Drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife extinction and mosquito-borne illness — the things that climate change models are predicting have already arrived there, [scientists] say.

That’s the subhead on a stunning L.A. Times piece, “What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia,” which opens starkly:

Reporting from The Murray-Darling Basin, Australia — Frank Eddy pulled off his dusty boots and slid into a chair, taking his place at the dining room table where most of the critical family issues are hashed out. Spreading hands as dry and cracked as the orchards he tends, the stout man his mates call Tank explained what damage a decade of drought has done .

“Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It’s devastation,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men — big, strong grown men. We’re holding on by the skin of our teeth. It’s desperate times.”

A result of climate change?

“You’d have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise,” Eddy said.

You have to have your head stuck in the bloody sand, or just be a consumer of big media — see CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story “” never mention climate change.

This LAT story is one of the most powerful pieces of climate change journalism to appear in a major U.S. newspaper. It is the climate story of the decade, literally — and if we don’t reverse course soon, it will be the story of the century, if not the millenium — for America and the world.

Australia is the the driest inhabited continent on earth, with a fragile ecosystem, which makes it the canary in the coal mine for how global warming will create Dust Bowls in the SW and around the globe (see “Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in”: Are the Southwest and California next?).

It is, sadly, probably too late to save much of Australia.  But it is not too late to save the U.S. Southwest and other key regions in or near the subtropics.  We can still prevent the worst.

Two years ago, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” on our current emissions path “” levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California.  The Bush Administration itself reaffirmed this conclusion in December (see US Geological Survey stunner: SW faces “permanent drying” by 2050.)

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I’ve been blogging for the ThinkProgress Wonk Room for a little more than a year now. This weekend — one in which both the Christian and Jewish faiths contemplate the miracle of life and renewal — has provided me an opportunity to step back from the daily onslaught of political strife and think about why I continue to fight.

To deal with global warming progressively requires commitment to progressive values: fairness, opportunity, and honesty. Fairness means that those who have benefited the most from our pollution-based economy bear the greatest responsibility in building a clean energy economy. Opportunity means giving those who have benefited the least hope for a better tomorrow. Honesty means bridging the divide between political reality and actual reality.

In reality, moving to a green economy is necessary to save the planet.

The window for directing this nation on a sustainable path is rapidly closing. The disintegration of the global thermostat –- the Arctic ice cap, the world’s glaciers, the Antarctic ice shelves –- is accelerating. Wide swaths of the world, from Australia to Texas, are in droughts that may be the beginning of permanent desertification. Sea level rise is accelerating. The acidifying oceans are absorbing less carbon dioxide. Increasingly powerful forest fires not only destroy ecosystems but emit stored carbon. Even if global pollution goes down tomorrow, weather disasters, heat waves, hurricanes, floods, the oceans themselves will continue to rise for decades. Global boiling is destroying Tuvalu and the polar bear — and it’s also already struck New Orleans and Cedar Rapids.

Weather disasters are the al Qaeda of climate change. The September 11th attacks cost this nation $80 billion and thousands of lives. This nation woke up to the threat of international terrorism, fueled in part by the global dependence on Middle East oil. Hurricane Katrina cost this nation $80 billion and thousands of lives (and displaced a million). We haven’t woken up.

Building a green economy takes a trillion-dollar shift in resources that has the potential to radically reform the power structure in the United States. A green economy involves moving from capital-intensive energy to labor-intensive energy — instead of McMansions heated by giant power plants financed by the Bank of America, it’s homes greened by insulators and solar panel installers, linked on a smart grid. By making work pay instead of pollution, the economy will thrive but established interests will be forced to change.

Like health care and labor reform, limiting carbon pollution threatens the corrupt business model of the corporate right. So there are 2000 full-time corporate lobbyists, and multimillion-dollar campaigns — run by ACCCE (coal interests), ASWF (right-wing financiers), AFP (pollution industry), COC (corporate right), and NAM (heavy industry) — with one message: we can’t afford change.

In reality, they’re the only ones who can afford the status quo — energy costs and polluter profits rising, oil drilling and oil dependence rising, greenhouse emissions and climate disasters rising, poverty and inequity rising, wages and jobs and health declining.

So for those who fear that we can’t afford change, yes we can. And we must.

E&E News PM (subs. req’d) has some updates on White House efforts to get the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster for a climate bill:

The White House is reaching out to moderate Senate Democrats in an effort to build support for legislation to sharply curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, a White House energy and climate aide said today.

“We have had a number of conversations with the staffs of some of the moderates,” said Joseph Aldy.

“We have reached out to them to understand what are the key issues they would like to see addressed in an energy and climate package, and making sure that as we move forward we are not missing any of the important voices in the debate,” he added.

At the same time, the administration continued to send signals that it understood the inevitable — no climate bill that starts with 100% auction in the first year could get the necessary votes in both houses:

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