Climate insecurity - The real threat is staring us in the face

As if the climate emergency was not already bad enough, today’s revelations that the Australian Defence Force is concerned about the security implications of global warming only underscores the fiddle-while-Rome-burns incompetence of our federal government. This morning the ABC revealed documents showing the military warning of increased “sea-borne migration” due to warming, which could mean 100 million refugees seeking to come to Australia. Meanwhile, serving defence chief Angus Campbell has warned [$] that China might occupy Pacific islands abandoned as seas rise. Today it’s the ADF in the news, but just about every Australian institution is calling for urgent action to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees: the Reserve Bank, ASIC, the courts and the banks who have refused to fund Adani’s coalmine. Everyone, that is, except Australia’s denialist politicians and their media cheerleaders who seem determined to drive the country over a cliff.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on the USS Ronald Reagan. 

Last week David Attenborough told a British parliamentary inquiry it was “extraordinary” that climate-change deniers were in power in Australia, given we are “already facing having to deal with some of the most extreme manifestations of climate change”. As economist Ross Garnaut warned more than a decade ago, Australia’s large agricultural sector and a reliance on trade with developing nations in Asia, which are also put at risk by rising temperatures, makes it one of the most vulnerable countries in the developed world.

Read the story from The Monthly by Paddy Manning - “Climate insecurity - The real threat is staring us in the face.”