At the time of the COP26 summit held in Glasgow, Kim Hill speaks with journalist Tom Doig and veteran scientist Dave Lowe about the climate crisis. A highlight of 2021 Word Christchurch.

Kim Hill speaks with journalist Tom Doig and scientist Dave Lowe about the climate crisis. (A highlight of the 2021 WORD Christchurch Festival)

Listen to the conversation

During the course of a wide-ranging conversation, Tom Doig and Dave Lowe read from their recent books about their own experience of climate change in action.

Tom Doig reads from Hazelwood:

They told us it was going to be bad, and it was bad.

We got up early in the morning, soaked all the tea towels and some spare sheets and strung them up over Johnny's vege garden. Then we sat in the kitchen and waited for the sun to rise. It got hot, then hotter, then impossibly hot. We watched as Johnny's tomato and kale and snowpeas drooped, shrivelled and died. It was over C40˚. It was ten in the morning.

It was 2009. It was one more Saturday in Melbourne.

As Johnny's garden cooked, I stayed inside and tried to watch DVDs, but it was too hot to concentrate. If I opened the front door, the air was a searing full-body punch. A friend texted me. I walked down the road to the shops, and my thongs melted off my feet.

By 3:04pm on 7th February 2009, it had reached C46.4˚. That was ten degrees hotter than the human body. That was unliveable.

I went to a barbecue that night. It was too hot to cook, so on the ride over I bought a couple of big bags of salt and vinegar chips. When I got there, everyone else had done the same. We sat around drinking beer, eating a fine range of salted snacks, and asking each other if everyone had heard from our friend Jenneke. She was in rural Victoria, and no-one could get through to her. Jenneke was a volunteer firefighter along with her Dad Vica.

That night she escaped death, just, when Vica drove their fire engine off the road, up over a kerb, through a chain-link fence into the middle of a cricket oval moments before the Maryville fire engulfed the town. As they hid in the fire truck with blankets over their heads, adrenaline buzzing in her ears, Jenneke watched houses and gas tanks exploding on all sides. She watched a car driving round slowly, trying to find a safe place. She doesn't know what happened to that car.

"I had the strong feeling of being very, very isolated," she said. "We could listen to the truck's radio, but couldn't radio out ourselves as all the radio towers had burnt down. The radio described all the fires round the state, but said nothing about Marysville. It was this strange feeling that the whole town was burning up, and no-one outside even knew."…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details