David Spratt
David Spratt has been Research Coordinator for the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration (Melbourne) since 2014. He was co-founder of the Climate Action Centre (2009-2012). He blogs at climatecodered.org on climate science, existential risk, IPCC reticence, the climate emergency and climate movement strategy and communications, and is a regular public speaker.
David's recent articles
18 March 2025
Government refuses to articulate 'frankly terrifying' security risks
The Albanese Government has jammed itself by trying to not talk about the greatest threat to Australia’s future, but has now opened itself to the charge of playing politics with security issues.
15 January 2025
Climate and security risks? Shhh, says the Albanese Government
The Los Angeles fires have again demonstrated the need for a steely-eyed approach by governments to climate risks, ensuring that the assessment of those risks is up-to-date, considers the plausible worst-case scenarios, and is made widely available so the public understands what we are facing.
31 December 2024
A year of scientific shock and awe
In 2024, faster than forecast change taught us new lessons about the climate system. In 2025, worse is to come, as political shock troops steer a course towards climate-driven societal collapse, writes David Spratt.
3 December 2024
Climate policy is on a collision course with physical reality
There is a chasm in outlook between the global climate policy-making elite with their focus on distant goals, market solutions and non-disruptive change, and activists and key researchers who see the world hurtling towards climate breakdown and social collapse.
12 November 2024
America first, Earth last: Australia’s security now needs a climate focus
There’s a new, stark reality we must face: Donald Trump's victory will push the Earth system further down a perilous path towards three degrees Celsius of global warming or more, with catastrophic consequences for human civilisation and the environment.
9 October 2024
Entering an age of social and security consequences
“I will not sacrifice Great British industry to the drum-banging, finger-wagging Net Zero extremists,” was the headline The Sun in London gave to a piece last week by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, defending the expenditure of 22 billion pounds on the cargo cult of carbon capture and storage. This headline captured the delusion at the core of climate-policymaking around the world: that there is an economically non-disruptive path out of the climate emergency. There isn’t.
25 July 2024
The Albanese government has created a climate vacuum, and we will pay the price
Whilst the global impact of climate disruption is rapidly accelerating, and the last, record-breaking year has been extraordinary, public concern in Australia about it is waning, and the government bears much of the responsibility.
13 February 2024
Shock as warming accelerates, 1.5C is breached faster than forecast
If there was shock and awe last week when the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that global average warming over the last twelve months February 2023 to January 2024 had exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (C), it was likely because too many people had succumbed to the predominant but delusional policy-making narrative that holding warming to 1.52C was still on the cards.
25 January 2024
Towards an unliveable planet: Climates 2023 annus horribilis
The heat and extreme climate records of 2023 shocked scientists. So where are we heading? Given current trends, the world will zoom past 2C of warming and the Paris climate goal of limiting warming to 1.5-2C.
24 January 2024
Humanitys new era of global boiling: Climates 2023 annus horribilis
For climate change, 2023 was an unprecedented year, absolutely gobsmackingly bananas and scary and frightening. And that was what climate scientists said! The UN Secretary General called it the year in which humanity crossed into a new climate era an age of global boiling.
18 December 2023
COP28 a tragedy for the planet as Stockholm Syndrome took hold
Up to 100,000 people most of whom derive their professional status and income from climate-related politics, advocacy and business flew into Dubai for the COP28 annual global climate policy-making event, the Conference of the Parties under the United Nations climate convention. And the result?
22 November 2023
COP-out: Why the petrostate-hosted climate talkfest will fail
After a succession of record-breaking months of record heat including 1.8C in September, global warming for 2023 as a whole will likely tip 1.5C, with 2024 even hotter as the effect of the building El Nino is felt more fully. Already hundreds of thousands have died and millions displaced, primarily in countries least responsible for climate change. The annual economic cost globally is in the hundreds of billions.
26 September 2023
Did Penny Wong really just suggest China is an existential threat?
The Australian Government has a big problem with its security narrative. Preparing for a putative war with China is the nations top security priority, while the governments knowledge of the growing existential threat of climate disruption and their security consequences remains a closely-guarded secret.
28 August 2023
Fatal mistake: Intergenerational report misleads on climate risks
The Australian Governments public analysis of climate risk, our greatest threat, is dangerously misleading. The Intergenerational Report 2023 (IGR) is a prime example. By dumbing down the implications of climate change with simplified economic models, the IGR and similar reports are institutionalising the global failure to face climate reality.
6 August 2023
Are we failing to see the wood for the trees on climate risks?
Extreme climate impacts are exploding in this years Northern Hemisphere summer. We urgently need to understand how climate disruption will affect Australians: their safety and well-being in the face of ever-more-extreme climate events, the viability of public and private infrastructure, communications and logistical systems, challenges to food security, and much more.
3 May 2023
Are Australias climatesecurity risks too hot to handle?
The Australian government is keen to talk about defence, big submarines, China and national security. And renewable energy, big batteries, electric cars and big hydrogen. But put the two together security and climate and an odd thing happens.
29 March 2023
IPCC: a gamble on earth system failure
The fact that the IPCC incorporates in its core business risks of failure to the Earth system and to human civilisation that we would not accept in our own lives raises fundamental questions about the efficacy of the whole IPCC project. If low risks of failure are taken as a starting point, net zero 2050 becomes not a soundly based policy aim, but an appalling gamble with existential risk.
19 May 2022
The Dominoes are falling fast. We face a climate emergency
The belated release of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authoritys Reef snapshot: summer 2021-22 has exposed the Federal governments insistence that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is not endangered as the lie it has always been.
27 September 2020
When climate risks are so high, short term actions matter most
Many carbon budgets are based on an under-estimation of warming to date, and the path of future warming. And all such budgets either ignore, or underplay, the loss of carbon from long-term stores such as the melting of permafrost which are already active processes.
12 July 2020
As warming approaches 1.5C, a carbon budget for the Paris targets is delusional
There's a lot of talk about how much carbon budget (new emissions) are allowable to keep global heating to the Paris target of 1.5C. The reality is that over the last year, global average warming was already close to 1.5C, based on a true, pre-industrial baseline.