Beautiful weather: The social politics of global warming

In one of the park’s corners still stand tall chocolate-coloured brick chimneys and domed kilns from the brick works that used to hold sway over this land, now as anachronistic as ancient plinths. The parkland itself is an open place where friends and strangers gather and bump along, remembering out how we do that thing called society, together, in practical terms.

“Would you mind if I sat there?” “Is this your child? She fell over and was calling for you.” “Any chance I could borrow your bike pump?” There’s the lightest of breezes and the mid-winter sunshine feels glorious on my bare arms. Overhead, there is blue in every direction.

Two early-thirties women walk past, one pushing a stroller, the other laden with basket and bag, which I imagine have been lightened by the eating of the picnic they once contained. I catch a snatch of a familiar phrase, as one says to the other: “we’ve been really lucky; it’s such beautiful weather, for winter.”

Yes, such beautiful weather.

As it happens, Sydney’s July in 2018 is full of what we would conventionally understand as beautiful weather, incredibly fortunate for the time of year. According to the Bureau of Meteorology:

Greater Sydney experienced very warm and dry conditions in July. Most sites across the region set new records for the highest mean daily maximum temperature for July. Rainfall was very much below average, with a few sites recording their lowest July rainfall on record and several their driest in more than 20 years.

If only the sunshine was just a matter of orthodox good luck. Instead, the record heat is just another sign of global warming. It is a bitter-sweet paradox that the wonderful weather can be so delightful and yet so menacing, another warning sign that global warming is accelerating and that the consequences are now upon us.

The magnificent weather we are enjoying in the park is the forced smile of a planet in pain.

The magnificent weather we are enjoying in the park is the forced smile of a planet in pain.

Sydney’s unseasonal balminess has felt like another echo of our national exceptionalism; that deeply ingrained notion that bad things happen elsewhere in