Global Warming - a personal view

I’ve just spent the past 6 weeks in Brisbane. It’s 1600km (about a thousand miles) north of where I live and it’s different up there. Tropical and humid. One of my Brissie friends asked me what I thought of the weather and I told her I had no opinion because Brisbane has no weather. Seriously. It’s just 30º and humid up there.

Hot days, 31º, cool change, 29º. Really. Weather? They had none. During the entire 6 weeks we did not have the doors or windows of the flat we were staying in closed. Humidity was depressing. I always felt dirty.

On Friday I came home. Flying over Melbourne, everything was brown. No green. No green anywhere. The sky was orange/brown. The air was still and dry. My nose hurt and my throat hurt, that’s how dry it was.

On Sunday Monkey and I went to get a few groceries. As we went to the supermarket we heard the fire siren going off. We were only in there for a few minutes, and then back home. We live on the opposite side of the valley from the supermarket. The sirens had been going on and on and were still going off when we came out of the shop. Belgrave, Tecoma, up the hill, down the hill. All the sirens were going off. On a perfect hot, still day everyone was pitched and frightened. As Monkey turned the car into the end of our street I could see a man standing on the roadside (we don’t have footpaths in our suburb) and he was looking back across the valley. I could see the plume of smoke rising up.

We stood on our verandah and watched the fire. It was on Terrys Avenue which runs up the side of the supermarket carpark where we’d been only a few minutes earlier. Our son was on holiday with a friend whose family lives on Terry’s Avenue. One of my writing buddies called to tell me that the fire had started just a few doors away from where her brother lives (he had rushed his family to her house).

The wind was blowing from SE-ish so the fire was headed up the hill, away from us. Towards where my mum lives. To say I was pathetically greatful when the water-bombing helicopter flew overhead would be a vast understatement. I know there were plenty of CFA volunteers on the ground, but being able to see the helicopters at work gave us a real feeling of security, especially when the big Erikson skycrane turned up. I had my binoculars, the radio turned on and the scanner tuned in. Monkey took photos.

fire bomber

The fire was put out with no loss of life. Was it deliberately lit this time? Who knows. Could have been a cigarette butt chucked out of a car window or a lawn mower with a dodgy spark plug or a nine year old with no real concept of the situation. Who knows. This place is a tinderbox. A week of 40º+ has turned live plants into kindling and there’s no sign of rain. Someone told me one of those “facts” that there are three “well above average” places in the world for bushfire risk and ferocity and one was the South of France and one was Victoria (we thought California might have been the third, but we weren’t sure). But there you go. It’s nothing new, either. Black Thursday in 1851 was possibly a worse fire than this year’s (so far) but because the state wasn’t as heavily populated, less is known about it.

Black Thursday

Thing is, while all this fire and drough and stuff is going on in Victoria, Queensland is pretty much underwater. And I don’t mean that figuratively. They had a day with 300mm of rain. Then they had 3 more days with 200mm each day. To put it into perspective, 300mm is about a year’s worth.

Yeah. I know it’s a joke, but I’m over that now. It’s just about bloody time somebody did something about the weather.