You may have been expecting fireworks, first-footing, haggis and other Celtic fare in my first Digression for a while, but no, it’s a Doomsday analysis.
I don’t mean Doomsday as in the Marvel comic character; look instead at the Doomsday Clock, a harbinger of global catastrophe. The world’s atomic scientists have adjusted the time of the clock (founded by Albert Einstein in 1945), 17 times since 1947. The members of the Science and Security Board, deeply worried about the deteriorating state of the world, set the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight in 2019 and at 100 seconds to midnight in 2022. The best we could do was 17 minutes to midnight (in 1991).
The SASB will reveal the 2025 Doomsday Clock time in Washington, DC on January 28, 2025. In so doing, the team will consider multiple global threats, including; the proliferation of nuclear weapons, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, the Russia-Ukraine war, Israel-Hamas war, Israel-Hezbollah conflict, bio-threats and the continued climate crisis.
Bob & Winne’s curtailed honeymoon
The world is in as parlous a state as it was when my parents – Bob and Winnie, journeyed to Scotland’s fabled west coast Isle of Skye for a honeymoon in early September,1939. The honeymoon was cut short by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war against Germany.
Dad’s skills as a baker and cook were at the top of a list of ‘must haves’ for the British government of the day. He was elevated from Reserve status to regular army duties in double time. Private Wilson to you.
Perhaps I exaggerate by making comparisons about Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and today’s conflict-ridden world. Or not.
I spent a couple of heatwave days locked in the home studio (it faces west), finishing a Doomsday song for Generation Beta. If you didn’t know, babies born between 2025 and 2039 are Gen Beta. Whatever they want to call them, this next generation (and Alpha that came before them), will probably grow up with a grudge against their parents’ generation and the ones that came before. From their perspective, we pillaged the planet, mostly for material gain. As a result of damage done over 200+ years, climate change has run amok.
If you want some insights from Gen Alpha, this (lengthy) opinion piece in The Guardian does not hold back.
The majority (97%) of actively publishing climate scientists still agree that humans are causing climate change. I got that stat from my research assistant Al (well, AI looks like Al, doesn’t it?).
Digressing just a little, did you know that the saxophone parts on Paul Simon’s hit You Can Call Me Al were programmed on guitar synthesisers by Rob Mounsey.
My pal AI also tells me that 99% of peer-reviewed literature on climate change says it is human-induced.
Yet in 2020, Australia was ranked third in the world on a table of climate denier countries (topped by the US at 12%)
A University of Canberra survey conducted in 2020, not long after the Black Summer bushfires, found that Australian news consumers were far more likely to believe climate change was “not at all” serious.
The Conversation’s report on the survey of 2131 people found that 15% don’t pay attention to climate change news.
Of the 40 countries in the survey, Australia’s 8% of “deniers” was more than double the global average.
A recent Pew Research Center survey on global threats found that whether you believe climate change is a major threat depends on your political views.
Scepticism rules in the US, where 85% of voters who lean to the left thought climate change to be very serious; on the right of politics, only 22% agreed.
As I wrote this, Doomsday arrived early for some residential suburbs in Los Angeles, burnt to the ground by unseasonal and out of control wild fires.
In Australia, 91% of those who place themselves on the left side of the political spectrum say climate change is a major threat, compared with only 47% among those on the right. In the share market world this would be called ‘talking to your book’. That is, politicians acknowledge climate change as a threat, yet appease business interests by backing new coal mining and oil and gas projects.
Despite those trends, at least 10 countries in the Pew Report have changed their tune dramatically in recent years as floods, cyclones and other climate change events have crippled towns and cities.
President 47 And The Doomsday Clock
As President 47 prepares to take over the Oval Office, we all wonder just what will replace former President Biden’s policy of backing Israel’s armed offensive against Arab nations.
The most worrying sign of the Middle East conflict escalating is the mass importation of cannon fodder. This derogatory term describes troops regarded as expendable. It was most used to describe Australian and New Zealand innocents abroad during WWI. They were sent to the front line to fight in trenches, where survival was rare and dysentery more common.
The Russian-Ukraine war, which dates from 2014 but got more serious in 2022, took on a different hue in late 2024.
Russia imported 10,000 troops from North Korea, a secretive state from which no verification of facts is ever offered. Sources including NPR, the BBC and the Washington Post say the troops sent to the front have limited training and experience in front-line warfare. Al Jazeera reported in late December that 1,000 North Korean troops had been killed and 2,000+ soldiers injured on the Kursk front line.
But what does all this have to do with us folks Down Under? Quite a lot, as we are allied to the US and by extension, Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas/Gaza. Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong have walked back their too-early pro-Israel statements, but the damage is done.
Fair to say we would become a fancied takeover target in any world war or Doomsday scenario. Just as the late John Marsden imagined it in Tomorrow When the War Began, Indonesia (or China or India), would have no trouble invading Australia using barges and four-wheel drive landing craft.
Despite the US establishing a large Marine presence in northern Australia, our capacity to retaliate against mass invasion is questionable, nuclear submarines notwithstanding.
Not that it will come to that – nuclear warheads and the dodgy people at the top will bring any escalation to a rapid end. In the meantime, more ordinary people will be flushed out of their homes and businesses to continue life as refugees and asylum seekers.
Sad to say, Australia’s new laws relating to those who come by boat leaves no room at all for a future here.
As Kasey Chambers once sang: “If you’re not pissed off at the world then you’re just not paying attention.” (from the song Ignorance and the album Barricades and Brick Walls).
Kasey wrote the tune in 2001 and 24 years later keeps on rolling out new music and blunt opinions. My editor recommended Kasey’s 2024 biography “Just Don’t Be a Dickhead”. The publisher has asterisked the title, even though 9 out of 10 streaming dramas freely use far more offensive words.
If this Digressions essay and the accompanying song carry any hope at all, it might be that Kasey’s book title become a universal cry for fair and reasonable discourse, at all levels.
Take five then have a listen to a song on the same topic.
