Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide

BRUNY ISLAND, Australia — Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.

An out-of-control fire in Hillville, in the Australian
state of New South Wales, on November 12.Credit...

The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.

The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.

Read the opinion piece by Richard Flanagan from The New York Times - “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.”

‘Critical': parts of regional NSW set to run out of water by November

Parts of regional New South Wales could run out of water as early as November with data showing the worst-case scenario for the state if there’s no rain or government intervention.

A huge mat of red duckweed floats on the surface of
 the Macquarie River in Dubbo due to the decreased
flow of water. WaterNSW say Dubbo is set to be one of
the first NSW towns to lose water if it does not rain.

The projections from NSW’s river operator and bulk water supplier WaterNSW show without significant rain the first towns to lose water supply will be Dubbo, Cobar, Nyngan and Narromine with the Macquarie River forecast to run dry by November.

The Macquarie River experiences an average inflow of 1,448GL annually but in the past two years has seen just 97GL enter the river system, the data shows.

Read the story from The Guardian by Paul Karp and Australia Associated Press - “‘Critical': parts of regional NSW set to run out of water by November.”

(It’s events such as these that will focus peoples’ thinking about the climate crisis - Robert McLean)