With record-setting heat waves, bush fires and drought, Australians are increasingly convinced they are facing the early impacts of global warming. Their growing concern about climate change has led to a consensus that the nation must now act boldly to stave off the crisis.
On March 28, for the first time in anybody’s memory, the floodlights surrounding the soaring white shells of the Sydney Opera House were temporarily extinguished, part of Earth Hour, an international event spanning 88 countries and 24 time zones to prompt world leaders to take action on global warming.
Although iconic buildings in Paris, New York, London, and Tokyo were similarly darkened, arguably none of these symbols was as apt as the unnerving black space that suddenly opened on the shores of Sydney’s harbor. Perhaps more than any industrialized nation, Australia is contending with the increasingly dangerous effects of hotter, dryer, and more unpredictable weather patterns — changes that many of the country’s leading scientists and politicians now attribute to shifting weather patterns, at least in part due to climate change.
In February, on the same day that the temperature in Melbourne reached 116° F — the hottest day ever recorded in Australia’s second-largest city — driving winds pushed a catastrophic bushfire across 1,500 square miles of eucalyptus forests in the state of Victoria, destroying 1,800 homes and farms and killing 173 people. That, too, set a record — for the most deaths from a bushfire in Australia’s history.
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Adelaide and Melbourne are running out of water. The Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s prime food-growing region, is in the 12th year of a devastating drought that is putting the country’s ability to feed itself in question. The 400,000-square-mile basin, larger than France and Germany combined, has been so dry that the 1-million ton-rice crop was decimated last year, and production of wheat, lambs, and cotton are in significant decline.
