If only the extreme weather knew the extreme nicknames we give it

Rain bombs, heat domes, atmospheric rivers, polar vortexes. Everyone used to talk about the weather without doing anything about it, as Mark Twain’s friend Charles Warner complained. But now we do do something about it. We make up new words for it.

What excitement is in store for this summer? Not just a hot one, or the once-novel but now old-hat El Nino. This year, the Southern Oscillation Index is sending warnings. We have unusual variances in the Indian Ocean Dipole, maybe a Walker Circulation Breakdown. There’s every chance of a Climate Whiplash. We think we can tame nature with terminology. Meanwhile we send our prime minister to console the Pacific with words, as if we can talk hard realities into our control.

Experience generates new language, but one of the hazards of experience is how easily you can mistake anecdote for evidence. Anyone over a certain age can remember how hot the summers used to be, how violent the hailstorms, how destructive the floods and cyclones. Look at archival footage from the 1980s and see how crispy-brown our Januaries were.

We pinned names to events. The Black Summer of 2019 was preceded by Black Saturday (2009), Ash Wednesday (1983) and Black Friday (1939). In 52 years Darwin has not been hit by anything like Cyclone Tracy.

Next month, it will be 32 years since Sydney was shredded by the 1994 mini-hurricane that has never since been exceeded in its destructive force.

It’s consoling to think that you, personally, can name so many extreme weather events that you can utter, in the face of disaster, “It was ever thus.” You might use your wisdom to denounce a “climate cult” and declare that warnings about human-induced climate change are “ahistorical and implausible”. You’re old enough, having spent all of 60 or 80 years on this planet, to remember that these things come and go in cycles. Those Pacific nations? You remember when Al Gore said they’d all be underwater, and they’re not, are they?