The old man called himself the Climate of Australia, and he was tired.
A young woman, a climate scientist from a university in Melbourne, had once come to sit on this very cliff. She had looked at his data—his temperatures, his rainfall totals, his shifting ENSO patterns—and called him “unhinged.” “Polarized,” she said. “Getting hotter. Drier at the edges. Wetter in the middle. More violent.” climate of australia
He thought of the Munga —the evil winds of August that carry no rain, only the smell of smoke from distant, self-made fires. He thought of the Cocktail Hour , that sudden, violent shift at 4 PM in the tropics where the temperature plummets twenty degrees in ten minutes, and the sky turns the color of a bruised mango. They called it a “storm.” He called it a heartbeat. The old man called himself the Climate of
And with that, the old man who was the Climate of Australia dissolved into his elements. A wisp of cloud, a shimmer of heat haze, the scent of eucalyptus oil, and the distant roar of a bushfire just beginning its spring campaign. “Getting hotter
The old man had laughed. It sounded like a dry thunderclap.
He stood up, cracking his spine like a fault line. Far to the east, a low-pressure trough was forming over the Coral Sea. It would become a cyclone. It would have a gentle name, like Tiffany , and it would tear the roofs off a town called Innisfail.