My experiences living with the global upheaval of climate change

Andy Wang traces his relationship with climate change.

The Sydney city is just visible amidst the dirty orange sky.

As I write this, it is June and I am in Sydney, a time of year where there should be long nights and cold blasts. Whilst we are currently experiencing a cold snap, the Bureau of Meteorology still reports that Australia is heading to another warmer than average winter. I used to be afraid of the cold, but now I fear the heat. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, countries burn. Moscow recently broke its all-time May high-temperature record and much of Europe and Russia will soon be baking under the lethal sun. Climate change has been a constant memory of mine ever since I was a tiny child and I am convinced it will permanently change our only planet.

I was born in a city on a plateau, where thick layers of snow made my grandparents' childhood winters happy and carefree. However, I have had no such precious opportunity to see the same scenes that my elders witnessed. The last snow that covered the ground fell in 2005, three months later than usual, and people took the day off work only to see something that has been lost for so long. My parents took me to the mountain tops where I could overlook the city, not realising this would be the last time I would see my home covered in snow. 

Today, the snow is melted by the thick layers of hot air before even hitting the ground. As I grew, I asked others where the snow in the winter had gone, only to get the vague answer of climate change. Only old photos in the museum and our grandparents' memories live to remind us of this lost history. 

In my early school years, one of my favorite activities was to find a place near the railway and wait for trains to pass. Today I am still a train boy and glad for it. However, in my memory, except for passenger trains, most of them were cargo trains that carried tonnes of black coal. They have been extracted underground from the western part of my country, and most of them ended in electricity factories, industrial boilers and some family heating facilities. My family used to have a coal stove and they had to change the coal ash inside every four hours to keep it from emitting heat. Now, we get grey skies and dirty rain almost all year round - something which was non-existent in times gone by. Yet most of our electricity is still produced by thermal power plants. Our actions remain the same even as the world around us changes and I am starting to work out the reasons why the snow won’t stick. 

The Sydney Opera house, ecompassed in heavy smoke.

It’s no secret that the burning of fossil fuels brings countless pollutants to our natural environment and introduces enormous amounts of greenhouse gas into our atmosphere. When I made my first trip to Australia, I had a chance to see the Great Barrier Reef in a submarine. My geography textbook had inserted colourful photos of the reef and I expected to see something wonderful like that. What I saw, though, quite shockingly, were large scales of white color. Most of the coral had died, along with its ecosystem, and mass bleaching occurring over recent decades continues to move through the region, decimating the reef. 

After I moved to university, the effects of climate change only became stronger. A significant downpour dampened my first New Year's Eve in Sydney and the burning days make the heat emit function of sweat useless. In the second half of 2019, I saw the worst bushfire season in history. I was depressed, studying in Fisher Library and overlooking the quadrangle covered in a haze of yellow-grey smoke. One day I received a call from my family saying that Sydney had the worst air quality and the highest temperature in the world. When I finally got a chance to see Circular Quay, I almost could not believe my eyes: the Opera house and Harbour Bridge had disappeared under the thick smoke.

The outline of the Sydney Harbour Bridge is just visible amidst the grey smoke.

I am only 21 right now, and climate change has already taken a heavy toll on me. People around the world have already seen countless devastations in the past decade alone. An unprecedented global upheaval is already underway. I dread to think of the devastation we are yet to witness and the financial and mental pain we will experience if we continue to treat scientific evidence as some sort of manufactured joke. 

Photography by Andy Wang.