By Jo Nova
It’s like the bushfires and baking heat are already here (in your mind, if not in reality)
It’s as if we’re preparing for Pearl Harbour or something — and if you are not scared, you should be, and even if this summer isn’t that unprecedented, you will feel like it is, and if the hellfire doesn’t eventuate, there’ll be no headlines saying “Oops. We panicked for nothing!”
After 150 years of Pacific Oscillation, the Pacific has oscillated again. An El Nino has been declared, and like the last 27 El Ninos since Federation, it will probably be warmer and drier “than average” in Australia. But the Merchants of Panic are already calling it a summer of severe wildfires and droughts. There’s no flames yet, but Reuters is wheeling out the photos of burnt out wrecks. SBS found experts to badger us into making a “heat wave plan” — like seriously, as if Australians need three months to remember what summer is. No really — The Executive Director of Sweltering Cities (whatever that is), says you should buy up those extra ice cube trays now and learn the signs of heat exhaustion. Prepare your home — like what, find the air conditioner remote?
Even in France, apparently the risk of an Australian bushfire and drought that might, maybe potentially happen is now worth a headline. See how this works? Even if the world were cooling, there’s always someplace that might have a hot summer coming, and when all the world shares headlines of hellfire, people will feel like climate hell is truly here, even if the weather was just exactly what it has always been.
For perspective, here are the last 147 years of Pacific variation, just so people can appreciate how extraordinary this isn’t. This is a BOM graph, made by an agency that gets a million dollars a day from Australians to understand our climate, but somehow our billion dollar public news agencies can’t find it, and the BOM forgot to mention it in the press release.
It’s just another day in the land of droughts and flooding rains:
What matters is that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is the largest short term driver of Earth’s climate, and we have no idea what makes it tick; we can’t predict it more than a few months in advance, and we have no clue at all about what it will do this time next year. (If we did, the BoM could tell our farmers useful things, like what kind of rainfall they’ll get before they put the seed in. )
Hidden in the small print on the ABC site, but not mentioned on the nightly news, is that El Nino’s don’t always create widespread drought, and that the models are sometimes wrong, and the slow development of this years event “might limit its strength”.
How to manufacture climate anxiety
SBS News really takes the cake today. The new normal is a world where you practically need a roster on the fridge to plan who does the 3pm check to see if Nana had her glass of water.
The Executive Director of Sweltering Cities, Emma Bacon, says people should have a heat wave plan.