It's hard to focus on anything but COVID at the moment but accelerating global heating is an even bigger problem - caused by the same over-population, over-consumption, urbanisation and deforestation which are driving a new age of pandemics...

...which is explored in my book launched this week: https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/p/body-count-paddy-manning). The book is based on interviews with Australians who've lost family or loved ones to extreme weather events, disease and other causes linked to warming.

It sounds grim but in travelling from Launceston to Townsville, Kinglake to Grantham, I've been privileged and inspired to meet and hear from some of the extraordinary Australians who've lost the most to climate change...their stories are both tragic and heroic.

I'll be talking about all this at 6pm on Thursday night with public health expert Dr Helen Haines MP, Member for Indi in an online "Meet the Author" event hosted by ANU/Canberra Times (register here: https://www.anu.edu.au/events/virtual-live-event-in-conversation-with-paddy-manning) and in other events over the next few weeks.

“I still remember saying to her…if a fire ever gets into that forest they’ll never stop it, it’ll be like a nuke going off” David Tener, at the memorial for his wife Alison, who died in their home at Duffy – across the road from pine plantations - during the 2003 Canberra fires

“'Stay or go' was thought to be the best plan . . . that was a plan that was designed for a different level of threat than what was there on that day. The climate had changed” -- Dale Ahern, whose mother Charm and father Leigh died at their home at Steels Creek on Black Saturday

“Dad was acutely aware of the hazards and intensity of the fires. He’d been saying that for the last ten years.” Justin Lang lost his father Dick and brother Clayton, who both died trying to flee in the Kangaroo Island bushfires in 2020, at the peak of Australia’s ‘Black Summer’.

Among all the people who died with an indirect attribution to this catastrophic summer season, Imogen Jubb says "my Mum is likely one of them.” Her elderly mother Annemarie - pictured here with her husband of 47 years, Peter - had a heart attack as bushfire smoke choked Canberra.

“[I’m] just saying to other families, make sure your elderly mother, or mother-in-law, father, or whatever, is more cautious ... when they go out in the heat” – Evelyn McLeod, in her western Sydney home, holds a photo of her father Chuck, who died in a heatwave in 2018.

“Take my brother first” Jordan Rice, who drowned with his with mother Donna when their car was trapped in the Toowoomba floods of 2011. The tragic story broke hearts around the world & father John Tyson - pictured at Donna and Jordan's grave - brought up two surviving sons alone

“We looked across the paddock and all you could see was a bloody house coming, in the water. I said, “Well, I’m out of here.”” Danny McGuire stands by the memorial for his wife Llync-Chiann, and two kids Garry and Jocelyn, who drowned when floods hit Grantham in 2011.

“[Dad] had no chance. He was 72 years old. I’m kind of lucky that the body got stuck where he did or he would’ve been washed into Newcastle harbour.” Michael Wilson, holding up the service medals of his late father Brian, a Vietnam vet who died in the shock Dungog flood of 2015

“I’m proud of the way he went, and he would be rapt himself. He went out swinging!” – Ron Foster, on the spot where his father Trevor was swept away while trying to save their sheep at his home in Ouse, during the 2016 Tasmanian floods

“I don’t know what caused it. To me, it was rain plus-plus.” Mark and Gerard ‘Bear’ Allford, at the memorial for their mother Mary, who drowned when the Mersey River flooded without warning at Latrobe in 2016.

“How many times do you hear people die by asthma?” Elsa Voong waited on the phone for an ambulance in Melbourne’s outer suburb of Mernda, as her husband Sam Lau collapsed in the thunderstorm asthma outbreak of 2016. Her two kids Jet and Julia hold a photo of their late father.

“I didn’t know anyone who didn’t like my wife. She was just a great person.” – Peter and Leonie Jackson on their wedding day at Avoca Beach on the NSW Central Coast. Leonie died in an outbreak of melioidosis - a tropical soil disease – when floods struck Townsville in 2019

“That’s what engineers do, they like to put things right, they like to fix things – and he could fix neither himself nor the environment” – Rosey Edgar mourns the 2012 suicide of her former husband, Andrew ‘Wilf’ Wilford, a former weapons systems engineer and climate activist

“Our people are now dying younger…right across my region it’s happening.” Muruwari and Budjiti man Bruce Shillingsworth, an artist, activist and educator from Brewarrina in western NSW, who describes the First Nations’ loss of water as ‘a second wave of genocide’

“It’s likely to be an extraordinary century and we’re going to have to have our wits about us to get through it.” The late ANU emeritus professor Tony McMichael AO, a global pioneer in the study of the health impacts of climate change, who died of influenza in 2012