08/24/2026
THIS IS NOT A NATURAL CALAMITY: ITS BEING DONE TO US KNOWINGLY.
Tim Winton, The Guardian, Aug 30, 2026
Global heating is an outrage, not a tragedy. We deserve the facts about the climate crisis –
Well, there’s no getting around it now. What many of us once feared has become a reality.
The dangerous conditions climate scientists long warned of have become our common, if deeply unwelcome, experience, and season by season, our acquaintance with disorder and extremities deepens. In both hemispheres, wildfires rage right into our cities and incinerate entire neighbourhoods. Marine heatwaves are bleaching corals and cooking seagrasses on a global scale. This northern summer has brought temperatures most Europeans associate with the Australian desert. Heat events in Europe have paralysed whole countries, destroyed infrastructure and killed citizens in their thousands.
Such is life at barely 1.5C of heating since pre-industrial times. We keep telling ourselves this is the new normal. But the awful truth is, we’re on track for nearly twice this. That’s tough to digest.
In 2024, I published a novel, Juice, about a world that has lurched beyond even the horror zone of 3C of heating. Many readers told me the book was terrifying. Some felt it was prophetic. And while I appreciate having galvanised a few readers and helped them imagine the consequences of what’s still being done in our names, I hope to God they’re wrong about the book’s visionary aspect. Because the world of Juice is a nightmare. It’s what I fervently hope we will not pass on to our descendants.
My book was published into a strange cultural malaise from which we have not yet recovered. It feels like a debilitating communal illness whose symptoms include febrile delirium, visceral rage and a kind of nihilistic lassitude. But among the afflicted, you sense a terrible thirst and hear a babble of confusion, and also many plaintive cries of yearning. What sufferers thirst for is honest information. What they are addled by is the tide of bu****it that besets them. What they yearn for is solidarity and common purpose.
There are those who have come to think of global heating as an inevitable fact, a tragedy, if you will. And there are some who have been convinced it isn’t real, not a fact at all. These sufferers have been poorly served, for instead of being ministered to humanely and conscientiously, they have been at the mercy of quacks and carpetbaggers. What we are all experiencing is not a mystery ailment. Neither is it inevitable. And it’s sure as hell no tragedy – it’s an outrage. Only those who have been coached into crippling delusion can continue to deny the very heat that torments them; they are victims of gross malpractice.
There’s nothing accidental or inadvertent about what we’re all suffering through together. We’ve had enough time now and have sufficient expertise to understand that this is not a natural calamity. This is something that is being done to us. Knowingly. Which makes it a crime.
A narrow class of people is profiting from our anguish. They know they’re setting our world on fire. They persist because they love neither the Earth nor its people. What they care about is money. Not just enough to get by on. Not even enough to become grotesquely rich with. They want the kind of money that bends others to their will. They seek power, buy it, co-opt it, leverage it and always thirst for more of it. As far as they’re concerned, the rest of us can go to hell – so long as we bend the knee and keep paying them as we stagger towards the flames.
This is why reporting on the state of our climate is so inadequate. Too often, coverage is evasive, recklessly shallow or simply dishonest. The oligarchs who own the news and direct the algorithms of social media are committed to keeping it that way. They give us bread and circuses and bank on our remaining distracted and tractable. They are betting against our children’s futures.
