“America, China, Russia and India are led by men so wrapped in their own political survival that they’d rather blow up the bedroom than hop between the climate-change sheets.,” writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.  

“EVERYBODY complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” So said Charles Dudley Warner in a quote commonly misattributed to his good friend Mark Twain. 

The same goes for “politics makes strange bedfellows”. Oddly enough, these two little quips, taken together, will decide the future of humanity.

It is now clear that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were too sanguine in their predictions of the chaos that even the 1.5-degree increase in global heating would wreak upon the species that caused it. 

They either underestimated the effect of the feedback loop that increases the problem exponentially, or they merely provided advice instead of rousing the populace to action. Scientific politesse trumped bellowing rage.

Moreover, they failed to join the dots where the rolling pandemics, economic disruption and rising nationalistic hysteria, would all follow the collapse of manageable weather systems. 

That, alas, is what is now staring us all in the face. The Arctic ice is melting at an increasing rate, the methane is rising from the great Russian tundra, the melting snow and ice from the Himalayas to the Antarctic are not just raising sea levels, they are rearranging the oceanic currents and winds that result in wild inundations like the ones we’re suffering right across eastern Australia.

And this is just the beginning.

Our feeble international response is so pathetic that it’s reflected in the first of Mr Warner’s quips. The second is a work in progress. 

The four great polities that have within their power to act in concert to at least slow the feedback to manageable proportions – America, China, Russia and India – are led by men so wrapped in their own political survival that they’d rather blow up the bedroom than hop between the sheets. 

Even Joe Biden’s America, which used to accommodate both sides of the political spectrum in an admittedly spacious double bed, has split into two singles – one red, one blue – and never the twain shall meet. 

So, where do we go from here?

Curiously, I think the answer lies in the very extremity of the climate changes that are bedevilling the world and threaten to become existential. 

We have seen the response in miniature time and again as the fires bear down on townships or the floodwaters rise to unimagined heights. When that happens, communities transform themselves to become mutually supportive entities. Where once they were niggling neighbours, now they’re roaming Samaritans willing to put their own lives in danger to rescue the very bloke they used to feud with.

And at the official level, local, state and federal authorities put aside their differences for the common good. The day is coming when, together, they will recognise that SES volunteers can no longer handle the crisis; a new professional organisation of civilian emergency workers will be created to deal with the disasters. And our economies will be reorganised to incorporate the Disaster Force into a major industry.

Next step is the realisation that we might not be in bed together, but we’re all in the same boat; and the disaster industry will be upscaled to an international force whose operations will ignore the man-made borders that used to mean so much. 

At such a time, the pretensions of small men such as Putin, Trump, Modi, the mad mullahs of Iran et al will seem simply pathetic as they’re washed away in a flood of human sensibility. 

Well, that’s my dream anyway.

robert@robertmacklin.com