Planning to “adapt” to 3°C of warming risks normalising catastrophic outcomes – and avoiding the urgent task of deep, immediate decarbonisation.
David Spratt
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Silence facilitates climate disinformation, and the government is complicit
As extreme weather intensifies and disinformation spreads, the government’s silence on climate change is undermining public understanding and action.
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Former defence leaders say oil wars threaten our security, and climate change deepens the danger
In full-page statements in the national media today, 19 Australian security practitioners and former Defence leaders have published an Open Letter on why Australia’s dependence on fossil fuels is a critical economic and security vulnerability. (more…)
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Authoritarianism is undermining climate action – and time is running out
The global rise of authoritarianism is weakening climate governance just as warming accelerates and tipping points draw near. This failure now poses a direct threat to our future. (more…)
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Climate hot takes for 2025
Scientific evidence in 2025 showed global warming accelerating faster than expected, while emissions continued to rise and climate policy lagged dangerously behind physical reality. (more…)
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A tribute to Ali Kazak
I had the privilege, together with the late Frans Timmerman, of working with Ali a good deal from the mid-1970s till the mid-1990s in producing the newspaper/magazine Free Palestine, and as national secretary of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign for a decade. (more…)
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Australia’s climate assessment fails on sea-level rise risks and vulnerable communities
Australia’s first climate risk assessment has the stated purpose of guiding adaptation responses to protect people and property in a heating climate, but what happens if the reality is worse than some low-ball projections of future risks? (more…)
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New National Climate Risk Assessment – more omission than commission?
The Albanese Government will soon deliver Australia’s first domestically-oriented National Climate Risk Assessment, which was due in December 2024. (more…)
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Faster than forecast, accelerated warming creates a climate time-bomb for the Albanese government
The physical reality of accelerating climate heating and faster-than-forecast impacts have mugged climate policymaking, which now needs to be rebuilt with up-to-date scientific observations and understandings, and a risk-management approach that gives particular attention to the most-damaging, plausible high-end scenarios. (more…)
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Ali Kazak and the transformation of the politics of Palestine in Australia
It was with great sadness that we learned of the passing on 17 May of Ali Kazak, at the age of 78. Over five decades, Ali dedicated his enormous energy to building understanding and support for Palestine, the land of his birth. (more…)
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2025 is the crunch year in the scientific contest about accelerated warming
The record-breaking warming years of 2023 (1.5°C) and 2024 (1.6°C) were above expectations and shocked scientists. (more…)
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Government refuses to articulate ‘frankly terrifying’ security risks
The Albanese Government has jammed itself by trying to not talk about the greatest threat to Australia’s future, but has now opened itself to the charge of playing politics with security issues. (more…)
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Climate and security risks? Shhh, says the Albanese Government
The Los Angeles fires have again demonstrated the need for a steely-eyed approach by governments to climate risks, ensuring that the assessment of those risks is up-to-date, considers the plausible worst-case scenarios, and is made widely available so the public understands what we are facing. (more…)
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A year of scientific shock and awe
In 2024, faster than forecast change taught us new lessons about the climate system. In 2025, worse is to come, as political shock troops steer a course towards climate-driven societal collapse, writes David Spratt.
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Climate policy is on a collision course with physical reality
There is a chasm in outlook between the global climate policy-making elite with their focus on distant goals, market solutions and non-disruptive change, and activists and key researchers who see the world hurtling towards climate breakdown and social collapse. (more…)
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America first, Earth last: Australia’s security now needs a climate focus
There’s a new, stark reality we must face: Donald Trump’s victory will push the Earth system further down a perilous path towards three degrees Celsius of global warming or more, with catastrophic consequences for human civilisation and the environment. (more…)
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Entering an age of social and security consequences
“I will not sacrifice Great British industry to the drum-banging, finger-wagging Net Zero extremists,” was the headline The Sun in London gave to a piece last week by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, defending the expenditure of 22 billion pounds on the cargo cult of carbon capture and storage. This headline captured the delusion at the core of climate-policymaking around the world: that there is an economically non-disruptive path out of the climate emergency. There isn’t. (more…)
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The Albanese government has created a climate vacuum, and we will pay the price
Whilst the global impact of climate disruption is rapidly accelerating, and the last, record-breaking year has been extraordinary, public concern in Australia about it is waning, and the government bears much of the responsibility. (more…)
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Shock as warming accelerates, 1.5°C is breached faster than forecast
If there was shock and awe last week when the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that global average warming over the last twelve months — February 2023 to January 2024 — had exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C), it was likely because too many people had succumbed to the predominant but delusional policy-making narrative that holding warming to 1.5–2°C was still on the cards. (more…)
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Towards an unliveable planet: Climate’s 2023 annus horribilis
The heat and extreme climate records of 2023 shocked scientists. So where are we heading? Given current trends, the world will zoom past 2°C of warming and the Paris climate goal of limiting warming to 1.5-2°C. (more…)
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Humanity’s new era of “global boiling”: Climate’s 2023 annus horribilis
For climate change, 2023 was an “unprecedented” year, “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” and “scary” and “frightening”. And that was what climate scientists said! The UN Secretary General called it the year in which humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of “global boiling”. (more…)
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COP28 a “tragedy for the planet” as Stockholm Syndrome took hold
Up to 100,000 people — most of whom derive their professional status and income from climate-related politics, advocacy and business — flew into Dubai for the COP28 annual global climate policy-making event, the Conference of the Parties under the United Nations’ climate convention. And the result? (more…)
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The Paris Agreement is dead. Australia must change its strategic priorities
As COP28 flounders, the Paris Agreement is dead, and the imperative for emergency action has never been greater. This demands a fundamental change to Australia’s strategic priorities. (more…)
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COP-out: Why the petrostate-hosted climate talkfest will fail
After a succession of record-breaking months of record heat including 1.8°C in September, global warming for 2023 as a whole will likely tip 1.5°C, with 2024 even hotter as the effect of the building El Nino is felt more fully. Already hundreds of thousands have died and millions displaced, primarily in countries least responsible for climate change. The annual economic cost globally is in the hundreds of billions. (more…)
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Did Penny Wong really just suggest China is an ‘existential’ threat?
The Australian Government has a big problem with its security narrative. Preparing for a putative war with China is the nation’s top security priority, while the government’s knowledge of the growing existential threat of climate disruption and their security consequences remains a closely-guarded secret. (more…)
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Fatal mistake: Intergenerational report misleads on climate risks
The Australian Government’s public analysis of climate risk, our greatest threat, is dangerously misleading. The Intergenerational Report 2023 (IGR) is a prime example. By dumbing down the implications of climate change with simplified economic models, the IGR and similar reports are institutionalising the global failure to face climate reality. (more…)
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Are we failing to see the wood for the trees on climate risks?
Extreme climate impacts are exploding in this year’s Northern Hemisphere summer. We urgently need to understand how climate disruption will affect Australians: their safety and well-being in the face of ever-more-extreme climate events, the viability of public and private infrastructure, communications and logistical systems, challenges to food security, and much more. (more…)
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Are Australia’s climate–security risks too hot to handle?
The Australian government is keen to talk about defence, big submarines, China and national security. And renewable energy, big batteries, electric cars and big hydrogen. But put the two together — security and climate — and an odd thing happens. (more…)
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IPCC: a gamble on earth system failure
The fact that the IPCC incorporates in its core business risks of failure to the Earth system and to human civilisation that we would not accept in our own lives raises fundamental questions about the efficacy of the whole IPCC project. If low risks of failure are taken as a starting point, “net zero 2050” becomes not a soundly based policy aim, but an appalling gamble with existential risk. (more…)
