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LuAnn Dahlman and Rebecca Lindsey – updated 12/01/2022 from NOAA, climate.gov/news-features
Climate Change: Ocean Heat Content
Jessica Guynn – 21/01/2022 USA Today
Climate change denial on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok is ‘as bad as ever’
Nick O’Mallley – 18/01/2022 in The Age
Decarbonise or die, world’s biggest investor warns business chiefs
Joshua Partlow, 17/01/2022 in the Washington Post
Covid humbug distracts politics, media and virtually everyone from what really matters — solving the existential climate emergency
It is reasonable to fear Covid. It is a nasty pandemic disease, it will make a significant fraction of the world’s population too sick to work for a few days. However, even if we did nothing to manage it, a very small number (no more that 5% and probably less than 1%) of people might die from it. Where the scope of human history is concerned, this is insignificant. Who remembers the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Flu? that was at least as lethal, and people still die from flu today. Also, humans have faced much worse pandemics before (e.g., the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages), and we will probably have worse ones in the future. That is the nature of life on Earth. We keep on trucking.
What is wrong is that we are allowing Captain Humbug, his troop of COALition puppets and like-minded fellow travelers in the social and news media to blind and distract us (i.e., don’t look up!) from seeing and paying attention to the vastly more fearsome reality of the rapidly escalating climate emergency. Although the climate emergency is developing on a timescale of years rather than months, good science and risk management show that it is likely to be vastly more deadly than Covid. Those paying attention to the environment can see and fear that global warming is already passing some important tipping points where natural positive feedbacks from the environment will cause Earth’s Climate System to ‘flip’ over to its Hothouse Hell state.
However, looking over the history of the last three COALition Governments, it has been increasingly clear that the common thread has been to deny, distract and disrupt any real action to resolve the climate emergency by government or citizens. By contrast, it is equally evident that the COALition puppets have always been working to subsidize, protect, put the interests of the special interests of their patrons and masters in the fossil fuel and related industries first, above any actions in the favor of citizens that might in any way harm their patrons. In this, Scotty from Marketing has always been up front with his line of humbug, lies, disinformation, and distraction to keep citizens from looking over the curtain of blather to see what is really happening. This is exquisitely demonstrated by the man himself, in the famous episode of marketing coal to his colleagues.
Michelle Grattan’s article in The Conversation reviews some of the signs of growing chaos amongst the Humbug troop of puppets, clowns, backstabbers, liars, fools, and suspected grafters. Captain Humbug is hoping to con the Australian people that Covid is the only thing that matters and that his team will manage it best.
.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Michelle Grattan, 20/01/2022
The Conversation
It sounded a touch desperate – Prime Minister Scott Morrison imploring backpackers to “come on down” to Australia, as the Omicron crisis escalated.
“Enjoy a holiday here”, said the one-time managing director of Tourism Australia, and “at the same time join our workforce and help us”. The backpacker flow is slow, so there’ll be a $3 million advertising campaign (minus Lara Bingle) to lure them, and they’ll get a rebate on their visas if they come soon.
People were quick to see the irony – while Morrison was spruiking working holidays, travel advice in the US was updated to say “avoid travel to Australia”.
Read the full article….
Here I have shown several ways the morally corrupt LNP COALition Government helped by tame media has created a blinding cloud of humbug and bulldust. Helped by distractions Government hyperinflation of real concerns about Covid and playing the Djoker, few people have noticed that virtually nothing has been done or even planned to stop or even reduce carbon emissions. Nor have many people taken any real notice of the fearsome possibility that our inaction on the climate emergency may be committing the global biosphere and our own families and history to near term mass extinction. These circumstances have given fossil fuel gluttons a free pass to continue pumping their greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere to continue forcing GHG concentrations and global temperatures ever higher when we should all be working flat out to stop emissions and start working to reverse the global warming process.
We need to replace the LNP and other fossil fuel puppets NOW with sensible people who have committed to putting action on the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to give you information from a variety of sources to help you to rank the candidates in YOUR electorate on their likely performance relating to the climate emergency if elected to a ‘green’ tinged Parliament. Red lights for COALition and those whose preferences are likely to go to the COALition; green lights for those who have publicly committed themselves to placing the climate first if elected and Greens because of their official policy; and amber lights for those who we think can be trusted to work with or join a green tinged coalition if Labor fails to gain a majority. Currently we include the Labor Party as a whole in the amber category because their policy is still very ambivalent about shutting down the fossil fuel industry.
Covid humbug distracts politics, media and virtually everyone from what really matters — solving the existential climate emergency
It is reasonable to fear Covid. It is a nasty pandemic disease, it will make a significant fraction of the world’s population too sick to work for a few days. However, even if we did nothing to manage it, a very small number (no more that 5% and probably less than 1%) of people might die from it. Where the scope of human history is concerned, this is insignificant. Who remembers the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Flu? that was at least as lethal, and people still die from flu today. Also, humans have faced much worse pandemics before (e.g., the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages), and we will probably have worse ones in the future. That is the nature of life on Earth. We keep on trucking.
What is wrong is that we are allowing Captain Humbug, his troop of COALition puppets and like-minded fellow travelers in the social and news media to blind and distract us (i.e., don’t look up!) from seeing and paying attention to the vastly more fearsome reality of the rapidly escalating climate emergency. Although the climate emergency is developing on a timescale of years rather than months, good science and risk management show that it is likely to be vastly more deadly than Covid. Those paying attention to the environment can see and fear that global warming is already passing some important tipping points where natural positive feedbacks from the environment will cause Earth’s Climate System to ‘flip’ over to its Hothouse Hell state.
However, looking over the history of the last three COALition Governments, it has been increasingly clear that the common thread has been to deny, distract and disrupt any real action to resolve the climate emergency by government or citizens. By contrast, it is equally evident that the COALition puppets have always been working to subsidize, protect, put the interests of the special interests of their patrons and masters in the fossil fuel and related industries first, above any actions in the favor of citizens that might in any way harm their patrons. In this, Scotty from Marketing has always been up front with his line of humbug, lies, disinformation, and distraction to keep citizens from looking over the curtain of blather to see what is really happening. This is exquisitely demonstrated by the man himself, in the famous episode of marketing coal to his colleagues.
Michelle Grattan’s article in The Conversation reviews some of the signs of growing chaos amongst the Humbug troop of puppets, clowns, backstabbers, liars, fools, and suspected grafters. Captain Humbug is hoping to con the Australian people that Covid is the only thing that matters and that his team will manage it best.
.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Michelle Grattan, 20/01/2022
The Conversation
It sounded a touch desperate – Prime Minister Scott Morrison imploring backpackers to “come on down” to Australia, as the Omicron crisis escalated.
“Enjoy a holiday here”, said the one-time managing director of Tourism Australia, and “at the same time join our workforce and help us”. The backpacker flow is slow, so there’ll be a $3 million advertising campaign (minus Lara Bingle) to lure them, and they’ll get a rebate on their visas if they come soon.
People were quick to see the irony – while Morrison was spruiking working holidays, travel advice in the US was updated to say “avoid travel to Australia”.
Read the full article….
Here I have shown several ways the morally corrupt LNP COALition Government helped by tame media has created a blinding cloud of humbug and bulldust. Helped by distractions Government hyperinflation of real concerns about Covid and playing the Djoker, few people have noticed that virtually nothing has been done or even planned to stop or even reduce carbon emissions. Nor have many people taken any real notice of the fearsome possibility that our inaction on the climate emergency may be committing the global biosphere and our own families and history to near term mass extinction. These circumstances have given fossil fuel gluttons a free pass to continue pumping their greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere to continue forcing GHG concentrations and global temperatures ever higher when we should all be working flat out to stop emissions and start working to reverse the global warming process.
We need to replace the LNP and other fossil fuel puppets NOW with sensible people who have committed to putting action on the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to give you information from a variety of sources to help you to rank the candidates in YOUR electorate on their likely performance relating to the climate emergency if elected to a ‘green’ tinged Parliament. Red lights for COALition and those whose preferences are likely to go to the COALition; green lights for those who have publicly committed themselves to placing the climate first if elected and Greens because of their official policy; and amber lights for those who we think can be trusted to work with or join a green tinged coalition if Labor fails to gain a majority. Currently we include the Labor Party as a whole in the amber category because their policy is still very ambivalent about shutting down the fossil fuel industry.
Dan Gearino, 20/012022. Inside Clean Energy
Wind and Solar Costs Have Risen. How Long Should We Expect This Trend to Last?
Dan Gearino, 20/012022. Inside Clean Energy
Wind and Solar Costs Have Risen. How Long Should We Expect This Trend to Last?
by David Spratt in Climate Code Red
First in a series.
As global heating reduces the extent of floating Arctic sea-ice each summer, the heat-reflecting ice is replaced by heat-absorbing dark ocean water, adding energy to the Arctic system, driving more melting. This is a “positive feedback”, a self-reinforcing change. Examples abound in the climate system. On Greenland, for example, warming is reducing the height of the ice, and this lower elevation means it will melt more, because the temperature is higher at lower altitudes.
Sixteen years ago, James Hansen warned that “We live on a planet whose climate is dominated by positive feedbacks, which are capable of taking us to dramatically different conditions. The problem that we face now is that many feedbacks that came into play slowly in the past, driven by slowly changing forcings, will come into play rapidly now, at the pace of our human-made forcings, tempered a few decades by the oceans thermal response time.”
Those feedbacks can drive non-linear (or abrupt) change that is difficult to forecast. That happened to Arctic sea-ice in the summer of 2007, when a collapse in the ice extent led one experienced glaciologist to exclaim that it was melting “100 years ahead of schedule”; actually, the scientific understanding was 100 years behind reality! The same thing is happening in Antarctica now, according to the new observations of the Thwaites Glacier.
For the full article ….
Spratt warns us that more posts will follow in this series. One might relate to the unexpectedly rapid thawing of the Siberian permafrost (H on the map above) that holds at least two times more carbon Earth’s entire atmosphere.
This is something I have researched in detail with my own eyeballs using the original satellite scans. My findings are described in my graphical essay/presentation, “Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost.” The authors of the tipping point papers Spratt cites and linked generally anticipated thawing of the permafrost would be one of the later tipping points. These authors certainly did not anticipate that all-time record temperatures would be recorded in 2020 above the Arctic Circle (due to Arctic amplification), or how this heat affected the rapid acceleration in frequency, extent, and ferocity of wildfires on the Siberian permafrost.
Spratt and I and a few other generalists (some of us with complex systems engineering backgrounds) can see that what is happening is well outside the boundaries of the IPCC’s super-conservative and bureaucratic approach to climate science that assumes that future climates can be predicted – at least in a statistical sense – by treating climate change as if it followed the universal laws of physics in a statistically repeatable way. However, even the IPCC’s tightly controlled conservative approach that only mentions the possibility of global mass extinction on one out of the 3949 pages of their recently released AR6 Report still shows we are well on the road to climate Hell.
As Spratt notes in the article here and I explain in detail in another graphical essay/presentation circulated earlier this month, “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong“, climate change does not behave repeatably as one would expect in physics experiments. Climate is generated by a complex dynamical system of many variables interacting in non-linear and some times actually mathematically chaotic feedback loops such that climate change is actually unpredictable as one looks more than a few weeks into the future.
What this means for our future is that we are moving down the road to Hell farther, faster and sooner than anyone putting total faith in the IPCC’s complacent discussions of emissions budgets and 2050 net-zero targets would believe, and that the government and media puppets of the fossil fuel special interests are happy to refer to in their blizzard of optimistic humbug about a rosy future and keeping a vibrant coal burning industry going so there will be full employment.
The stark reality is that if we cannot very quickly mobilize a global effort to
we will soon have passed the point of no return where the natural climate feedbacks are warming the world sped up so fast that nothing humans could do would prevent temperatures from running away to Earth’s Hothouse Hell state. That climatic flip would, of course, lead to completion of the global mass extinction event we have already started. Humans would be among the 90% or more of Earth’s biosphere to go extinct (as happened in the End Permian mass extinction).
Our current LNP COALition Government is clearly comprised of puppets of the greedily gluttonous special interests of the fossil fuel and related industries that are exploiting Australia’s natural resources for minimal return to Australia or its citizens. To have any hope of generating effective action on climate change against the blizzard of humbug, lies, misrepresentation, misdirection, alternative facts, fake news, bulldust and blather that members of this government emit to provide subsidy, cover, and protection for their patrons, they must all be removed from office and replaced wherever possible by electingtrustworthy people who have made public commitments to make action against climate change their first order of business.
Vote Climate One is dedicated to helping you achieve this replacement (where needed) in every Federal Electorate by making it easy to use our Australian preferential voting system to full effect. This help is provided via our Traffic Light Voting System. If we can sterilize the pigpen our Parliament has become and replace it with houses of genuine leadership and legislation, we might actually be able to engineer a solution to the climate emergency that provides us with a path into a foreseeable future.
If you agree with the program outlined here, we are seeking like-minded volunteers to help us in this effort to change our Parliament as Climate Heroes or in any other way.
Berlin may show the world how most of its citizens can live without private cars.
