Three years ago I was shaping a chapter on climate for my political memoir. For this bit of futurology, I described a Sydney in 2050 where the air is full of smoke: “Right now all parks around Sydney are up in flames. There is a new fire regime. They blaze all year ... Outside, the howling winds seem to pick up, blowing the burnt matter from the Blue Mountains.”

My idea was that this was 30 years off. Instead, Sydney is now experiencing air pollution that would have disposed of Sydney’s Olympic bid.

How could we have asked athletes to heave in lungfuls of particulate pollution when merely walking in a park is a health risk? We would have been running harder than Cathy Freeman to persuade the IOC that while we now suffer savage fires in November, we should be safe in September.

The CSIRO first warned in 1988 that, with the climate changing, we would see a worsening fire danger in grasslands and forests. Since then, it has revisited the subject on multiple occasions. In 2005, its scientists predicted that by 2020 the number of days when forest fire danger was very high to extreme would rise by up to 25 per cent – which is where we’ve arrived– and up to 70 per cent by 2050.