Bruce Bisset: The world is burning now - imagine what the future holds

Fires have been tearing through New South Wales and Queensland. Photo / File

In Australia, in California, in the Amazon rainforest, across the vast arboreal tundra of Siberia, and in numerous other places around the globe, wildfires are raging.

The world is burning up, and we are only 1.2C above the long-term average prior to the industrial revolution.

Imagine what it will be like in two or three decades time, when the increase will be closer to 2C. We'll achieve that unwanted target sometime around 2050, at present rates of greenhouse gas emissions; sooner, if those emissions continue to increase.

The chances of us limiting global warming to only that much are negligible, given on one hand scientists say emissions must drop to net zero by 2030 to avoid it, while the IPCC expects emissions to continue climbing to peak around 2030. That's an equation that can't be balanced.

Moreover, the chance of limiting the temperature rise to only 1.5C, as called for by the Paris Accord, is already gone. That target will be reached between eight and 15 years from now – depending whose projections you want to use – and nothing will prevent it.

Not that this should come as a surprise; the past five years have been the hottest on record and the rash of stifling killer heatwaves they've engendered must surely have put the world on notice that far from being a conspiracy myth, global warming is here with a vengeance.

How is it, then, that in many of the most powerful countries in the world, the elected leaders are climate denialists?

They not only pretend there's no emergency, they have the gall to blame climate protesters for the problems they and their mates have caused!

Brazil's Bolsonaro, for example, who claimed indigenous tribes and protesters trying to save the rainforest had started the swath of fires that have raged across hundreds of thousands of hectares of "the lungs of the world", when there's no doubt it is greedy loggers and even greedier cattle farmers remaking the land for their own profit who are to blame.

Or America's Trump, who had the temerity to threaten to refuse federal aid to California because that state's governor, who happens to be a Democrat, had somehow failed to take "good care" of the brush and forests there, so must be faulted for the extent of the wildfires.

Or Australia's deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, who said people didn't need to hear the "ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies" at a time when half the Eastern seaboard is burning, in order to deflect questions about the real cause – which his government denies.

Certainly in the US and Australia's case, the fact these are some of the top-emitting nations, per capita, gives a clue. People are evidently so comfortable with the business-as-usual neoliberal scenario that they believe they cannot afford to be wrong, so happily elect deniers.

Whereas in truth, the world cannot afford them. And they could, if they chose, make a great deal of difference for a relatively minimal loss of income - probably less than what the rest of the world is forced to get by on, without any such choice.

That human-induced climate and ecological change is driven by the exploitation of the poor by the rich is Greed 101. But that some of those who are oppressed join their voices with the oppressors sadly demonstrates how easy it is to be fooled by a good time, not a long one.

Outside, the world is burning. And in global warming terms, it's still only spring.

• Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Views expressed are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.