Apocalyptic skies form from the catastrophic Australian bush fires. Photo/Supplied
Happy new year! As in really sort of like reasonably or fairly happy new year in an average sense. Personal circumstances may vary – you might have woken up to 2020 in love, on a warm coast surrounded by family, or alone, anxious, afraid, hoping that there was something worthwhile
to watch on TV – but the general mood is that 2020 hasn't been welcomed in with the requisite hilarity and optimism of all New Years.
Something is missing. Something is casting a shadow. New Zealand, first to see the dawn of the new decade; but the light is murky, done out in weird shades of orange and red, brought on by the Australian bush fires.
The fires have provoked weird skies in Christchurch, Dunedin, Rotorua, Auckland, and other places. The scientific term for it is cloud condensation nuclei (CCNs), meaning the hazy skies caused by smoke across the Tasman Sea.
This isn't global warming. That sounds too laidback, too passive for what's happening. This is more like global heating. This is the future, a helter skelter coming down fast. It's easy to toll the bell of doom but with each year we're drawing closer and closer to some kind of climate change chaos, and the Australian bush fires act to put a siren on it.
Nuclear war was the very real and very terrifying threat the world had to put up with during the long, tense years of the Cold War. The next big fear was post 9/11, and the way Bush's US administration worked fast to put out the fires of an Islamic extremist uprising with the gasoline of its foreign policy. It feels almost nostalgic that we were afraid of ideology, religious mania and the killing machines operated by Pax Americana.
