landscapes destroyed. A lifetime of memories razed to the ground. As Australia’s climate continues to warm, the most intimate places of human safety – our very homes – are being threatened in an increasingly dangerous world.
The scenes experienced by those caught up in the ordeal are being described as apocalyptic—rightly so.
It’s confronting to see military evacuations, usually reserved for developing regions of the world following natural disasters, happening right here in 21st-century Australia. The sheer scale and severity of the emergency has actually overwhelmed our capacity as a nation to deal with the unfolding events. Not just in one area following a single event, but across multiple disasters occurring simultaneously in every state and territory of our nation. As a climate scientist, the thing that really terrifies me is that weather conditions considered extreme by today’s standards will seem sedate in the future. What’s unfolding right now is really just a taste of the new normal.
At this point I could restate all the lines of scientific evidence that clearly show the links between human-caused climate change and the intensification of extreme weather conditions not just in Australia, but all over the world.
To avoid sounding like a broken record, instead I will say that as a lead author on the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report of the global climate due out next year, I can assure you that the planetary situation is extremely dire.
It’s no exaggeration to say my work as a scientist now keeps me up at night.
As I’ve watched the events of this summer unfolding, I’ve found myself wondering whether the Earth system has now breached a tipping point, an irreversible shift in the stability of the planetary system.
It’s no exaggeration to say my work as a scientist now keeps me up at night.
There may now be so much heat trapped in the system that we may have already triggered a domino effect that could unleash a cascade of abrupt changes that will continue to play out in the years and decades to come.
Rapid climate change has the potential to reconfigure life on the planet as we know it.
We know this because the geologic record contains evidence that these events have occurred in the past. The key difference is that we’ve never had 7.5 billion people on the planet, so the human species really is in uncharted territory.
The scientific community is acknowledging this by including new sections on abrupt climate change throughout key areas of the upcoming IPCC report. We now consider these “low probability, high impact” scenarios an increasingly critical part of our work.
There may now be so much heat trapped in the system that we may have already triggered a domino effect that could unleash a cascade of abrupt changes.
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, adapting to climate change in the driest inhabited continent on Earth is going to take a bit of work.
To prepare our nation for the very challenging times ahead, we need political leaders – at every level – prepared to face this harsh reality.
I single out our political leaders because the rest of the country is already leading the way. The leadership and true guts being shown out there by our local communities, often with minimal resources and under intense duress, has been staggering. The resilience, dedication, generosity and heart being demonstrated by our emergency services and embarrassingly unpaid volunteer firefighters is truly the stuff of legends.
Cynics might say that our government seems to be taking advantage of the fact that we are a remarkable people willing to do whatever it takes to defend our incredibly unique nation. But the longer we leave things on a national policy level, the worse things are going to get.
Failing to adequately plan for the known threat of climate change in a country like Australia should now be considered to be an act of treason.
The geologic record contains evidence that these events have occurred in the past. The key difference is that we’ve never had 7.5 billion people on the planet, so the human species really is in uncharted territory.
The scientific community has been trying to warn the government of the need to plan to adapt to climate change for at least a decade. In fact, the world’s first global conference on climate change adaptation was hosted here in Australia, on the Gold Coast in 2010.
This conference was run by the former National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCARF), which lost its federal funding in June 2018. It was a visionary initiative to attempt to help the most vulnerable nation in the developed world prepare for climate change. Despite this immensely important task, the initiative is now vastly scaled-down and operating through Griffith University by a handful of dedicated researchers.
How anyone thought that axing funding to the only dedicated national climate change adaptation program in the country was a good idea is completely beyond me.
This summer has been a brutal reminder that no matter how much we want to avoid addressing the problem of climate change, it simply can no longer be ignored. As this summer has shown, it is now part of every Australian’s lived experience.
Rapid climate change has the potential to reconfigure life on the planet as we know it.
Now is the time for our political leaders to make a choice about which side of history they want to be on. There is much work to be done, and we are fast running out of time.
As a climate scientist I find prime minister Scott Morrison’s request for people to be “patient” as infuriating as it is condescending. With respect prime minister, the science of climate change has been ignored in this country for decades. We are now seeing the very worst of our scientific predictions come to pass.
Everyone’s patience has worn thin. The Australian people are justifiably angry and are now demanding true leadership in the face of this climate emergency.
We have already squandered over a decade debating climate policy in Australia. All the while, the clear reality of a rapidly destabilising planet accelerates all around us.
There genuinely is no more time to waste. We must act as though our home is on fire – because it is.
Dr. Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer based at the Australian National University
