This is our climate “zero point”

by David Spratt

I want to explore why climate policymaking has reached a “zero point”. 

This term comes from Slavoj Zizek’s 2025 essay of the same name, in which he asks how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and confront despair without collapsing into it. He describes the “zero point” as the ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups, a concept taken from Lenin.

Climate policy-making has failed in its core task, which was to stop dangerous climate change. The evidence, the destruction, is accumulating around us, at a pace that has shocked scientists. We have arrived at the rock bottom, though most policymakers seem loath to accept this proposition. 

Climate advocacy is dominated by the politics of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, where petrostates have the power of veto, and nominally science-based outcomes are politically mediated and scientifically reticent, underestimating the pace and scale of the transformative action required. 

Key components and outcomes such as the Paris Agreement, “net zero by 2050”, carbon budget overshoot and similar constructions are an artifice of poor approaches to risk, rather than a reflection of Earth System conditions. 

Government needs to act urgently on greatest security blind spot, say former senior defence leaders

 

Australia is lagging behind traditional allies and failing to take the climate threat seriously, according to a distinguished group of former senior security officials, in an open letter published in metropolitan newspapers today . Signatories to the letter include former Defence Force Chief, Adm. Chris Barrie, and Air Vice-Marshall John Blackburn, former Air Force Deputy Chief.

Australia faces a summer of deadly heat, with an unprecedented “super” El Niño underway forecast to bring record global temperatures over the next year. Climate disruption, extreme heatwaves and drought threaten Australians’ health and livelihoods, our energy and transport systems, water security, crops and livestock, and food prices.

The Australian Government has said little about these threats. A 2022 Office of National Intelligence report on climate and security risks remains hidden. There has been no systemic policy action.

So what is the goal of climate action? Serious question!

 by David Spratt 

There can be no excuse for not knowing that 1.5°C of warming would create a disastrous outcome, but few have chosen to say so. Indeed, up to the 2025 COP in Belém, the large Australian advocacy and umbrella organizations were actively advocating for 1.5°C, for example that “the 1.5°C threshold represents an ethical and moral boundary”. 

What is the morality in saying 1.5°C is an appropriate threshold when the World Health Organization concludes that more than 200,000 lives have been lost to the "silent killer" of extreme heat in Europe since 2022?

Right now, there is very strong evidence for the coming collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which transports tropical ocean heat to the north-east of North America and western Europe. AMOC is slowing down and now rapidly approaching a tipping point for its collapse over a hundred years.  This would be a going-out-of-business scenario for north-west European agriculture, monsoons that typically deliver rain to West Africa and South Asia would become unreliable, and huge swaths of Europe and Russia would be devastated by drought. As much as half of the world’s viable area for growing corn and wheat could dry out. 

The coming Super El Niño could push a hotter world towards food crisis

by David Spratt

A super El Niño could intensify heat, drought, fire and crop losses across Australia and Asia, while fertiliser shortages raise the risk of a wider food crisis.

The world is heading into a burst of global heating with a developing El Niño that is unprecedented in the observational record. Scientists were shocked when global average warming exceeded 1.5°C in 2024, but now they are estimating 2027 could be around 1.7°C, and a single month in the next year may reach 2°C.

 Figure 1: Global average warming is projected to be 1.76°C in 2027 as the full impact 
of the El Niño is experienced -The Climate Brink

This is extraordinary, with profound impacts for Australia and the region. An El Niño shifts jet streams, alters rainfall and raises global temperatures, and a ‘super’ event would sharply disrupt global weather, increasing the risk of extreme heat, droughts and flooding, and reducing crop yields. And all this is exacerbated by the ongoing war on Iran, which has cut fertiliser use and production, driving down crop yields.

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).