A crying shame: humanity sleepwalking to disaster

Almost every day I read or hear commentators on diverse fields of human activity blithely talking about trends and conditions that are likely to play out in the future. Some of them are happy to extend their prognostications decades into the future and adopt a business-as-usual approach.

Dr Ian Bayly at work in his private, post-retirement zooplankton laboratory.

Very few of them display any overt awareness that humanity is facing the prospect of a climate-induced societal collapse in the near term and that consequently much of their commentary is likely to be incapable of fulfilment.

I recently read Losing Earth: the Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change by Nathaniel Rich. Which decade was he referring to? The 1980s. To be a bit more conservative, and allow for some reasonable degree of time-lag, my view is that the 1990s is a fairer nomination for when effective climate change mitigation could have, and should have, commenced.

Here I have some personal experience: for six years before my retirement at the end of 1995, I taught climate change science to a second-year class at Monash University.

Read the story from The Age by Ian Bayly - “A crying shame: humanity sleepwalking to disaster.”

‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C

It was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”

 A sign warns bathers of the extreme heat on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia.

It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.

Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.

Read the story from The Guardian by Naaman Zhou - “‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C.”