Fuel, fear and fault lines: how the Iran war is rewriting Australia’s energy politics - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Key Points

Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz has exposed Australia’s deep dependence on imported refined fuels and limited reserves1. Short-term policy responses lean toward fossil fuel security, while structural solutions point to faster renewable deployment and electrification2. High and volatile oil and gas prices are lifting household and industry costs, but also improving the economics of solar, wind and storage in Australia3. Transport, agriculture and mining are acutely exposed to diesel and petrol shocks, driving renewed interest in electric vehicles and off-grid renewables4. Australia’s role as a fossil fuel exporter and emerging renewable superpower is sharpening political choices about energy security and climate commitments5. The Iran war underlines that the clean energy transition is not only technological, it is a geopolitical contest over fuels, chokepoints and supply chains6.

On a hot March afternoon in Perth, motorists queue at a a suburban service station, watching digital price boards edge higher with every delivery.¹ 

For many, the jump of tens of cents a litre in a few weeks feels less like a market fluctuation and more like a forewarning.

The immediate cause lies thousands of kilometres away, where Iran’s blockade and conflict around the Strait of Hormuz have choked a route that normally carries about one fifth of the world’s oil.¹ 

For Australia, which imports about 90 per cent of its liquid fuels, the disruption has sent petrol and diesel prices sharply higher and revived a long‑running question: what happens when the ships stop coming.²

Politicians talk about “resilience” and “self‑reliance”, yet the policy choices now being made cut in two directions at once, doubling down on fossil fuel supply to keep the economy running, or using the crisis as a pivot to accelerate renewables, electrification and storage.³ 

The answer will shape not only household bills and regional jobs, but also whether Australia can meet its climate goals in a more volatile world.

From chokepoint to catalyst

In global energy markets, the Strait of Hormuz has always been a vulnerability, yet its closure in wartime has turned a hypothetical risk into a lived shock.¹ 

Crude oil prices have surged, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) benchmarks have risen as traders price in the risk of sustained disruption to Middle Eastern exports.⁴

For most countries, the consequences are higher prices and inflationary pressure. For Australia, the impact runs deeper because the country relies not only on imported crude but predominantly on imported refined petrol, diesel and jet fuel from Asian refineries that themselves depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil.² 

The choke is therefore two steps upstream, hitting crude flows into Singapore, South Korea and Japan, then rippling through to the refined products shipped to Australian ports.²

Short term, governments tend to prioritise keeping fuel flowing at almost any cost, tapping emergency stockpiles, offering subsidies or tax relief and urging producers to lift output.⁴ 

Longer term, however, repeated shocks change investment decisions by households, utilities and industry, shifting capital away from fuels exposed to geopolitical risk and toward renewables that run on sun and wind rather than shipping lanes.³

Crisis: accelerator or brake on clean energy

Past disruptions offer a cautionary tale. The oil price spikes of the 1970s spurred efficiency standards and nuclear expansion in some countries, yet also entrenched new fossil fuel sources such as North Sea oil and later Middle Eastern gas.³ 

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine pushed Europe to turbocharge renewables and heat pumps, but it also triggered a scramble for coal and LNG that raised global emissions in the short term.³

The Iran war appears to be following a similarly mixed script. Analysts warn that rising oil and LNG prices above 100 US dollars a barrel will lift costs across transport, power and manufacturing, yet these same price signals make solar, wind and batteries more competitive on a lifecycle basis.³ 

The International Energy Agency expects clean energy investment globally to keep increasing, with solar alone projected to attract more capital than oil production, even as fossil fuel spending remains substantial.³

In the near term, governments under pressure from voters often reach first for familiar levers, such as expanding gas supply or coal generation, to stabilise prices and avoid blackouts.⁴ 

Whether this crisis produces a “renewable acceleration effect” or a “fossil fuel rebound effect” will depend on decisions made in the next few years about grids, storage, electric transport and industrial electrification, not simply on fuel prices themselves.⁶

Australia’s layered fuel vulnerability

Australia’s predicament is acute because it holds only about 30 to 37 days of petrol, diesel and jet fuel in domestic stocks, well below the 90 days required under its treaty obligations with the International Energy Agency.⁵ 

After years of refinery closures, just two facilities remain in operation, in Geelong and Brisbane, leaving the country heavily reliant on imported refined products from North and South‑East Asia.⁵

Those imports already travel through other narrow maritime passages such as the Malacca, Lombok and Sunda Straits, meaning a crisis in the Persian Gulf is only the first layer of exposure.² 

Any further disruption in South‑East Asian sea lanes would quickly translate into physical shortages, not just higher prices, for a continent‑sized country where regional communities depend on trucks, utes and diesel generators.²

This vulnerability is not theoretical. As conflict in Iran escalated, Western Australia began to see steep increases in retail fuel prices, with average unleaded costs in Perth jumping by around 70 cents a litre in less than a month according to state monitoring data.⁷ 

Families cut back on discretionary driving, and small businesses in freight and construction reported thinning margins as fuel bills rose faster than they could adjust contracts.⁷

Transport: shocks at the bowser

Nowhere are the effects more visible than at the bowser. Australia imports around 90 per cent of its refined fuel, so global oil price spikes flow quickly into pump prices, adding roughly 40 cents a litre compared with pre‑crisis levels by some estimates.⁴ 

For a typical family car with a 60‑litre tank, that means paying around 24 dollars more at each fill, a significant hit to household budgets during a broader cost‑of‑living squeeze.⁴

Rising petrol and diesel costs are, in theory, a powerful driver of electric vehicle uptake because they shorten the payback period for higher upfront EV purchase prices.³ 

Recent disruptions have coincided with spikes in Australian EV sales, helped by state incentives and a growing second‑hand market, as drivers seek protection from volatile fuel bills and look to charge at home from rooftop solar.³

History suggests, however, that surges in EV interest during crises can fade if fuel prices later stabilise and policy support remains patchy.³ 

Without firm fuel efficiency standards, charging infrastructure investment and clear phase‑out dates for combustion engines, temporary price shocks may not translate into a sustained shift in the national vehicle fleet.³

Australia’s aviation and shipping sectors face similar pressures but have fewer immediate alternatives, given the limited availability of sustainable aviation fuels and green shipping fuels at scale.³ 

The result is higher costs for regional air travel and freight, feeding through to ticket prices and the cost of goods in remote areas.⁷

Power bills and the promise of renewables

The gas market links the Iran crisis directly to electricity bills. Disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has pushed up international LNG prices as buyers anticipate tighter supplies, even where physical cargoes have not yet been curtailed.⁴ 

In Australia’s interconnected east coast market, gas‑fired generators often set the marginal price of electricity, so higher gas input costs flow into wholesale power prices and, with a lag, household bills.¹²

At the same time, the economics of new generation are shifting. The IEA and other analysts find that the levelised cost of energy from utility‑scale solar and onshore wind has fallen sharply over the past decade, by up to 80 per cent in some cases when combined with cheaper batteries, making them increasingly competitive against new coal and gas plants even before accounting for fuel price volatility.⁹ 

Unlike gas or coal, renewable projects have no exposure to international fuel markets once built, insulating them from geopolitical disruptions in places like the Middle East.⁹

High fossil fuel prices can therefore accelerate investment in grid‑scale batteries and pumped hydro storage, which help manage the variability of wind and solar and reduce reliance on peaking gas plants during demand spikes.⁹ 

In Australia, where households have installed rooftop solar at world‑leading rates, adding batteries and smarter demand response could significantly cut the need for imported fuel‑linked generation over time.⁹

Industry: exposed yet adaptive

Energy‑intensive industries are feeling the strain. Mining operations across Western Australia rely heavily on diesel for haul trucks and stationary generators, so sudden jumps in fuel costs squeeze margins and threaten the viability of marginal projects.⁷ 

Aluminium smelters and fertiliser plants also face rising input costs through higher electricity and gas prices, amplifying competitive pressures in global markets.¹⁰

Yet the same crisis may hasten change. Several major miners have already begun electrifying haul fleets and investing in on‑site renewables and battery systems to cut diesel consumption, lower emissions and reduce exposure to volatile fuel markets.⁷ 

Interest in green hydrogen for steel, ammonia and heavy transport has grown as policymakers and investors look for alternatives that can be produced domestically from renewable electricity.³

For now, these technologies remain costly and often rely on public support or premium markets, but sustained fossil fuel price volatility could shift that calculus faster than expected.³ 

If capital flows into electrification, transmission and clean industrial processes rather than new fossil infrastructure, the current crisis could mark a turning point in Australian manufacturing strategy.⁹

Farming through a fuel and fertiliser crunch

On a grain property in regional New South Wales, a farmer watches the diesel gauge as closely as the weather forecast. Every planting and harvest season depends on affordable fuel for tractors, trucks and pumps, along with fertilisers derived from gas‑intensive processes.¹⁰ 

The Iran conflict has tightened both markets, lifting diesel and fertiliser prices and raising production costs for Australian farmers.¹⁰

Higher input prices tend to feed into retail food costs, adding to inflation and hitting low‑income households hardest.¹⁰ 

Some producers pass on the increases, others absorb them and delay equipment upgrades or reduce hired labour, decisions that can ripple through regional economies dependent on agriculture.¹⁰

Over the longer term, sustained high diesel prices could make electrified farm machinery, such as battery‑powered tractors paired with on‑farm solar, more attractive where grid connections or microgrids are available.⁹ 

Emerging practices, including renewable‑powered irrigation and low‑emissions fertiliser production using green hydrogen, offer potential pathways to reduce the sector’s exposure to both price shocks and emissions constraints, though they are not yet widely commercial.⁹

Households on the front line

For many Australians, the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf become tangible only when they tap a credit card at the servo or open a power bill. Rising fuel prices since the Iran war have been among the fastest in the developed world, according to some analyses, reflecting Australia’s import dependence and limited buffer of domestic stocks.⁵ 

Households in outer suburbs and regional towns, where public transport is sparse, are particularly exposed because driving is often unavoidable.⁷

Some families respond by consolidating trips, delaying visits to relatives and cutting back on discretionary travel, a pattern already visible in surveys and anecdotal reports.⁷ 

Others invest in rooftop solar, home batteries or more efficient vehicles if they have the savings or access to credit, deepening an emerging divide between those able to insulate themselves from energy shocks and those forced to absorb each new spike.⁹

This divergence highlights a central tension in energy policy: measures that rely on households to invest in technology can reduce system‑wide demand and emissions, yet without targeted support they risk leaving low‑income communities more exposed to price volatility.⁹ 

As governments respond to the Iran crisis, decisions about rebates, tariffs and support for social housing retrofits will influence who gains and who loses from the energy transition.³

Exporter and potential clean energy superpower

Australia faces a particular dichotomy. It is one of the world’s largest exporters of coal and LNG, supplying the very fuels whose prices are now spiking, yet it is also positioning itself as a future renewable energy superpower through green hydrogen, critical minerals and high solar and wind potential.³ 

This dual identity complicates domestic debates about how quickly to shift away from fossil fuel production and how to manage the geopolitical implications of doing so.⁶

On one hand, high global prices deliver windfall export revenues and royalties, bolstering budgets and funding services, particularly in resource‑rich states.¹⁰ 

On the other, sustained investment in new coal and gas projects risks locking in emissions and infrastructure that will be costly to retire as global climate policies tighten.³

International agencies warn that to meet agreed climate targets, investment in new unabated fossil fuel supply needs to decline sharply while spending on renewables, grids and efficiency continues to rise.³ 

For Australia, that means deciding whether to treat the current crisis as justification for further fossil expansion or as the last warning before a deliberate pivot to low‑carbon exports such as green metals and clean energy technologies.⁹

Climate goals under pressure

The emissions impact of the Iran war is likely to be complex. In the short term, higher fossil fuel prices can depress consumption and encourage efficiency, but the crisis has also prompted some countries to extend the life of coal plants and approve new gas infrastructure in the name of security.³ 

If such investments persist, they risk undermining the emissions reductions required this decade to keep global temperature goals in reach.³

For poorer countries, the calculus is even harder. Higher energy prices and debt burdens can push governments to delay climate investments, prioritising immediate affordability and access over long‑term decarbonisation, especially where international finance is limited.³ 

That dynamic may widen the gap between advanced economies able to invest in clean technologies at scale and developing nations left reliant on cheap but polluting fuels.³

Australia’s own climate commitments, including emissions reduction targets and net zero pledges, now sit alongside a renewed focus on fuel security and cost‑of‑living relief.⁵ 

Balancing these priorities will require more than slogans, it demands credible plans to cut demand for imported fossil fuels through efficiency, electrification and renewables, rather than simply searching for new supply.⁹

Policy choices at the crossroads

If oil prices remain elevated into 2027, as some experts warn, the choices made today will crystallise into long‑lived infrastructure and market structures.⁶ 

To ensure the crisis leads to faster decarbonisation rather than deeper fossil dependence, analysts point to several priorities: accelerating grid upgrades, setting clear EV and appliance standards, strengthening fuel security rules and directing public finance toward clean energy, not new fossil projects.³

For Australia, a credible strategy would likely include higher minimum fuel stockholdings, diversified supply routes and resilience planning for key sectors, alongside a rapid build‑out of renewables, storage and transmission to cut exposure to imported fuels in power generation.² 

In transport, binding fuel efficiency standards, expanded charging infrastructure and targeted support for EVs and e‑buses could reduce oil demand while improving air quality and household budgets over time.⁹

Critically, regional communities that have long depended on fossil fuel industries will need support to diversify their economies through investment in renewable projects, clean manufacturing and services, so the transition is managed rather than imposed.⁷ 

Without such planning, resistance to change may grow, especially if people feel they are being asked to shoulder the costs of climate policy while energy companies profit from higher prices.¹⁰

A geopolitical transition, not just a technological one

The Iran war has laid bare a simple reality: the energy transition is as much about geopolitics as it is about engineering.⁶ 

Fossil fuels flow through chokepoints controlled by states and, at times, by armed groups, making supply vulnerable to conflict and coercion in ways that electrons on a domestic grid are not.¹

Yet clean energy supply chains have their own geopolitical risks. Solar panels, batteries and critical minerals are concentrated in a handful of countries, raising concerns about new forms of dependence even as reliance on Middle Eastern oil and gas eventually declines.³ 

For Australia, rich in lithium, nickel and rare earths and endowed with strong solar and wind resources, this shift offers both opportunity and responsibility.⁹

Ultimately, the question facing policymakers is not just how to keep the lights on during a distant war, but what kind of energy system they want to inhabit when the next crisis arrives.⁶ 

Whether Australia emerges more resilient, more equitable and on track to meet its climate goals will depend on whether it uses this moment to reduce its exposure to fossil fuel geopolitics, or simply to reroute the same vulnerabilities through different ports and pipelines.²

Conclusion: a fragile equilibrium

The shock from the Strait of Hormuz has exposed how quickly events in a distant waterway can seep into Australian lives, from supermarket prices to regional air tickets. It has also forced a reckoning over the country’s layered fuel vulnerabilities, its limited reserves and its dependence on refineries and sea lanes it does not control.²

At the same time, the crisis has sharpened the appeal of an energy system built on abundant sun and wind, local storage and electrified transport, one less beholden to geopolitical chokepoints and sudden price spikes.⁹ 

Households, miners and farmers are beginning to experiment with this future, installing solar, testing electric machinery and seeking ways to hedge against the next oil shock.⁷

Australia’s governments now sit at a junction. They can treat the Iran war as justification to entrench fossil fuel supply networks, investing in new coal, gas and import infrastructure that may linger beyond a safe climate window, or they can treat it as a final warning, a prompt to double down on renewables, storage and efficiency.³ 

The balance they strike between energy security, economic stability and climate commitments will determine whether today’s queues at the servo become a recurring feature of Australian life or a memory of a system in transition.

References

1. Australian fuel prices: what to expect following newest conflict in Iran (NRMA)
2. Hormuz closure brings Australia’s layered fuel vulnerability to the fore (ASPI)
3. Energy fallout from Iran war signals a global wake-up call for renewable energy (AP / IEA analysis)
4. The Iran war has triggered a fuel price rise. What does this mean for Australian consumers? (The Conversation)
5. The 90-day question looming over Australia’s fuel price pain (SBS)
6. Iran war sparks oil supply crisis lasting until 2027 (news.com.au)
7. From petrol prices to mining, how the Iran war is impacting Western Australia (ABC News)
8. Ominous oil bargain facing Australia as fuel supplies dry up (Yahoo Finance Australia)
9. IEA says faster transition to renewables equals lower household prices (RenewEconomy)
10. How disruption in Iran’s Strait of Hormuz is affecting Australia (The Guardian)
11. How the Middle East war spiked Australia's fuel prices (ABC News)
12. Australian energy bills could surge as Iran conflict drives oil, gas and LNG prices higher (The Guardian)

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The Clock Is Slowing: How Climate Change Is Lengthening the Day - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

New research traces the lengthening of Earth's day
to unprecedented levels not seen in 3.6 million years,
adding a planetary dimension to the climate crisis.

Key Points

Climate change is lengthening Earth's day at a rate of 1.33 milliseconds per century, driven by melting polar ice redistributing mass toward the equator.1 This rate of change is unprecedented in 3.6 million years of Earth's climate history, exceeding any naturally occurring fluctuation in the Quaternary period.2 Researchers reconstructed ancient day-length variations using the chemical signatures locked in benthic foraminifera fossils and a physics-informed deep learning algorithm.3 The physics mirrors a figure skater slowing their spin by extending their arms, as mass moves away from Earth's polar axis toward the equatorial bulge.4 Even millisecond shifts in Earth's rotation can disrupt GPS systems, satellite navigation and global financial networks that depend on atomic-clock precision.5 If emissions remain high, scientists warn that climate change could overtake the Moon's gravity as the dominant force shaping Earth's rotation by century's end.6

For as long as civilisations have measured time, the 24-hour day has seemed immutable. It is not. 

A study published in March 2026 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth finds that Earth's days are growing longer at a rate unmatched in 3.6 million years, and the primary driver is human-caused climate change.¹

The finding connects two phenomena that seem, at first, to belong to entirely different realms: the melting of polar ice sheets and the rotation of the planet itself. 

Yet researchers at the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich have shown they are inseparable. 

As greenhouse gas emissions accelerate the melting of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, the resulting meltwater flows into the oceans and spreads toward the equator, making Earth slightly wider at its middle. That subtle redistribution of mass is enough to slow the planet's spin.²

A Millisecond That Matters

The change is not perceptible to a person going about their day. Between 2000 and 2020, climate-related factors lengthened each day by the equivalent of 1.33 milliseconds per century.¹ 

A millisecond is one-thousandth of a second. But in the world of precision timekeeping, even that fraction carries consequences.

Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, is set by atomic clocks and must be periodically adjusted to match Earth's actual spin. These adjustments, called leap seconds, are added or subtracted to keep clocks aligned with the planet's rotation. The global financial system, GPS navigation, power grids and internet infrastructure all depend on this synchronisation.⁵

Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, documented in Nature in 2024 that ice melt had pushed back the need for a timekeeping adjustment by roughly three years, from 2026 to around 2029.⁸ 

Many computer systems can add a leap second, but far fewer are programmed to subtract one. That asymmetry, Agnew noted, represents a genuine technical risk.

The Physics of the Spin

The mechanism at work is a fundamental principle of physics: the conservation of angular momentum. Any spinning body resists changes to its rotation. When its mass is concentrated close to the axis of spin, it rotates quickly. When that mass spreads outward, the rotation slows.

Scientists at ETH Zurich describe it in terms every sports fan can visualise. A figure skater executing a pirouette pulls her arms tightly to her body to spin faster. When she extends them outward, her rotation slows immediately.⁴ 

Earth works the same way. Ice stored at the poles is positioned close to the planet's rotational axis. When it melts and flows into the oceans, that mass migrates toward the equator. Earth's waistline widens, and the spin decelerates.

Since 1993, global sea levels have risen by roughly 10 centimetres on average.⁴ 

Scientists project a rise of at least 60 centimetres by the end of this century under high-emissions scenarios. Each increment of sea level rise adds to the equatorial bulge. Each addition slows the rotation a fraction more.

Reading the Deep Past

To understand whether today's changes are unusual, the research team needed to compare them against millions of years of history. That required a novel form of detective work rooted in ocean sediment.

The scientists turned to benthic foraminifera, microscopic single-celled organisms that live on the seafloor and build calcium carbonate shells. When they die, those shells accumulate in ocean sediment, preserving a chemical record of the water conditions at the time of their formation.¹ 

By analysing the oxygen isotope ratios locked inside fossil foraminifera shells, researchers can infer ancient sea levels, and from those sea levels, calculate how Earth's rotation must have changed.

"From the chemical composition of the foraminifera fossils, we can infer sea-level fluctuations and then mathematically derive the corresponding changes in day length," said Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, the study's first author and a climate scientist at the University of Vienna.¹

Paleoclimate data of this kind carries substantial uncertainty. Fossil records are incomplete, and the signals preserved in ancient shells can be distorted by diagenesis, the chemical alteration of sediment over geological time. To account for these complexities, the team applied a probabilistic deep learning algorithm, a physics-informed diffusion model designed to extract meaningful patterns from noisy data.² 

The model was constrained by the known physical laws governing sea-level change, lending it greater credibility than a purely statistical approach.

Unprecedented in 3.6 Million Years

The results were stark. During the Quaternary period, spanning roughly the past 2.6 million years, natural ice ages caused Earth's ice sheets to advance and retreat in cycles driven by orbital variations in the planet's path around the Sun. These cycles produced measurable fluctuations in day length.² They were, however, comparatively gradual.

The current rate of 1.33 milliseconds of additional day length per century stands outside that entire range of natural variation. Going back further, to the Late Pliocene some 3.6 million years ago, the researchers found no comparable period of change.² 

The closest historical parallel involved deglaciation events after major ice ages, but even those transitions, driven entirely by natural orbital forcing, did not produce a rate of rotational change equal to what is occurring today.

"The current rapid rise in day length can thus be attributed primarily to human influences," said Benedikt Soja, Professor of Space Geodesy at ETH Zurich and a co-author of the study.⁶

A Planetary System Responding to Human Activity

Earth's rotation is not governed by a single force. The Moon's gravitational pull exerts tidal friction on the oceans, and that friction has been the dominant driver of rotational slowing over geological timescales. 

Simultaneously, the slow rebound of Earth's crust following the last Ice Age, a process called glacial isostatic adjustment, shifts mass back toward the poles and tends to speed the planet's rotation. Both processes are predictable and relatively constant.⁴

A fourth factor, fluid motion within Earth's molten outer core, can temporarily accelerate or decelerate the spin over periods of 10 to 20 years. Right now, core dynamics are causing a slight countervailing speed-up that partially offsets the climate-driven slowing.⁶ 

The interplay between these forces demonstrates how tightly Earth's internal processes and its surface climate are linked.

NASA-funded research, published in separate papers in 2024 in Nature Geoscience and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that climate-related mass redistribution, including groundwater depletion and glacial melt, accounts for roughly 90 per cent of the periodic oscillations in Earth's polar motion since 1900.⁵ 

The same research documented that the lengthening of the day has been accelerating at a faster pace since 2000 than at any point in the preceding century.

The Coming Century

The implications extend well beyond timekeeping. If high-emissions trajectories continue, Soja's team projects that the climate-driven influence on Earth's rotation could surpass the Moon's gravitational effect before the end of the 21st century.⁶ 

That would mark a profound inversion: for billions of years, the Moon set the pace. Human industry would have overtaken it.

Research published in 2024 found that melting ice had already shifted Earth's rotational axis by roughly 10 metres since 1900, a phenomenon called polar motion.⁵ 

That shift in turn generates small perturbations in Earth's interior, feeding back into the dynamics of the molten core in ways scientists are only beginning to understand.

For satellite systems, the changes are not trivial. GPS and space navigation rely on precise models of Earth's rotation to calculate the position of objects on the ground and in orbit. Small but persistent errors in those models, compounded over time, can translate into navigational inaccuracies. As the rate of rotational change itself changes, those models must be continuously revised.⁵

Caveats and Open Questions

The researchers are transparent about the limitations of their methodology. Deriving day-length changes from foraminifera fossils requires a chain of inferences: from isotope ratios to sea levels, from sea levels to ice volumes, and from ice volumes to rotation rates. Each step carries uncertainty, and the deep-learning model, however sophisticated, is only as good as the data it processes.¹

Christian Bizouard, an astrogeophysicist at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in France, noted that Earth's core activity remains nearly impossible to predict. Any projection about future rotational change depends on assumptions about core dynamics that current science cannot fully resolve.⁷

Other unresolved questions include the long-term effect of groundwater depletion on rotational dynamics, the potential role of deep-ocean circulation changes, and whether atmospheric mass redistribution caused by shifting weather patterns contributes meaningfully at multi-decadal scales. 

Future research using higher-resolution sediment cores and improved geodynamic models may refine these findings, or challenge some of their assumptions.

Beyond Temperature: Rethinking What Climate Change Does

Public understanding of climate change tends to focus on temperature records, sea-level projections and extreme weather events. This research points to a broader and more unsettling truth: human activity is now altering the physics of the planet itself.

Geophysicist Duncan Agnew put it plainly in comments following his 2024 Nature paper. Humanity, he said, had "done something that affects, measurably, the rotation rate of the entire Earth."⁸ 

That statement is not hyperbole. It is a finding published in peer-reviewed journals, supported by satellite geodesy, fossil chemistry and deep-learning modelling applied to 3.6 million years of data.

The interconnections are striking. Carbon emissions warm the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere melts ice. Meltwater redistributes mass across the globe. That redistribution slows a planet four and a half billion years old. Each step in that chain is measurable. Together, they describe an influence that no previous civilisation has exerted.

Conclusion: Time, Physics and the Human Footprint

There is a particular quality to the claim that humans have altered Earth's rotation. It moves the climate crisis out of the domain of weather and economics and into the domain of planetary mechanics. The day itself, which for 3.6 million years changed only when natural forces of ice ages and orbital cycles compelled it, is now changing because of us.

That change remains invisible without instruments. Judah Levine, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has noted that everyday life is not sensitive at the millisecond level.⁵ 

The person catching the 7 am train will not notice. But the GPS receiver calculating where that train sits on the track will, eventually, need to account for a slightly longer day than the one its model assumed.

The deeper significance is not logistical. It is conceptual. When the Quaternary's great ice ages waxed and waned in response to orbital shifts, they did so over tens of thousands of years. The current rate of rotational change, driven over decades by the burning of fossil fuels, has already exceeded what those vast natural cycles produced. If emissions remain high, scientists project that rate will double by 2100.¹

What remains unknown is whether there are thresholds, points at which the cascading feedbacks between ice loss, sea level, polar motion and Earth's interior dynamics produce changes that outpace current projections. The foraminifera in their ocean-floor sediment recorded every ice age for millions of years. They are now recording something that has no precedent in their long archive. 

What that record will show to researchers a century from now depends, in no small part, on choices being made today.

References

1. University of Vienna: Climate change slows Earth's spin, day lengthening unprecedented in 3.6 million years (2026)

2. Phys.org: Climate change is slowing Earth's spin at unprecedented rate compared to past 3.6 million years (2026)

3. Smithsonian Magazine: Melting polar ice sheets are slowing Earth's rotation (2024)

4. Newsweek: Earth's rotation is changing at a speed not seen in 3.6 million years (2026)

5. NBC News: Melting ice is slowing Earth's spin, shifting its axis and influencing its inner core (2024)

6. Euronews: Unprecedented in the past 3.6 million years, how human-made climate change is making days longer (2026)

7. NBC News: Melting polar ice is slowing the Earth's rotation, with possible consequences for timekeeping (2024)

8. Nature: A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming, Duncan Agnew (2024)

9. EurekAlert: Climate change slows Earth's spin, day lengthening unprecedented in 3.6 million years (2026)

10. Gizmodo: Earth's spin is slowing at a pace not seen in millions of years (2026)

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The Invisible Front: How War Is Burning the Climate - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Armed conflict releases hundreds of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, yet militaries operate almost entirely 
outside global climate accounting

Key Points

Global military activity accounts for an estimated 5.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions, placing it fourth among the world's largest national emitters. 1 Russia's three-year war in Ukraine has generated roughly 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, more than the combined annual output of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. 6 The first 120 days of Israel's campaign in Gaza produced emissions exceeding the annual output of 26 nations, with reconstruction projected to add tens of millions of tonnes more. 9 Military emissions reporting was exempted under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol after US pressure; the 2015 Paris Agreement made reporting voluntary, and most countries still disclose nothing. 12 Post-war reconstruction is one of the largest hidden carbon costs of conflict: rebuilding Syria's damaged housing alone is projected to release around 22 million tonnes of CO₂. 15 Rising defence budgets compete directly with climate finance; global military spending hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024, while the $100 billion annual climate finance pledge to developing nations remains unmet. 3

The burning began in the dark. 

In February 2022, as Russian armoured columns crossed the Ukrainian border and artillery shells tore open industrial facilities along the Donbas, a different kind of damage was accumulating, invisible but measurable: the carbon footprint of a major land war in the 21st century. 

Within weeks, researchers at a small Dutch-based non-profit, the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, began logging what no international climate body was required to track. 

Within seven months, they had documented at least 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent released into the atmosphere. The equivalent, they noted, of the Netherlands' entire annual output.

That calculation was only the beginning. By the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2025, total war-related emissions had reached 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined yearly output of four Central European nations. ⁶ 

The figure encompasses battlefield fuel use, the burning of forests and agricultural land along the front lines, the destruction of energy infrastructure, and the airspace rerouting that has forced civilian aircraft onto longer, more fuel-intensive paths across a continent. It does not yet include the enormous carbon cost of rebuilding what was destroyed.

Ukraine has become the most closely studied climate casualty of modern warfare. But the dynamics playing out across its scorched plains and shattered cities are not unique. From Gaza to the Sahel, from Myanmar's contested borderlands to the oil fields of Libya, armed conflict is quietly generating greenhouse gas emissions on a scale that existing international frameworks are simply not designed to count. War, it turns out, has a carbon footprint, and it is enormous.

The Scale of the Problem

Researchers at the Conflict and Environment Observatory and Scientists for Global Responsibility published a landmark estimate in 2022: the world's militaries, taken together, account for roughly 5.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. ¹ 

If armies and defence industries were a single country, they would rank as the world's fourth-largest emitter, behind only China, the United States, and India, but ahead of Russia. That figure, the researchers noted, covers only peacetime operations and the supply chains that sustain them. The additional emissions generated by active conflict were not included.

Quantifying those conflict emissions is far harder than it sounds. Satellite imagery can detect fires; chemical sensors can identify pollutants; proxy indicators, including fuel consumption records, weapons delivery logs, and damage assessments, can fill some gaps. But the data is fragmentary, access to conflict zones is restricted, and the methodologies for estimating wartime emissions are still being developed. A further complication is that destruction of industrial infrastructure often temporarily reduces civilian emissions, making it easy to misread a country at war as cleaner than it was before. ¹⁶ 

The actual picture, once fires, reconstruction, and military fuel use are included, points firmly in the other direction.

Wartime emissions compare unfavourably with sectors the public knows well. The global aviation industry produces approximately 2.5% of annual CO₂ emissions. The entire military sector, at 5.5%, is roughly double that. Cement production, one of industry's most notorious emitters, accounts for around 8%. Shipping contributes about 2.9%. War, in other words, belongs in the same league as heavy industry, yet it appears in almost no national climate account. ²

Not all forms of warfare generate equal emissions. Mechanised land war, with its fuel-hungry tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and artillery supply chains, is among the most carbon-intensive. Aerial bombing campaigns add enormously to that total: a single modern fighter jet burns through tonnes of fuel per sortie, and the industrial production of precision-guided munitions is itself highly energy-intensive. 

Research presented at a 2025 American Academy of Arts and Sciences roundtable explored whether lighter technologies, such as drones and cyberattacks, might reduce a conflict's carbon footprint over time. The tentative conclusion was that, while individual strikes may emit less, the combination of more frequent use and the eventual need to rebuild what such weapons destroy will likely offset any efficiency gains. ¹⁷

Two Conflicts, One Planet

In Ukraine, war has become the largest single source of the country's carbon emissions. A 2025 assessment by the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War found that 36% of all war-related greenhouse gases came directly from military activity, including fuel burned by tanks, jets, and supply vehicles, plus the steel, concrete, and explosives used to construct and maintain hundreds of kilometres of frontline fortifications. ⁷ 

Another 27% is attributable to reconstruction activity already underway. The rest is distributed across energy infrastructure destruction, civilian aviation rerouting, and the displacement of refugees across Europe.

The fires are among the most alarming findings. In 2024 alone, roughly 965,000 hectares of Ukrainian land burned, more than twice the total area burnt across the entire European Union that same year. Landscape fires along the front lines accounted for 48.7 million tonnes of CO₂, a 113% increase on the preceding two years. ⁸ 

The fires result from a lethal combination: artillery-sparked blazes during dry summer conditions, climate-driven heat extremes, and the practical impossibility of firefighting in active combat zones. Climate change and the war are amplifying each other.

In Gaza, the carbon arithmetic is compressed into a far smaller geography. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Lancaster University published a study in early 2024 finding that the first 120 days of fighting generated between 420,000 and 652,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent from direct military activity alone, more than the annual emissions of 26 individual countries. ⁹ 

When pre-war construction, such as tunnel infrastructure, and projected post-war reconstruction are factored in, the total rises to more than 61 million tonnes. That number exceeds the combined annual emissions of Sweden and Portugal.

The reconstruction estimate is significant. By January 2024, between 36% and 45% of buildings in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged. Rebuilding 100,000 damaged structures using conventional techniques would generate at least 30 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, equivalent to New Zealand's annual output. ¹⁰ 

Cement and steel, the fundamental materials of urban reconstruction, are two of the most carbon-intensive industries on earth. Every bombed city carries within it a future emission debt.

Beyond Ukraine and Gaza, emissions from conflicts in Myanmar, the Sahel, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo receive far less scientific attention, not because they are small but because monitoring them is even harder. The DRC, for instance, has lost vast tracts of tropical forest to the pressures of prolonged conflict and displacement, releasing stored carbon on a scale that is only partially captured by satellite systems. 

Researchers who gathered at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025 warned explicitly that smaller but persistent conflicts were being systematically overlooked in global emissions accounting. ¹⁷

Black Rain and Poisoned Ground

When a fuel depot is struck by a missile, the immediate result is a fireball visible from kilometres away. The longer-term result is more insidious. Large-scale hydrocarbon fires, and the war in Ukraine has produced hundreds of them, generate enormous plumes of black carbon, a mix of soot and chemical particulates that absorbs solar radiation and accelerates atmospheric warming. 

These plumes can travel thousands of kilometres. Research on the 1991 Gulf War oil fires, which consumed roughly 700 Kuwaiti wells over nine months, found that the resulting soot contributed to the accelerated melting of Tibetan glaciers, thousands of kilometres from Kuwait. ¹⁶ 

The fires contributed more than 2% of global fossil fuel CO₂ emissions in that single year.

Urban bombardment creates analogous contamination on a smaller but more geographically concentrated scale. When buildings collapse, they release decades of stored materials: asbestos, heavy metals, PCBs, and fuel residues. In Gaza, a preliminary assessment by the United Nations Environment Programme in June 2024 found that approximately 37 million tonnes of debris had accumulated, contaminating soil and groundwater with toxic substances. ¹¹ 

These contaminants disrupt soil chemistry in ways that reduce long-term land productivity, effectively converting farmland into dead zones for years or decades.

Explosions themselves alter soil structure. The detonation of high explosives compacts soil, fragments its chemistry, and introduces heavy metals, including lead, copper, and zinc from shell casings, into the ground at concentrations that inhibit plant growth and leach into groundwater. 

In Ukraine, ammunition containing heavy metals has contaminated agricultural land across some of the country's most productive farming regions. Ukraine's agriculture sector accounts for around 60% of the country's exports; the long-term damage to that soil represents an economic and ecological loss that extends far beyond the current war. ⁸

Water systems are particularly vulnerable. In Gaza, the destruction of eight wastewater treatment plants, of which six had been damaged or destroyed by May 2024, resulted in an estimated 130,000 cubic metres of raw sewage being discharged daily into the Mediterranean Sea. ¹⁰ 

The groundwater beneath Gaza, already stressed by decades of over-extraction, has been further contaminated by munitions residues and the collapse of sanitation infrastructure. The Mediterranean plume from such discharge carries biological and chemical pollutants into shared regional waters, crossing borders regardless of political agreements.

The Carbon Cost of Destruction

The destruction of cities is a form of carbon release that operates on a vast but largely uncounted scale. Buildings, bridges, pipelines, and power stations represent embodied carbon, the cumulative emissions produced when they were first manufactured and constructed. When they are bombed, that embodied carbon does not disappear; it joins the ongoing atmospheric ledger as debris management and reconstruction demand yet more energy. 

Clearing the rubble from Aleppo and Homs alone, according to estimates by the Conflict and Environment Observatory, would require more than a million truck journeys. ¹⁶ 

Each of those journeys burns diesel. Each load likely contains hazardous materials.

Modern cities, precisely because they concentrate so much energy infrastructure, are acutely vulnerable to this form of cascading damage. The bombing of electricity grids, transformer stations, gas pipelines, and district heating systems does not merely deprive civilians of warmth and light. It forces the substitution of dirtier, less efficient energy sources, including diesel generators, wood burning, and coal-fired backup systems, often for years after the fighting has stopped. 

In eastern Ukraine, chemical factories, oil refineries, and coal processing facilities have been among the most heavily targeted sites. The resulting toxic releases have contaminated the Dnipro river basin and the Black Sea. ²⁰

Damage to dam and water management infrastructure creates the longest-lasting environmental cascades. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine in June 2023 released a torrent of contaminated water across a vast agricultural floodplain, destroyed riparian ecosystems, and deposited an unknown volume of munitions residues and industrial pollutants into the lower Dnipro and the Black Sea. The ecological recovery from an event of that magnitude is measured in decades, not years.

The Long Carbon Tail of Reconstruction

Post-war reconstruction is, in many respects, the most underappreciated chapter of war's climate impact. The Iraq War between 2003 and 2008 was responsible for an estimated 141 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, according to a study by Oil Change International. In that same period, only 21 EU member states individually produced more emissions than the war itself generated. ¹⁸ 

Much of that total came not from the fighting but from the logistics, fuel supply chains, and the early phases of reconstruction.

Syria's civil war, which has left roughly 60% of urban infrastructure damaged or destroyed, carries an estimated reconstruction emission debt of 22 million tonnes of CO₂ for housing alone, not counting roads, power stations, schools, or hospitals. ¹⁵ 

In practice, reconstruction in conflict-affected countries has rarely incorporated climate considerations. Iraq and Syria both relied heavily on oil revenues and conventional construction, locking in carbon-intensive infrastructure for another generation. Gas flaring, in which excess petroleum gas is simply burned off rather than captured, intensified in Libya, Syria, and Yemen during and after their respective conflicts, a trend that has continued long after the fighting receded.

Ukraine presents what may be the most consequential reconstruction opportunity yet seen. President Zelensky has spoken of needing at least $5 billion per month for rebuilding. The international community has been debating whether that rebuilding could be structured around clean energy, energy efficiency, and decentralised renewable systems rather than the gas-dependent grid Ukraine relied on before the war. 

Proponents argue the war presents a rare chance to leapfrog fossil fuel infrastructure entirely. ⁷ Sceptics note that the immediate pressure to restore heat, light, and industrial capacity tends to overwhelm long-term planning, and that international reconstruction funds have historically moved far more slowly than the carbon-intensive imperative to rebuild fast.

The Reporting Gap

In 1997, as diplomats in Kyoto negotiated what would become the world's first binding climate treaty, the Pentagon lobbied hard for an exemption. Military emissions, US officials argued, could not be disclosed without jeopardising national security, revealing the locations and readiness of forces to potential adversaries. 

The lobbying worked. The Kyoto Protocol excluded international military operations from national emissions totals and allowed countries to group domestic military emissions with civilian categories, obscuring the true military share. ¹²

The 2015 Paris Agreement technically ended the formal exemption. In practice, it replaced mandatory exclusion with voluntary disclosure, which amounts to much the same thing. Under the Paris framework, countries may report their military emissions but are not required to do so. According to the Military Emissions Gap organisation, which tracks reported data submitted to the UNFCCC, only four countries provide detailed disaggregated military fuel data. ¹³ 

A 2025 report by Scientists for Global Responsibility found that almost all official military emissions figures, even for countries with comparatively strong reporting practices, cover less than 10% of their actual military carbon footprint.

The practical result is that a sector producing an estimated 5.5% of global emissions operates in almost complete statistical darkness. Researchers working on the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report have noted that the scenarios used to model future climate trajectories do not include a quantitative assessment of military spending's impact on CO₂ emissions. 

A 2025 peer-reviewed study in a leading environmental journal found that events such as the US-led War on Terror and Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to measurable increases in global CO₂ emission intensity, estimating that military spending growth accounted for 27% of the total change in emission intensity between 1995 and 2023. ⁴ 

That finding has not yet been incorporated into mainstream climate modelling.

Several credible proposals exist to address the gap. The Conflict and Environment Observatory has published a framework for mandatory military emissions reporting. Academics from Oxford, Lancaster, Columbia, and Harvard have co-signed calls for the UNFCCC to require explicit military reporting in national inventories. The European Parliament has called for transparent reporting by member states. ¹⁴ 

None of these proposals has so far produced binding change.

Energy Markets and the War Premium

Russia's invasion of Ukraine reshaped European energy policy faster than any Green New Deal had managed. As Russian gas supplies were severed or sanctioned, European governments scrambled for alternatives, reopening coal plants, racing to build liquefied natural gas import terminals, and accelerating renewable deployments at a pace that would have seemed impossible in 2021. 

The short-term reaction was unambiguously dirty: coal consumption rose sharply in Germany and across Eastern Europe in 2022 and 2023. The medium-term trajectory, however, pointed toward a faster clean energy transition, driven by the hard lesson that energy dependence on an aggressor is a strategic liability.

Whether that acceleration will persist is an open question. Geopolitical instability has a well-documented tendency to push governments toward energy security at the expense of climate commitments. Oil Change International estimated that Russian fossil fuel exports earned approximately €58 billion in just the first two months after the invasion, with the EU accounting for €39 billion of that total. ¹⁹ 

The revenue funded the continuation of the war. European dependence on Russian gas was not merely an environmental failure; it was a strategic one, and the two failures turned out to be inseparable.

Military supply chains are themselves highly carbon-intensive. Producing a modern tank requires enormous quantities of steel. Artillery shells consume both steel and explosives. Explosives production is energy-intensive and relies on chemical processes that generate significant nitrous oxide emissions. 

The US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, and its supply chain emissions, covering the weapons and equipment it procures, roughly double its direct operational footprint. ⁵ 

As NATO members race to rearm, those supply chain emissions are multiplying across the alliance.

The Economic Displacement

Every dollar spent on a missile is a dollar not spent on a solar panel. The relationship is not quite that simple, but it is not entirely metaphorical either. Global military spending hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024. In the same year, the long-standing pledge by wealthy nations to provide $100 billion annually in climate finance to developing countries remained unfulfilled, despite having been due since 2020. ³ 

The contrast is stark: the same governments that have consistently failed to meet their climate finance commitments spend 50 times as much on their militaries every year.

Rising defence budgets are not merely displacing climate spending at the national level. They are generating additional emissions through the investments themselves. Research by macroeconomist Balázs Markó at Bocconi University found that for every percentage point increase in military spending, total emissions rise by between 0.9% and 2%. ² 

NATO's 2025 commitment to a target of 5% of GDP for each member nation, if met, would double the alliance's combined military expenditure between 2025 and 2030, generating an estimated additional 840 million tonnes of emissions compared with a scenario where spending remained at 2% of GDP.

Climate change itself is increasingly identified as a driver of future conflict, creating the feedback loop that many researchers now consider the most dangerous long-term dynamic in the field. Water scarcity, crop failure, extreme heat, and displacement are already documented contributors to instability in the Sahel, in the Horn of Africa, and across parts of the Middle East. 

If warming continues to generate the conditions that make conflict more likely, and conflict generates the emissions that accelerate warming, the system becomes self-reinforcing in the most dangerous possible way.

Recovery, Accountability, and What Comes Next

How long do ecosystems take to recover from the damage of war? The honest answer is: it depends on the damage, and sometimes the answer is never. Vietnam's forests took decades to partially recover from the aerial spraying of Agent Orange, a herbicide that destroyed an estimated 4.5 million acres of forest and farmland and left soil contamination that persists today. 

Ukraine's nature reserves, more than 12,000 square kilometres of which have become active combat zones, will require at least 15 years to recover from the direct physical damage alone, according to preliminary Ukrainian government estimates. ²⁰ 

The chemical contamination and unexploded ordnance that now covers roughly 30% of the country's territory complicate that timeline substantially.

There are examples where environmental restoration has been incorporated into post-conflict recovery. El Salvador, after its civil war, invested in watershed management and reforestation as part of a broader rural recovery programme. Rwanda made systematic forest restoration central to its post-genocide agricultural strategy. Bosnia invested in mine clearance partly because the contaminated land was economically unusable. These are partial models, not templates. ¹⁶ 

None of them operated at the scale and complexity that Ukraine, Syria, or Gaza now present.

International legal frameworks for environmental accountability in war remain weak. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court recognises widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment as a potential war crime, but prosecutions on those grounds are extremely rare. 

A group of researchers at Goldsmiths and the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network has called for Israel to be investigated under Rome Statute provisions for systematic agricultural destruction in Gaza. Ukrainian officials are building a reparations case against Russia partly on climate damage grounds, estimating total climate liability at more than $42 billion using a social cost of carbon of $185 per tonne. ⁶ 

Both cases face the same obstacle: no binding international mechanism exists to adjudicate climate damages caused by war.

Environmental monitoring during conflict is emerging as a potential new area for cooperation. Satellite systems operated by the European Union, including the Sentinel-5P instrument used to track atmospheric pollutants, have already produced detailed data on air quality changes over Gaza and Ukraine. 

Researchers using those tools have tracked spikes in carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, and methane as infrastructure burns and waste management collapses. The science is ahead of the policy: the data exists, the methodologies are improving, but no international body is yet required to act on what the satellites see.

Conclusion: The Unanswered Question

There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance at work in contemporary climate politics. Governments negotiate emissions cuts, publish net-zero targets, and announce clean energy subsidies while simultaneously increasing military budgets, fighting wars, and exempting their armed forces from the reporting requirements they impose on every other sector. The gap between what is measured and what matters has rarely been wider.

The research being produced now, from the meticulous carbon accounting of Ukraine's war to the satellite studies of Gaza's air quality, represents a genuine scientific advance. For the first time, it is becoming possible to measure, in near real time, what armed conflict costs the atmosphere. That knowledge is valuable. Whether it will translate into accountability, into changed behaviour at the negotiating table or on the battlefield, is a different question entirely.

The atmosphere does not distinguish between a tonne of CO₂ from a coal plant and a tonne from a burning oil depot struck by a cruise missile. Both warm the planet. Both narrow the window for the action the IPCC says is still possible. If the world is serious about climate, it will eventually have to reckon with the emissions it has been most reluctant to count. 

The question is whether that reckoning comes in time to matter, or only after the damage has been done.

References

1. Parkinson, S. & Cottrell, L. (2022). Estimating the Military's Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Scientists for Global Responsibility and Conflict and Environment Observatory.
2. Climate Change Performance Index. (2024). CCPI x Military Emissions Gap: How Military Emissions Impact Global Warming.
3. Transnational Institute. (2025). Climate Collateral. Updated November 2025.
4. PMC/Nature. (2025). Rising military spending jeopardises climate targets. Environmental research journal.
5. Crawford, N. C. (2019). Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War. Watson Institute, Brown University.
6. Initiative on GHG Accounting of War / Planetary Security Initiative. (2025). Climate Damage Caused by Russia's War in Ukraine: Three Years.
7. de Klerk, L. et al. (2024). Climate Damage Caused by Russia's War in Ukraine: 24 February 2022 to 23 February 2024. Initiative on GHG Accounting of War.
8. European Commission Joint Research Centre. (2025). War Worsens Climate and Environmental Challenges in Ukraine.
9. Queen Mary University of London. (2024). New Study Reveals Substantial Carbon Emissions from the Ongoing Israel-Gaza Conflict.
10. Wikipedia / UNEP. (2024). Environmental Impact of the Gaza War. Based on UNEP preliminary assessment, June 2024.
11. Shaheen, A. et al. (2024). The War on the Gaza Strip and Its Consequences on Global Warming. Frontiers in Human Dynamics.
12. National Security Archive. (2022). National Security and Climate Change: Behind the US Pursuit of Military Exemptions to the Kyoto Protocol. George Washington University.
13. Military Emissions Gap. (2025). Problem: The Military Emissions Gap. Conflict and Environment Observatory.
14. Scientists for Global Responsibility. (2025). Most Militaries Report Less Than 10 Percent of Their Carbon Footprint.
15. Conflict and Environment Observatory. (2021). How Does War Contribute to Climate Change?
16. CEOBS. (2021). How Does War Contribute to Climate Change? Conflict and Environment Observatory.
17. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (2025). Carbon Footprint of Military: The Environmental Impacts of Modern Wars. Roundtable Report, July 2025.
18. IPS Journal. (2022). War Is a Climate Killer.
19. IPS Journal. (2022). War Is a Climate Killer: Russian fossil fuel exports and European dependency.
20. Wikipedia. (2025). Environmental Impact of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

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Fire, Then Flood, Then Fire Again: Australia's Climate Whiplash Is Getting Worse - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

A new report finds record fossil fuel pollution is overpowering natural cooling cycles, plunging communities from one disaster to the next with barely a breath between.

Key Points

Australia's 2025-26 summer delivered record heat, catastrophic fires and severe flooding in rapid succession, a pattern scientists call “climate whiplash.” 1 Fossil fuel pollution is now overriding natural climate drivers like La Niña, pushing Australia's temperature baseline permanently higher. 2 South Australia's Marree recorded a new state high of 49.8°C in January, then received ten times its normal monthly rainfall within a week. 3 Melbourne has logged as many extreme heat days since 2000 as it did in the entire twentieth century. 4 Insurance payouts for extreme weather averaged $4.5 billion a year between 2019 and 2024, more than double the prior 30-year average. 5 Mid Coast Council in NSW has applied for disaster recovery funding 16 times since 2019, illustrating the mounting fiscal strain on local government. 6

In the space of ten days last January, communities along Victoria's Great Ocean Road lived through catastrophic fire weather warnings, watched cars wash out to sea in flash floods, and then braced again for returning extreme heat. 

It was not a fluke. It was the new rhythm of the Australian summer.

A report released this week by the Climate Council documents the arc of that season in troubling detail. Titled Breakneck Speed: Summer of Climate Whiplash, the report charts the back-to-back disasters that struck between December 2025 and February 2026, and sets out the science that links them to rising greenhouse gas concentrations from burning coal, oil and gas.¹

The picture it draws is one of a country whose disaster management systems, insurance markets and local government budgets are absorbing punishments that once came once a generation but now arrive in clusters, sometimes within days of each other.

A Season Unlike Any Other

The 2025-26 summer did not arrive with the signature of a dangerous El Niño, the Pacific Ocean warming pattern associated with drier, hotter conditions across much of Australia. Conditions were actually the reverse. Australia moved through the summer in a La Niña pattern, which typically brings cooler temperatures and wetter weather to large parts of the continent.

Yet the summer still delivered the fourth-hottest year on record for Australia and the globe's third-hottest year on record.² For climate scientists, that apparent contradiction carries a pointed message.

“Climate change is now firmly behind the steering wheel of Australia's temperatures,” said Adjunct Professor Andrew Watkins, a Climate Councillor and meteorologist. “In fact 2025 started and ended in La Niña, which usually cools large parts of Australia, yet this was our fourth hottest year on record. That tells us the baseline has shifted.”

The mechanism is straightforward, though its consequences are not. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap more heat in the atmosphere and oceans. That underlying warmth is now powerful enough to overwhelm natural cooling cycles that once reliably moderated Australian summers. What a La Niña could subtract, decades of fossil fuel pollution have more than added back.²

Records That Should Not Have Fallen

The summer's temperature records were not marginal. They were historic.

On 27 January 2026, Walpeup and Hopetoun in Victoria recorded a new state high of 48.9°C, surpassing the previous record set at Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. Almost one third of Victoria recorded its highest January temperature ever on that single day.³

In South Australia, the small outback town of Marree, near Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, endured five consecutive days above 48°C. On one of those days, the thermometer reached 49.8°C. On the outskirts of Port Augusta, the mercury touched 50°C on 30 January, making it the most southerly place on Earth ever to reach that threshold.

Melbourne reached 42.9°C during the season. The city has now recorded eleven days at or above 42.9°C since the year 2000. It recorded the same number across the entire century from 1900 to 1999.⁴ In Mildura, 45°C was reached only six times between 1946 and 1999. Since 2000, the town has exceeded that mark a further 27 times in just 26 years.

In the Northern Territory, Alice Springs recorded more than 30 summer days above 40°C, almost twice its historical average of 17, before intense rainfall triggered dangerous flash flooding on 12 February.

The Physics of Whiplash

The whiplash pattern, where extreme heat is followed rapidly by extreme rainfall and flooding, is not coincidental. It follows directly from the physics of a warmer atmosphere.

“Our hotter oceans and atmosphere also mean more water evaporates into the sky than ever before,” Professor Watkins explained. “With more moisture in the atmosphere, storms produce more rain.”

Some towns in western Queensland recorded their average annual rainfall within the first five weeks of 2026. A tropical low in February then triggered flood watches across nearly half the continent.¹ Communities that had been cut off by smoke and heat in January found their roads submerged under floodwaters a month later.

Dr Linden Ashcroft, a Climate Council research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, points to shifts in atmospheric circulation as a further driver. Global warming is altering the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles, destabilising the jet streams and pressure systems that once kept Australian seasons more predictable.

“We've got more energy in our earth system than at any other time in human history,” Dr Ashcroft said, “and that means these events are packing more punch.”

The heatwaves this summer also broke from historical patterns in a second respect. Record temperatures in the south-east were not driven by hot northerly winds blowing off the desert interior, as has historically been the case. They arose from atmospheric conditions that were, in the assessment of climate scientists, reshaping themselves in real time.

Two Case Studies in Rapid Disaster

The Great Ocean Road communities in Victoria lived through perhaps the most compressed version of the whiplash cycle. Fire warnings one week, flood waters the next, then heat again. The speed of the transition left little room for recovery, for insurance assessors to complete their work, for damaged roads to be cleared, or for residents to weigh whether to rebuild.

The second case is both more remote and more economically critical. The Eyre Highway stretches across the Nullarbor Plain and is the sole land link between Perth and Australia's eastern states. During the 2025-26 summer, the highway closed because of fires burning in 45°C heat. Two days later, floodwaters cut it again.¹

The economic consequence of losing that route, even briefly, ripples through freight costs, fuel prices and the supply of goods to and from Western Australia. It is a pointed illustration of how climate whiplash reaches beyond the communities directly struck by fire or flood. It enters supply chains, business continuity plans and infrastructure stress assessments.

In South Australia, Marree's ordeal extended over weeks. After five days above 48°C, a two-day rainfall event dumped ten times the town's normal February monthly rainfall. A fortnight later, eight consecutive days of rain cut all roads into the town. For a community that depends on those roads for food, medical supplies and commerce, the compound isolation was more than meteorological discomfort. It was a test of basic resilience.³

The Fire Season Rewritten

Greg Mullins, a former NSW Fire Commissioner and Climate Councillor, has spent his career measuring the boundaries of what fire services can manage. His assessment is unambiguous.

“We used to think of catastrophic fire conditions as once-in-a-generation events,” Mr Mullins said. “Now they're arriving every decade. The climate baseline has shifted, and that means bigger, more dangerous, destructive fires flaring up more quickly, more often.”

This summer, Victorian firefighters battled 200 fires in a single day, a volume of simultaneous demand that strains command structures, equipment and the endurance of personnel. The season ultimately resulted in the loss of 451 homes and more than 1,000 other buildings in Victoria alone.

In Tasmania, strong winds on 4 December fanned nearly 30 bushfires, destroying 19 homes on the east coast. Hobart recorded its windiest summer day at 98 kilometres per hour. Three weeks later, between 23 and 26 December, the state experienced daily snowfall. The range of extremes within a single month in a single state captures the disorienting character of modern Australian summers.

Mr Mullins noted that destructive fires are now occurring even on cooler days, driven by wind rather than heat alone. This expands the window of fire danger beyond the hottest days of summer, and confounds the traditional seasonal preparation models used by fire agencies and communities.

Mounting Costs, Stressed Budgets

The financial toll accumulates in ways that are visible in insurance premium notices, council balance sheets and government disaster recovery allocations.

Between 2019 and 2024, insurance companies paid out an average of $4.5 billion per year for extreme weather events. That figure is more than double the annual average across the prior 30 years.⁵ Those costs do not remain contained within the industry. They flow through to household premiums, through to properties that become uninsurable, and through to communities where rising premiums effectively price out lower-income residents.

At the local government level, the Mid Coast Council in New South Wales has applied for state and federal disaster recovery funding sixteen times since 2019. That frequency of application is not a sign of poor management. It is a measure of how regularly disasters now strike a single coastal council area and how thoroughly they exhaust local fiscal capacity.⁶

Summer extremes are also leaving lasting damage to ecosystems and agricultural land, with dead livestock, degraded pastures and compromised water catchments adding costs that do not always appear in insurance statistics but weigh heavily on regional economies.

What Comes Next

Dr Ashcroft noted that the Pacific Ocean typically resets between March and April, at which point climate scientists gain clearer sight of whether El Niño or La Niña conditions will dominate from May onwards. The prospect of an El Niño summer following the baseline already established by fossil fuel-driven warming is one that concerns scientists who observed what La Niña failed to prevent in 2025-26.

The Climate Council's report calls directly on governments to cease approving new coal and gas projects, and to accelerate the transition to clean energy. Mr Mullins framed the connection between energy policy and disaster cost as direct and immediate: “Disasters are costing Australians dearly.”

The report also identifies a specific mechanism by which continued fossil fuel investment worsens future fire risk. Every additional tonne of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere raises the heat baseline. A higher baseline means more days above the thresholds that drive catastrophic fire conditions, more moisture cycling through the atmosphere to produce extreme rainfall events, and less recovery time between disasters.

A Nation at a Crossroads

Australia occupies a peculiar position in the global climate conversation. It is among the world's most exposed countries to climate impacts, and among the most significant exporters of the fossil fuels that drive those impacts. The summer of 2025-26 did not resolve that tension. It sharpened it.

Communities along the Great Ocean Road, in the outback of South Australia, in the freight corridors of the Nullarbor, and in the suburban fringes of Melbourne and Mildura are absorbing costs, physical and financial, that compound with each season. Their fire services, council budgets and household insurance policies carry a burden that is growing faster than the systems designed to absorb it.

The Climate Council's report lands at a moment when Australia faces a federal election and questions about the pace of its energy transition remain sharply contested. The summer's record heat, its fires and its floods do not determine how those political questions will be resolved. But they do define the conditions under which future Australians will ask the same questions, if the present trajectory continues.

Whether Australia's political settlement will keep pace with its physical reality is a question the 2025-26 summer raised with unmistakable urgency, and one that neither the heat nor the floodwaters have yet answered.

References

1. Climate Council: New report: Aussies flung from summer fires to floods in breakneck climate whiplash (2026)

2. Climate Council: Bronze Medal Nobody Wants: 2025 Earth's Third-Hottest Year (2026)

3. Climate Council: Breakneck Speed: Summer of Climate Whiplash – full report (March 2026)

4. Bureau of Meteorology: Melbourne climate data, December 2025

5. Insurance Council of Australia: Catastrophe statistics

6. Canberra CityNews: Summer climate ‘whiplash’ hitting harder and faster (March 2026)

7. Climate Council: Breakneck Speed – report landing page (2026)

8. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis (2021)

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