CSIRO’s Climate Change in Australia website has just been refreshed in a way that encourages exploration. Politicians should assign their staff to study what they’re entrusted with dealing with. But here in Australia it’s hard to see anyone in our two dominant political parties paying much attention at all (at least until Extinction Rebellion moves them onwards?) In the meantime, I’ve begun my naive, amateurish, slow, browse.
This is the way we need to think. We’re trying to keep the world—in all its complexity of land areas versus ocean areas—to +1.5C. When the world is at this level, global temperatures will oscillate above and below this level, but we can talk about this +1.5C world. Are we there yet? No, and probably we won’t get there until sometime after 2030. But there may be a year or two of these “+1.5C world” years before then, maybe even in the next few years.
In Australia? Well, we’re warming, on our land mass, at 1.4 times the global pace. And in 2019, that fierce incandescent year, we, as a nation, experienced what will be typical in our upcoming +1.5C world.
Where I live in Melbourne? Even in 2019 the fiery temperatures were in Northern Territory, Western Australia, and New South Wales. I haven’t been through a +1.5C year. But I shall, I shall, and before too long.