If only the extreme weather knew the extreme nicknames we give it

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Rain bombs, heat domes, atmospheric rivers, polar vortexes. Everyone used to talk about the weather without doing anything about it, as Mark Twain’s friend Charles Warner complained. But now we do do something about it. We make up new words for it.

What excitement is in store for this summer? Not just a hot one, or the once-novel but now old-hat El Nino. This year, the Southern Oscillation Index is sending warnings. We have unusual variances in the Indian Ocean Dipole, maybe a Walker Circulation Breakdown. There’s every chance of a Climate Whiplash. We think we can tame nature with terminology. Meanwhile we send our prime minister to console the Pacific with words, as if we can talk hard realities into our control.

Experience generates new language, but one of the hazards of experience is how easily you can mistake anecdote for evidence. Anyone over a certain age can remember how hot the summers used to be, how violent the hailstorms, how destructive the floods and cyclones. Look at archival footage from the 1980s and see how crispy-brown our Januaries were. We pinned names to events. The Black Summer of 2019 was preceded by Black Saturday (2009), Ash Wednesday (1983) and Black Friday (1939). In 52 years Darwin has not been hit by anything like Cyclone Tracy. Next month, it will be 32 years since Sydney was shredded by the 1994 mini-hurricane that has never since been exceeded in its destructive force.

It’s consoling to think that you, personally, can name so many extreme weather events that you can utter, in the face of disaster, “It was ever thus.” You might use your wisdom to denounce a “climate cult” and declare that warnings about human-induced climate change are “ahistorical and implausible”. You’re old enough, having spent all of 60 or 80 years on this planet, to remember that these things come and go in cycles. Those Pacific nations? You remember when Al Gore said they’d all be underwater, and they’re not, are they?

The wisdom of the elders is prevailing. A Pew Research study has found that in high-income countries, concern about the threat of human-induced climate change dropped by 10 per cent between 2022 and 2025. The Lowy Institute surveyed a similar decline in youth climate activism between 2019 and 2024. Corporate finance is retreating from emissions reduction initiatives. Locally and internationally, climate has slipped below cost of living and immigration as a political priority.

Even though large-scale polls still affirm a majority belief in the existence of human-induced climate change, there is a quantifiable retreat from the commitment to make sacrifices to do something about it. Excuses are found in the divergent leadership of the leading polluters. America has stopped acting on climate, so what can we do? China is electrifying its entire economy, so what can we do? Pessimism and optimism about the big nations results in the same helplessness among the smaller.

This can change, however. This week the High Court did something that environmental law specialist Professor Jacqueline Peel called a “game changer”, deciding that an Australian government must reckon with the ultimate climate impact of our fossil fuel exports. In rejecting a New South Wales coal mine expansion, the court ruled that planners could no longer count only “scope 1” emissions: the pollution produced in digging the coal from the ground and sending it to port. They now also have to count “scope 3” emissions, the far more consequential environmental impact of our coal being burnt at its destination in, for example, Asian blast furnaces. While Australia produces one per cent of the world’s emissions domestically, we are, after Russia, the second-largest exporter of fossil fuel emissions, and our responsibility quadruples to about 4.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The High Court decision brought this fact out from where it had been swept, under the legal carpet.

Fortuitously, the judgement coincided with Anthony Albanese’s trip to Fiji for the pre-COP meeting. While he spoke of a “Pacific-owned and Pacific-led solution”, and minister Chris Bowen said “climate change is the number one, two and three issue for Pacific countries”, Australia’s record on coal and gas expansion left a residue of scepticism. If Australia is to follow the High Court ruling and not just legislate over the top of it, as the conservative political parties have demanded, then we will not be able to continue talking big and doing little, outsourcing our true climate impact to others.

The problem with experience is that it is so easily mistaken for science, and this cuts both ways. Frustrated environmental campaigners may secretly hope for another Black Summer to refocus the easily distracted Australian mind. As Russia was losing battles in World War I, the revolutionary leader Lenin is thought to have said, “The worse things get, the better they get.” Bad news for the country meant good news for those who wanted to change it. The problem with this thinking, apart from the obvious, is that it entrenches the illusion that seeing is the only avenue to believing. A bad summer is no more scientifically persuasive than a mild summer. Climate change isn’t measured by one summer or one lifetime.

Does the evidence even need stating? According to NASA Science, 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001. The north and south poles are together losing more than 400 billion tonnes of ice a year. Sea levels, which rose 20 centimetres in the last century, now rise at double that rate, accelerating each year. Ocean warmth and acidification, and the retreat of glaciers and ice cover, are increasing at unprecedented levels.

And for all the extreme weather events you can remember, no matter how long you have lived, they are quantifiably more frequent and extreme now. As NASA reported in 2021, “There are reductions in the number of cold waves, increases in the number of heat waves on the ocean and on land, increases in the intensity of rainfall and drought, and increases in the intensity of wildfires. Despite the complications and uniqueness of individual events, scientists are finding significant human contributions to many of them.”

It’s almost embarrassingly basic to cite the evidence, but the spectre of economic recession is only going to strengthen the headwinds against accepting and acting on reality. It’s understandable that we want to look after ourselves first, and understandable that we think our experience is a substitute for scientific observation. It’s understandable to want to control reality with new words, like parents who think that naming their children creates their character. But the natural world doesn’t particularly care about our understandable human emotions. It doesn’t buy political sales pitches. Unlike us, nature knows no words; it doesn’t hear what we call it; it only speaks through its actions.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.