Scott Morrison’s remarkable complacency over Australia’s wildfires shows exactly how not to deal with the climate crisis

Editorial: No scientific paper, no protest, not even a speech by Greta Thunberg can make the case for action to save the planet more eloquently than the sheer graphic scale of these events

Eastern Australia is on fire. A state of emergency has been declared. The news footage of people losing everything and fleeing for their lives resembles scenes from a disaster movie.

It is a disaster, and a manmade one. It is driven by extreme weather conditions, in turn driven by the manmade climate crisis. Records for most and least rainfall have been broken, and meteorologists explain how the normal workings of winds and currents across the Indian and Southern oceans have been disrupted – and lit and fanned the flames. These unfamiliar changes are worse than freakish. They are entirely explained by the climate emergency and will become more permanent.