The word “change” lacks urgency. Seasons change. Tides change. Climates change. Sounds innocuous. But when The Guardian changed its style guide and said it was ditching “climate change” in favor of “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown,” it was mocked by some for being overly dramatic. Then came January 2020 in Australia. Who would dare mock now? Australia is clearly facing an emergency of unprecedented scale, and the world is paying attention. The heightened awareness may have even influenced the timing of two substantial positive announcements from the private sector that, in a small way, provide hope to counterbalance the fear and anger arising in the wake of Australia’s unfathomable tragedy.

Australia would be the ghost of climate future, if it weren’t all too real. The apocalyptic fires that consumed the news at the start of the year were closely followed by destructive hail storms in two major cities and a dust storm in the parched farmlands. The images mirror scenes from dystopian movies, but those were set in the distant future, not this week.

And we won’t awaken from this nightmare.

Hailstone found by my mother, Melbourne, Jan 19, 2020

This is not to say that Australia is the only country impacted or the only climate emergency in the news: the U.S. had 14 billion-dollar-plus disasters in the last year alone. However, the contrast of a rapid series of Mad Max-like images with its reputation as a carefree and comfortable country (with weird-but-cute wildlife) has shaken people. If it could happen there, it could happen here. Suddenly the blurry warnings are sharply in focus.

We can’t pretend we didn’t see them.

The only hopeful note emerging from the events in Australia is that it has captured the attention of people who were on the fence or indifferent about climate change. As the “Lucky Country,” as Australians call it, bore climate event after climate event, the majority of Australians absorbed the shocking truth that climate activists had been chanting about for years: climate change is here. Their Prime Minister, who carried a lump of coal into Parliament a few years earlier, can’t be excused as being amusing or provocative: he showed a criminal indifference to the impact of his actions. And that majority is angry and ready to take action.

Hope emerges from the corporate sector

The beginning of the year was also marked by two meaty announcements from the private sector; announcements that show the slowing down may be within view. The world’s largest investment firm and the world’s largest software company both released initiatives shaped by the inability to dismiss the climate crisis.

BlackRock, which manages close to one in every ten dollars on the planet — seven trillion dollars— announced that start of what will, as Bill McKibben calls it in his New Yorker article, become a “seismic” shift in the financial landscape. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, in a letter to clients, announced a range of climate-risk-driven decisions, from putting no new funds into companies that derive more than a quarter of their revenues from thermal coal to offering a wider range of model portfolios and exchange traded funds that invest in companies that meet environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles. With fossil fuel stocks generally underperforming, it is not as brave a step as it sounds, but it is a massive, and welcome, signal to the global financial markets.

The other big reveal came from Microsoft, which is taking corporate penance a step further than the companies seeking to reach net zero. It’s not simply aiming to get to net zero by 2030, it is looking to repay it’s entire historic carbon footprint by 2050. By addressing its lifetime emissions, Microsoft is embracing the underlying goal of Project Drawdown: to not only stop emitting greenhouse gases but also get below zero so we drawdown the greenhouse gases emitted in the past. If they are serious about it, senior executives will have their bonuses tied to the company’s progression towards the goal, in the same way they likely are tied to revenue growth and other business metrics today.

Good, but not enough

The corporate one-upmanship is a welcome trend, but it’s not enough. The 177 companies that signed on to an agreement last year to be net zero by 2050 have the combined emissions of France. Merely 25 corporate and state-owned entities are responsible for 51% — more than half! — of all the global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. While some claim a few meager steps towards adding clean energy to their mix, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ scorecards show those corporate carbon machines, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, aren’t making any significant changes.

These may simultaneously be the best of times and the worst of times: the best as we see bold action begin, the worst as we realize that those actions were too late for us to avoid the brunt of the climate breakdown.

If you’ve ever had a sweater with a loose thread, you know when it is picked one too many times, it unravels much faster than expected. When I labeled the 2020s as The Unravelling, I didn’t expect to see such a rapid acceleration of starkly visible climate change. For the land of my birth, Australia, it’s been a period of anger and mourning. For the rest of the world, a wake up call. The only hopeful news is that some are waking up and taking it seriously. And though it may be too little, it is never too late to start the journey back to a safe level of CO2.