I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

Through romanticising the extremes of Australia’s climate and geography, so foreign and exotic to the sensitivities of northern Europeans, Dorothea Mackellar’s 1904 poem “My Country” has penetrated deeply into the national psyche.

It’s a particular touchstone for conservatives, who historically have attempted to construct a distinctively “Australian” identity around ideas of a rugged (white) masculinity – independent, strong and unyielding in the face of a hostile natural environment – conquerors and colonisers with a larrikin streak.

In the context of contemporary debates around climate change, the poem is enjoying something of a renaissance. Tony Abbott, when asked in early 2014 about the record-breaking heat wave across much of Australia, responded that such events “are just part and parcel of life in Australia”. We are, “to use the famous phrase, a land of droughts and flooding rains”.

Unfortunately, the very real and damaging impacts of global warming are unlikely to be countered by even the most steadfast and romantic of rhyming quatrains.

Scribbling while Australia burns, we might say. And if a recent joint report by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology is anything to go by, burn it will.

The report, based on the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of Australian climate data, shows we could be headed for a temperature rise of more than 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Significantly, owing to Australia’s large and arid land mass, this figure is higher than that for the world as a whole.

Five degrees might not sound like much. The impact, however, would be devastating. Longer and more severe droughts, and the accompanying bushfires, would pose an increasing threat to lives and livelihoods. Destructive weather events such as cyclones, storms and floods would be more frequent.

Among the most significant consequences would be the death of the Great Barrier Reef. Coral bleaching and increasing ocean acidity associated with global warming are already having a serious impact. Live coral coverage has declined by around 50 percent in the past 30 years. A 2014 report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said the outlook for the reef was “poor, has worsened since 2009 and is expected to further deteriorate in the future”.

According to the CSIRO researchers, even if, via rapid and drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, we manage to limit temperature rises to only 2 degrees, the reef is in serious trouble.

“Droughts and flooding rains” might well be the stuff of poetry but the death, for example, of 173 people in the Victorian bushfires of 2009, or 38 in the Queensland floods of 2010-11 make for a rather gloomier picture.

While politicians pose for the cameras in control centres, emergency service workers are left to wage the battle for people’s homes and lives – more often than not on a budget slashed to the bone by the very same politicians posing as stoic leaders, standing firm in the face of adversity.

Of course, the fact that big business and the political leaders who serve them have no interest in seriously tackling global warming has nothing to do with poetry. It is, rather, all about that more mundane and thoroughly material issue of profit.

Dorothea Mackellar found romance in our “ragged mountain ranges”. The captains of industry see only dollar signs.