The deafening silence in the Eye of the Hurricane

In the eye of the hurricane is a moment of calm and silence, before wild chaos and destruction resumes. Symbolically, the world now stands in such a place.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.”

Thus opens the 2024 State of the Climate Report, authored by such distinguished names as William Ripple, Johan Rockstrom, Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes and Stefan Rahmstorf.

Released in the same week as the third hurricane in a season barrelled into the US State of Florida, wreaking another $50 billion’s worth of havoc and sending millions fleeing for their lives, the report was greeted with stony indifference by governments world-wide.

Hurricanes are fuelled by warm seas. And warm seas are fuelled by coal, oil and land clearing, driving planetary heating. In the Caribbean it requires water temperatures of 26 degrees C to spawn cyclonic storms. This year they were 30.5 degrees – a gigantic heat engine churning out climate terror.

Not all governments are completely indifferent, however. Some are doing their level best to speed the disaster. In Australia, for example, the Albanese Government has so far approved 7 huge new coal mines, yielding 1.5 billion tonnes in fresh carbon emissions – and has 25 more queued up to go. To distract public attention from its climate treachery, the Australian Government is preparing for war with China.

Two years in a row, the desert nation of Saudi Arabia has been ravaged by floods, which tore through the cities of Mecca, Jeddah, Jizan and Medina. Saudi is the home of the world’s largest oil company, the state-owned $2 trillion Saudi Aramco, which has for two decades ranked as the world’s No 1 climate polluter. The heat deaths of 1300 pilgrims in Mecca in 2024 was a clear sign that Saudi Arabia itself may be uninhabitable before the end of the century. At the Grand Mosque a temperature of 51.8 degrees C was recorded. Meanwhile, Aramco has vowed to be the “last man standing” in world oil production.

In the US, the world’s second largest climate polluter, climate disasters have cost the nation $1.5 trillion in the past ten years. Yet both parties in the forthcoming presidential election are pledged to a fossil fuelled economy – one to “drill, baby, drill” while the other is supportive of record US fossil energy production. As a result, the US has been slammed by over 200 climate disasters in the multi-billion dollar range since 1980. Yet all those fleeing Floridians will return to their ravaged homes – and most will cast their votes in favour of more hurricanes.

The irony is that, in country after country, the senior miliary brass are warning their governments that climate constitutes the biggest security risk now facing any nation. And they are being steadfastly ignored by the political machine.

In Australia the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG) – a body of eminent retired military commanders, business people and defence academics – has told the government bluntly “Climate change now presents a grave, and potentially existential, threat to society and human security”. The Group’s chair, Admiral (retd.) Chris Barrie, added “The Climate Risk is recognised by catastrophic risk and security analysts as the greatest threat to civilisation.”

In a subsequent report “Too Hot to Handle – the Scorching Reality of Australia’s climate security failure” the Group gave the Australian Government a resounding “fail” in a report card on its performance in reporting on the climate security risk. It criticised defective methodology, enforced secrecy, a tokenistic approach, lack of public engagement and failure to recognise the scale of the threat in eight Government policy statements since 2022.

In particular, the Group accused the Government of hushing up a major report by the Office of National Intelligence on climate risk. The inference, that its findings have been supressed so the Government can freely pursue its game of appeasing fossil fuel corporates by opening new mines, was plain.

It would not be an understatement to say that a deep anger is brewing among defence experts, not only in Australia but globally, at the way western politicians are willing to burn the human future – by ignoring what is arguably the biggest threat since humans first emerged.

While the climate threat garners headlines the military, to its credit, is also starting to recognise a plethora of other threats, equally grave, which compound the existential crisis. In the words of the ASLCG “Catastrophic events include nuclear war, climate change, biosecurity including pandemics, and disruptive technologies such as AI.” It has now added ecological collapse.

The  World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risk Report found that more than half of those surveyed believe that the risk of global catastrophe is high or extreme over the next decade.

At a recent National Climate Security Roundtable hosted by the Group, Netherlands General Tom Middendorp, chair of the International Military Council on Climate and Security, added the depletion of key resources (like water) and food failures among the catastrophic threats now facing the world.

The Council for the Human Future’s recent Roundtable also listed global poisoning, overpopulation, rising social and economic inequality and the worldwide spread of lies as compounding the existential emergency.

Like many thinking citizens, the military are perplexed that so many political leaders are now ‘human crisis deniers’, steadfastly ignoring all the warnings by experts and the tested data provided by science.

Some claim that the political mind simply does not grasp the idea of ‘risk’ – or, rather, it sees risk as meaning “risk of my not being re-elected”, which in political calculus comes way ahead of a risk that could destroy human society.

Others see the $7 trillion tentacles of the global fossil fuels sector, fat from the subsidies it receives from governments, seizing the political steering wheel in democracies and autocracies alike. The fact that the UN climate Conference of the Parties has now been overwhelmed by representatives of the oil sector is proof enough that the real government of the Planet lies in a handful of greedy corporate boardrooms, not in any parliament or party plenum.    

Even the militaries of the world are powerless in the face of such overwhelming might. Indeed, they too, are largely beholden to it.

Thus we sit, in the illusory calm of the eye of the hurricane of human downfall, blithely awaiting the next blow. The science tells us, unambiguously, we are in “an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.”

There is no plan to overcome such a crisis in any country on Earth, or in the UN. There is not even a world agreement that humans ought to try to survive and mitigate these risks.

Which is why we need an Earth System Treaty – and a World Plan of Action

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