Heat
Written by Ben Boyang
The north westerly wind that blew extremely hot air all the way from the Pilbara in WA caused catastrophic bushfires around Victoria. Such things were once very rare event, despite Victoria being quite possibly the most fire prone place in the world, just in front of or behind California.
We can count on one hand the devastating bushfires over the last century: the ’39 fires, the ’69 fires, Ash Wednesday in
1983, Black Saturday in 2009 and Black Summer 2019.
Soon we may well need to take off our shoe to keep up the count.
For about 60 thousand years before the white man invaded this country, the locals were used to a heat wave of this magnitude about every 25 years. They prepared for these extreme events by burning the available fuel in the cooler months so there was less fuel int the hotter months, a sensible approach. Unfortunately, these days we are far too busy doing more important things to bother making such thorough preparations.
Since industrialisation started going full steam ahead, literally, heat waves and other inclement weather events have begun to increase. In this century they have increased at an alarming rate. Apparently, we can now expect catastrophic heat waves every 5 years. Soon enough they will occur every 2 years!
On January 9th, here in Victoria, we experienced what has become a ‘once-in-5-years’ heatwave. Now here we are 2 weeks later hit with another ‘once-in-5-years’ heatwave.
Of course we all knew this would happen…eventually, didn’t we?
In 1988 Jim Hansen from NASA blew the whistle on climate change.* we all knew that industrialisation was the cause, but we were all so enthralled with the benefits of industrialisation that we decided unconsciously to continue our with our rapture even though deep down in our souls we knew we would have to pat the price of our deal with the devil. Some of us are already paying that price. Most of us are still in denial. We have come to expect, ndeed to demand that as we progress through life we get richer. If this does not happen we get very angry and turf out the government of the day. We are prepared to buy rooftopsolar and even the occasional electric car if we can see the economic benefit, but we are not yet prepared to sacrifice our life goals of getting richer and richer as we age.The average wage in Australia is about $1
00,000 per year. This puts us in the top 1% in the world.
In 2020tThe richest 1% of the global population produced approximately 16% of the world’s total CO2 emissions. We emitted as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity, which is about 5 billion people. We, the 1 Percenters, used upour anuall fair share of emissions in just 10 days. While we were doing that we enabled the extremely wealthy to burn even more carbon. We all enthusiastically bought the products created by the billionaires in order to fulfil our dreams of ever
growing wealth. The wealthiest 0.1% of the US burn carbon at 4,000 times the rate of the world’s poorest 10%.
So if you are looking for the culprits here, do not just blame the pollutocrats, they are merely supplying what we demand.
*In June 1988, in the middle of an extreme heatwave in the US, Jim Hansen addressed the US Congress. He said that he was 99% sure that the heatwave was partly caused by human activity. The cat was out of the bag. ExonBobile had known about climate change since the 1960s, but had kept it a well guarded secret. On June 23rd 1988 the whole world found out. Jim Hanen has been vilified and ostracized since that day.
Furthwr Reading…
ABC Jan ‘26
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