Australia must rethink leadership in the Trump era – Starting with climate

 by Adm. Chris Barrie (Rtd), first published at The Diplomat 

We live in a rapidly evolving risk landscape. The conflict in the Middle East has not resolved and its effects will last for months, if not years. The Iran-U.S. clashes have transformed into something that strains supply chains, reduces crop yields, rewrites regional politics, and concentrates attention on near-term stability at the expense of the big global challenges.

The decisions by the Trump administration to retreat from the commitments and frameworks of global climate action have created a leadership void that is felt most acutely not in Washington or Brussels, but in the low-lying islands of the Pacific, in the Australian communities already contending with extreme fire seasons and more intense floods and cyclones, and in every boardroom and cabinet room where 30-year infrastructure decisions are being made in the face of deepening uncertainty.

Could Four Billion People Die at 3°C?

by David Spratt, first published at Safe Climate Australia

The claim that four billion people could die in a 3°C warmer world has become a powerful climate narrative. But what does the science actually support, and where does evidence end and speculation begin?

The proposition that four billion people or more would be dead if — and more likely, when — global warming reaches 3 degrees Celsius (°C) has gained some currency, mainly due to the 4DB (four billion dead) website and associated activities.

Now, that is half the current global population, and on current warming trends of 0.3-0.35°C/decade, the world will hit 3°C around 50 years from now, perhaps earlier, in part because there is little prospect of a rapid decline in fossil fuel emissions.  So that’s a mind-blowing average of 80 million people a year dying due to climate impacts every year from now to 2075? Is that realistic?

The number of greater than four billion dead at 3°C first appeared in a 2025 report on Planetary Insolvency: Finding our balance with nature, published by the UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the University of Exeter.ing our balance with nature, published by the UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter.

Climate disruption, not China, is the key security threat facing Australia

by David Spratt

Download the submission

Climate disruption, not China,  is the key security threat facing Australia is the main message in the Safe Climate Australia submission to the AUKUS Public Inquiry.  This is the text.

Summary

• Climate disruption presents Australia’s greatest long-term security threat.
• AUKUS risks over-prioritising military competition over systemic climate risks.
• Climate impacts threaten food, water, infrastructure, health and regional stability.
• Security spending should better reflect the scale and certainty of climate risks.
• Australia needs a climate-first national security framework focused on resilience and prevention.  

Perfect recipe for food insecurity

by Neil Greet, first published at The Canberra Times 

The cost of living is at the centre of Australians’ concern and a major political battleground, but one of the biggest inflation threats is flying under the radar: a food-cost crisis brewing at the intersection of two current global events.

The first is the war on Iran that has cut global fertiliser supply by a third and doubled prices in some cases, the consequence being less planting of grain staples this year, and lower yields over the next year. Australia’s wheat harvest in 2025-26 is expected to be down by a quarter. Across Asia, it will also affect rice and other crop yields.

Avoiding 'worse-case' climate warming is big news. But is it true?

Claims that climate scientists have abandoned their most dire scenario have been widely misunderstood. While the highest emissions pathway is now considered unlikely, evidence suggests the climate system may still be tracking toward dangerously high levels of warming.

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Figure 1: RCPs and SSPs

Occasionally, climate science is big news. On 26 May, the New York Times headlined: “Why scientists retired the dire climate scenario used for over a decade”. A good story!

The Australian, true to form, went with “Climate doomsday scenarios just got a major rewrite”, and in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post it was  “The climate apocalypse? Don’t count on it”. There were a host of similar headlines.

Climate deniers and Donald Trump used an old playbook to claim scientific fraud (surprise!), but were called out, with ‘Trump twisted a climate debate beyond recognition’ and ‘Factcheck: Trump’s false claims about the IPCC and ‘RCP8.5’ climate scenario’.

“Don’t mention the climate!”

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Acknowledgment rather than denial of a crisis’s reality is the key to coping with it, but the 2026 Australian Government budget is a continuation of the Labor Government’s denial of the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions before the climate reaches a tipping point.

The 2026 budget speech was titled ‘Resilience and reform’. ‘Resilience’ – a very fluid term favoured by political communicators these days – was deployed 13 times, but the word ‘climate’ failed to appear even once.

This glaring omission reaffirms the government’s reluctance – seemingly intentional – to discuss climate change risks, as I have previously discussed in P&I.

Any sane foreign policy would put climate risks, not China, at centre stage

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Australia’s defence and foreign policy settings are focused on geopolitical rivalry, while far greater systemic risks – especially climate disruption – receive little strategic attention.

Blinded to the greater risks, the Albanese Government and the security commentariat have spent four, unrelenting years making the case that China is the biggest threat to Australia’s future.

Defence and foreign policy, encapsulated in the AUKUS agreement, tie Australia to a nation currently engaged in what the historian Timothy Snyder calls “Superpower Suicide”: “a systematic undoing of American power by Americans” in which “fighting a war for no reason we can name, losing it, and covering our defeat with genocidal and apocalyptic propaganda” had led to ”rapid and catastrophic decline as the result of specific choices in the last year”.

Energy security is now inseparable from national security. Australia has options, but they’re being neglected

 by Adm Chris Barrie & Ian Dunlop, first published at The Sydney Morning Herald 

Camels flee a burning oil well during the first Gulf War, Kuwait, 
1991. Photo: Steve McCurry

Just as the war on Iran dents oil production, drives up petrol prices and ricochets around the global economy, Thursday’s fire at the Geelong oil refineries causes even more domestic pain. The disturbing energy vista only heightens the need for a far faster transition to renewables and widespread electrification.

The fragility of fossil fuel supply lines and our reliance on them is now obvious, yet the newly released defence strategy downplays the strategic consequences of Australia’s fossil fuel dependence. The strategy fails to fully recognise how Australia’s expanding coal and gas exports are perpetuating a cycle of fossil fuel addiction, undermining our long-term security and claims to regional leadership.

Has climate policy-making gone completely off the rails?

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Has climate policy-making gone right off the rails? That question pops into my head with increasing frequency these days, most recently when I glanced at a Guardian headline: ‘Daunting but doable’: Europe urged to prepare for 3°C of global heating.

The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change has a new report,  Strengthening resilience to climate change recommendations for an effective EU adaptation policy framework,  and the story quoted Board member Maarten van Aalst saying that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit… It is a daunting task, but at the same time quite a doable task. It’s not rocket science.”

"Sustainable" aviation? Qantas's climate policy is heading for a crash landing

by Mark Carter

Rising fuel costs and disrupted flight paths, a consequence of the unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran by Israel and the US, are not the biggest risk to Qantas’s business. 

Its dependence on fossil fuel is. The harsh reality Qantas faces is that in less than five years it must cease flying completely if it is to stick to its stated aim of helping prevent 2ºC or more of global warming. 

Nothing confirms the level of risk associated with Qantas’s "sustainable aviation" claims more than this threat to its ongoing operation, exposed in a new report from Flight-Free Australia, “Brace for impact! Qantas’s climate crash flightpath”. 

Silence facilitates climate dis-information, and the government is complicit

By David Spratt

A shorter version of this article was first published at Pearls and Irritations.

The US–Israel war on Iran and another oil crisis has again highlighted the need for Australia to accelerate the transition to renewable energy and electric transport and sustainable industrial processes, and to phase-out the coal and gas export industries. At the same time, anti-renewable-energy and climate-change-scepticism dis-information campaigns have made inroads in Australia. 

In the face of a barrage of climate dis-information, silence from those who should be countering it constitutes an own goal: a boost to the dis-information campaign. 

As the Senate Select Committee inquiry on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy approaches its final report, questions must be asked about the Australian Government’s response to climate dis-information.  Is it using its unparalleled media power to educate Australians about accelerating climate change and the urgent need for a complete renewable energy transition? 

Fossil fuel dependence and climate disinformation are now Australia’s biggest threats. Power must be wrested back from big tech, say former defence leaders

Download the report

A former Chief of the Australian Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie Retd, has called for legislation to regulate, and if necessary break up, the digital-tech monopolies that are now enabling an information war threatening Australia’s future and undermining its ability to respond to escalating climate disruption.

Monopolies and duopolies can exercise dangerous market power and political power, including in technology, in the media and social media, and in communications. Anti-trust laws were first enacted in the USA in 1890, and resulted in companies like AT&T and Standard oil being broken up. 

Adm Barrie, a member of the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, was launching a new report, “The climate disinformation war: How to fight back for Australia’s democracy and security”.

This comes as the Federal Parliament’s Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy is due to release its final report this week, reflecting increasing attention on the role of disinformation in shaping Australia’s climate and energy policy.

Former defence leaders say oil wars threaten our security, and climate change deepens the danger

By Ian Dunlop and David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations  

View the Open Letter

In full-page statements in the national media today, nineteen 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.  

Published in the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald, the letter’s signatories include Admiral Chris Barrie, the former Chief, Australian Defence Force, Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO, Deputy Chief, Royal Australian Air Force (Retd), Cherl Durrant, the former Defence Director of Preparedness & Mobilisation, and Brigadier Michael Bond CSC & Bar, Australian Army (Retd). 

 They say that protecting Australians by accelerating the renewable energy rollout is now a security priority: 

 “We call on the Australian Government to accelerate the transition to clean, domestic energy. Rapidly expanding renewable energy — including wind, solar, batteries, hydro and renewable fuels produced in Australia — and electrifying our transport system with home-grown energy will strengthen Australia’s security, reduce exposure to global energy shocks and help limit the escalating risks driven by climate change.”

Major conflicts in Ukraine and in the Middle East — including the Suez crisis, two Arab-Israeli wars, the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war of 1991 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the USA  — have all caused energy supply and economic shocks. The consequences are rising food prices, higher transport costs and potentially severe economic disruption. Today, with the Israel/US/Iran conflict, we face another oil shock, possibly far worse than its predecessors. 

Authoritarianism is undermining climate action – and time is running out

 

Climate emergency briefing: Impacts, risks and key actions 
for Australia in the age of authoritarianism 
is published today by the Breakthrough 
National Centre for Climate Restoration. 

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

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.

Authoritarianism is stalking nations and global institutions, often allied with climate scepticism and denial. This has weakened climate governance, most notably in the United States. In Russia and the Middle East oil and gas producers, climate denial-and-delay and authoritarianism co-mingle.  And climate barely rated a mention at Davos this year.

Climate hot takes on 2025

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

• ClimateGenn podcast:  2025 In Climate Review: AMOC, Overshoot & Emergency Briefings with Guest David Spratt

Scientific evidence in 2025 showed global warming accelerating faster than expected, while emissions continued to rise and climate policy lagged dangerously behind physical reality.

Climate warming is a field of fast-changing physical realities – in many cases beyond scientific expectations – and gob-smacking new flood and heatwave and fire extremes, month after month, enhanced by a heating climate. And we are now ending a year when climate denial reached new peaks in the American Presidency and within our home-grown Liberal-National-Party coalition.

Fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are expected to increase by 1.1 per cent in 2025 to reach a record high; the global average concentration of CO2 rose by 3.5 parts per million which was the largest increase since modern measurements started in 1957; and it is projected that fossil fuel emissions by 2050 will be barely lower than today, according to the 2025 Production Gap report (see diagram).  In fact, both oil and gas supply are projected to continue rising till 2050.

Leading from behind: How governments and advocates in Australia avoid the new climate reality

 

Taken together, governments now plan even higher levels of coal production to 2035, and gas production to 2050, than they did in 2023. Planned oil production continues to increase to 2050. Source: Production Gap report 2025

by David Spratt

[This is an extract from Climate catastrophe: Is rapid cooling now essential?, published by Arena.]  

‘To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticise power, because there is no basis on which to do so’, wrote Timothy Snyder, a historian of Europe and fascism, in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017). ‘If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights’, he added.

And one of those great spectacles is climate politics, and the fossil fuel industry’s deep pockets.

According to Minister Chris Bowen, climate is a good news story of wind, solar and batteries, and jobs, clean hydrogen and Australia as a clean energy superpower. Ask him about faster-than-forecast physical impacts, accelerating warming and imminent tipping points, and he will respond that Australians don’t want bad news or climate fear. The pattern is very clear in Bowen’s speeches, media and parliamentary performances (Spratt, D., ‘The Albanese government has created a climate vacuum, and we will pay the price’, Pearls and Irritations, 25 July 2024).

Australia’s climate assessment fails on sea-level rise risks and vulnerable communities

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

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?

Australia has just released its first-ever National Climate Risk Assessment, and some big numbers drew fairly predictable media coverage: First climate risk assessment finds 1.5m Australians at risk from sea level rise by 2050, No Australian spared and Apocalyptic report a ‘wake-up call’ on climate impacts: PM.

The global heating emergency and preventing 2°C by 2040: What's the plan?

 by David Spratt

We know where we are heading: towards a planet that will be unlivable for most people, as the human systems built up over centuries collapse. This is not news.  Nor is the evidence that we have reached 1.5°C and that, with accelerating warming, the world will hit 2°C around 2040. 

On present indications — with the fossil fuel giants and petrostates on the offensive — emissions will decline only slowly to 2050, as a number of reports on the "production gap" have indicated.  

Yet by 2°C or more, and perhaps even before then, there is the prospect of a "Hothouse Earth" scenario, a threshold in which a cascade of system changes makes warming self-sustaining, leading to conditions hotter than any experienced over the last few hundred thousand years by modern humans.

So cooling the system is must now be a key task, and that is the focus of coming online conference: The global heating emergency and preventing 2°C by 2040: What's The Plan? organised by the The Healthy Planet Action Coalition.

Podcast: Climate risk realism and the case for cooling to a livable planet

 

Listen to the podcast

by David Spratt

Recently I had the opportunity to join Arjana and Kathy from MEER podcasts to discuss climate risk realism and the case for cooling to a livable planet. We cover climate risk, tipping points, and the case for surface-based, and reversible cooling alongside deep decarbonization.

You can list on:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTQ-xjgtA5E
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/10RnCFsCUJrUqJksynlPKM  
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meer-podcast/id1735135001
• RSS: https://rss.com/podcasts/meer/2223406 

Chapters:
00:00 Intro & state of the climate 
09:23 Timelines, policy realism & trade-offs 
17:38 Risk, overshoot & stability 
26:25 Cooling options & evaluation 
35:20 Try this 
37:36 Myth vs Measurement 
42:17 Closing & resources 

MEER (surface-based cooling) develops frugal, reversible, surface-based cooling to reduce heat stress and balance Earth’s energy—alongside emissions cut:  https://www.meer.org/ 

 

 

 

 

 

A climate-first foreign policy is essential for Australia and regional security

Adm Chris Barrie (Rtd) launches the report. Parliamentarians attending the launch and supporting the report include MPs Sophie Scamps, Nicolette Boele, Monique Ryan, Allegra Spender, Kate Chaney, Helen Haynes, Zali Steggall and Andrew Wilkie, and Senators David Shoebridge and David Pocock.

  

by Australian Security Leaders' Climate Group, first published by Pearls&Irritations

A group of high-profile Australians, including Admiral Chris Barrie, have released a critical new foreign policy plan in the wake of climate change.

For too long, government policy processes have left climate action to energy or environment ministries. That separation is no longer viable. Climate change is an existential threat that demands a whole-of-government — and whole-of-foreign-policy — response.

Such a response should recognise that climate disruption is a key expression of the breakdown of the Earth’s complex physical-biological systems and of the human systems which rely on them.

Decision-makers should recognise that climate change is only one among a number of existential threats which now confront humanity as a result of our unsustainable management of the planet, all of which must be addressed, though climate arguably requires the most urgent action.