South Wind

The 2025 global surface temperature verdict is in: it was one of the world’s three warmest years since 1850, the other two being its immediate predecessors. When the rapidly-warming ocean is factored in, our climate is in utterly new territory.

We know this despite the ructions in US government services under a climate-denying Trump administration. We have the data that prove it, because keeping weather records and analysing their content are the work of a global network that continues to function regardless of what any government thinks.

The World Meteorological Organisation’s assessment of 2025’s weather reinforces a growing scientific conviction that the world we knew before 1980 is long gone. In that year, the global average topped 0.5C of warming above pre-industrial levels for the first time.

The last of the “cool” years, when the world dipped below that mark, was 1992, the year of the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro. Ever since, the warming trend has been relentlessly upward. A 2026 graph from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service shows occasional sudden leaps in 1998, 2011, 2016 and 2023 – all strong El Niño years when a natural cycle boosts temperatures.

In 2024 the approach of a “cool” La Niña phase indicated a pause in warming, but climate scientists were shocked to see that this natural phase no longer works as it used to. That year breached 1.5C of warming for the first time, and 2025 was close behind even though it started and ended with a La Niña.

Why is this happening? The WMO finds two main reasons: first the build-up of greenhouse gases in the air, caused by continued emissions and plants’ increasing inability to take up excessive carbon dioxide, and second, very high ocean temperatures resulting in another reduction in CO2 take-up.

Other factors like low clouds and atmospheric circulation are part of the mix, says WMO, but that’s scientific caution at work.

There’s no getting away from the dominant driver of warming – 50 per cent more carbon dioxide in the air than when I was a kid – mostly because humans keep burning fossil fuels – petrol, diesel, natural gas, coal. Everything else hangs off that simple truth.

In our hearts we know this – all of us including Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and other political voices here and everywhere repeating the lie that none of the above matters; that we can put off decisive action and overshoot safe limits while continuing to enjoy our fossil-fuel bonanza.

Thanks to wavering support by the world’s governments for cutting emissions, in another decade or two no-one will be able to avoid the devastating consequences. Those culprits still alive and kicking might then be held accountable, but what would be the point?

After the 2024 global temperature shock, the following current information in Yale University’s authoritative climate bulletin e360 reflects widely-held positions among the world’s leading climate scientists. If you want to know what we’re up against, note this.

With nature no longer absorbing our abuse, says the Yale bulletin, Earth’s once-stable climate systems are now at various points of no return, where changes cannot be reversed. Future climate change won’t happen gradually but with sudden shifts, it says, citing leading Earth systems scientist Johan Rockstsrom.

The result will be a world permanently transformed, with devastating consequences for people and nature. Hopes currently being expressed that we can delay cutting emissions after overshooting temperature limits are fanciful. There is no way back to the world of our childhood.

A destabilised climate is expressing itself in weather catastrophes rising in frequency: soaring heatstroke deaths in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, raging winter wildfires in the US and escalating death and destruction from extreme wind and rain.

Last year, NASA scientist Bailing Li disclosed that her agency held data showing the intensity of the world’s weather rising dramatically over the past five years, while the International Chamber of Commerce reported a $2 trillion global bill from extreme weather over the past decade.

Pointing to models indicating 2C of warming within 20 years, the Yale bulletin warns that “without an abrupt change of course, the warming will only accelerate”.

Australians are used to extremes of wet and dry, calm and storm, fire and fury. But what they now see at home and abroad – unstoppable fires in dry landscapes and high winds, deadly heat, extreme precipitation inundating towns and delivering flash floods, devastating landslips – is above and beyond.

People in places affected don’t shrug any more because they understand this and know things are getting worse. Ambitious action to lower emissions is the only sensible response. Opposing it is unforgivable.

In 2014 the Hodgman government abolished the Tasmanian Climate Action Council, set up under the 2008 Climate Change (State Action) Act to help successive state governments understand what “state action” means.

Why did they do it? Their explanation at the time was that it was too expensive. But its cost in 2013-14, including bringing leading Sydney-based ecologist Lesley Hughes to Hobart to chair quarterly meetings, was just $152,000. That wouldn’t cover a single political minder.

Then-environment minister Matthew Groom, the sole government speaker in that critical House of Assembly debate, rushed through his short speech as if he didn’t want to discuss it. A handful of opponents did their best to delay the inevitable, but it was all over in 2½ hours.

The Legislative Council took just 38 minutes before voting to axe the TCAC, with Rob Valentine, then the member for Hobart, the only dissenter. The whole dirty deed took less than three hours of parliament’s time.

The axing of climate measures and institutions by the Abbott government six months earlier was the Hodgman government’s opening to ditch the TCAC. The government redefined action to mean writing plans, setting targets, supporting this or that local endeavour, while doing nothing about actual carbon emissions. Setting aside so-called offsets, they remain stubbornly high to this day.

To be fair, that was the pattern around the world in all but a handful of jurisdictions, mainly small ones where the citizenry has been able to hold government feet to the fire. Climate policymakers know all too well that the slow burn of climate change is a poor fit with short election cycles, and there’s been no shortage of those in Tasmania since the last four-year term ended in 2018.

The TCAC did not go down without a fight. Within months Leslie Hughes was back in Hobart, at her own expense, to support a new voluntary group, Climate Tasmania. It brought together recognised authorities in climate science, economics, energy markets, law, public health and public policy. Most were former TCAC members.

That was well over a decade ago. Early on, for reasons best known to those involved, the group asked me to join, which I did. Inevitable departures have brought in other newcomers including very active members in the state’s north. Thanks to Zoom we’ve managed to keep things ticking over.

Climate Tasmania has spread information, managed seminars, met with MPs and written submissions to government and parliament, seeking to put our views about government actions (or the lack of them) and to build interest in substantive measures for a safer future.

We’ve had our moments, including a memorable visit to Incat’s sensational electric ferry project hosted by the heroic Robert Clifford, but little progress has been made on the policy front. While solar power has grown significantly, actual Tasmanian emissions remain stubbornly high, and cold hard facts like record 2025 insurance payouts for Australian weather disasters speak for themselves.

Although every sane person knows in their bones that the climate is changing, mainly because we keep using coal, oil and gas for energy, some politicians choose the path of denier-in-chief President Donald Trump and seek to wind back the clock.

Whatever the short-term successes of these holdouts, their credibility is undermined at every turn by the renewable revolution. Australians with the means are starting a shift to electric vehicles, and the proportion of Australian homes carrying solar panels – many with battery storage – is fast closing on a world-leading 50 per cent.

Mitigating carbon emissions will always be necessary, but addressing change already happening is a rising challenge. At Climate Tasmania, drawing on community concern and informed by the best current science, we need to get parliament to lift its game.

Mutual support is fundamental to the whole question of how humanity responds to the climate crisis. We in Climate Tasmania try to remain positive because no-one needs a constant refrain of bad news. We have the benefit of being able to discuss between ourselves what’s happening around us and around the world. In so doing we support each other.

This week we are taking on a couple of new, younger members with many active years ahead of them as climate scientists. Their disciplined study of natural processes is needed more than ever as we are forced to adapt to a changing climate.

We still know the value of personal contact and how to have a good time, so our next meeting will be a get-together in the flesh. We remain positive. Every day is a new day, and who knows what tomorrow might bring?

“I speak for all Australians in expressing a profound sorrow to the Aboriginal people. I am sorry. We are sorry. Let the world know and understand that it is with this sorrow that we as a nation will grow, and seek a better, a fairer, and a wiser future.”

That was John Howard in a national telecast on the eve of the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Not the one in the Lodge who had refused to offer any such apology, but an actor of the same name reading a script written by John Clarke for a comic TV “documentary” called The Games.

Years later, in the finest moment of his political career, prime minister Kevin Rudd expressed “profound sorrow” to Australia’s Indigenous people in the Australian parliament. But despite its global notoriety for having rounded up Aboriginal inhabitants and shipped them to Flinders Island, Tasmania, or Lutruwita, didn’t rate a mention in that speech.

In December 2016, Will Hodgman’s Liberal government looked like making amends for that omission, backing plans to acknowledge Australia’s frontier wars and honour the world’s oldest living culture.

The founder of Mona, David Walsh, and its creative director Leigh Carmichael teamed up with Aboriginal writer Greg Lehman to produce a plan for a National Truth and Reconciliation Art Park at Macquarie Point.

Walsh said at the time that as one of the “whitefellas treading on blackfella graves” he wanted “to find a way through” the fog of the standard settlement narrative. “It will be easy enough to find fault and to criticise. But we’ve done nothing for far too long, and continuing to do nothing will only make things worse for everybody, invaders and indigenes alike.”

Carmichael said Macquarie Point could be the site of Australia’s first major public acknowledgment for a part of our history “that no one wants to talk about, but ultimately made us who we are”. Lehman said Macquarie Point could be “a catalyst for change… a positive example not just for Australia, but for the world.”

The $240,000 study, funded by the Hodgman government, envisaged an expansive “art park”, plus an information centre and a fire and light installation, celebrating 40,000 years of Tasmanian culture.

Will Hodgman called it “bold and brilliant”. Suggesting that the park could also acknowledge the site’s original wetland habitat, a Mercury reader said that “Macquarie Point can become a place of healing and a beacon of hope for the future.”

Such moments in history need to be seized. Inspired by John Clarke’s sentiment that “we as a nation will grow” by acknowledging past missteps, we might have latched on to a remarkable feature of our past: that long before humans penetrated South America, for 20,000 or so years this island marked the southernmost reach of humankind.

In 2021 things were still ticking over. The Macquarie Point Development Corporation (MPDC) and the Aboriginal community had put together a “co-design group”, and Hodgman’s successor, Peter Gutwein, tabled in parliament a landmark report, “Pathway to Truth-Telling and Treaty”.

But ahead of his April 2022 resignation, Gutwein had also started a push for a Tasmanian AFL team. Visiting AFL executives took a liking to Macquarie Point, and in September 2022 new premier Jeremy Rockliff made a stadium on the point his pet project.

The national truth and reconciliation memorial became an “Aboriginal Culturally Informed Zone”. The co-design group objected that the narrow strip between Davey Street and the stadium proposed for this wouldn’t work, and members quit.

Which is where we are today, as the ground at Macquarie Point is being prepared for the young gods to grace our capital with their occasional winter-time presence. I remain of the view that Macquarie Point is the wrong place for the stadium, but it was parliament’s decision, and it’s done.

This can’t be allowed to rest here. Our island community is duty-bound to fill this yawning gap in its narrative. The project put together by Lehman, Carmichael and Walsh is lost, but we can’t allow their vision to disappear down the cracks, or between Davey Street and the stadium.

Australian football has strong Indigenous connections going back to colonial times if not beyond. Aboriginal athletes, male and female, have brought their culture into the game and enriched it with their sublime skills. There must be ways, more than one, of bringing together this real, living phenomenon and the imperative to get our origin story out there.

Our continuing failure to recognise this island’s ancient Indigenous culture has become a running sore in the Tasmanian community. So too is the stadium. Bringing them together into a single nationally-significant project might be the healing balm we need.