Emergency On Planet Earth

Despite horrifying new symptoms of a global sickness we’ve ignored for too long, climate scientist Joëlle Gergis says the apocalypse is not a done deal

It’s not very often you find yourself on the front line of history in the making. The realisation that we live in a time when everyone, everywhere is needed. Although sometimes it can feel hopeless and overwhelming, the worst thing we could do right now is lose hope.

As a climate scientist, it’s my job to monitor Earth’s vital signs. We carefully chart changes in temperature, ice cover and rainfall patterns, just like a doctor or nurse tends to a patient in their care. Unfortunately, things are now changing a lot faster than many scientists ever imagined. Just like a patient in intensive care, Earth is in a race against time.

Increasingly it is becoming hard to bear witness to the events now playing out season by season every single year. As each day passes, inescapable truths keep barrelling through me in an intense, visceral way. Even if science isn’t your thing, anyone paying attention would agree that the world is now changing in ways we can no longer ignore. Just this year we witnessed the unprecedented burning of the Amazon rainforest, 70,000 people made homeless by Hurricane Dorian — the most powerful tropical cyclone on record to strike the Bahamas — and usually frozen areas of the Arctic melted to an extent that threatens to alter the very stability of life on our planet. Here at home, we watched catastrophic bushfires in Queensland and New South Wales rage through the largest remaining stands of subtropical rainforest in the world. Although these moss-drenched rainforests have clung on since the age of the dinosaurs, searing heat and drought saw these precious relics burn. I never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d be watching the last of our ancient rainforests go up in smoke.