Drought, made ever worse by climate change, scarce water resources exploited for private profit over public interest, political blame shifting, a sniff of corruption perceptible even under the foul stink of a million dead and rotting fish…

This is your future.

Happy New Year.

Of course most of the next two weeks we’ll spend ourselves in furious derangement over Australia Day, partly because furious derangement is all a dying government has now. They want everyone tearing at each other over bullshit identity politics because it distracts from grave political and economic realities that can only end in tears.

The accelerating disaster of climate change is one of those larger realities, and every year at this time, in the furnace of summer, collapsing heatwave records make it more difficult to maintain the fiction that we can treat this very finite planet as an infinite waste dump and heat sink.

So as tempting as it is to sink the Dunlop Volleys into ScoMo’s darkly amusing Straya Day pantomime, it’s best to just roll our eyes and move on to what’s actually gonna kill us.

Climate change is a theory, a model or set of models, some of them competing; a reality, but often an abstract one. In earlier decades, before scientists had accumulated the datasets they have now, we called it global warming because that was the big, headline effect. But we’ve since learned that breaking a planet’s climate engine can cause strangely contradictory weather effects.

Scorching droughts and heatwaves in one part of the world. Apocalyptic snowmaggedons in others.

But there’s nothing abstract about a parched river bed full of dead and bloated fish. Even the dimmest bulb in the National Party should be able to light up and see that picture. It’s a simple but gross and measurable effect of a warming planet. Sure, it’s happened before. Hundreds of times since the 1980s, probably thousands since white settlement and even before then.

Earlier die-offs were natural events. This latest ‘fish kill’ is also natural, an event that takes place in the natural world because of imbalances in the interplay of elements within that world. River levels. Water temperature and oxygenation. Algal health.

Increasingly, however, the effect of these merely natural disasters will be amplified by human inputs. In the Murray-Darling, the most important of these might be poor resource management and economic exploitation. Driving the process at a deeper level, however, is the increasing power of man-made climate change to amplify such disasters.

There’s more of them coming. Heatwaves this week. Cyclones as we get into February. Droughts for years ahead.

But seriously, let's lose our shit over the administrivia of Australia Day’s tradition of heritage stretching all the way back to 1994.