Sunday Star-Times

Doubters, is it hot enough for you yet?

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still grasp at every other possible argument, up to and including complete falsehoods about greens impeding hazard reductions?

Is it that the truth is just too inconvenie­nt? That certainly seems the most likely explanatio­n for the abundance of media coverage that serves to protect the establishm­ent and the status quo.

If you have a sweet number going, well no big surprise if you resist anything that might put it at risk. Is that what the Murdoch media is up to?

Does he really believe that’s acceptable? Digger please.

Some people fear the unknown and so resist anything that might change the way things are.

But doing nothing doesn’t mean that things will stay as they are. That option has gone.

We have just two choices, they both take us into the unknown, and we have to pick one: give up fossil fuels and move to sustainabi­lity, or remain unsustaina­ble and live with the consequenc­es.

To help explain the wall of flames across their nation, the ABC has created a webpage to lay out the future in exceptiona­lly clear graphic form.

Here’s the executive summary: the hotter it gets, the worse things are. And it will not be good. It will be awful. Horrible. Deadly.

It plays out the IPCC model of a 4 degrees Celsius increase in temperatur­es this century, assuming no fossil fuel use change.

Temperatur­e bars reach across the page, moving further and further into the danger zone year after year.

In the end those bars come down to something really simple: if nothing changes it will be really really hot, a whole lot of the time.

By the time a child born today is 20, they say, what we currently think of as extreme would by then be considered a mild summer.

By their 50th birthday, three-quarters of humanity would be facing at least 20 days a year of deadly heat and humidity.

The fundamenta­l point is where those bars are taking us: the hotter it gets, the worse it gets and right now we’re seeing how wrong everything can go when it gets too hot.

But if we do act, the future can be better. It really can. The webpage underlays the projected bars with the ones we’ll see if we can hold the emissions. It’s vastly better.

There is so much we can do. Electrify everything. Plant more trees. Make public transport free. Produce things on a sustainabl­e basis.

It’s knowable, it’s doable. If you care about humanity all you have to do is get on board.

And if you just have some angry objection to Greta telling you off, well, this would probably stop her damn whining.

If we do act, the future can be better. It really can.

 ?? RICKY WILSON/ STUFF ?? Climate protest was big in 2019, but the naysayers persist in the face of all the evidence, writes David Slack.
RICKY WILSON/ STUFF Climate protest was big in 2019, but the naysayers persist in the face of all the evidence, writes David Slack.

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