The National Weather Service, in the United States, is one division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It collects and analyses data regarding weather patterns and the climate. Our daily weather updates and forecasts – will it be hot or cold, sunny or rainy, will there be snow, sleet, or drought – depend on the vital work of the NOAA and the weather service.

The weather app, a ubiquitous feature on our mobile devices, gather and provide the latest information about the weather. We make decisions regarding our day by including, among other things, weather forecasts.

Not only that, but bodies such as the NOAA collect and analyse vital data regarding the incidence, frequency and magnitude of severe weather events – hurricanes, droughts, tropical cyclones, tornadoes, heavy rainfall, prospects of flooding – with advance warning of severe weather events, people can be prepared, emergency evacuations undertaken, and first responders can be equipped to deal effectively with the adverse impacts.

The Trump administration, under the guise of cost cutting, is threatening to close all that down. Our up-to-date weather reports might become a thing of the past. It is not just me, a loonie leftie, saying this – the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the publication of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), is sounding the alarm.

Since the Trump administration assumed office, thousands of jobs have been cut from the NOAA. The crucial work of scientists has been impacted, decimating vital research into climate change, marine ecosystems, and water and air quality. The NOAA, created in 1970 by then Republican President Richard Nixon, has a wide mandate to collate and evaluate data regarding the natural environment, and make recommendations regarding the deployment of government resources.

Hollowing out the NOAA, as well as gutting federal agencies dedicated to tracking and informing the public about climate change, is part and parcel of the Trump/MAGA cult’s obsessive denial of the science of climate change, and the paranoid delusion that any form of government spending represents creeping ‘socialism.’ Gee, I was always told that political interference in scientific affairs and institutions was a hallmark of authoritarian regimes, such as the USSR or China…..

Indeed, the MAGA cult in power has had to confront another powerful communist woke menace that believes in climate change – the US military. The Department of Defence, at least as far back as 2015, noted that due to the increasing levels of moisture and rainfall, coastal cities such as Miami are at increasing risk of being inundated.

In an article for the New Yorker magazine, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote that army engineers are studying various proposed solutions for the incrementally rising sea levels at the Miami coastline. The US army noted that there is no question that human-induced global warming is having a direct impact on sea levels, thus threatening coastal cities.

The Trump administration can scream about ‘woke’ climate change as much as it wants, there is no denying that the Department of Defence is taking climate change impacts seriously. Be that as it may, the Pentagon has now turned its myopic sights on the US military, downgrading climate change mitigation strategies elaborated by the military. References to climate change are being steadily expunged from military-affiliated websites.

Ironically, among the many installations threatened by an increasing frequency of flooding and hurricane are Florida’s military bases.

The NOAA is an essential independent agency for fighting the climate emergency. Would the US military, and first responders to weather emergencies, be better prepared or worse if the NOAA was gutted and abolished?

I am old enough to remember the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident on the territory of the former Soviet Union. This particular meltdown, and the Moscow authorities’ response to that disaster, were widely mocked and denounced in our corporate-controlled media. Here was concrete evidence that the Kremlin, so we were informed, could not care less about the health and safety of its own citizens. The allegedly haphazard and panicked emergency response to that disaster was further evidence, in the western mind, of the incompetence of the Soviet Communist system.

Whether the response of the Kremlin authorities to the Chernobyl disaster was inadequate or not, I do not know. I do know that the US is in no position to lecture other countries about disaster management, given its own track record of poor, inadequate and inefficient responses to numerous climate change-induced disasters.

Remember the smash hit movie of 1996, Twister? Two dedicated scientists, played by Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton, lead a team of determined storm chasers. Resolved to develop new and improved early warning tornado detection technology, the intrepid scientists are motivated by an ethical desire to save lives; early warnings can provide affected communities with enough time and resources to evacuate, thus saving lives.

I wonder what the residents of Kentucky think of that movie today.

Earlier this year, eastern Kentucky was hit by tornadoes. While that is not an unusual occurrence for Kentucky – tornadoes obviously cut across state boundaries – the severity and frequency of tornadoes is increasing. The NOAA early hurricane and tornado detection teams have been savagely hit by the Trump administration’s cutbacks.

Meteorologists and scientists are doing the best they can under the circumstances, but downgrading early warning systems leads directly imperils lives and communities that live in tornado zones. Public confidence and trust in NOAA and government weather institutions plummets, and social media conspiracy theorists step up to fill that gap with misleading and maliciously false information.

How about we improve those scientific institutions, such as the weather service, which help up make better decisions in our lives? While ballistic missiles and bombs provide us with a false sense of ‘security’, it is a scientifically literate population that is the best guarantor against misinformation.

The United Kingdom (UK) and Saudi Arabia are close allies. They maintain and have continued to develop extensive economic and military ties. Do not take my word for it; please feel free to read the UK government’s own description of its ties to Riyadh as a strategic partnership.

By 2030, the governments of both nations expect bilateral trade to increase to $39.6 billion.

Why is there such a close and mutually financially beneficial relationship between London and Riyadh? Surely the British government realises that it is laying itself open to charges of hypocrisy – a liberal parliamentary democracy maintaining trade and military links with a theocratic, hereditary monarchy like Riyadh. Why does the UK, where women enjoy the liberal freedoms of a capitalist state, intimately cooperate with a regime that maintains strict gender segregation?

The answer to that question lies in understanding Britain’s role in shaping the modern Saudi state in the 1910s and 20s. Indeed, the UK has a long history of colluding with and supporting fundamentalist groups, arming and training them, as a bulwark against Arab nationalist and anticolonial movements in the Middle East region.

Britain, eager to defeat the Ottoman Turkish empire, encouraged the Arab revolt, an uprising by Arabic-speaking peoples in the Arabian peninsula. The leader of this nationalist uprising was Sharif Hussein, a notable leader in western Arabia which was then known as the Kingdom of Hejaz. This was significant because his territory contained the holy sites of Mecca and Medina.

Guardian of the holy sites and Arab leader. Hussein received numerous assurances from Britain (the 1915 Hussein-McMahon correspondence) that London would respect the creation of an independent Arabia after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks. We all know through the romanticised and somewhat fictionalised movie Lawrence of Arabia that London’s policymakers were secretly plotting, along with France, a division of the spoils once the Ottoman Empire was defeated.

The secret Sykes-Picot agreement, signed in 1916, involved carving up the Middle East into spheres of influence shared between Britain and France. What is not publicised in that film, nor to students of the British empire, is that London was worried. Sharif Hussein was an anticolonial and nationalist leader. What happens if he is successful – would his example inspire similar anticolonial uprisings in Egypt and India?

Here is where the UK made a fateful decision; to financially and militarily back the fundamentalist and ultraconservative Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, the king of the central Arabian state of Nejd. His brand of theocracy is known as Wahhabism, named after the 18th century theologian Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab (1703 – 1792).

Believing Islam to be corrupted by foreign elements, Wahhab wanted to purge Islam of those he considered apostates. A highly strict, orthodox interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism is today the official ideology of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud was no fool, realising that British arms and training would give him a decisive edge over his rival, Sharif Hussain.

The supply of armaments and money flowed into the coffers of the house of Saud. With British backing, the Wahhabi leader was able to impose his brand of Salafi revivalism on the entire territory of the Arabian peninsula after the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish empire. The subsequent political and economic character of the unified Saudi state was heavily influenced by this covert development.

Sharif Hussein’s forces were defeated, not by arms alone, but by imperial British treachery. Throughout the 1920s, the UK improved its relations with the emergent Saudi state. It is interesting to note here that Hussein repeatedly refused London’s proposal to start a Jewish state in Palestine.

Hostile to Zionism, Hussein desired the unification of Arab lands, including Syria and Palestine, into one entity. Ibn Saud on the other hand, accepted (however reluctantly) the Zionist project in Palestine. The 1917 Balfour declaration, committing Britain to a Jewish state in Palestine, was the price Ibn Saud was willing to pay for British finance and military backing.

By 1925, Hussein had been forced out of the port city of Aqaba, a city his forces liberated from Turkish control during the First World War.

Let us be clear – Britain actively colluded with a fundamentalist ultraconservative movement to achieve its geopolitical objectives. It is quite hypocritical for the UK to publicly denounce the Saudis for culturally regressive practices, but then actively support those political forces which advocate religiously fanatical culturally regressive policies.

London’s collusion with fundamentalist groups is not just a matter of history. There are important lessons for us today.

The current government in Damascus, headed by the fundamentalist and ultraconservative organisation Hayat Tahrir al-Shams (HTS), a Sunni supremacist group, received copious funding and military support from the UK, in their effort to topple the previous Ba’athist regime in Syria.

While every uprising undoubtedly has domestic origins and legitimate grievances, the military support and political backing provided to HTS by Britain is of an order of magnitude similar to the UK’s regime change policies of the past. Only now, months after the ousting of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, is the full extent of London’s covert support for the Syrian Sunni rebel group emerging.

While it is easy to view the success of HTS as a purely indigenously based, rapid advance against a tottering regime, the HTS militia was steadily groomed and cultivated over the years from its enclave in northwestern Syria.

Emerging as an Al Qaeda offshoot, the HTS has ruled Syria with lethal force, engaging in ethnic cleansing against minority communities. London’s role in orchestrating a regime change in Syria, accompanied by a media campaign to whitewash HTS’ image as a ‘moderate’ force, is only now just becoming clear. The HTS leadership is media savvy, and able to appeal to a Western audience – something no doubt their British paymasters trained them to do.

No amount of slick public relations can obscure the violent and extremist nature of the HTS militia. The new regime in Damascus recently announced their intention to privatise public assets, cut corporate taxes, and make Syria a business-friendly economy – a failed prescription that we have witnessed many times before.

The success of the HTS Salafi uprising has more in common with the Sudeten German ethnic uprising in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. An uprising, sponsored by a foreign power, intended to break apart a multiethnic and multi-confessional state, thus making it easier to monopolise. This is a playbook we have witnessed in the past.

I grew up in a car-centric suburb, in outer western Sydney. It was a quiet place, leafy, with only a tiny shopping village. It was tranquil, uninterrupted by the sounds of traffic or crowds of people – and it was absolutely f*cking boring.

The car centric suburb is a place of isolation, loneliness and a vortex of despair and boredom.

Forced to catch the bus – privately owned – or rely on the car, my late father being the chauffeur, I realised I could not actually walk anywhere. Oh yes, the local park, but for any amenities, it required at least a bus trip. Usually, I required the train – public transportation.

I am not alone in my experience. Consider the following observation of Muizz Akhtar, writing in Vox magazine in 2022 about the American suburban experience:

Distance and isolation are fundamentally built into the urban areas — defined by the US Census Bureau as any area with at least 5,000 people — where most of us live. State and local governments prioritize building infrastructure for cars, and public transportation remains underfunded and unreliable. Wide roads and parking lots spread everything out and make walking extremely difficult, if a neighborhood even has sidewalks to begin with. Today, because a majority of Americans, including an increasing number of children and the elderly, live in car-centric areas like suburbs, our ability to form connections and community is limited.

Constructing suburbs for car-dependent travel fails to contribute to the building of human connections.

The suburban home is built far away from shops, cinemas, schools, theatres, universities and general places of public gathering. Yes I know, there have been (and are ongoing) developments in western Sydney. A university was established to accomodate students in the region. More businesses are moving out to Parramatta, which has become a hub of activity.

Surry Hills, in the inner city, and Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, are separated by kilometres. Yet they both have a social contact street culture. People can walk and meet each other in restaurants, bookshops, cinemas, pubs and so on. Urban planners are finally waking up to these kinds of deficiencies in western Sydney suburbia.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and lockdowns were enforced, social isolation became a major issue. Involuntary confinement undermines the human need for social interaction. I do not want to say that I was completely unaffected by such lack of contact, but I was ready for such an outcome. Making myself busy and occupying my mind are social skills that I developed as a result of the normative isolation of suburbia.

No, lockdown was not a breeze, but it was something with which I coped better than most. Reading is a joy for me, because a good book transports you to another time and place, another location without leaving your house. No, it is no substitute for social connections. However, books became my way of breaking the monotony.

I will return to the impact of reading a bit later, but first let’s make an observation. Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood, writing in Psychology Today magazine, make the point that car-heavy lives construct a mode of living where we are always traveling away from our surroundings, not actually enjoying them. If enjoyment and connection is to be found by driving for miles away, what does that say about our suburban surroundings?

Spontaneous and serendipitous connections with potential friends are much harder to come by if we are cocooning ourselves in our cars.

A place which I enjoyed immensely and found connection was the old Soviet bookshop. Formerly located in Sydney’s CBD, it was the victim of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ubiquitous move to the internet. Yes, you can find multiple publications on the Net, and of course, the tech giant Amazon dominates book sales. Be that as it may, there was something unique about that bookshop.

It was the place that taught me that the world can be understood and experienced. It was a supplement to my university education. I kept up my studies for my university course, but also undertook a ‘postgraduate’ course, if you will, in Marxist books. The Soviet example taught me that reading is not only a joy, but a way of understanding the lives and struggles of other people.

The storefront bookshop, while not completely dead, has been overtaken by online media. Social media is one way of connecting with people, especially those who are geographically separated from us. However, there is no substitute for browsing the shelves of an actual bookshop.

No, I am not suggesting that we demolish the existing suburbs. I am suggesting that we redefine our image of the suburb, not simply as an investment property developer’s dream of houses to be bought and sold like cattle, but rather as places of human connection, walk ability, and green spaces.

It is important to raise one final point here. We all need to save for a financially secure retirement. I guess I am thinking more about this question now that I am approaching decrepitude. How secure will we be retiring to suburbs that are located in the middle of a climate hellscape?

Socially connected living goes beyond just numbers, but let’s consider the following regarding living in safe suburbs – what happens when they get inundated, or demolished by cyclones? Should not we be planning our suburban communities for these eventualities?