South Wind

One frantic year into what is shaping as a momentous four-year term (if that’s all it is), the world is now wide awake to what it’s like having Donald Trump make play with the most powerful economic and military force in history. It’s not pretty, but it sure has everyone’s attention.

Trump’s imperial America is on the march. Its empire is measured by economic reach and bolstered by a military capable of rapid deployment anywhere – the kind of force that snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their Caracas bunker ten days ago.

Trump and acolytes like Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, are triumphant. “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Miller said after the raid, “but we live in a world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

This is Trump’s America, as the president’s own border police snatch people they deem to be illegal immigrants off streets and out of homes and workplaces, handcuff them and send them into detention, who knows where. Even in America with its violent history, this is new.

The Caracas raid has set the scene for the rest of Trump’s second term, and it’s coloured black. He says America will “take back the oil… we should’ve taken back a long time ago” – a reference to when Venezuela sent US oil companies packing by nationalising the industry in 2007.

Venezuela’s heavy crude is hard to extract and handle, which is not lost on those American companies resisting Trump’s efforts to get them back there. But there’s a bigger issue in play. A ramped-up Venezuelan industry would be a major global source of carbon pollution.

For Trump and the oil executives he met last week, that’s irrelevant. With the world teetering on the brink of unstoppable global warming they have always shown contempt for science and humanity’s wellbeing. Their mantra: Make America great, bugger the planet.

Which brings us to the world’s biggest island.

Historically no-one wanted to know about Greenland, buried under more than a mile of ice, except the handful of Inuit and Norse people who found ways to live there. Three centuries ago Denmark took it on as a colony (now self-governing) and when the nuclear age began it allowed the US as a NATO ally to operate military bases there.

The melting of Greenland ice is now accelerating at a rate that would see global sea levels rise over a metre this century. That would inundate low-lying coastal land including Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Largo.

Blind to such a prospect, Trump sees the vanishing ice as a chance to extract mineral wealth while enlarging his empire. He intends to take Greenland, by force if necessary.

In the strongman’s simple world, bigger is always better. Greenland won’t be enough for Trump, and his next target is right next door. Canada is even larger than the US itself. Along with Greenland it would make the US the world’s biggest country. How tantalising is that?

Strongman leaders don’t like having their style cramped by others’ rules, so Trump despises the United Nations. Ironically it was America that in 1945 led the quest for world security. Besides providing the UN with its New York headquarters it seed-funded agencies for peacekeeping, protecting the vulnerable, fighting disease and growing food.

Since the 1980s the UN has also supported climate science, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Branding this science as false, Trump now seeks to silence it. Last week he formally withdrew his country from both the IPCC and the 33-year-old bedrock treaty that underpins global climate action.

Trump’s removal of UN guardrails, added to his defunding of science, his territorial ambitions and his exercise of raw power at home and abroad endangers everyone. While the man-boy has his fun with guns and oil, the world is rushing headlong towards self-immolation. In strongman language, that’s betrayal on a planetary scale.

This imposes new responsibilities on all Western democracies including Australia. We need to heed Mark Carney, prime minister of our close Commonwealth sibling Canada, the country most at risk from Trumpian imperialism. He warned several times in 2025 that the old order of things has gone and we must now fashion a new one.

All democracies must redefine their alliance with the US, and their leaders including Anthony Albanese must talk about this, publicly.

We are sailing in uncharted, shark-infested waters. We should all be afraid, and we should all be furious.

Video has long been my go-to place for first-hand information and direct quotes on things of interest, but recently I’ve had several rude awakenings when video clips I’d taken to be genuine turned out to be complete fakes.

And like a contagious disease, the fakes appear in greater numbers in your YouTube viewing list the more you click on them. What was once a reliable source of verifiable information on contentious subjects is no longer.

I was confident I had the skills and experience to pick a fake a mile away, but decades in journalism and government service didn’t prepare me for online life today. We’re now at the disconcerting point where AI video tools, aided and abetted by social media viewing algorithms, can drag us unknowing into complete fantasy.

Human contact is the stock-in-trade of journalists (as it is of everyone if only everyone knew), but for it to work as it should we need to know that the people we see are real and that what they say came from them. In a trigger-happy world fake videos created by bad actors can bring disaster.

The criteria for picking fake from real are constantly changing. The first fakes I came upon were low-resolution, blurry and grainy, a dead giveaway. But as passing time keeps reminding us, AI technology is getting more proficient at creating fakes, making it easier and cheaper to convince users that black is actually white.

All this is happening because there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The US online journal Axios quotes a senior partner at Menlo Ventures picturing 2026 as AI’s “show me the money” year, along with the prediction from James Brundage, head of EY’s Global and Americas Technology Sector, that “boards will stop counting tokens and pilots and start counting dollars.”

Well, yes. When they’re not theorising or visualising, counting money is what boards do, and what they expect from their minions.

And no-one got sacked for breezy optimism, like OpenAI’s head of applications, Fidji Simo. She believes that we’ll soon have AI “constantly running in the background, getting things done for us across the web and the real world … We’ll be able to trust it to make decisions and take action on our behalf,” she says.

Of course – just like we knew to trust those used car salesmen back in the last century.

As the 21st century grinds on, it may be that most of AI’s exponentially growing range of tasks will be for everyone’s great benefit. But many of them will not, and like those blurry videos showing the bombing of boats allegedly being used by Venezuelan drug smugglers we may never be able to verify their authenticity.

The media conference at the weekend in the wake of the US military’s smash-and-grab raid in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, led by the master of fakery, Donald Trump, was in hindsight most striking for what was not talked about.

For a change, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t get a look in. Weeks of questions about Trump’s past connections with the child sex trafficker suddenly ceased. Instead it was all about the raid: a triumphant show of US military brilliance made possible by the strength and courage of the man at the top. He couldn’t have wished for a better political distraction.

But the Caracas raid has opened up a whole new can of worms. If instead of his usual hearsay he’d absorbed a bit of real history – say, the history of Iraq around 2004 – he might have understood that forcing a new regime on a major country isn’t at all like appointing a new company CEO. So the master of misinformation might also turn out to be its victim too.

Politics and the truth have always had a loose relationship. The combination of an authoritarian president, vested interests everywhere you look and AI online sludge are reason to question the truth of everything we see and hear in public media, an absence of trust that adds to the burden of daily life.

Nine months ago a plausible, detailed research paper titled AI 2027, predicting the arrival of artificial general intelligence by 2027, explored its likely progression before bypassing humanity altogether. “If we’re on the cusp of superintelligence, society is nowhere near prepared,” it concluded.

But when were we ever prepared for any historic change?

If you’ve scratched yourself lately you’ll realise that real life is not online. This article may be in front of you in an unchangeable form, in print on paper you can touch. If so, allow yourself a moment to celebrate glorious reality.

The end is nigh for another year, which means yet more televised rituals of popping corks, fireworks and people embracing, moving in time with the beat and giving every appearance of being happy.

It’s just a show. The world – at least the human part of it – continues to screw up with worsening effects, and the past year has been truly hideous.

Leaders here and abroad, accustomed to rules to prevent overreach by state and capital, were blindsided by Donald Trump’s second go at ruling America. Formal, established limits to power mean nothing to a president focused squarely on the one who in his eyes embodies the state – himself.

American democracy and by extension democracy everywhere is vulnerable as never before. What is most likely to push it beyond repair is something Trump and his minions, flying in the face of everything science tells us, persist in calling a “hoax”. That is, human-induced climate change.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” says the Book of Ecclesiastes. That used to be true, but not any more. Unlike our regular New Year rituals, what we now confront is utterly new. They can say we’ve heard it before but we haven’t.

And this applies whichever country or hemisphere we live in, regardless of our political power and however large or lacking our wealth. Climate brings all people together, globally. It’s just that the knaves and fools in power today don’t yet know this. Or more likely, they close their ears to anything that might spoil their party.

When Trump came to office, the study of climate was front and centre in his gunsights, and Trump 2.0 has been devastating for US and global science. But it’s not yet terminal. Those around the world who do climate science for a living (or in many cases for nothing) continue working, albeit with less support as public funding dwindles or dries up entirely.

Exercising their minds now is not whether the world will pass the 1.5C Paris warming mark, but by how much. Behind only 2024, this year’s 1.5C of warming was the second highest on record. They expect 2026 to be slightly cooler, about 1.4C above pre-industrial, before the world starts hotting up again.

Veteran climatologist James Hansen, 84 years old and still able to make sense of the data, expects a developing El Niño to drive warming to 1.7C in 2027 – “further confirmation of the recent global warming acceleration”.

With the world currently on a high-emissions trajectory, that “safe” Paris limit will be vanishing in the rearview mirror by the end of this decade. Today’s global warming is more rapid than any previous such episode over millions of years. Or if you prefer, since well before Adam woke up to find himself in the Garden of Eden.

Without official US support, governments in Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, China, Japan and the rest must now step up to ensure the continuity of observations – essential to any effective climate response.

Of all the components of the climate system, the hardest to monitor and measure is the global ocean. Europe is deeply concerned about the part of it that laps its shores and defines its temperate climate – the Atlantic – and especially about a weakening Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The warming Gulf Stream, part of this system, allows Europe to sustain a large population. Without it the continent is in deep trouble.

AMOC and another connected system centred on Antarctica form a global circulation system driven by heat and salinity differences between water masses – essential to sustain marine life and a massive influence on the world’s weather. Both circulations are slowing as melting ice sheets dilute surface waters, and there’s a danger one or both of them will collapse to a much weaker state.

Recently a multinational European team including the eminent oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf, of Germany’s Potsdam Climate Institute, found a growing likelihood that AMOC will collapse this century, triggered by a rising influx of freshwater from Greenland’s melting ice sheet.

AMOC’s influence extends globally. For the east coast of Trump’s America its loss would mean rapid sea-level rise and intense heatwaves, storms and rainfall. In many parts of the rest of the world including East Africa, South Asia, Australia and the western US, an AMOC shutdown would radically alter rainfall patterns, bringing widespread drought.

Said Rahmstorf: “We have already left behind the stable Holocene climate in which humanity has thrived… A full AMOC collapse would be a massive, planetary-scale disaster. We really want to prevent this from happening.”

We really, really do. If you’re in need of a New Year resolution, this is a good place to start looking.