Saddle up your plastic pink flamingos climate change deniers. Like the creeping tide, the inexorable impacts of climate change keep rolling forward, unstoppable, coming for everyone, ready or not. And 2019 is going to be the start of the the very big wake up with heat, wind, fire and water.
WHY NOW? STRAIGHT UP, IT’S IMPORTANT TO BEAR IN MIND THAT THE WHOLE CLIMATE CHANGE CONVERSATION ISN’T NEW. NEITHER IS THE SCIENCE. THE ISSUE IS THE WILL. CREATING THE WILL TO SUPPORT SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE, AT WORST REFUSE TO SEE AND AT BEST ARE HOPING WILL GO AWAY.
Of course climate change is not going away, it's accelerating. And as the effects are becoming more real, they are terrifying. But with so many agendas still conspiring to ignore it, something really pervasive and persistent has to happen to get everyone's attention and keep it. And that is what will start to bring change in 2019.
There are 3 important levers, which don't seem connected, that together will accelerate broad based support for climate change and its consequences this year. The weather. Our children. And yes, Trump, the metaphorical and physical orange canary.
For many, the vagaries of the weather have been the fuel of climate change denial. But it’s the lack of vagary in soaring temperatures, persistent droughts and extreme weather events that is starting to chip away at even the most conscientious denier.Everyone feels the weather. It's easy to buy another plastic pink flamingo for the beach and ignore sea levels rising in countries you cannot see; ice melting at a scale you cannot imagine; or feel bad for drought addled farmers as you flick on to the next story - especially while supermarkets are heaving with produce. For now.The story of 2019 will be the steady dawning realisation of consequences. As the climate changes and as more and more of us experience the seeds of what it feels like.
More and more people, including our children, will call out ignorance as they start to check in the hypocrisy of knowing and feeling the evidence, but all the while pretending nothing is wrong. Swedish student striker Greta Thunberg summed it when she said, "if people knew what a nightmare scenario we will face if we don’t keep global warming below 2 °C, they wouldn’t need to ask me why I’m on school strike outside parliament."There is no one more dangerous than our children right now. They have everything to lose if nothing changes. They don't have mounds of money to protect or corporate agendas to fulfil. They just want a decent place to live. Actually, they just want to live. Have you ever been to someone's house the morning after a huge party or a hotel room after the Rod Stewart? What we are planning to hand our children is kind of like that. Here you go. Welcome to your home. #thanksnothanks
Emerging from the smoke haze and heat of 2018, the reality is that all but one of Australia’s top 10 hottest years have occurred since 2005. Temperatures are now about 1.1 degrees above the pre-industrial norm. The average maximum temperature in 2018 was 1.55 degrees above the 1961-1990 average. (See chart from BOM below). We are more than half way to the 2-degree upper limit of warming which almost 200 nations agreed to work towards under the Paris climate agreement signed in 2015.According to the IFRC, nearly 85% of all disasters are now weather related. And weather events are becoming increasingly extreme. Some of the worst fires on record were seen this year in California as fires encroached residential areas.Across the Asia-Pacific region, flooding and tsunamis make us the most disaster-prone on the planet, with 40 per cent of the 335 disasters recorded worldwide in past recorded year and almost 60 per cent of disaster-related deaths in our region.Most people read these stats, look at the images, tutt, omg and move to the next thing. But here is the thing and the reason all those images will start to become increasingly real. 2018 was Australia's second warmest year on record for daily high temperatures. On 27th December, 2018, Marble Bar in WA hit a max temperature of 49.3°C. That is its hottest day since temperature records began in 1901. The airmass over inland WA was one of the hottest ever seen, and caused a severe to extreme heatwave over large parts of the country. (Particularly around Sydney and Canberra where someone's thongs melted on the bitumen.) This is not normal and it's getting hotter.So when it comes to the every day, the big one in Australia is the heat and as the driest continent on earth, the impact of higher heat is going to be increasingly felt by everyone as can be seen in this weather map for the first quarter of 2019.
We really have to acknowledge the ridiculously consistent support of Donald Trump for being such an outstanding example of the consequences of greed, narcissism and bully boy political stupid. The mean. The lies. The betrayals, The criminal. Misogyny, out of control guns, high class capitalism castrating the planet for the benefit of a few. The fuck you, I'm in this for what I can get.Trump’s conga line of every discriminatory, evil, careless way one person could possibly treat another is dividing us. But Trump is a big assed orange canary. Singing out the skin crawling realization that this is what happens when you ignore the signals. Actual people voted for what Trump stands for. Actual people. And this is just the beginning of what things are going to be like if it all goes to hell in a hand basket.
The ekko.world road map was originally inspired by a weather event - the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. The business didn't start until years later, but the tsunami was the realisation that we were acting like toddlers playing with matches. And climate change wasn’t just an idea or a macro issue, but a growing mess that really was going to redefine us all. And so it is. Climate change doesn't just change the weather. It changes everything that is good in the world. Literally.