Due to changing climate, our lake has lost so much water that the boat ramps are now a distance from the water and there are no more water sports or fishing.
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I am made so sad by climate change, also angry that politicians still refuse to put a moratorium on fossil fuel mining. Due to changing climate, our lake has lost so much water that the boat ramps are now a distance from the water and there are no more water sports or fishing. We had the fiercest storm we have ever seen recently. I miss seeing the wildlife – in the last 8 months I have seen no roos, wallabies, echidnas, snakes and just one lizard. There have been dead frogs in the garden.
Glaciers are disappearing in the Himalayas, Greenland, Italy, Switzerland, and the permafrost in the Tundra melting. Huge blocks of ice shelf breaking off in the Arctic, causing rising sea levels and an exponential rate of melting of the ice as it becomes thinner. The rising levels are threatening the homes of the Pacific islanders and the Torres Straits Islanders are fighting for their homes. In Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, millions of years old, is dying due to warming seas. Dreadful floods and violent bush fires have caused vast destruction and loss of wildlife. We are losing species due to loss of habitat and climate effect. Rivers are drying up. 500 words are not enough to list everything! A quote: “Nature is party to all our deeds and decisions and she has more votes, a longer memory and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
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I had never seen an Australian forest die due to drought. In the summer of 2019, I thought the fires had already been through our land, but it was the brown of acres of dead eucalypts. Then the creeks and the dams dried up and the platypus and the birds disappeared. We have had some good rain since then, but it’s sporadic, from drought to flood to drought, and the platypus didn’t return, and neither did so many of the birds that used to breed here. In the first flush of rain in 2020, there was too much rain, then too much regrowth in the bush. The creeks and dams were filled with toxic algal blooms and the last signs of life on the waterways were gone. Now, we are waiting for the inevitable fires to follow. Every month, we are fire-free, and it feels like we won the lottery. Our fire season has been extended, too, so it is very hard to feel relaxed. We are on constant alert. The increase in temperature has obviously stressed the insects, too. When I was a child and even as a young adult, our cars would be covered in bugs if we drove at night. Now, having a bug on the car is rare, and we haven’t seen a bogong moth for years. We have also noticed so many more snakes in this extended hot weather, and they are not entering their brumation (hibernation period) at normal times. This year, we have had them out and visible for at least six weeks longer than usual. This will be upsetting so many systems in nature here. Apparently, snake catchers around Australia are working very hard right now. Snakes have never bothered us, but now many of them are coming around our house. I wonder if they are running out of their normal food in the bush. How can the birds and the rest of the food chain survive? It is obvious to anyone watching that there are multiple systems collapsing so fast.
Read my storyPeople all across Australia are being harmed by climate change. These are some of their stories.
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