In December 2019, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is blanketed by an ochre curtain of muck. Smoke from out-of-control bushfires burning tens of kilometers away has shrouded the city. It's an unforgettable sight, but the smoke invades all the senses differently. I can, for the first time, taste climate change. It's ash and soot and heat and illness. I can feel it settle in my lungs as I inhale. I feel it again when I cough up the ash into a balled fist on the train home.

I struggle to kick the image of the "This is fine" dog out of my head throughout the summer. The animated dog, star of countless internet memes, sits in a room engulfed by flames. The room fills with smoke. Everything begins to melt. It refuses to do anything about it. The dog merely chimes "This is fine," sips on its coffee and sublimates. Its eyeballs begin to seep out of its head. 

Two years later I'm reclining on a moss-free rock at the very edge of the end of the world, just a few kilometers east of Australia's Casey Station in Antarctica. I can hear the distant squawking of Adelie penguins and, occasionally, the splash they make as they porpoise across the surface of the water. The faint smell of guano flitters in and out of my nostrils when the wind switches direction. I'll take that over ash any day.

The sound of the Adelies eventually makes way for a steady, rhythmic dripping. From my rocky seat, just meters from the water's edge in Newcomb Bay, I can hear the continent slowly disappearing into the ocean. Drip. This, I'm later told by a member of the station, is a routine sound during the Antarctic summer. Sit and listen long enough and you'll hear the ice melting; hang around and you'll see rock-strewn hills emerge from layers of snow as the sun beats down. This isn't climate change you're hearing and seeing.