I continue to feel your pain Tao.
I saw a photo today of a mother with her kids in a boat on a lake trying to avoid the fire on land. The skies were totally dark and the comment was that it was noon time
Hi Steve,
I am so proud of Australia but today after a truly horrendous day of new fires with 7 people feared dead in NSW and Victoria from just this morning and with all major roads in south eastern Australia being closed and the prospect of no telecommunications in the south east of our country we as a country and a community have shown that we stand together and support each other completely.
Surf lifesaving clubs are taking people in who have been told to evacuate from the country to seek refuge at the beaches. People have lost their homes and many are trapped without any immediate prospect of getting home till the roads are deemed safe again. The skies here today are just full of ash and grey again and the sun is a scary orange yet in south eastern Australia the skies here were actually red today. Nobody has ever seen such a horrible fire season in all our recorded history and our firefighters have been fighting wildfires for 41 days straight now.
We are the driest continent on earth and we are completely the canary in the coal mine for what living in a future extremely vulnerable hot climate may mean to any of us.
The worst aspects of all the projections are here. I can’t keep quiet as my country is on fire and so many of our people suffer. This is not what we should be living with. Shove the politics, people are burning, animals are burning, my country is burning and in truth my heart is just about breaking. How almost silly just any other activity seems at this point. This is the very start of a new decade and such a horrible omen for our people. I can only truly hope this isn’t actually our future. No matter what your philosophy or belief is we are clearly at something of a turning point. The choices we make now will be with us for all of the future.
We have to learn to live in a way that the planet can actually bear and we are starting to now live the projections. Today I saw 45.5 deg c (114 deg Fahrenheit) on the dashboard as I drove along the coast. Tonight 100km/h winds are predicted. There are dry lightening storms that have set off 100’s of more fires down south.
More support is coming in the next weeks from the United States and Canada, we are lucky to have such good allies in this. Saturday is predicted to be another spike day, it’s just hard to brace yourself for any more.
If the people who call for climate moderation are wrong we just end up with a healthier planet, if those who deny climate change are wrong we will likely all end up done in. I have trained in this area of science for over a decade but in truth this is well beyond my imagining. Today, the firestorm that was the very last day of 2019 in Australia may well be a vision of the future for all of us here. I can only pray that it is not.