I can’t get to sleep I think about the implications

As you saw if you logged on earlier in the week we spend Christmas in Banff — pretty great if you don’t insist on such mundane considerations as “warmth.” We met a lot of people from Australia — both visitors and workers. More than one person told us about the horrible wildfires raging through the country right now, and a recent story in the Post talks about how climate change is already affecting the country:

Australia is a poster child for climate change. Wildfires are currently raging on the outskirtsof itsmost iconic city and drought is choking a significant portion of the country.

Nearly 100 fires are burning in New South Wales, nearly half of them out of control. Residents of the state, where Sydney sits, wear breathing masks to tolerate the heavy smoke, which has drifted more than 500 miles south to the outskirts of Melbourne.

This is happening even though average atmospheric temperatures in Australia have yet to increase by 2 degrees Celsius.

The ocean is another story.

A stretch of the Tasman Sea right along Tasmania’s eastern coast has already warmed by just a fraction below 2 degrees Celsius, according to ocean temperature data from the Hadley Center, the U.K. government research agency on climate change.

This is going to be really horrible, and much worse than necessary.