For as long as I’ve been reading the news, I’ve felt a large amount of despair about where we’ve been collectively going.
The past 10 years have felt like a montage, as extreme weather events arrive with increasing frequency.
This, I feel, is where the montage stops and the rest of the movie begins.
Last year, I read along as the Canadian town of Lytton, normally covered by snow three months of the year, broke the country’s temperature record at 46.6ºC on June 27.
The next day, it broke it again, reaching 47.9ºC. The day after, 49.6ºC.
We don’t know how hot it got in Lytton on June 30, because the town burned to the ground in a bushfire.
It’s not isolated. Heat waves on the subcontinent and in Europe, Antarctica and east Africa have all made headlines in the past 12 months.
Floods — such as the ones that devastated Pakistan in September and have ravaged Lismore twice in 12 months — are becoming more and more damaging.
This week the United Nations said we have basically no hope of restricting global heating to 1.5ºC. That ship has sailed. We’re now speeding down a “highway to hell”.
And now, finally, I got to experience the ramifications first-hand as floods arrived in Shepparton.
During the emergency, full of adrenaline, watching the best of people come to the fore, I felt hope.
We watched as walls of sandbags were built in Murchison and Rochester, hundreds of people donated their time to help others, people banded together.
The amount of heart-warming stories that came out of the floods gave me hope. Communities will stand up.
On the flipside, a large chunk of Rochester’s population has had to move to Elmore. Houses in Mooroopna and Seymour and beyond will be uninhabitable for months.
And if the waters rise again in this wetter-than-expected November and December, will we have the strength to come together again?
I worry it’s like trying to hold back the ocean.
Without something meaningful from governments around the world, without something to stop extreme events becoming more and more common, communities will continue to bear the brunt of these floods.
We’ll keep having to rebuild, and we’ll keep having to band together, and we’ll keep having to throw more and more money at recovery efforts.
For developed nations, by the time the costs of throwing money at recovery outweighs the cost of making significant changes, I worry it’ll be too late.
The montage has stopped, and in most of these movies humanity pulls together to fight some bigger existential threat — fending off the aliens or the disease or the crisis.
I’m not confident or hopeful this movie has a happy ending.