Climate change demands we adopt a war footing

Australia, along with all other countries in the world, should be on a war footing.

However, that is not to confront each other, rather to gather our resources and build resilience into our communities for what will be the biggest single challenge humanity has ever faced.

A decade-long drought for south-eastern Australia followed by record rainfalls of which many Goulburn Valley people felt the impact of both were little more than an entrée to the main event.

The resolute skeptics of human-induced climate change continue their doubt-mongering even though conclusive findings by some of Australia’s most respected organizations, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), point to significant and dangerous changes in our climate.

Both those organizations have considered what is happening to earth’s atmosphere and by implication our climate and subsequently our weather, is unquestionable attributably to human activities.

Honourary president of the United Kingdom’s Campaign AgainstClimate Change, George Monbiot, said: "Climate change is perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered. Its impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, and any famine we have confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering."

Monbiot’s observation about what we are facing is as grim, if not worse, that what the world experienced at the beginning of World War Two.

It was then that all the great powers of the world took control of their economies and directed industry to make as many weapons as possible, as fast as possible, to kill as many people as possible and win the war.

Right now, the call to action is equally urgent, but for a different reason.

When the US entered World War Two in December 1941, government expenditure exploded and GDP (now understood to be an inadequate measurement of a nation’s wellbeing) doubled in three years.
The Soviet Union, Germany and Britain all did the same. This rearmament boom did not bankrupt the governments. Instead, it created jobs and lifted the whole world out of the Great Depression.

The same science that
puts froth on our
beer illustrates that
climate change is real.

That sweeping activity energized the people of the world to kill and destroy and now we need to do the same thing, but contrarily to save lives and protect property.

Individual efforts are honourable and need to be acknowledged, but only a society-wide, government backed initiative will create sufficient societal movement to help us endure.
That is alarming and catastrophic-like talk, but it is real and climate change being human-induced demands we behave differently and trust the science; the same science that puts froth on our beer.

Our lives of froth and bubble are about to end and although decidedly unhappy about that, we should, unquestionably, prepare as if for war.