I always relish the time between Christmas and the start of a new year. It is almost always spent at the same sleepy beach town on NSW’s north coast with family and friends. It is the happiest and easiest of times. There has never been a year I haven’t felt grateful for the comfort and joy the familiar ritual delivers.
This year more than ever. How inexplicable that in one part of the state we could enjoy idyllic days at the beach while other parts of the state were being ravaged by fires?
Having a holiday at all felt incongruous while so many lives and homes and communities right around the country were being threatened, destroyed and lost, with no relief in sight.
Has a year ever started quite like 2020?
This catastrophe in our backyard has evidently struck a chord. The fact comedian Celeste Barber has raised $40 million in just a few days will never not be amazing. The lengths to which so many Australians have travelled to help those impacted is extraordinary. The food being cooked, fires being fought, homes being saved, shelter being offered, provisions being supplied are all a testament to our humanity. Craig Kelly’s global infamy for a diabolical television interview in the UK and then describing the well credentialed meteorologist Laura Tobin as an ignorant pommy weather-girl is not.
So too the vacuum of political leadership displayed.
But the most terrifying reality we can not ignore is that these catastrophic fires may not be a one-off. They may be the new normal.
The link between climate change and the longer, more intense bushfires is clear. Experts and authorities had predicted and warned as much. Back in 2008, in the Garnaut Climate Change Review, economist Ross Garnaut predicted that without adequate action Australia would face a more frequent and intense fire season in 2020. It was a message too many didn’t want to hear.
Garnaut told the ABC on Wednesday, “If you ignore the science when you build a bridge, the bridge falls down.”
Even now there is a ‘disinformation campaign’ underway on social media seeking to exaggerate the role of arsonists to undermine the link between climate change and these fires. It is entirely unsurprising.
The subject and issue of climate change has been handled so woefully in Australia that it’s been readily dismissed as a merely hypothetical political hot potato. As something nebulous for the Canberra bubble to fight over.
The current bushfires that may cost an estimated $20 billion aren’t hypothetical or nebulous. They are proof of the legitimate, tangible threat the changing climate poses to our planet. If it sounds hyperbolic consider that more than 10 million hectares of land in Australia have been scorched this fire season. In NSW alone, the area burned is greater than the size of Denmark.
It was just a few months ago that the Prime Minister Scott Morrison openly cautioned climate change campaigner Greta Thunberg, and children generally, to avoid ‘needless anxiety’ over the climate.
If only the anxiety was needless. If he had shared some of the scientifically-founded concerns Thunberg has been voicing would he have taken the meeting the former fire chief Greg Mullins repeatedly requested last year? Not to prevent the fires but to be better prepared?
Aside from scorching so much of this continent these fires make clear that climate change poses a very serious threat to all of our lives: it seems there is finally some broad consensus on that. Ordinarily the sentiment might be ‘better late than never’ but is it?
Twenty-five lives lost,1900 homes destroyed, millions of hectares burned, up to one billion animals killed and suffocating smoke that has reached Chile, 11,000 kilometres away, is devastating. Imagine if this is just the beginning? As horrific as that it is to consider we already know the price of ignorance is worse.