It is easy to develop a kind of fatigue about warnings of catastrophe over the relentless heating of the planet. The alarm sirens have been persistent over decades and yet the world keeps turning. Life goes on. It seems like meaningful action can always be put off until another day.
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But the conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make it clear the day of action really has come.
The Secretary-General of the UN put it well. Antonio Guterres said the report was "a code red for humanity".
"The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk," his statement said.
We know this in Australia. None of us will forget the catastrophic bushfires of summer 2019-20. Similar hellish images now fill our television screens from Greece (as they did earlier in the year from North America).
Australia's top scientists at the CSIRO have said that the problem is on our doorsteps.
"This long-term warming trend means that most years are now warmer than almost any observed during the 20th century. Australia's warmest year on record was 2019, and the seven years from 2013 to 2019 all rank among the nine warmest years," the agency says in its national climate statement.
These are facts, and no amount of fog created by politically motivated deniers can hide them.
There is a political difficulty, and that is that it is a collective problem. It is easy for every individual - whether a person or a government - to do little or nothing, on the assumption everyone else will shoulder the burden.
Economists call it "the tragedy of the commons", where everybody has a self-interest in consuming the common resource until that resource is exhausted - to the detriment of the whole society. Each individual acting in his or her self-interest creates a worse outcome for those same individuals or their children.
Collective action is the way to solve this problem. Governments have to rise above their own short-term, immediate interest. If they don't, we all face a world of worsening catastrophe from which nobody will be able to isolate themselves.
It is a relief that Mr Trump has been replaced in the White House by Mr Biden. In The Lodge, Mr Morrison has to raise his game.
We are not hopeful. He may be too dependent on the views of Rupert Murdoch's news organisations, and it is disappointing to see that some still refer to a "climate cult".
Sky News host Alan Jones said that the IPCC climate change report was "a gift to Scott Morrison" if he wants to win the election.
According to Mr Jones, Mr Morrison only has to say, "I won't be doing anything on climate change or carbon dioxide emissions that prejudices the economy, that damages industry, that affects business and that costs us jobs".
This is a cynical view. We prefer the authority of the scientists.
Of course, there are hard choices to be made. Re-engineering an economy is not simple or without cost - but it should not be a matter dominated by shock-jocks and social media pundits. The trusted voices are those of engineers and economists.
It should also be an issue for leaders with the stature to rise above the minutiae of day-to-day politics (or election-to-election politics).
Mr Morrison needs to reveal himself as a leader with that stature.
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