The climate war we have to have

Blitzkrieg, when we discover it won’t just be a gentle linear warming, but rather will involve instances of dramatic, unexpected, lightning-fast shifts.

Triage, which we’ll have to apply to many species as habitats are wiped out; and also to farms and businesses, and even whole communities.

Power imbalance, when we see how puny the empire of humans really is when it goes up against a planet’s climate.

The war analogy is being used with calculated intent to shock people everywhere out of their comfort zone. It is designed to penetrate our cocoons, getting inside our air-conditioned castles and plasma-screen lives, to tell us loud and clear that a great enemy is massing on our borders.

The language of war is the best we have to capture the massive scale of the problem, and to drive urgency in responding at equally massive scale. The 3rd Degree, the strategic space between 2C and 3C of warming, defines our challenge as climate war skirmishing gets under way. In this context, we have to be ready to throw out all of the current orthodoxies - such as regarding the American or Australian lifestyle as non-negotiable, or excluding pollution from the cost of energy - and re-think how we run the nation.

As some countries have embraced in times of war, a government of national unity could be one option, while without doubt we’ll have to elevate social and environmental sustainability to equal or greater status as that enjoyed by the economic kind.

Finally, in a war it’s also vital to know your enemy. That’s the trickiest part of all on the climate front. Ultimately the enemy is the face each of us sees in the bathroom mirror every morning, and our own energy-intensive, high-consuming, wasteful lifestyles. Each of us has a voice, a vote and a wallet. We better start deploying them to get politicians and business leaders acting at speed and scale commensurate with the threat.