Pearls and Irritations

No one knows what was on the mind of Labour leaders discussing emission limits while approving near one hundred new coal mines and gas wells, thus betraying future generations and eroding the life support systems of the planet.

Smirking with satisfaction for achieving government at last, albeit at the cost of adopting conservative climate and nuclear policies, the ALP went back on their previous commitment to fight climate change, as expressed by Kevin Rudd: “Climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation”.

Nowadays the last thing governments and major parties are following is what climate science requires, the single most critical factor society has ever faced. But while the media is humming with the words “climate change”, institutions have become populated by politicians, economists, statisticians and social scientists to the near-exclusion of climate scientists – the only people who understand the processes in the atmosphere/ocean system. Thus, while linear projections of climate changes dominate media news reports, the science increasingly indicates abrupt changes in climate trajectories. 

With few exceptions the proposed reductions in carbon emission are restricted to national boundaries, allowing large scale exports, yet the spread of carbon gases throughout the planetary atmosphere is not always acknowledged by the authorities, pretending as if invisible boundaries exist between domestic and exported greenhouse gases, amounting to open-ended export of lethal gases threatening entire populations.

Current concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (>420 parts per million) are already at a level which triggers amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans, requiring major draw-down atmospheric CO₂ and methane, at costs estimated at hundreds of $billions. It is hard to see how sequestration can succeed unless humanity diverts the $trillions invested in conventional and nuclear weapons, which threaten another type of atmospheric calamity, a nuclear winter, where even a small nuclear war can transform the entire planet.

This points to another factor triggering major climate change: With the proliferation of nuclear weapons world-wide a combination of greenhouse and nuclear-induced climate changes have become  increasingly likely. Armed with up to 40 nuclear Tomahawk Cruise missiles equipped with multiple warheads the Virginia class submarines constitute a lethal nuclear war platform whereby the arsenal of a single submarine can potentially annihilate major industrial centres and large population concentrations of an adversary. The firing of these missiles and retaliation from the surviving nuclear forces of the opponent virtually guarantee a global nuclear conflagration, including clouding of the atmosphere and obliteration of agriculture on a time scale of up to decades.

There were times when prophets promised the people peace on Earth, now the powers-to-be and their media mouthpieces are promising the world a nuclear holocaust between the rival empires in three years to come. Previous wars often erupted from territorial, economic, political, religious or ideological disputes, now the US vs China + Russia conflict is taking place between essentially private enterprise systems, repeating “sapiens’” insane obsession with war for the sake of war. 

A nuclear war would terminate such insanity. Is it too late to hold pre-emptive Nuremberg trial for those who poison the planetary atmosphere and promote nuclear war?

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