Climate collapse isn’t coming — it’s already here and Australia is burning faster than ever, writes Ben Laycock.
THE NORTHERLY WIND that blew extremely hot air all the way from the Pilbara in WA caused catastrophic bushfires around Victoria recently.
Such things were once a rare event. Despite Victoria being quite possibly the most fire-prone place in the world, just in front of or behind California, we can count on one hand the devastating bushfires over the last century: the ’39 fires, the ’69 fires, Ash Wednesday in 1983, Black Saturday in 2009 and Black Summer 2019.
Soon we may well need to take off our shoes to keep up the count.
For about 60,000 years before the White man invaded this country, locals were used to a heat wave of this magnitude about every 25 years. They prepared for these extreme events by burning the available fuel in the cooler months, so there was less fuel in the hotter months, a sensible approach. Unfortunately, these days we are far too busy doing more important things to bother making such thorough preparations.
Since industrialisation went full steam ahead, literally, heat waves and other inclement weather events have begun to increase. In this century, they have increased at an alarming rate. Apparently, we can now expect catastrophic heat waves every five years. Soon enough, they will occur every two years!
On 9 January, here in Victoria, we experienced what has become a "once-in-five-years" heatwave. Now here we are two weeks later, hit with a heatwave that is off the charts. We have not had a whole week above 35 degrees on this continent since records began. Scientists tell us that Indigenous Australians did not have to endure such extreme weather in their 40+ thousand years on this continent.
Of course, we all knew this would happen… eventually, didn’t we?
In 1988, Dr Jim Hansen (then Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) blew the whistle on climate change.*
Many knew that industrialisation was the cause, but we were all so enthralled with the benefits that we decided unconsciously to continue with our rapture, even though deep down in our souls we knew we would have to pay the price of our deal with the devil. Some of us are already paying that price. Most of us are still in denial.
We have come to expect, even demand, that as we progress through life, we get richer. If this does not happen, we get very angry and turf out the government of the day. We are prepared to buy rooftop solar and even the occasional electric car if we can see the economic benefit, but we are not yet prepared to sacrifice our cherished dream of getting richer and richer as we age. The average income in Australia is about $100,000 per year. This puts us in the top 1% of the world’s population (the threshold is US$37,000 (AUD$54,000).
In 2020, the richest 1% of the global population produced approximately 16% of the world's total CO2 emissions.
We emitted as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity, which is about five billion people. We, the one percenters, used up our annual fair share of emissions by 10 January. Now we are burning everyone else's fair share.
While we were doing that, we helped the extremely wealthy to burn even more carbon. We all enthusiastically bought the products created by the billionaires in order to fulfil our dreams of ever-growing wealth. The wealthiest 0.1% of the U.S. burn carbon at 4,000 times the rate of the world’s poorest 10%.
So, if you are looking for culprits, do not just blame the pollutocrats; they are merely supplying what we demand. It's a bit hypocritical to call your dealer a drug pusher just after you've got your fix!
*In June 1988, in the middle of an extreme heatwave in the U.S., Jim Hansen addressed the U.S. Congress. He said that he was 99% sure that the heatwave was partly caused by human activity. The cat was out of the bag. ExonBobile had known about climate change since the 1960s, but had kept it a well-guarded secret. On 23 June 1988, the whole world found out. Jim Hanen has been vilified and ostracised since that day.
Ben Laycock lives in the bush in a small hamlet called Barkers Creek. He writes about almost everything, with a focus on climate change.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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