Unless the world urgently and drastically cuts its Carbon emissions, we are in for a pretty catastrophic time.

We can see in more detail what we can expect with increasing climate change in the long-awaited first Federal government National Climate Risk Assessment report, September 2025.

See: https://www.acs.gov.au/pages/national-climate-risk-assessment

This report warns of worsening bushfires, storms, floods, problems with food production and agriculture, stressed natural systems, increased disasters and rapidly rising insurance costs. We can see this already beginning to happen, both in Australia and overseas, with climate-related disasters from all parts of the world becoming a disturbing part of our daily newsfeeds.

This human-induced climate change is caused by we humans releasing more and more Carbon compounds and other Greenhouse gases, called emissions, into the Earth’s atmosphere.

This increasing amount of emissions creates a blanket-like layer which causes the atmosphere to lose less heat out to space and to heat up. Apart from the problems caused by too high temperatures by themselves, the extra energy in the atmosphere causes more extreme weather - more and stronger cyclones, typhoons and storms, intensive rainfalls, hail, strong winds, more droughts and unpredictable weather and more frequent and intense bushfires. And that, for many people, animals and crops, spells DISASTER.

A lot of the greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the burning, extraction and transport of fossil fuels, which are used for energy production, transport and lots of other things.

This is why one of the best things the world can do is to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

As  Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, stated at the COP28 Summit in Dubai in November 2023, “We cannot save a burning planet with a fire hose of fossil fuels”.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said as long ago as 2021, that every extra tonne of Carbon released into the atmosphere from now on will make our climate crisis worse. So – It only takes one Bucket of Coal……

I  wrote the poem Sins of Emission, Commission and Omission in 2022 about the Federal Coalition government’s actions and inactions to reveal the multitude of ways that they were making our climate crisis worse. Unfortunately, many of our State and Federal governments are still guilty of climate change sins. Particularly in relation to massive subsidies to fossil fuel companies, permitting extensive land clearing and forestry and not including climate change in project approval decisions.

It doesn’t matter where the emissions enter the atmosphere, they all contribute to the world’s climate change.

Some people and companies don’t take responsibility for the emissions that come from the coal or gas or oil that they are responsible for extracting and selling to someone else, domestically or overseas. These are Scope 3 emissions. Historically, most governments haven’t held them to account for the emissions that are burnt elsewhere, but I hope that this is gradually changing.

That’s why I wrote a poem about Scope 3 Emissions.

Don’t they realise that there is only one shared atmosphere on this only one shared planet that we live on?

Update December 2025