'Fatal Calculations': a report by Breakthrough

A rational response from Australia’s leaders to the unprecedented and disastrous 2019-20 megafires would have recognised, first, that they are another warning— and the strongest yet — that the catastrophic impacts of human-induced climate change are here now as lives are lost and livelihoods destroyed. Second, it would accept the need for emergency action.

But no. The moment the rains came and extinguished the fires, rationality sank back into the political swamp. The government’s commitment to massive fossil fuel expansion immediately resurfaced. Apparently nothing could be contemplated which might interfere with maximising short-term economic growth, or achieving a budget surplus — until the coronavirus hit hard. And disinformation exploded, as denialists attempted to fob off bushfires as just another example of Dorothea Mckellar’s “Land of drought and flooding rains”. Nothing unusual here, they said, move on. 

Even those more inclined to now accept the reality of climate change do not, or prefer not to, understand the real risks. The Australian Labour Party, the Business Council of Australia and others commit to a net-zero emission reduction target by 2050, and simultaneously support the expansion of the coal and gas industries.

That’s Ian Dunlop writing in the forward to the latest report from Breakthrough - “Fatal Calculations”.

Climate summit calls for urgent action after Australia's fire-hit summer

The megafires of Australia’s summer “are a harbinger of life and death on a hotter Earth”, a climate summit has said in a forceful declaration for urgent and dramatic climate action.

A firefighter near Potato Point on NSW south coast on 23 January.
A Climate Emergency Summit held in Melbourne this weekend
has called the bushfire crisis a ‘harbinger of life and death
 on a hotter earth’.

The Climate Emergency Summit, held in Melbourne this week and of which Guardian Australia was a partner, released a declaration saying the warming world was a clear threat to Australian society and civilisation.

“The climate is already dangerous – in Australia and the Antarctic, in Asia and the Pacific – right around the world. The Earth is unacceptably too hot now,” the declaration said.

Read the story from The Guardian by Ben Doherty - “Climate summit calls for urgent action after Australia's fire-hit summer.”