More than once in the last few weeks I have woken with the fleeting fear my house is on fire.

The unprecedented, severe early fire season devouring great swathes of bushland up and down Australia’s east coast has sent rolling waves of bushfire smoke across Sydney. It has been seeping through open windows and into air-conditioning systems, clinging to hanging washing and the backs of our throats, shrouding the tops of buildings and obliterating views.

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Life here is going on, but things feel and smell different.

Local health authorities repeatedly warn people to avoid outdoor exertion as the smoke pushes the air quality into “hazardous” territory over and over. My friends tell me their kids are being brought indoors at daycare, where they have to find age-appropriate ways to talk about bushfires, because the topic has become unavoidable. Other friends who haven’t needed an inhaler since childhood are using them again for the first time in decades. Sydney Instagram is awash with red moons, brown skylines and nervous apocalypse jokes. Hospital presentations for respiratory problems have spiked.

On a particularly smoky day, the radio announcer interrupts the umpteenth Post Malone song to warn people about the dangerous haze. “If you’re driving out there guys, turn your lights on,” he said. I did. It was 11am. Delivery riders on bicycles weaving precariously through the traffic pass by my car window, wearing ineffectual-looking masks over their faces. At city beaches, ash is washing up on the shore.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A women wears a face mask while traveling on a ferry as smoke haze shrouds Sydney Harbour on 21 November. Photograph: Cassie Trotter/Getty Images

We’ve always had devastating fires of course, and smoky days in Sydney, but in a changing climate, with warmer weather and less rain, the intensity is ratcheting up.

It is, as ever, rural and regional Australia that has borne the heaviest costs of this crisis – in lives, homes and the gruelling labour. But perhaps these past few weeks will be a particular turning point for those in the city, who often only watch these crisis from a sympathetic distance. We now find ourselves – though not in immediate peril – nonetheless breathing it in every day.

City limits won’t hold out the reality of the natural world and its changing climate

Living in the city we can feel almost immune to the rhythms and changes of the natural world. We’ve largely built our way out of its whims. Many of us live comfortably in air-conditioned offices and shopping centres through the sweltering summer, move about in brightly lit streets after dark, buy food and goods largely on demand, no matter what the season. Even if we know natural calamities are happening, we don’t often feel it, see it or smell it.

These past few weeks have served as a stark reminder that none of us are immune. City limits won’t hold out the reality of the natural world and its changing climate.

Indeed, our cities are hugely vulnerable. Report after dizzying, terrifying report tells us that so many of the world’s great metropolis, especially those built on coastlines, risk inundation in the face of rising sea levels.

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“The word ‘apocalypse’ derives from the Greek apokalypsis, which means ‘something uncovered’ or revealed,” wrote Naomi Klein in her call to arms on climate change, This Changes Everything. That book was written in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the superstorm that killed more than 50 people and caused billions in damage to New York City and its surrounds .

In that case, Klein wrote, it showed how dangerous it was to be dependent on centralised forms of energy, the life-and-death cost of social isolation, and the huge risks that come from social inequality and poor housing.

One thing these past few weeks have revealed about Sydney is that it is not just our coast, but our clean air and the outdoor lifestyle we all take for granted that is at stake in a warming climate. Kids, the elderly, those with respiratory illnesses, and particularly those who depend on outdoor, manual jobs will be worst affected amid rising temperatures and increasingly hazardous air.

If periods like this become routine, could we become, as my colleague Brigid Delaney astutely wrote last summer during a heatwave, more like Dubai, a place where the wealthiest residents live a life mostly indoor, a “climate-controlled version” of reality, while the rest suffer?

Play Video 1:10 Bushfires leave thick, smoky haze across Australia's east coat – video

There is evidence of a political reckoning taking place – as polls point to people becoming increasingly worried about climate change. We no longer see it as a theoretical risk but a real, unfolding crisis. Cities may be vulnerable, but they’re also home to our most valuable resource at the moment: increasingly large numbers of people who can push for change.

Yet there is no such evidence yet that urgency has blown in the direction of our political leaders, who continue to mock those raising alarm about climate change and refute the need for greater action. That inertia is only adding to the suffocating atmosphere.

At the beach last week, I lay on the rocky outcrops around Coogee with scores of others, baking like seals amid the heat and an acrid brown haze that stretched out towards New Zealand.

Near me, a group of young women lit up a couple of cigarettes and passed them around.

“You can’t smoke here, it’s not allowed,” an older woman sitting nearby yelled in their direction. “You’re polluting the air!”

They laughed and kept on puffing. “Look around,” one retorted. “Why does it even matter?”