There is nothing unusual about floods in north Queensland. Every summer, somewhere in the tropical north, a cyclone generates enough rain to inundate the low-lying suburbs of coastal towns, decimate banana crops and wash topsoil and fertilizers onto the Great Barrier Reef. (The reef is undergoing mass coral bleaching because of warming seawater, but that’s last year’s story.) Laconic residents are interviewed every wet season standing in the debris of their cyclone-battered homes, clad in Stubbies (shapeless gabardine shorts that expose bum-cracks and, on a bad day, drooping genitals), drinking stubbies (small brown bottles of beer), making understated comments about the danger and the damage: “Yeah, it got a bit windy there for a while. Reckon me roof’s being recycled in Fiji by now … ”

The difference this year is that there hasn’t been a cyclone. This is just rain — endless rain, filling dams far beyond their capacity, swelling rivers, drowning two young men who allegedly fled the scene of a looting. The extent of the livestock losses won’t be known until the floodwaters recede, but gut-wrenching photographs of cattle bogged so deep in mud they appear to be made from the stuff, blood leaking from bullet-holes in the skulls of the animals that had to be put down, are an indication of the horrors to come.

While North Queensland floods, Tasmania burns. The prehistoric forests of the southwest wilderness, usually too damp to sustain extensive fires, have been ignited by lightning strikes. High temperatures, warming seas and lack of rain have made the forests vulnerable. Burning in terrain too rugged to access by road, the fires have been impossible to control. Recent rain has alleviated the situation, and the area has even experienced its first snow of the year, but the fires continue to smolder, ready to flare again when the weather dries. Unlike the fire-dependent forests of the Australian mainland, which have evolved from millenniums of Indigenous burning practices, the old-growth Tasmanian forests do not regenerate after fire. Separated from the continental land mass around 12,000 years ago, the small pendant island that hangs off the southeast corner of the continent shares its vegetation with the Gondwanan remnants of New Zealand and South America. The burned tracts of ancient forest are gone for good.

Australia is no stranger to fire, floods and drought. For anyone who has grown up outside the southern cities, extreme weather events are a part of life. Droughts that last for five or six or even 10 years are common; cyclonic rains regularly bring floods to the northern part of the continent; every summer sees the inhabitants of the southern and coastal forests on bushfire alert. But this level of extreme weather is new, and likely to be a new norm.

We have moved into a new age of climate volatility. According to the 2018 State of the Climate Report, compiled by the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Southern Hemisphere oceans are absorbing most of the extra heat generated by global warming. Sea surface temperatures in the Australian region have risen around one degree Celsius since 1910, with eight of the 10 warmest years on record occurring since 2005. The starkest evidence is the rate of warming in the seas around Tasmania, which is occurring at more than twice the global average. Records reveal an equivalent one-degree rise in land temperatures, accompanied by a steady shift in rainfall patterns, with rainfall increasing in northern Australia, while the south becomes more prone to drought. Prolonged periods of high temperatures are much more frequent, and bushfire seasons are longer.