First published in Die Burger

The future has a horrible way of creeping up on us and becoming the present.

Remember all those warnings about the climate crisis that we thought so alarmist just a few years ago? Suddenly they are no longer the future, they are the present.

In California, tens of thousands of mussels have died, cooked in their own shells at low tide in a record-breaking June heatwave.

Across Europe, temperatures soared to record levels as Spanish firefighters battled the worst wildfires in living memory. And while a temperature of 45.9°C (recorded in southern France on Friday, 28 June 2019) is not that unusual for Africa, it is unprecedented in Europe, the first temperature over 45ºC ever recorded in France.

The World Meteorological Organisation says 2019 is destined to be among the world’s hottest-ever years, and the five years from 2015 to 2019 will likely be the hottest five-year period on record.

Closer to home, a scientist friend has just returned from a research trip in the Kalahari. He wrote on Facebook that, “The trip was great except for the Richtersveld, which has had a complete ecosystem collapse. The world’s greatest succulent diversity hotspot is 90% dead; no rain for seven years. Who knows where to from here?”

In the Karoo, farms are being abandoned and poverty and joblessness are turning small towns into overcrowded centres of tik (crystal meth) abuse and petty crime as people leave the land.

Human rights lawyer Delme Cupido and Maties post-doctoral researcher Tristen Taylor painted a dire picture in a Business Times article.

They quoted Dr Imtiaz Sooliman of Gift of the Givers as saying “the scale is far bigger than anyone in this country understands. This drought is bigger than anyone has ever seen or ever known.”

At least 63 towns need urgent drought aid, and commercial agriculture in the Karoo was in a state of “total collapse” with 8,000 agricultural jobs lost.

Hester Obermeyer from the Sutherland NGO Save the Sheep, said that in 2015, Sutherland had a carrying capacity of 400,000 sheep. That’s now down to 63,000.

A friend who owns a lodge in Zambia forwarded me WhatsApp messages from a pilot operating in Botswana’s Okavango Delta.

The pilot wrote: “Ons het FOKOL water en almal se moere raak minder [We have NO water and everybody’s temper is fraying]. The elephants are killing the cattle for water. I reckon we are gonna lose most of our wildlife this year.

“Zambezi down 4m lower than usual, Kariba is empty, they can’t make power again. Vic Falls hotels sitting in the dark, burning diesel at almost $5 a litre. I flew over the Zambezi the other day, and just before it enters Cahora Bassa, it’s a piss-trickle little stream.”

These may seem, as Richard Bacon’s book title has it, a series of unrelated events, but they’re not.

They are a glimpse of the future, but the future is no longer decades away, it is here.

Global heating is real, climate breakdown is real. It is past time for world leaders to face up to the fact that unless we treat this as a global emergency, Earth faces a total systems collapse. DM