Weather Whiplash

I must have blinked and missed it. A week ago, night-time temperatures were in the single digits but today spring has arrived and daytime temps are in the twenties. Trees that seemed dormant a few days back are suddenly blooming. Not just one or two trees, but rows of trees along streets that appeared bare the last time I looked.

Officially, spring is at least another week away, yet Sydney basked in 27 degrees today. This past year has been the second warmest on record, but fortunately rainfall has been average, at the very least in the Eastern states. Luckily, because bushfire season is starting earlier each year and dry vegetation acts like kindling.

For the 16 years that we lived in the Blue Mountains, every spring brought with it that heart-in mouth feeling as fire trucks raced by. My daughter developed a keen sense of bushfires. She can smell one miles away. This is the inadvertent training young children get who live in fire prone areas. We saw the destruction around us with alarming regularity and knew several people who lost their homes. I never knew the full extent of the effect it had on me until I left.

Unfortunately, it is expected that we will have to endure more heatwaves, extreme conditions in summer and increasingly hazardous weather conditions earlier than ever before and not just in Australia. We will all have to learn mitigation tactics and put an end to being complacent about our impact on the planet. It is high time we stop talking about the weather and work together to actively improve the climate.