We’re already at war, but Albanese the appeaser is blind to it

This much we know: the war has entered a new and terrifying stage. Since April, a full-scale offensive has been underway in Canada, where the enemy has visited devastation on some 15 million hectares of territory, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee, including entire regions by air. So fierce, so utterly one-sided is the assault that its toxic consequences have for months painted the skies of the United States’ east coast apocalyptic orange, and even inked their way into the faraway horizons of Spain and Portugal. 

Further south, schools from Minnesota to Missouri to Mississippi have closed over the past week as yet another blistering, continent-size siege blankets the country, killing untold thousands and making a mockery of the nation’s heat records. The same, of course, is true elsewhere, from the Middle East to China, Japan and so too southern Europe, where our foe continues to fuel firestorms that recast scenes of the sublime into chiaroscuro hellscapes. 

It’s our new quotidian nightmare, though one, the sober lesson of paleoclimatology tells us, far more unsparing than we can possibly imagine. 

In a nod to the gathering force of the enemy, similar assaults have been wielded against much of South America over the course of the region’s winter, where normally congenial conditions have given way to temperatures that partake in the surreal and absurd. The heat, at times exceeding the high 30s, has been so disorienting, so severe, that seals and other marine life have been sighted making their way to the beaches, only to die in the extremities. The winter heatwave is one of the most “extreme events the world has ever seen,” said climatologist Maximiliano Herrera — one that’s “rewriting all the books”. 

Except, of course, the continent’s experience in this sense is far from singular. As Maui and its people burned, as gargantuan hail and eerie flooding savaged northern Italy, as remnants of a freak hurricane unleashed historic floods in California’s otherwise blistering Death Valley, and as flooding — veritably biblical in scope — has submerged parts of the Horn of Africa, China, Japan, Pakistan and, most recently, Austria too, an invisible wildfire has plundered half of the earth’s roiling oceans, reducing large swathes of its iridescent coral rainforests into white graveyards of grief.  

Our foe’s weapon of choice, neither secret nor surprising, is untrammelled heat in all its obscene, off-the-charts power. And though novel search-and-rescue missions have ensued in some areas, success has proven frighteningly elusive. 

“We are,” said the pioneering climate scientist James Hansen two weeks ago, “entering a new climate frontier.” One not seen in a million years, and one which explains the disabusing of the present moment in all its terrible grandeur. The last time our fickle ice-age planet contended with comparable levels of atmospheric carbon was, after all, more than 3 million years ago during the lost and ancient world of the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were more than 30 metres higher and temperatures some 4 degrees hotter. 

Such insights may or may not explain why winter sea ice equivalent in size and scope to Western Australia has mysteriously failed to materialise in Antarctica, the site of one of the oldest frontiers of the war. Why it is perhaps unsurprising that great tracts of the Greenland ice sheet melted thousands of years ago in comparable or cooler conditions than today. And how, when cast against this backdrop, the truly hair-raising analysis that the great North Atlantic current could collapse within decades, if not years, is far less outlandish than appearances suggest.

In reality, as author and columnist for The New York Times David Wallace-Wells has so exquisitely put it, the unvarnished facts of the current moment simply are hysterical. And together they conspire to spell one incontrovertible truth: that, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are in the midst of a global war, and one which we’re rapidly losing as the enemy — that invisible wisp of carbon and methane — organises a civilisation-scale collapse on our horizon with runaway global warming. 

Indeed, the situation today is such that even with immediate systemic action, it’s now likely those in their 60s might yet bear witness to 2 degrees warming in their lifetimes, allowing the panoramic heatwaves, freak storms and flooding of 2023 to survive in their memories as among the milder of this age. Two degrees warming, it bears emphasising, would see the world careen past at least nine climate tipping points, beyond which mass crop failures, epic if not permanent droughts, and the preludes to the coming “water wars”, “killing fields” and global famine awaits.  

In all this, death and starvation would shadow at least half the world’s population, and hundreds of millions would find themselves irrevocably displaced.   

On this rendering, and as the world approaches 3 degrees warming — expected as early as the 2060s — the footings of civilisation are destined to crack and crumble as economic collapse, outright chaos and armed conflict between countries over resources shift from the margins of the possible to the present. 

It’s from this vantage point that the Albanese government, for all its pre-election pro-climate rhetoric, is revealed for the appeaser it is. Rather than confront these horrifying realities with sound climate policies, as promised, and enhanced efforts at global cooperation, the government finds itself utterly preoccupied with China’s rise and maintaining American hegemony, going so far as to accuse those who oppose its polarising support of the half-a-trillion-dollar AUKUS deal of being dangerous, if not delusional, “appeasers”.

At the same time, its gaslighting of the nation over the sincerity of its climate position continues with abandon. As recently as two weeks ago, the prime minister insisted on the ABC’s 7.30 the government had “addressed” the climate challenge by taking it “seriously”, never mind its suite of empty and off-track targets, its carbon credits scam, its approval of new fossil fuel projects, its shallow and unreal analysis of climate change in the Intergenerational Report, its political links to the fossil fuel lobby, and, not least, its refusal to release even a redacted version of the climate threat assessment completed by the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) late last year. 

“The only logical conclusion I can come to is that the ONI report directly contradicted the government’s line that China is the greatest security risk to Australia,” David Spratt of the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration told me. “And so, the government has entered into a form of climate denial and secrecy in order to justify AUKUS and its broader foreign affairs position.” 

The problem, Spratt went on to say, is that denial of this kind quickly transforms into a refusal to identify with any precision the real and immediate threats facing the nation, and therefore derails attention from the country’s true security priorities.  

“We have to be, in an intellectual sense, brutally honest about the risks,” he said. “And where there’s secrecy, you can’t even get to step one, which recognises climate change as a real, existential threat.”

It’s such denial — this unashamed greenwashing and deception on the part of Albanese — that constitutes one of the most pernicious and dangerous frontiers in the climate war. Where the government should be consulting with the nation, it condescends; where it ought to be taking steps to protect the nation, it obfuscates and blinds the nation, taking away what armour it might have; and where it ought to be minimising the level of suffering the climate war is destined to summon, it instead exacerbates it, throwing fuel onto the fire. 

In this sense, perhaps it’s altogether too charitable to describe Albanese and his warped priorities as a form of climate appeasement. Perhaps his stance is more akin to those “highly civilised” German bombers George Orwell wrote of in 1940 during the blitz — those he said were “flying over, trying to kill [him]”.  

This is especially so, given the combined weight of the world’s climate commitments, if met, would nevertheless condemn the world to at least four degrees warming by the century’s end; and if we were to fail, up to eight degrees warming and possibly beyond. A level of warming, in other words, unseen for some 20 million years.