by Sarah Gill
Just weeks ago, Perth broke the benchmark for the number of
summer days over 40 degrees, so this spike takes us sailing into uncharted
territory: a phenomenon repeated across the continent as records fall like
dominoes, starting with the summer's widespread record temperatures across the
south-east and Victoria's highest-ever minimum temperature, clocked in December
2015.
The recent bushfire in the south-west of Western Australia –
a monster blaze that created its own weather pattern and raged for 17 days,
claiming two lives and razing the town of Yarloop
– is just one chapter
in this year's devastating bushfire saga, which included the devastation around
Victoria's Great Ocean Road in December.
Read Sarah Gill’s opinion piece in today’s Melbourne Age - “CSIRO cuts: getting our priorities all wrong.”
(Work done by the
CSIRO is about saving lives and yet our Federal Government keeps a tight grip
on the organization’s purse strings, so much so that the body has elected, with
the government’s knowledge, to change its emphasis on what is does in terms of
researching, documenting and responding to climate change.
In a contradictory
sense, it was also announced that while doing less about addressing climate
change, our government will spend $2 trillion on defence over the next two
decades; defence, when taken back to its first principles is about killing
people.
More than half of
that $2 trillion should be spent on helping Australia, and Australians, prepare
for the significant changes unfolding, quickly, because of climate change. That
is, of course, if the Turnbull-led Coalition Government really cares about
saving lives – Robert McLean.)
