Scott Morrison’s remarkable complacency over Australia’s wildfires shows exactly how not to deal with the climate crisis

Editorial: No scientific paper, no protest, not even a speech by Greta Thunberg can make the case for action to save the planet more eloquently than the sheer graphic scale of these events

Eastern Australia is on fire. A state of emergency has been declared. The news footage of people losing everything and fleeing for their lives resembles scenes from a disaster movie.

It is a disaster, and a manmade one. It is driven by extreme weather conditions, in turn driven by the manmade climate crisis. Records for most and least rainfall have been broken, and meteorologists explain how the normal workings of winds and currents across the Indian and Southern oceans have been disrupted – and lit and fanned the flames. These unfamiliar changes are worse than freakish. They are entirely explained by the climate emergency and will become more permanent.

As a result, 18 people are dead, others injured and the loss of wildlife runs into hundreds of millions. Even before the bushfires spread to the forests and the seaboard, Australia was suffering a severe drought, as it has more often in recent years. Something like a fifth of the nation’s emblematic kangaroo population has been wiped out; the web has been inundated with viral videos of cute koalas begging for water.

No scientific paper, no international talking shop conference, no protest, not even a broadcast by Sir David Attenborough or speech by Greta Thunberg can make the case for action to save the planet more eloquently than the sheer graphic scale of events in Australia.

The dramatic images and stories being generated are powerful. They prove, were proof needed, how pitifully inadequate humanity is when nature turns against it. There is no possible amount of mitigation that can counter the serious, unpredictable, climate crisis. We cannot act after the event to, say, protect Bangladesh from permanent floods or the southern United States from savage tropical storms or sub-Saharan Africa from creeping desertification.

Despite the bravery of the Australian emergency services, they cannot guarantee the safety of Australians. The authorities are helpless and will grow more so as the heatwave continues and intensifies as their summer wears on. When the prime minister, Scott Morrison, turned up in small rural towns hit hard by the crisis, he had nothing much to say to the people there who feel so abandoned and afraid. Though they had plenty to say to him – and did so with rude Aussie frankness. Indeed, Mr Morrison’s remarkable complacency and a string of PR disasters show how not to deal with a global as well as regional emergency.

On one point though, Mr Morrison makes some sense, although the irony is bitter. Australia may mine coal, but its small industrial base is not burning the bulk of it. It is indeed China, India and the advanced economies of the world that are burning coal exported from Australia and are principally responsible for damaging the earth’s delicate balance.

That blame can be extended to the other climatic threats to life, from fires in Siberia the size of the EU, to the droughts in southern and east Africa, to recent floods across England.

On the broadest possible scale, the climate emergency is an example of what economists call the tragedy of the commons. In the past, the biggest polluters have not paid for the damage they’ve done to other peoples. Yet Australia today stands as a stark warning that western advanced economies too can be existentially threatened by the climate emergency.

The climate crisis deniers are fond of deriding the global climate emergency as something that affects only a few polar bears or some obscure species of Amazonian frog. It does affect them, but it also degrades the standard of life of every human being on the planet. Australia shows it to be so; it can only add to the international political pressure to change our ways.