I read books on wilderness survival and have mini-panic attacks if I think about all the new skills I would need to learn to be self-sufficient, and protect and sustain my family, should organised society come to a creaking halt. I obviously don’t want this to happen, but do enough reading on climate change and it’s hard to escape it as a real possibility. I’ve always been worried about the environment and the sheer amount of waste we humans create. Our obsessions with image, consumption and new gadgets. The attitude that nature is inferior and dispensable. A society built on a never-ending golden age of economic growth in a resource-finite world. Looking around, everyone seems fine – business as usual. But I have a lingering sense that we’re in a twilight zone, a calm before the storm. There are plenty of reasons to be worried. About two years ago, media reporting on sea level rise shocked me to attention. My house was close to sea level. I checked a coastal risk calculator and presto, a sneaky couple of metres of sea level rise would lead to financial ruin. I sold and moved up a hill.

Loading As sea levels rise, coastal infrastructure and homes will be wiped out by storm surges. Coupled with increasingly devastating droughts, floods, bushfires and cyclones, many homes will become uninsurable and consequently unsellable in the future. Carbon emissions keep ticking up (now 411 parts per million). According to the US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the last time the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were this high was more than 3 million years ago, when the sea level was 15 to 25 metres higher. Read NASA’s Vital Signs for sobering pictorial summaries of CO2 concentrations. The world is relentlessly breaking heat records. Eighteen of the 19 hottest years on record have occurred since the year 2000. The natural world is not ready for this, and will not adapt well or quickly.

We are hot-boxing our habitat at an unprecedented rate, achieving in tens of years what should take thousands. Scientists have learned that up to 90 per cent of the global warming so far has been absorbed by the oceans. The world has warmed a lot more than we realise, but it has been hidden in the depths. Adults have had more time to hone their denial and apathy skills, so it’s been left to children to state the obvious. As temperatures rise, the nutritional content of food decreases. Staple foods like rice will reduce in both quantity and nutritional value, leaving countries hungry. Rainfall is dropping in southern Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology states that this drying “is the most sustained large-scale change in rainfall since national records began in 1900”, with the strongest trend in our South West.

This has been heralded as a welcome sign of political engagement and activism by the younger generation. It is also a humbling reality check. Loading Adult-led society has become such a pre-occupied, self-interested and fragmented machine that the clear-eyed children have had to ring the alarm bells. In their interviews, the child-protesters are compelling, truthful and mature – a contrast to most climate change statements by politicians, which verge on caricature. If humans took drastic action, and implemented the following rather than sitting on our collective behinds talking about iPhones and economic growth, we could limit the damage and perhaps secure a future for our species: Stop burning fossil fuels now and transition to renewables;

Put remarkable pressure on the large emitters and our government;

Make decisions in our daily lives that reduce unnecessary consumption;

Take an interest in politics, and expect better. Elect politicians who actually care about people and the planet, rather than those who will do and say anything to stay in power;

Investigate big ideas like carbon capture technologies, reforestation, regenerative/holistic farming using livestock grazing to bring back grasslands, aerosols for carbon dimming. Maybe launch sun shade satellites to selectively shade the earth while we get back on track.