Previous chapters have summarized present knowledge about climate change, its causes, projected future trends, impacts, and potential responses. In this final chapter, we connect more directly to the current policy debate. To begin, we review the politics of climate change as it stands in 2019, in terms of recent events and major actors’ policies and positions. We then discuss the main arguments still being made to oppose serious climate action. Finally, we offer our own judgments of what climate actions appear most promising, given present knowledge and conditions.

The scientific primer in Chapter 1 reviewed the basic physics of climate and explained why the climate is expected to warm if more greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere. This chapter deepens the discussion, examining in detail the observed changes in the Earth’s climate, the extent of human influence on these changes, and potential future changes in the climate. Contrary to the impression you might get from following the debate in the news, current scientific understanding of the climate, its variations, and influences on it is actually quite advanced. We parse the questions of the reality and importance of climate change into four separate, specific questions.

Boarding an afternoon flight the day before, a State Labor Minister who was also travelling handed me a copy of the Apology that he had just received from a federal colleague. He was curious about what the Koories on board the flight would make of it. Just reading it, I didn’t immediately make much of it. It was not until the following nation-setting day, standing in the gallery of Parliament House, only metres from then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, when I heard the Apology and in doing so witnessed an event that will be forever remembered in the oral history of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, that it had impact.

My life began at the water’s edge near a tiny town in Tasmania. I had eight older brothers and sisters, one of whom had died from diphtheria before I was born. My father was Aboriginal and my mother an Englishwoman who had moved to Tasmania while still a teenager. Her father had been a merchant mariner who sailed to Hobart on his final voyage, where he settled with his family. My dad was also a mariner, and it was probably inevitable that they should meet. The marriage, however, was pretty unusual for the times.

We are matrilineal, tracing our family through the women for as long as we have been a people. Our country is in south-eastern Australia and is now known widely as the Snowy Mountains, the High Country of south-eastern New South Wales and northern Victoria. We know our Country and stories of our family in that Country for countless generations. However, when we talk about business to do with our family it is always in English because, for most of the people who identify as Ngarigu, with the exception of a few old people, our language is sleeping – it is not the language in which we still communicate. We talk about our languages as being ‘asleep’, waiting for us to wake them up again, because while ever the people who belong to a language still exist, that language continues to have a life. We need the teachers of Australia to work with us to help us wake up our languages.

My name is Jessa and my cultural connections are to the Wiradjuri nation. My mother, Grandmother and Great Grandfather were all raised in Cootamundra. Through marriage, my whanau connections are to Ngāti Kauwhata, Ngāti Raukawa and Waikato-Tainui in Aotearoa New Zealand. I was awarded my PhD through the Australian National University and have been an Aboriginal educator for the last decade.