Community batteries: Managing green energy on grid?

William P. Hall on April 6, 2022

Existing fossil energy grids were not planned to manage and distribute renewable energy and require either $$$ re-engineering or new thinking

The approved “Summary for Policy Makers” that begins the third part of the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 6th Assessment Report, was issued late yesterday after receiving political sign offs after considerable discussion with sponsoring governments. Despite attempts by several governments including Australia’s, to deny or downplay aspects of the report, even this rendition of the scientific findings forecasts an extremely dire future from continued global warming if it is not stopped and reversed below the 1.5 °C level. Fossil fuel burning must stop! (see video).

“It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5C,” said Prof Jim Skea, a co-chair of the report. “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”

The implication for the biggest culprit, fossil fuels, is clear: it’s over. The IPCC states that existing and currently planned fossil fuel projects are already more than the climate can handle. More projects will lock in even greater emissions and our journey to climate hell.

Damian Carrington, 05/04/2022 in the Guardian. It’s over for fossil fuels: IPCC spells out what’s needed to avert climate disaster – Analysis: The third part of the panel’s report makes clear a century of rising emissions must end before 2025.

As strong as the present report is in discussing the dire consequences facing humanity if we fail to stop and reverse the warming, the whole IPCC process is structured in such a way that it cannot help but understate the magnitude and likelihood of the risks. I document and discuss this issue at length in my presentation: Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong.

Vote Climate One’s local community in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges has been aware of the need to replace fossil fuels for decades. It has a long established interest in renewable energy projects including the establishment of a community owned ‘Power Park’ supporting wind and solar generation together with battery storage. Unfortunately, this has been stalled for years by state government bureaucracy, not helped by relentless attacks on the harvest of wind energy by Federal and State COALition governments, beginning with Tony Abbott (then PM), Barnaby Joyce (then Agriculture Minister) and Joe Hockey (then Treasurer).

With the major project still stalled, and aware of difficulties incorporating big renewable energy generators into the fossil energy grid, the Macedon Ranges community group recently won state government funding for a feasibility study and community engagement program to implement energy storage and batteries at the community level. This project is detailed in the webinar video: “What is a neighbourhood battery and why should I care?“. Even without the local energy farm, the ability to localize and manage energy storage at the community level should considerably reduce the problems anticipated from incorporating renewable energy sources into the fossil electricity grid. This offers a way to facilitate the generation and use of renewable energy at the neighborhood level while reducing peak demands on the fossil network.

Our featured article from the ABC explores this ‘neighbourhood battery option’ in some detail:

  • Virtual Power Plants versus community batteries
  • The most effective scale, size, and location
  • Community battery program initiatives by local community groups and councils.
  • Lack of trust in retailers, long identified as a problem in Australia’s energy market, is highlighted as a barrier to the adoption of commercially run community battery programs.

This 464kWh community battery in the Perth suburb of Port Kennedy means local residents don’t need their own home battery.(Supplied: Western Power) / via the article

by James Purtill, 05/04/2022 in ABC News

A community battery ‘like a corner store’: Is this the future of home energy storage?

When Australia’s first community battery trial came to the Perth suburb of Alkimos Beach in 2016, Kelly was sceptical.

“There was a whole lot of discussion about whether it would save us money or not. The fee structure was quite complex,” she said.

Eventually, her family took a punt and signed up to the trial.

“And it did save us money. It was at least $100 every two months.”

Read the complete article….

What does this all tell us about our governments’ concerns and abilities to solve the climate crisis?

Many communities are already well prepared to switch from fossil to renewable energy sources as soon as the supply and distribution issues can be resolved. Given that governments supposedly exist to protect and keep their citizens safe from external threats (i.e., global warming) in this case) we should be able to expect that that they would be promoting and facilitating the growth and spread of renewable energy technologies. But, at least in the case of Australian federal and some state governments, they are dong precisely the opposite: denying the science, and blocking and humbugging efforts to research, develop, promote, and roll out renewable technologies across all of our communities.

We have to replace the COALition Government in Parliament with people we can trust to put action on climate change as their first priority before we can have any hope that the government will do its job to facilitate and support effective action to stop global warming. Not only do we need to replace Capt Humbug and his troop of fossil fuel puppets, but the clean-out should also include micro-party members such as mining multi-billionaire Clive Palmer’s one-man fake news bureau Craig Kelly, and Pauline Hanson’s anti-science nut Malcolm Roberts.

If you doubt my interpretation, let them tell you in their own words how hard they are working to keeping their patrons’ greenhouse gas emitting industries keep growing in the face of the oncoming climate catastrophe.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he is supportive of Australia’s fossil fuel industry – and particularly coal, which he… says will be around for “decades to come”. “When it comes to the coal industry, it’s worth $35 billion to us every year in exports, and that’s money Australia needs to grow our economy,” Mr Morrison said. “What you need in today’s energy economy is you need to continue to run your coal-fired power stations for as long as you possibly can and that is our policy … we want them to run as long as they possibly can.” Coal-fired power stations will continue to run to back up renewable power sources, although Mr Morrison said gas would play a larger role in the energy mix in years to come. Mr Morrison added that building a new coal-fired power station would be difficult because of the state government planning powers, which would “probably never allow them to do it”. For the video see: The Australian, 14/03/2022, Commentary/coal-will-be-around-for-decades-to-come-scott-morrison/video. See also ‘We will keep mining’, says Australian prime minister Scott Morrison about the future of coal.

If that wasn’t enough, here’s a choice of some of Scotty’s thinking about stopping our slide down the slope to runaway global warming and possible near-term extinction

Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal, 15/02/17
via the Guardian:
We’ll keep mining!
09/09/2021 via the Guardian

We need to get the gas from under our feet. We’ve got to get the gas!
The future of power: What’s behind Australia’s push for gas-fired energy | ABC Four Corners

We need to turn away from the the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with the kind of business as usual Scotty from Maketing and his fossil fuel puppets are spruiking!

It seems to taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.

In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment WG2 Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.

Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact all they doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about.

In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our young one’s future.

Give the children a future worth running towards rather than misery and probable death in the collapsing shambles of global mass extinction along the road to Hothouse Hell

Featured Image: Community battery in WA. / from Your Guide to Batteries, Western Power

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Thawing permafrost: Big climate system danger

William P. Hall on April 4, 2022

Permafrost holds 2x more carbon than Earth’s atmosphere and 3x more than all forests. Thawing will hugely impact global climate warming

Science Session: Thawing Arctic Permafrost–Regional and Global Impacts

by US National Academy of Sciences, 12/05/2020

Science Session: Thawing Arctic Permafrost–Regional and Global Impacts

Temperatures across the Arctic are increasing two to four times faster than the global average. The dramatic consequences that are already apparent include reduction of sea-ice cover, accelerating loss of land ice from glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet, proliferating wildfires, and—the topic of this panel—ongoing heating and thawing of the permafrost that underlies most of the land area of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions across the globe. Permafrost thaw is a direct threat to buildings, roads, and pipelines, and it can greatly accelerate erosion along rivers and coastlines with severe consequences for communities located there. But an impact with much wider consequences is the release of carbon dioxide and methane by the decomposition of previously frozen organic matter, affecting the rate of growth of global warming and all of its impacts everywhere. (There is estimated to be something like 2.5 times as much carbon in the as in the entire global atmosphere; the key question is how fast it will come out.) The panelists, leading Arctic experts all, explain the complex science of thawing permafrost and elucidate the implications both regionally and globally.

Editors note: I have often mentioned the potential risk of rapid permafrost thawing serving as a source of powerful positive feedback on global warming from the abrupt emissions of greenhouse gases. The emissions include methane, which has a global warming potential more than 80 x that of CO. The video runs for almost 1½ hours. However, if you want to understand how science works in what are relatively conservative approaches and whether the risks that concern us in the Vote Climate One group are real, the whole video should be well worth watching.

In this pay particular attention to what is left out of the predictive models for future growth of emissions. The actual reality is likely to be even worse.

Finally, a lot of the discussion is based on the idea still common in 2020, that there is some kind of ’emissions budget’ that allows time to stop anthropogenic emissions. With more data, e.g., from the still conservative IPCC Sixth Assessment Report there is much less mention that there is no ‘safe’ emissions budget. Action to slow and reverse global warming is urgent! To be effective this will need global mobilization with cooperation at government levels as well as involving people. Here, our government in Australia has been quite hostile to any kind of action on global warming because of their apparently rusted-on allegiance to the fossil fuel industry and super-wealthy special interests associated with it.

In Scotty’s own words in one of his pet mediums – something to think about:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he supports Australia’s fossil fuel industry – and particularly coal, which he… says will be around for “decades to come”. “When it comes to the coal industry, it’s worth $35 billion to us every year in exports, and that’s money Australia needs to grow our economy,” Mr Morrison said. “What you need in today’s energy economy is you need to continue to run your coal-fired power stations for as long as you possibly can and that is our policy … we want them to run as long as they possibly can.” Coal-fired power stations will continue to run to back up renewable power sources, although Mr Morrison said gas would play a larger role in the energy mix in years to come. Mr Morrison added that building a new coal-fired power station would be difficult because of the state government planning powers, which would “probably never allow them to do it”. For the video see: The Australian, 14/03/2022, Commentary/coal-will-be-around-for-decades-to-come-scott-morrison/video. See also ‘We will keep mining’, says Australian prime minister Scott Morrison about the future of coal.

What can/must we do about this dreadful government and even worse situation?

We need to turn away from the the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with the kind of business as usual Scotty from Maketing and his fossil fuel puppets are spruiking!

It seems to take the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old autistic girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.

In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment WG2 Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.

Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact they have expended considerable effort to deny the science, punish the institutions doing the science, misrepresent the facts, and try to divert interest to anything else but action on climate change. Beyond this they are continuing to support and subsidize continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry. Basically, all they doing is throwing coal on the fire and rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about.

In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ future.

Our young ones are walking into an unknown future. Give them hope and not the Ukraine.

Featured image: Tundra fire burning on permafrost along a 30 km long front (with even more burning out of the frame, dated 20/07/2022, Picture centered on lat=71.50116, lng=145.43701 at zoom 10, well north of the Arctic circle in Russia’s Siberian Sakha Republic. Image downloaded from European Space Agency’s Sentinel Hub EO Browser using False color, urban with RGB tweaking to emphasize currently burning area and the reddish burn scar. Fire burned for over 3 months / uploaded here by William Hall.. See https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/?zoom=10&lat=71.49244&lng=145.43839&themeId=DEFAULT-THEME&visualizationUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fservices.sentinel-hub.com%2Fogc%2Fwms%2Fbd86bcc0-f318-402b-a145-015f85b9427e&datasetId=S2L2A&fromTime=2020-07-22T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&toTime=2020-07-22T23%3A59%3A59.999Z&layerId=4-FALSE-COLOR-URBAN&redRange=%5B0.01%2C1%5D&greenRange=%5B0.22%2C1%5D&blueRange=%5B0.18%2C0.83%5D

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Video report: Arctic warming and scientific conservatism

Climate News Links on April 3, 2022

A personal story on Arctic climate change filled with facts together with discussion of how ‘conservative science’ nobbles urgency of action.

What Arctic climate tells us – It’s worse than we are told: Why science communication is conservative.

by Jason Box, 08/01/2022 on YouTube

Greenland ice melt – why climate communication is conservative – personal story

Featured image: 2100 years of summer Arctic air temperatures under different IPCC climate models. / From the video.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

History: First real evidence for abrupt climate change

Climate News Links on April 3, 2022

1969 Greenland ice cores provide convincingly accurately timed evidence for abrupt major changes in Earth temperatures and global warming.

Wally Broecker, shown here in 1997, proposed that the shutdown of a major ocean circulation pattern could lead to abrupt climate change. Jean-Louis Atlan/Paris Match via Getty Images / from the Article

by Alexandra Witze, 29/03/2022 in Science News

Wally Broecker divined how the climate could suddenly shift: The shutdown of an ocean conveyor belt could cause abrupt climate change

It was the mid-1980s, at a meeting in Switzerland, when Wally Broecker’s ears perked up. Scientist Hans Oeschger was describing an ice core drilled at a military radar station in southern Greenland. Layer by layer, the 2-kilometer-long core revealed what the climate there was like thousands of years ago. Climate shifts, inferred from the amounts of carbon dioxide and of a form of oxygen in the core, played out surprisingly quickly — within just a few decades. It seemed almost too fast to be true.

Read the complete article….

Editor’s note: See Broecker’s 1975 paper, Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? in Science, that gave us early warning 47 years ago on what might be happening. How different our future might have been if humanity took that warning seriously.

Leland_McInnes at en.wikipedia – (red) GRIP data: http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/data/grip-ss09sea-cl-50yr.stp (blue) NGRIP data:http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/data/NGRIP_d18O_50yrs.txt / License: CC BY-SA 3.0

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Rising crescendos: clusters of climate catastrophes

Climate News Links on April 3, 2022

In a warming climate extreme weather events may encourage other extreme events to closely follow, e.g., fires followed by floods & landslides

Debris from a mudslide covers a home on January 10, 2018 in Montecito, California. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images / from the article.

by Andrea Thompson, on 01/04/2022 in Scientific American

Double Disaster: Wildfires Followed by Extreme Rainfall Are More Likely with Climate Change: These events can cause devastating landslides and flash floods

At 3:30 A.M. on January 9, 2018, half an inch of rain poured down on the charred slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains in coastal southern California. The flames of the Thomas Fire—at the time the largest wildfire in state history—had swept through the previous month, leaving the soil and vegetation scorched and unable to soak up the onslaught of water. The destabilized ground gave way in a devastating landslide. Boulders crashed into houses in the town of Montecito, Calif., and a highway was buried under several feet of mud. The disaster killed 23 people and caused an estimate of around $200 million in damage.

Read the complete article….

See the scientific report that is the source of this article: Touma et al., 01/04/2022, Climate change increases risk of extreme rainfall following wildfire in the western United States in Science Advances

Featured Image: This image from a rescue helicopter records the burn scar from the Thomas Fire, as well as the path of a deadly mudslide in Montecito, Calif., in January 2018. Credit: California National Guard, CC BY 2.0 / from No Relief from Rain: Climate Change Fuels Compound Disasters: Climate change is increasing the risk of fire-rain events, raising mudslide concerns in fire-prone communities. by Leah Campbell, 12/12/2021 in EOS.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

See new Climate Council report on lost opportunities

William P. Hall on April 1, 2022

Eight years ago the LNP COALition govt. cancelled the national Climate Commission. But they kept on. Their report details lost opportunities.

Members of the Climate Commission would not lie down and die. They found their own funding and carried on.

Report summary, via Amanda McKenzie – Climate Council CEO, 01/04/2022:

The Lost Years: Counting the costs of climate inaction in Australia

Good factual, evidence-based reporting meticulously details the costs of 8 years LNP COALition Government denial and sabotage of science, blocking, disinformation, and downright malfeasance to prevent effective action on the growing climate emergency

The Climate Council’s full report can be downloaded from here.

Not counting front and end matter the Report provides 72 pages of well documented reportage on just what the government has done (1) to impede action on the global climate emergency that I have reported on extensively in Climate Sentinel News and (2) what the government has failed to do to help protect Australians from the worst impacts of climate change.

The analysis begins with an Introduction and Scorecard on Federal Government Climate Action that can be used to track progress into the future.

The real meat begins with Chapter 3 – Attacks on Science. What is documented here is a concerted attack to downsize and terrorize some of Australia’s world ranked scientific and technical institutions (e.g., CSIRO Climate Science Division) because the Government didn’t like the reality they reported. The cost of this denialism and threats is tracked through the remainder of the chapter (as well as through the rest of the Report).

Chapter 4 traces Australia’s dismal record, showing amongst other gems of mismanagement that:

In the thirty years since Australia first committed to tackling climate change, our emissions have increased by more than a quarter. [my emphasis]

p. 23

Chapter 5 – Setting the Record Straight, looks the physical cause of global warming, greenhouse gas emissions, and what can be done to reduce and stop them.

Chapter 6 – Reckless Conduct, looks at the LNP Government’s actions to promote fossil fuel industry growth at the expense of mitigating impacts of global warming induced climate change.

Chapter 7 explores the impacts of the LNP Government’s bad management of the climate emergency on Australia’s foreign policy and relationships.

The final chapter, saving the Conclusion of the Report surveys the Government’s program and policy decisions favoring its mates in the fossil fuel industry versus closing down or cutting programs addressing climate change.

…Australia can and should cut its emissions at an even faster rate than the required global average. The Climate Council recommends that to make a fair contribution to the required global effort, Australia should achieve net zero emissions by 2035, and reduce emissions by 75 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. As a first step, Australia should match its key allies and commit to at least halving emissions by 2030. We should aim high, and we should move fast in order to maximise the benefits and minimise the risks.

Embracing our natural advantages in clean energy, zero-carbon manufacturing and other climate solutions will ensure jobs and prosperity for Australians now and for generations to come. It will improve our health, and help protect our natural heritage. Bold and transformative action this decade is not only fundamental to protecting all of us, but can also secure Australia’s economic prosperity.

It’s crunch time. Another lost decade will put us on the precipice of climate catastrophe. The 2020s are our ‘Last-Chance Decade’ – a decade the next Federal Government cannot afford to squander.

pp. 65- 66

In Scotty’s own words in one of his pet mediums – something to think about:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he is supportive of Australia’s fossil fuel industry – and particularly coal, which he… says will be around for “decades to come”. “When it comes to the coal industry, it’s worth $35 billion to us every year in exports, and that’s money Australia needs to grow our economy,” Mr Morrison said. “What you need in today’s energy economy is you need to continue to run your coal-fired power stations for as long as you possibly can and that is our policy … we want them to run as long as they possibly can.” Coal-fired power stations will continue to run to back up renewable power sources, although Mr Morrison said gas would play a larger role in the energy mix in years to come. Mr Morrison added that building a new coal-fired power station would be difficult because of the state government planning powers, which would “probably never allow them to do it”. For the video see: The Australian, 14/03/2022, Commentary/coal-will-be-around-for-decades-to-come-scott-morrison/video. See also ‘We will keep mining’, says Australian prime minister Scott Morrison about the future of coal.

If that wasn’t enough, here’s a choice of some of Scotty’s thinking about stopping our slide down the slope to runaway global warming and possible near-term extinction

Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal, 15/02/17
via the Guardian:
We’ll keep mining!
09/09/2021 via the Guardian

We need to get the gas from under our feet. We’ve got to get the gas!
The future of power: What’s behind Australia’s push for gas-fired energy | ABC Four Corners

What can/must we do about this dreadful government and even worse situation?

We need to turn away from the the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with the kind of business as usual Scotty from Maketing and his fossil fuel puppets are spruiking!

It seems to taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.

In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment WG2 Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.

Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact all they doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about.

In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ future.

Our young ones are walking into an unknown future. Give them hope and not the Ukraine.

Featured image: Fig. 17 from the Climate Council Report, THE LOST YEARS: COUNTING THE COSTS OF CLIMATE INACTION IN AUSTRALIA

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Floods and then more floods! Can we expect more yet?

Climate News Links on April 1, 2022

Multiple floods in La Niña years are not unknown in Australia, but global warming can supply more water that makes extreme flooding even worse.

Jason O’Brien/AAP Image from the article

by Margaret Cook, 31/03/2022 in the Conversation

Why can floods like those in the Northern Rivers come in clusters?

Right now, Lismore residents are going through their second major flood in a month.

On February 28th, the devastating first flood peaked at 14.4 metres, fully two metres higher than the previous record of 12.27 metres in 1954, and well above the town’s 10-metre-high levee wall, constructed in 2005. Four people died, with 2000 homes destroyed or unlivable of the city’s 19,000.

Even as Lismore and Northern Rivers residents struggle to recover from the first flood, the floods are coming again. On March 29th, more heavy rain began falling onto the soaked catchment feeding into Wilsons River.

Read the complete article….

Featured Image: Lismore locals are still cleaning up after February’s floods – now they are being hit again. Darren England/AAP Image / from the article.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

We ignore those who know most about land we occupy

Climate News Links on March 31, 2022

The world’s first nations people have been surviving since the ice ages on lands we occupy. We ignore their knowledge at our perils.

Calgardup Bushfire burning in Margaret River. DFES Incident Photographer Sean Blocksidge/AAP Image/ / from the Article.

by Janine Mohamed, et al., 29/03/2022 in The Conversation

Indigenous peoples across the globe are uniquely equipped to deal with the climate crisis – so why are we being left out of these conversations?

The urgency of tackling climate change is even greater for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and other First Nation peoples across the globe. First Nations people will be disproportionately affected and are already experiencing existential threats from climate change.

The unfolding disaster in the Northern Rivers regions of New South Wales is no exception, with Aboriginal communities completely inundated or cut off from essential supplies.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have protected Country for millennia and have survived dramatic climatic shifts. We are intimately connected to Country, and our knowledge and cultural practices hold solutions to the climate crisis….

Read the complete article….

Castlemaine (Vic.) author Lynne Kelly explains how Aboriginal song lines and similar tools in other primary oral cultures accurately preserve and transmit survival knowledge down through hundreds of generations.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Excuse profanity, but Juice Media tells the truth

Climate News Links on March 31, 2022

Floods and climate disasters will keep rising until global warming is reversed. Scummo’s govt. will only continue shoveling coal on the fire.

Honest Government Ad | The Floods
The Australian Government has made an ad about this summer’s floods and it’s surprisingly honest and informative – 17/03/2022 in thejuicemedia

Editor’s comment: This was recorded BEFORE the present NB4 flooding in a sequence of NB4 floods…. Think about who you are voting for!

Featured image: River levels could top 16 metres at Lismore amid more expected rain, the weather bureau says. / from Northern Beaches Review article 28/02/2022 by Australian Associated Press, NSW flood crisis ‘unprecedented’: premier

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Vote with councillors, they’re working for you, unlike LNP

William P. Hall on March 30, 2022

Floods vs Fires: After the article below, East Coast Australia is copping more floods. If this is bad, what will the next El Nino be like?

Councillors and mayors are calling on the government to do more to tackle climate change. Source: AAP / Getty / from the article

by Michael Dahlstrom, 24/03/2022 in Yahoo! News

‘Community is suffering’: Leaders urge Scott Morrison to tackle climate crisis

Australians are exhausted from extreme weather and must be better protected, mayors and councillors from disaster-ravaged communities urge.

In an open letter, 31 elected local government representatives from Queensland, NSW, Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia called for the Commonwealth “to respond to accelerating climate change at the scale and pace required”.

Thursday’s plea for urgent action comes amid dissatisfaction at the government’s rescue and response effort amid unprecedented flooding in NSW and Queensland that claimed the lives of 17 people.

Read the complete article….

Featured image: Lismore flood survivors have delivered a powerful message at the front gates of Scott Morrison’s Sydney residence. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw from Lismore residents storm Scott Morrison’s Kirribilli House in protest of the government’s lack of response to climate change following NSW floods by Crystal Wu, 21/03/2022 in Sky News.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.