Next year, I will clock up 50 years as a firefighter. In my line of work, the sound of an alarm always triggers an immediate, co-ordinated, and focused response. Firefighters are trained to be out the door and at an incident within minutes of the alarm, and to do whatever needs to be done to save lives, property and the environment.

During an emergency, ignoring warnings or reacting slowly can be deadly. Every second matters, and sometimes the cost of any delay can be counted in lives lost, injuries sustained, properties destroyed, and the environment scarred.

When it comes to warnings about the urgent need to act on climate change, the IPCC’s latest report may not have come with blaring sirens and flashing lights, but as the UN Secretary-General said, it is a code red warning for humanity.

Put together by more than 200 scientists from around the world who reviewed thousands of studies, the report warns that climate change is already wreaking havoc around the world, with worse to come.

Australia had a major wake-up call about the consequences of climate change in the summer of 2019-2020, when unprecedented bushfires took dozens of lives, killed billions of animals, destroyed thousands of homes and buildings, and caused major health concerns due to bushfire smoke.

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Now, as I watch similar events unfolding in Greece—unprecedented wildfires, thousands of residents being evacuated, and exhausted firefighters battling the blazes in scorching hot temperatures—the scenes are all too familiar.

Our thoughts are with the people of Greece and Greek Australians with family back home, as the fight against these fires rages on, with the long road to recovery and rebuilding ahead.

Australians have been there before, and it’s a difficult journey. But if there is one kernel of hope in all this, it is that Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is miles ahead of Australia’s leadership when it comes to reducing the risk of worsening fires in the future.

In contrast to Australian Government politicians who tried to downplay and distract from the role of climate change in driving worsening bushfires during our Black Summer Crisis, Mr Mitsotakis has clearly said that the devastation reveals “the reality of climate change”.

This display of leadership in identifying the root cause of worsening bushfires is essential so that we can start solving the problem.
The IPCC has reminded us that we can avoid irreversible climate catastrophe, but only if we act very quickly to deeply reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. The steps we take from today to phase out coal, oil and gas – the biggest drivers of climate change – and to achieve net zero emissions, will determine whether our children have a liveable future, or one that is incompatible with a functional human society.

While Greece’s leadership has acknowledged the need to act on climate change, and the European Commission is acting rapidly on reducing emissions, Australia’s Greek community can only look on as Australia’s elected representatives fail to take the problem seriously enough.

Our national government is ranked near last internationally when it comes to climate action, and is clinging to fossil fuels despite warnings that new coal and gas are incompatible with a safe climate.

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It continues to stick to its ill-advised “gas-fired recovery” strategy that will worsen climate change; maintains that it has a “preference” to reach net zero emissions by 2050, but no policies to actually get us there; and insists that it will take a path of “technology, not taxes”, while funding technologies like Carbon Capture and Storage that isn’t working, and hydrogen from polluting gas.

We have all the technology we need to achieve what the Climate Council recommends as Australia’s fair share in the global effort to fight climate change – a cut in emissions by 75 per cent by 2030, and net zero by 2035. We have the wind and solar resources to lead the transition away from fossil fuels, and the minerals to make batteries. We could prosper in a global net zero economy, and by playing our part in the global effort to curb climate change, we could also help ramp down the intensity and severity of extreme weather events that cost our economy billions.

Our government continues to waste our taxpayer dollars on more fossil fuels, refuses to commit to net zero, and has nothing but our weak target of 26-28 per cent emissions reductions (below 2005 levels) by 2030 to take to the Glasgow climate conference in November. It has a deaf ear to the blaring alarm bells.

The costs of inaction are enormous. Our climate pollution not only worsens bushfires, heatwaves, droughts, floods and cyclones within our own borders, but feeds into worsening climate change impacts around the world.

From fires in Greece and other countries in the Northern Hemisphere, to floods in Europe, to scorching heatwaves in Europe and North America, climate change hurts us all.

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This IPCC report is one of the last warnings we will get before it’s too late to address deadly climate change. All governments, including Australia’s, have a duty to respond like the life-or-death emergency it is.

Greg Mullins is a Climate Council spokesperson, founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, a volunteer firefighter, and former commissioner of Fire & Rescue NSW.