Apocalypse Sydney

With a banner section depicting a West Coast drug culture, and Radiohead apparently dismantling the music industry by giving away their next album, it is indeed a truly apocalyptic edition of the Sydney Morning Herald today (Ed. this piece published in 2007).

But the apocalypse headline refers to something genuinely disturbing — the findings from a report issued yesterday, with the misleadingly plain title ‘Climate Change in Australia’. The SMH expands on its headline of ‘Hot, parched and sinking — apocalypse Sydney’ in the first couple of paras:

“Sydney faces a temperature rise of up to 4.3 degrees by 2070, and a tripling of the number of days a year when the thermometer soars above 35 degrees, if global greenhouse gas emissions are not cut deeply, a report warns. But it is already too late for the city to avoid a warming of about 1 degree by 2030 as well as a 3 per cent reduction in annual rainfall because of polluting gases present in the atmosphere.” [Sydney Morning Herald, 3 October 2007]

When I started writing this piece, I was sitting on a park bench in the shade, no more than 2 metres from the thin strip of sand that comprises the beach at Sydney’s Double Bay. The sparkling water of the harbour eased out in front of me, shifting through translucent green and turquoise into a deep blue 50 metres away, where small boats were moored, gently rocking in the…