Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor

Governments around the world continue to spend billions of dollars every single day combined on their armed forces. It is becoming increasingly obvious that these insanely massive capital allocations of people’s hard-earned tax money toward national security will not provide any protection at all for any citizens in the most important war taking place today. That would be the grave war to reverse accelerating climate change before it’s too late. The two leading world superpowers, the United States and China, should stop obsessing about each other’s military prowess like juveniles, and start leading the rest of the world out of this mess like mature adults with alacrity that seems nowhere to be found. Absolutely no less is the grave responsibility of those purporting to be “great powers,” and beacons for other societies, as both US and Chinese politicians want you to believe.

Appropriately, coincidentally, and dramatically, I hope and pray both Washington and Beijing heard in the last few days, loud and clear, the epic, biblical scale warning shots from a much higher power than any rival country. Behold and beware the wrath of Mother Nature, which can strike at any time and any place and leave behind a wake of death and destruction!

In China, flooding from excessive rainfall and poor drainage infrastructure created widespread apocalyptic scenes in many important populated areas both urban and rural, inundating even the capital city of Beijing itself. The seat of power could not be spared from the shame and tragedy. The damage looks to be unfathomable, the disruption to people and the economy are not yet knowable, and on top of all that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is spending most of its efforts on hiding the extent of the damage from its people and external nations, which will easily add up to many billions of dollars when all is finally tallied, whether in secret or otherwise. Even in a land choked by propaganda and censorship, I wonder how much longer Chinese leaders will be able to keep up the facade, when people’s homes and livelihoods are steadily wiped out by these ongoing climate anomalies in the months and years to come. I recommend you watch some of this footage if you haven’t already, for this is coming for us all no matter where we live unless things change:

Although the United States has a freer press for us to learn about what is going on in our world somewhat more easily and quickly, the news is otherwise just as bad for us here too, which should make us question what the point of a free press is anyway if half of us don’t accept scientific facts or logic as real. The war for the future survival of humanity itself recognizes no manmade borders, certainly no more than the COVID-19 virus ever respected our elaborately developed political boundaries. Adding onto the other deadly wildfires, heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and flooding that already defined this sweltering American summer that roasts across so many parts of this country at unprecedented scale, the island of Maui saw what is being described as the worst natural disaster in Hawaii state history in the wake of a hurricane that passed by dangerously close to its shores and burned large areas including dense population centers to a crisp.

There are so many uncanny features in common between the Chinese floods and the raging US wildfires from this week. (1) Hundreds dead, countless homes and businesses lost, billions of dollars in remediation, and all other sorts of acute tragedy and mayhem; (2) Unfathomable damage to natural flora and fauna in these areas, where so many species were already under strain; (3) These wounds are entirely self-inflicted in both cases, as neither country has shown anywhere near the political will needed to improve our climate patterns sustainably while there’s still some time left to act, despite decades of warnings that this is exactly the Hellscape we have been hurtling toward like a freight train due to the ways we choose to live; (4) These complicated and unwelcome weather events categorically unfolded without adequate warning, striking like bolts of lightning, with far too much force, and way too fast for any levels of government from local, state/regional to federal to even dream of mounting effective coordinated preparations and response operations.

More and more of these types of dangerous weather patterns and events will come to define the pathetic fate of the United States, China, and all other nations that call this planet home unless we dramatically change course. Clearly the enemy that now matters most is no longer any other nation, for all nations will either fry to death or survive together. We are headed steadily toward the former fate without drastic changes in policies and behavior by all of us, as individual people and as nations. The enemy we all share now in battle, and must in tandem work like Hell to defeat, is the wrath of Mother Nature whose warnings will otherwise give way to existential level crisis, where the survival of nation-states as we know them might be the least of our problems.

This is why I have chosen to become a self-declared climate warrior, which helps define and guide my career. You can learn more about that here, and I hope you too decide to join the battle in any big or small way you can: