As a new decade dawns, and bushfires rage out of control across Australia, we are beginning to realise some of the consequences of runaway climate change. The news coverage is horrifying, with families fleeing their homes to shelter on beaches, wearing dust masks as the smoke from the fires blots out the sun and turns the sky red. The photos look more like a vision of a dystopian apocalypse, and you can scarcely imagine the thoughts of the terrified families who stand to lose everything that they have built over a lifetime. The Government of Australia, propped up by fossil fuel companies and populated by climate change deniers wrings its hands and says that bushfires are normal. Not like this they aren't.
The fact is, this has only reached the front pages of our newspapers and websites because it is affecting a European-style country and people. The Australians are like 'us'. The speak the same language, have the same culture, and wear the same clothes. Many of us have friends or relatives who have emigrated there. However, the truth is that the effects of climate change have been apparent for many years now in less 'Western' parts of the world. Large parts of sub-saharan Africa are becoming untenable for human habitation.
Drought, desertification, and temperature increases are increasing pressures on human populations, and combined with weak and corrupt governments and exploitation by global corporations this is leading to conflict, terrorism, and mass migration. Tens of millons of people face starvation due to crop failure, and if conditions continue to worsen then vast areas of the continent will no longer be able to support any sort of human population. So what is to become of these people? Do they 'deserve' death merely due to an unhappy accident of birth that placed them there? Or does the rest of the world owe them a future of hope and a fair chance of a life of more than misery? Tens of thousands have for years risked everything by giving up everything they have worked for and walking across the Sahara Desert to seek a new life in what they perceive to be the promised land of Europe. Unfortunately all they frequently find is death or slavery before they even reach European shores, and the lucky few that do make it encounter walls, incarceration, hatred and hostility. The numbers that find a new and welcoming home are few indeed.
We privileged Europeans, led by our new populist Governments that are more concerned with blame and victim creation, are building walls and prisons, desperate to protect our unsustainable lifestyles to the last possible moment. Fuck the rest of the world. They can starve, and kill each other in orgies of violence as factions scramble to control the dwindling resources necessary for human life. It won't reach us. We are safe in the northern latitudes with our consumerist lifestyles, eating up more resources than we need and throwing away the husks into landfill and oceans. Safe for now, but not forever; as Australia demonstrates. Unless we start to take this crisis seriously, there will be no going back to the lifestyles we have become used to. As Greta Thunberg said recently:
"You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time."
The sad thing is that we know what we need to do. The Scientists, and reports from our own Governments have told us for years. We have just chosen to ignore it. If we continue to ignore the need to change, then Greta Thunberg again tells us the consequences:
"Around the year 2030, we will be in a position where we probably set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of industrialized society have taken place. Including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%. And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale. Furthermore these scientific calculations do not include most unforeseen tipping points and feed back loops. Nor do these calculations include already locked in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris Agreement work on a global scale. And these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. So if we are to stay below the 1,5 degrees of warming limit, which is still possible within the laws of physics, we need to change almost everything. We need to start living within the planetary boundaries. This will be a drastic change for many, but not for most."
The time for change is now. And if our Governments fail to act, we must compel them. And if they cannot be compelled we must replace them. If we fail then our children are doomed.