Then came the floods and the heaviest rainfall in 30 years. Rain blew sideways, and the house creaked. We carted buckets in the opposite direction, bailing out our small lawn as it drowned in several inches of water. And it struck me that this — a sudden and opposite problem after months of drought — illustrated the impossibility of simply “adapting” to climate change.

How do you adapt when the changes coming are not simply new patterns but the very loss of a predictable pattern? How do you adapt to chaos? How do you affordably prepare a home simultaneously for drought, wind, rain, smoke, dust, fire, blackouts, rising sea levels, falling trees, floods, hail and record-breaking temperatures?

In my part of Australia, the fires are out, for now. The air is hot and wet, and smells like a laundry. Ants trail the walls, and the parks and gardens are all long grass and mosquitoes. In the city, it would be easy to forget what the nation has gone through, and what people beyond the city are still going through.

The time has come for us to put away childish things and reckon with climate change, to do what we can to prevent a future in which extreme weather is more intense and more frequent. This time around, it was Australia that suffered, that served as a warning of our planet’s climate change future. Many other places will follow in the coming years.

So far, our national government has shown itself to be unequal to the task of taking climate change seriously. Its failures have revealed glimpses of the worst flaws of our national character, if such a thing exists: the stolid selfishness of my money, my holiday, my family, my right to burn coal. We need to feel international pressure to do more, and we deserve consequences for not doing as much as we should.

While we are fighting for political action, we also need to ask ourselves hard questions as individuals and communities. The question I have been asking myself is, what does it matter that I accept the science of climate change if I continue to live my life as if climate change were a hoax? Who cares how many people accept the data if we are still consuming, traveling, investing, eating, dressing, voting and planning for the future as if global warming were imaginary?

Over this summer, I have come to see there could be real opportunity to realign our lives in ways that are not only less resource intensive, but also better. In one tiny lesson from the season, we were able to significantly reduce our water usage by using gray water from the shower and the washing machine on the garden. Taking more care with the garden has lent a sense of pleasure and industry to our home. Looking back, it seems like madness that we ever used fresh drinking water from a hose to water plants.