Climate Scientists Make a Desperate Plea to 2025 Election Voters

The crucial election for climate change action

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
– Isaac Asimov

The 2025 federal election in Australia is shaping up to being a critical election for our future – not just our prosperity and wellbeing but possibly for our very survival. The challenge for the wise voter is to find a way through the confusing mishmash of messages to make sense of what is really happening and what should happen with regard to climate change action.

Although the cost of living has been hurting households and is top of mind for many Australians, polls show that climate change action is still important. The Climate of the Nation report released in November 2024 identifies that “50% of Australians think the Australian Government is not doing enough to prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change.”²

David Spratt, an Australian climate policy analyst, reminds us that cost of living is linked to the costs associated with climate change, as anyone shopping for food or renewing an insurance policy already knows. Hurricane Helene in September 2024 caused 219 deaths and a damages bill of $US79.6 billion.³ The losses from the January 2025 L.A. wildfires could range between $US76 billion and $US131 billion. 28 people died and 16,251 homes were destroyed.⁴ Besides the deaths and economic losses, there is the psychological toll through the disruption of lives.

Joelle Gergis, a leading Australian climate scientist, paints the picture that most Australians are experiencing:

For most people just trying to get on with their lives, thinking about climate change feels too complicated and overwhelming, especially in an era of war, pandemic and financial pressure. But the problem is that governments around the world are making fateful decisions right now that will shape our planet’s future. Meanwhile, most Australians aren’t aware how bad things are and how much worse they will get. But when we tune out, we squander the most powerful thing we have to influence our society: our vote.⁵

Voting wisely

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Dr Dilip Jeske is an American neuropsychiatrist and author of ‘Wiser: The scientific roots of wisdom’. He has published a number of influential papers detailing the neural activity associated with wise behaviours and decision-making, including voting wisely.

So how do you go about making a wise choice when voting?

Reflect! In his book, ‘Wiser’, Dilip Jeste says reflection “gives the brain time to pause, to untangle and sort through the myriad observations and experiences that wash over [you].”⁶

Listen with an open mind to what others are saying and experiencing. As Jeste notes, “You cannot be wise if you lack empathy and compassion—for others and for yourself. Compassion and self-compassion should be balanced.”

Compassion is particularly important when considering the effects of climate change. Climate change is a global issue not just a local problem. Think of the world to come for your children and grandchildren and for the many people in the world who will be deprived of food, shelter and livelihoods as we continue the way we’re heading.⁷

Jason Brennan, a political scientist at Georgetown University and author of The Ethics of Voting, has a message for the “rusted-on” voter who unthinkingly votes for the same party year after year: Don’t vote! In Australia, with compulsory voting, that means you must make an informal vote:

[I]f citizens do vote, they must vote well, on the basis of sound evidence for what is likely to promote the common good. They must make sure their reasons for voting as they do are morally and epistemically justified. In general, they must vote for the common good rather than for narrow self-interest. Citizens who lack the motive, knowledge, rationality, or ability to vote well should abstain from voting.⁸

When I first read that I thought it was a bit harsh. But on reflection, I must admit I have consistently voted throughout my life for my “true blue” team which I believed was best placed to deliver to my self-interest, which is basically prosperity and safety for me and my family. The only time I have consciously researched issues properly was in the lead up to the 2022 federal election, which I described in my blog post, The Wise Voter and the ‘Voices of’ Independents.⁹

When I look back to the times when I was a scrutineer on election night for the Liberal Party, I used to think the pile of informal votes were wasted votes. Maybe these were smart people after all to realise they couldn’t figure out the best candidate for their vote. The ones who definitely should not vote are those who use a pin to pick their candidate.

As a starter then, here are some questions to ask yourself as a responsible voter: Is the Government delivering what you, your community, the nation and what the international community needs? What are the gaps and how can they best be addressed? Which party puts into action the advice of climate scientists?

Let me help a little further by a brief review of the current state of affairs – the climate change reality.

The climate change reality

Australia is in peril, and yet the consequences of a warming planet on our sunburnt country are still poorly understood by most people outside of the scientific community, let alone by our government.
– Joelle Gergis, 2024

It was the heading of the article in May 8, 2024 issue of The Guardian newspaper that first got my attention: “World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target: Planet is headed for at least 2.5C of heating with disastrous results for humanity, poll of hundreds of scientists finds.”¹⁰

When I first read about the results of a survey of top climate scientists on what they believed global temperatures could rise to, I was shocked. I shouldn’t have been; stories had been bobbing up every so often for years warning us that our future was in jeopardy unless we took decisive action on climate change. But this wasn’t a message from one scientist, this was views of hundreds of the leading climate experts.

This prompted me to do some research to try to understand the basis for such statements like these in The Guardian article:

Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.
“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” said Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”¹¹

We have already reached 1.1°C and we can see the effects of this warming. It is now likely the 1.5°C threshold will be exceeded as soon as 2030 or 2035.¹²

If exceeding 1.5°C occurs in the next 5 to 10 years, it highly likely that by 2100 the average global temperatures will be in the ranges feared by the climate scientists unless drastic climate action measures are undertaken. A 2.5°C increase is a distinct possibility.

Joelle Gergis, a lead author on the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, goes further. She believes there is a 90 per cent chance that the continuation of current climate policies will result in 2.3°C to 4.5°C of global warming by the end of century, with a best estimate of 3.5°C. That is a truly devastating possibility.¹³

The effects of the increases in temperature will become more devasting as each level is reached:

At 1.5C, the ‘climate benchmark’: Heatwaves and storms intensify, tropical corals die off and tipping points for ice sheet collapses and permafrost thawing may be triggered.
At 2C: The brutal heatwave that struck the Pacific north-west in 2021 would be 100-200 times more likely. The increases in direct flood damage around the world doubles at 2C.
At 2.7C: Two billion people would be pushed outside humanity’s “climate niche”, i.e. the benign conditions over which the whole of civilisation arose over change to in the past 10,000 years.
At 3C: Cities including Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Miami and The Hague would end up below sea level.
At 3C and above: The impact of climate shocks in one place will cascade around the world, through food price spikes, food and water shortages, broken supply chains, and refugees by the millions.¹⁴

A frequent criticism of negative doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change¹⁵ is the claim they leave people without hope.¹⁶ The above scenarios are not doomsday scenarios but climate change reality.

While some individuals can contribute in their own way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by, for example, switching to an electric vehicle and installing solar panels, governments have to main role in facilitating the reduction of greenhouse gasses.

Government responses to the Paris Agreement on climate change

Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.
– Abraham Lincoln

Under the Paris Agreement of 2015, world leaders have stressed the need to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century. To achieve this goal, countries had to commit to reducing greenhouse gasses (GHG) levels. Iran, Libya, and Yemen were the only countries that had not signed the international agreement. Now President Trump has, for the second time, withdrawn the USA from the treaty.¹⁷

The Australian Government has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and reducing emissions by 43% below 2005 levels by 2030, with a focus on transitioning to renewable energy and developing a low-emissions economy.¹⁸

The problem is that Australia is not doing anywhere near enough to reduce GHG emissions to be able to meet its targets. According to the 2024 Climate Change Report, “Australia is currently deploying renewable energy infrastructure at about half the annual rate needed to reach Australia’s 2030 target.”¹⁹

Australian physicist and climate scientist Bill Hare also says Australia is unlikely to achieve its net zero target. He refers to the Government’s approach as one of “accounting tricks, offsets and more gas.”²⁰

And it is not just Australia that is not honouring its commitments. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are reaching new highs and the UN Emissions Gap Report for 2024 says a failure of countries to increase ambition and “start delivering immediately would put the world on course for a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1°C over the course of this century.”²¹

UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed is blunt when she says, “right now the greatest threat to global ambition is a lack of political will to act”.²²

Mitigation, adaptation and resilience to climate change effects

The aim of mitigation is to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by reducing CO² and by carbon capture. This is the intent of the Paris Agreement. But the delays and inaction have now created the need to adapt to the certainty of climate change.

Dagomar Degroot, associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, says history shows there is more to adapting to climate change than, say, building sea walls:

It’s usually the poorest people without access to resources, people who are just barely getting by, maybe relying on just one kind of crop so they are vulnerable when that crop fails. We found that societies that were most resilient had robust traditions of civic charity, or very little social and economic inequality. Reducing inequality is one way of adapting to climate change and building resilience.²³

Australia has belatedly made some limited headway to mitigate climate change but has achieved next to nothing in adaptation or resilience:

Failure to mitigate climate change will only make it more important to adapt. So far, however, policymakers have not kept up with this urgent need. Most funding to deal with climate change worldwide has been spent on mitigation, with only a small share given to adaptation, and the United Nations estimates that the need for adaptation is growing faster than the spending on it.²⁴

Governments don’t like to talk about climate change reality, let alone doomsday scenarios. Instead, they like to offer good news and hide the climate change reality. Consider the positive report presented to Parliament by the Hon Chris Bowen MP, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy on November 28, 2024:

The Annual Statement reports progress on our climate change and energy initiatives in 2024 and is an account of our commitment to transparency regarding our climate actions. We are doing well, but there is more to be done – for emissions, for affordability and for reliability . . . Its view now is that Australia has the policies in place to meet its 2030 targets. We’re bringing emissions down in the electricity and land sectors and that means emissions have fallen to 28.2 per cent below 2005 levels.²⁵

The problem is that it’s a misleading statement, as Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub has pointed out. Australia’s emissions have gone down because of land use practices. Remaining emissions only went down 1.7 per cent.²⁶

The London School of Economics – Grantham Research Institute explains the harmful impact of climate change misinformation:

The Global Risks Report 71, 2024, ranked misinformation and disinformation (on all topics) as the biggest short-term risk to human society, and extreme weather events as the top long-term risk, which implies that obscuring the facts about climate change can be extremely harmful. This is compounded by false information being significantly more likely to be reshared than the truth on social media platforms.²⁷

Which is more damaging – presenting the climate change reality or presenting a cherry-picked misleading view? The wise voter will not be taken in by false and misleading information online by following these tips:

1. Check the source
2. Check for bias
3. Look for signs of low-quality writing
4. Check the website
5. Check other sources to compare.²⁸

And then there is the case of the secret information being held by the Australian government. The National Climate Risk Assessment report by the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) was promised to be released to the public in November 2024. According the government, “It provides an evidence-based national picture of the emerging risks climate change poses to Australia’s community, assets and services.”²⁹

Businesses and the public need to know these risks – it’s basic risk management. Admiral Chris Barrie AC (Retd) former Chief of the Australian Defence Force, is one of the authors of the report, Too Hot to Handle: The Scorching Reality of Australia’s Climate-Security Failure, which states:

A fundamental rule of risk assessment is to focus on the “fat-tail” risks and the plausible worst-case scenarios, especially when the damages are so great and the risks are existential, such that there is no “second chance” to learn from one’s mistakes.³⁰

The ONI report is currently classified as secret but in December 2024 the government briefed ‘progressive independents’ on the contents but excluded the Greens, the Coalition and the relevant parliamentary committee.

The Saturday Paper reported that Senator David Pocock was one of those briefed but is gagged from discussing the contents. He says the report is “frankly terrifying” and shows how “woefully underprepared” Australia is for what’s coming.³¹

Why is it that only the ‘progressive independents’ were briefed? It’s well known that confidential briefing of opponents is a way of silencing public criticism. Is the government so fearful of the Teal independents’ climate change message that they have to restrict them from speaking about what climate change will mean to Australia.

Chris Barrie has the last word on the forthcoming election on May 3:

The problem for us in the 2025 federal election it is really our last chance to deal with the big issues on climate change. Because by 2028, which will be the next election, it will be too late.³²

It turns out that Australians have a very high trust rating of scientists.³³ Why, then, have we ignored the warnings of these hundreds of eminent scientists? That’s an important question which requires another blog post to answer.

~~~~~

Adrian Farrell is a researcher, writer and blogger at CanDoWisdom.com.

Endnotes

1. Channel Four Television Corporation, Valencia: At least 95 killed as flash floods ravage Spain, 2024, Still from Youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbiY9-i53D4&t=115s.
2. The Australia Institute, Climate of the Nation 2024, https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/climate-of-the-nation-2024/.
3. Adam B. Smith, 2024: An active year of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2024-active-year-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters.
4. UCLA Anderson School of Management, Economic Impact of the Los Angeles Wildfires, 2025, https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/about/centers/ucla-anderson-forecast/economic-impact-los-angeles-wildfires.
5. Joelle Gergis, High Way To Hell: Climate change and Australia’s future, June (Collingwood, Victoria: Quarterly Essay, 2024).
6. Dilip Jeste and Scott LaFee, Wiser: The Scientific Roots of Wisdom, Compassion, and What Makes Us Good (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2021) Kindle eBook.
7. Jonathan Crowe, “’It Makes No Difference What We Do’: Climate change and the ethics of collective action,” The University of Queensland Law Journal, 40, no. 3 (2021): https://journal.law.uq.edu.au/index.php/uqlj/article/view/6033/5009.
8. Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011), 4.
9. Adrian Farrell. 2022. “The Wise Voter and the ‘Voices of’ Independents,” CanDoWisdom.com. (Blog)April 28, 2022. https://candowisdom.com/politics/the-wise-voter-and-the-voices-of-independents.
10. Damian Carrington, “World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target,” The Guardian (London), May 8, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/world-scientists-climate-failure-survey-global-temperature.
11. Carrington, “World’s top climate scientists.”
12. Robert Rohde. “Global Temperature Report for 2024,” Berkeley Earth, published January 10, 2025, https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024/.
13. Joelle Gergis, High Way To Hell.
14. Damian Carrington, ”Brutal heatwaves and submerged cities: what a 3C world would look like,” The Guardian (London), May 11, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/11/brutal-heatwaves-submerged-cities-what-3c-world-would-look-like
15. Climate Emergency Institute. “Runaway.” https://www.climateemergencyinstitute.com/runaway.
16. Deborah Snow, “Why ‘doomism’ is part of the latest frontier in the climate wars,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 19, 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/why-doomism-is-part-of-the-latest-frontier-in-the-climate-wars-20191018-p531y7.html.
17. Justine Calma, “Donald Trump pulls US out of Paris climate agreement,” The Verge, published January 21, 2025, https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/20/24345964/donald-trump-paris-climate-agreement-exit.
18. “Net Zero,“ Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Australian Government, https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/emissions-reduction/net-zero.
19. Climate Change Authority, Annual Progress Report: Summary for Policymakers (Canberra, ACT: Climate Change Authority, 2024) https://www.climatechangeauthority.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2024-11/2024AnnualProgressReportSummaryForPolicymakers.pdf.
20. Bill Hare, “Sleight of hand: Australia’s Net Zero target is being lost in accounting tricks, offsets and more gas,” Climate Analytics, May30, 2024, https://climateanalytics.org/comment/sleight-of-hand-australias-net-zero-target-is-being-lost-in-accounting-tricks-offsets-and-more-gas.
21. UN Environment Program, “Emissions Gap Report 2024,” October 24, 2024, https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2024
22. United Nations, “‘Minutes from midnight’: Mohammed calls for urgent climate action,” published October 10, 2024, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1155591.
23. Joe McCarthy, “What Can Past Societies Teach Us About Climate Change?” Global Citizen, published August 7, 2021, https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/climate-change-lessons-from-history.
24. Deborah Campbell and Aaron Krol, “Mitigation and Adaptation,” Climate Portal, published December 14, 2023, https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/mitigation-and-adaptation.
25. Chris Bowen, “2024 Annual Climate Change Statement to Parliament,” Minister for Climate Change and Energy, published November 28, 2024, https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/bowen/speeches/2024-annual-climate-change-statement-parliament
26. Monash University Climate Change Communication Research Hub, “The cost of misinformation in a changing climate,” published February 20, 2025, https://www.monash.edu/mcccrh/projects/changing-climates/digital-news/changing-climates-articles/the-cost-of-misinformation-in-a-changing-climate.
27. London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute, “What are climate misinformation and disinformation and what is their impact?” published April 22, 2024, https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-are-climate-misinformation-and-disinformation.
28. NSW Government, “Spotting fake news,” https://www.nsw.gov.au/education-and-training/digital-citizenship/healthy-online-habits/spotting-fake-news.
29. Commonwealth of Australia, “First National Climate Risk Assessment report released,” published March 12, 2024, https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/mcallister/media-releases/first-national-climate-risk-assessment-report-released.
30. Chris Barrie et al., Too Hot to Handle: The Scorching Reality of Australia’s Climate-Security Failure, (Canberra ACT: Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, 2024), https://www.aslcg.org/reports/too-hot-to-handle.
31. Karen Barlow, “Secret briefings on climate national security risk,” The Saturday Paper (Collingwood, Victoria: Schwartz Media) March 15, 2025.
32. Barrie, Chris, and David Spratt. “Climate Change and Australian Security – A Conversation with Admiral Chris Barrie.” YouTube, Monique Ryan MP, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iVSIVP23mM.
33. Rachel McDonald, “Aussie trust in scientists remains high, so how do we keep it that way?” AusSMC, published January 24, 2025, https://www.smc.org.au/news/aussie-trust-in-scientists-remains-high,-so-how-do-we-keep-it-that-way.