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Since September, at least 24 million acres of Australia have burned in one of the country’s worst fire seasons on record.

The severity of the widespread fires is a symptom of global warming, and the blazes may even contribute to it — at least in the short term. Australia’s bushfires have released 400 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Before the fires ignited, Australia was already enduring its hottest and driest year on record. It’s summertime in the southern hemisphere, and the heat keeps rising.

I did not see vast expanses of rainforest framed by distant blue-tinged mountain ranges. Instead I looked out into smoke-filled valleys, with only the faintest ghosts of distant ridges and peaks in the background.

They seem disturbingly prescient in light of what we are witnessing unfold in Australia.

The brown skies I observed in the Blue Mountains this week are a product of human-caused climate change. Take record heat, combine it with unprecedented drought in already dry regions and you get unprecedented bushfires like the ones engulfing the Blue Mountains and spreading across the continent. It’s not complicated.

Australia could be one of the countries worst affected by the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak as factories in China remain shuttered and millions of people are confined to their homes and banned from travelling.

But evidence is mounting that China is suffering a significant slowdown. S&P has downgraded its growth forecast for the world’s second biggest economy to 5% this year from 5.75%, predicting that the impact would spread around the world, while it seems clear that China’s lockdown is set to deprive Australia of billions of dollars in revenue from big spending tourists and students.

“When you look at how this will affect other countries, what their exposure is to China, how big the economy is, what type of companies it has, then Australia ticks a lot of the boxes,” he said. “In terms of which countries will be most affected, we’re right up there.”

As this decade dawns, we are confronted with the reality of climate crisis—both in the image of uncontainable fires raging across the Australian bush, and in the voices of young people speaking truth to power and calling out for their future and the living Earth.

And as this future has arrived with smoke-filled air, its vocabulary has evolved: from the innocuous sounding “climate change,” to “climate crisis,” and now “climate collapse,” gradually awakening us to an accelerating disaster. Our seas polluted with plastic, air toxic, trees burning whether in the Amazon or Australia, we are also including other words to describe the nature of this crisis: ecocide, our deliberate destruction of the natural environment; and most recently: omnicide. Omnicide images a crime “we have previously been unable to witness because we have never imagined it.” Across Australia—with billions of dead animals and birds, and millions of people suffering ill health effects—we are witnessing what the world will look like with three or more degrees warming, “the killing of everything.”

With almost a hundred homes destroyed, we waited in the smoke-filled air, just out of the mandatory evacuation zone, with our go-bags ready, for nearly a week without electricity.

Climate change is costing cities as they try to adapt and mitigate. Farmers are facing increasing challenges, which can lead to consumers paying more for food.

"In my line of work, we do track the numbers and we do try to quantify the behaviour of the climate system, but ultimately what really matters is where it intersects and impacts with the people we love and the things we do," said Deke Arndt, chief of the global monitoring branch of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

"Some people who work in weather-sensitive sectors such as agriculture … are seeing [climate change] on an annual basis, and they're seeing [it] through greater extremes,

A teenage girl, Greta Thunberg, has become the world-famous face of the climate strike movement. But she's far from alone: Thunberg has helped rally and inspire others — especially girls.

In Castlemaine, Australia, Milou Albrecht, 15, co-founded School Strike for Climate Australia, which organizes student walkouts. As massive bush fires engulf parts of her home country, Albrecht's group has been pressuring the German corporation Siemens to withdraw from an Australian coal mining project.

The second, she says, is that "gender equality is itself a climate solution," with women's education and equity leading to smaller family sizes and, research shows, better land management practices.