Farmers on the front line of climate change

Not long after leaving school, I followed the well-trodden path of many farm girls and boys; packing my bags and joining a shearing team. Through 40-plus degree days of skirting fleeces and grinding blades (hot tip, this is not a good way to cool down) on the edge of the pastoral country during a Western Australian summer as a 17-year-old, I had no idea the suffocating heat was rapidly becoming a defining feature of our changing climate. Fast forward more than a decade and as I write this, in Crookwell, NSW it’s 38 degrees and a local sheep farmer has come in from an early morning start – forced to muster his lambs before the inescapable heat stresses livestock, and farmers. Shaking his head as the sweat drips down, he wonders how to adjust to temperatures 14 degrees above average.

Farmers, standing at the front line.

For most urban dwellers, summer means time by the pool and flocking to the nearest shopping centre when the heat becomes too much. For Australian farmers, summer means something very different. 

Read Verity Morgan-Schmidt’s story on The Border Mail - “Farmers on the front line of climate change.”

The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis

(This is part three of a work in progress. The series begins with The Last Decade and You, and continues with On Climate, Speed is Everything.

In the last two pieces, I pointed out how getting on the right emissions reduction curve for this era means taking bold action, now. We must peak global emissions by 2020. Then we must cut them in half by 2030 — and then cut them in half again by 2040, and then again, by 2050 — while restoring the natural world and spreading sustainable prosperity. 

Because the planetary crisis is steepening — the longer we wait, the harder it becomes to solve the problems we face — failing to get on the right curve will mean that we end up, very quickly, on an even steeper curve. Wait too long and the curves we face become essentially impossible to meet.

We can fail catastrophically on climate. We’ll know that failure when we have delayed action so long that we find ourselves confronting an insurmountable emissions reduction challenge coupled with rising and untenable losses — a crisis where all humanity’s choices are bad ones. We will have then reached a point where a even drastic program of global carbon austerity — even when combined with our wildest gambles on trying to pull CO2 out of the air and engineer the planet’s temperature — will simply not be enough to avoid tragic, essentially permanent losses for all humanity.

Read the story by Alex Steffen - “The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis.”