Highlights - LESLEY HUGHES - Lead Author, IPCC 4th, 5th Assessment Reports - Biology Professor, Macquarie University

"Australia is generally considered one of the most vulnerable developed countries to the impacts of climate change, and I've been in the climate science space for more than 30 years, but I have to say this last month has been particularly confronting. We're seeing all sorts of tipping points that scientists have been warning about for decades and they are really real right now. I've never had such climate anxiety, and it's sort of new for me to be struggling with that because I think I've been pretty resilient to sort of eco-anxiety. Talking about averages all the time is a real problem in climate science because the temperature on any one day goes up and down a lot more than 1.5 or 2 degrees. So we have to keep working on relating those average global temperatures to the extremes that people experience in their lives on the ground where they live. We have to keep reminding people that that is the sort of thing that we are going to see more and more often. It isn't a one-off event. It's a message about the future."