
Tasmania is burning - crispinb
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/05/tasmania-is-burning-the-climate-disaster-future-has-arrived-while-those-in-power-laugh-at-us
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throwaway5752
Full title: "Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived
while those in power laugh at us"

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throwaway5752
_Five years ago I was contacted by a stranger, Prof Peter Davies, an eminent
water scientist. He wanted to meet because he had news he thought would
interest me. The night we met Davies told me that the south-west of Tasmania –
the island’s vast, uninhabited and globally unique wildland, the heart of its
world heritage area – was dying. The iconic habitats of rainforest, button
grass plains, and heathlands had begun to vanish because of climate change.

I was shocked. I had understood that climate change’s effects on Tasmania
would be significant but not disastrous; the changes mitigated by Tasmania
being surrounded by seas that were not heating as quickly as others: the
island’s west would get wetter, the east a little warmer and drier, but
compared to much of the world it didn’t seem catastrophic.

But it wasn’t so. Tasmania’s sea waters were warming at two to three times the
global rate. Davies’ work, with that of other scientists, was revealing the
warming and drying of Tasmania’s west and highlands, and the growing impact
this was having. The highland lakes of Tasmania would, for example, in the
next 70 to 100 years see between a 10% and 20% drop in rainfall, coupled to a
20% to 30% increase in evaporation. By the end of this century a significant
proportion of these lakes and wetlands will cease to exist or be largely dried
out much of the year._

It gets worse from there.

~~~
crispinb
Money quote for me was:

 _Those faces contorted in weird mirth are the grotesque masks of a great and
historic crime, deriding not just their political opponents but mocking the
future with that pure contempt of power, daring us to remember beyond the next
news cycle, to care beyond the next confected outrage, to see past the next
lie. It is the image of our age: power laughing at us._

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crispinb
Anyone who has spent time here knows that the summer holiday has a very
particular place in Australia's cultural heart. This is particularly true for
people who grew up here - it's a vivid representation of joy & freedom.

This sense is rapidly being displaced by summer being a period of hellish
heat, fire & flood.

