Imagine waking up and not being ashamed of your country!
We live with ever increasing anxiety about species extinction (possibly including our own), environmental degradation, catastrophic bushfires and floods, deaths from heat stroke and a government that fails to act on the emergency. To survive, we will probably have to actively remove and safely sequester a significant fraction of the existing greenhouse gas from the global atmosphere, and possibly also enhance Earth’s reflectivity enough to reduce the amount of heat it captures from solar radiation. These goals will be hard to achieve, but let’s begin with the comparatively easy task of completely stopping human generated greenhouse gas emissions, i.e., zero carbon emissions from human activities.
Zero carbon by 2030 is a reasonable aspiration, especially in Australia. We have the knowledge and the resources for a technological transition. All we need is the political will. If we can do this, then we’ll know whether we have to do the other things also, and by then we should have a government able and willing to take leadership on these jobs as well.
The declaration of a Climate Emergency and the contingencies that flow from this will guide an economic transformation. Just as radical change happened with the declaration of the war economy, shifting perspectives made the impossible seem possible. We cannot imagine how fast change can happen as we are used to the spin, obfuscation, rorting, incompetence, reliance on the market to find solutions and the privatisation of government decisions via outsourcing to big donors in contemporary government.
Setting aside the debate about the necessity of the limits to growth and a whole systems approach we need to elect a new Federal Government who can work with a cross bench to shift public opinion as fast as is politically possible.
Many industries and communities are writing blueprints for the future. One comprehensive plan that will inspire hope and creative action in people who seek election at the 2022 Federal Election is The Million Jobs Plan by Beyond Zero Emissions.
by Beyond Zero Emissions, June 2020
The Million Jobs Plan: A unique opportunity to demonstrate the growth and employment potential of investing in a low-carbon economy
The publisher, Beyond Zero Emissions is an internationally recognised energy think-tank, that shows through independent research and innovative solutions how Australia can thrive through a transition to a zero-emissions economy. The plan aims to create employment, modernise our infrastructure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It proposes nation-building, transformative projects that can upgrade the economy, modernise industry, reskill the workforce and deliver a different future – economically and socially. The Plan includes case studies for coal industry regions. The Plan aims to make Australia more prosperous, fairer and more resilient, with local jobs that are lasting, secure, well-paid and backed by safe and fair working conditions. Their research shows that this is entirely achievable.
Some of its key points include –
70% of new jobs to be created in regional areas
Australia wide transmission line upgrades with government and private investment
renewable energy industrial zones and zero carbon community initiatives
Australian made manufacturing creating new supply chains
Building mass scale renewables to electrify industry and drive the development of zero emissions metals, green hydrogen, steel and aluminium
electrify public transport including regional trains and buses
energy efficient social housing and the creation of new standards to drive net-zero energy housing
technology to boost local building material production through government procurement policy to prioritise local, lower embedded emissions
the creation of a renewable hydrogen sector to meet emissions free ammonia for use in the production of fertilizers
investing in the circular economy with resource recovery and waste recycling, from raw material extraction to end-of-life
revegetation of 27M hectares in 5 years, replanting to achieve carbon neutrality
regenerative agriculture as well as wetlands regeneration and biodiversity protection
investing in training and upskilling the workforce
a green stimulus package to foster research and development and jobs in education
We applaud the many people who have put their hands up to stand for election in 2022 to collectively advance Australia’s contribution to solving the existential crisis we currently face.
For information on how to make your vote count to elect House and Senate representatives in your electorate who will put action on climate change at the top of their to do list, our Traffic Light Voting System will give you information about the various candidates and show you how to make the most of your vote.
Featured Image: Climate Sentinel Editor, based on an image by Kirsten Gillibrand from her campaign as a Democratic candidate in the primaries for the US Presidential Election in 2020. Source: via Wikimedia Commons.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
“This is coal” 09/02/2017 via David Marler on Youtube
“We’ll keep on mining coal” 09/09/2021 via The Guardian
We need to treat the climate emergency as a global war we are on track to lose unless we can focus our efforts on the only task that matters – reversing global warming. If we fail here no other tasks matter — our species risks extinction no matter how we arrange the deck chairs on the burning ship— and the risk continues to rise the longer we delay action.
William P. Hall
The climate emergency has two possible outcomes
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Risk runaway warming to a hothouse earth and extinction
RECOGNISE THE EMERGENCY
Mobilise to the max & work to become good stewards of our precious blue planet
There is no planet B
VOTE CLIMATE ONE to heal our planet
It is time for Australian citizens to reclaim our government from the puppets of the fossil fuel industry.
These humbugging puppets have been working for several years to keep their immensely rich patrons safe from any economic harm from actions to stop and reverse the global warming that has been changing our climate to allow ever more, and more deadly extreme weather events.
It is time for Australian citizens to replace the puppets in our Parliament with independent people or parties who are publicly committed to put action to fight the growing climate emergency at the top of their agendas if elected. As our name states, Vote Climate One has been established to help you elect these kinds of people in your individual electorates.
Welcome to our updated and “election ready” site! Please check it out!
Traffic Light Voting, explains how our system will help ensure that your vote will count maximally towards electing ‘climate friendly’ representatives in your house and senate electorates.
Climate Heroes explains how you can help in a very big way to put our voting guide in everyone’s hands in your electorate and help us to make the guide as accurate as it possibly can be.
Political parties discusses the roles political parties have played in Australia to bring us to the present state of general inaction relative to the worsening climate emergency, and what we know about their stances relative to solving the emergency.
Electorates tells you what what we know about each candidate in each individual federal house and senate electorate, and shows you how we have ranked them in relation to their party or public stances on prioritizing action on the climate emergency.
Once the election is declared and the ballot papers laid out by the Electoral Commission, we will provide printable copies of the form so you can mark your preferences before you go to the polling booth to save you time when you are actually voting.
Climate Sentinel News is where we most differ from all other election-related web-sites. Here is where we present a curated collection of daily news items and scientific reports providing the concrete evidence relating to global warming and climate change that underlies our concerns for the futures of our families.
If you are unsure about the real importance of climate change and actions to control it, this information will keep you up to date with the latest scientific knowledge and continuing evidence from the daily news. This keeps telling us (1) we face real problems from climate change, and (2) that with the proper government, we may actually be able to make the world safer from it.
If you agree with us that we need a very different kind of government that can go beyond ‘business as usual’ there are some very positive things you can do to help spread the message
Basically our problem is that we are a purely volunteer outfit. Any funding we can raise goes to our Climate Heroes program to support posting and letter-boxing our paper Voting Guide in marginal electorates. However, the Web campaign is also critically important to reach possible swing voters in all electorates in hope that we may swing a few surprises here as well to remove some of the worst special interest puppets from their normally very safe seats.
The internet (Web) is truly remarkable in that social media has the power to circulate ‘interesting’ news to an exponentially growing market as fake news publishers all too frequently demonstrate. This doesn’t even have to be paid for if readers want to share the item.
We think VoteClimateOne’s Climate Sentinel News and/or our Traffic Light Voting System might be circulated in this same way. For example, if you find this post to be interesting enough to share with some of your friends, Google and other search engines will pick up on this interest and prioritize showing the post in other people’s search results over other, apparently less interesting stuff. There are some very simple things you can do in Facebook and Twitter to multiply this effect many times over.
For Facebook – when you receive a post from VoteClimateOne (like this one), (1) click the Like icon. (2) click the Share icon and then the Share now (Friends), write something in the comment saying why they should read the post and add some appropriate hash tags, e.g., #VoteClimateOne #AusPol #TellTheTruth #ScottyFromMarketing #WhereTheBloodyHellAreYou #AustraliaBurns #AustraliaFloods #ClimateEmergency #GlobalWarming. The presence of any one of these in YOUR comment to the item you are sharing will insure that this vote climate one post will be added to the posts indexed under that hash tag. And the more times this one post is shared by someone else also using the same hash tag, the closer this post will be to the top of the list someone sees when they do a search on the hash tag.
If everyone receiving a post from Vote Climate One shares only one post a day with all of their friends, within only a few days we will saturate the Web – especially if the hash tags are specifically Australian in context. Twitter works in very much the same way, but Paul Hosking, our Search Engine Optimization guru explains how this works in a video.
There is no good news in the IPCC’s AR6 pt II report on impacts of ongoing global warming. If frequent, catastrophic risks will be uninsurable.
The problem with most extreme weather events like wildfire, floods, droughts, cyclones, etc., is that their catastrophic effects normally cover large areas.
Insurance companies are only profitable if premium payments produce more income than is paid out on claims for losses over the number of customers. If only a small proportion of insured people make claims, the company can still profitably sell the policies for a small fraction of the average payout, such that people can expect full payouts on the claims made, even though the premium paid is only a fraction of the payout.
Even in the case of widespread catastrophes, if such catastrophes are rare enough over the world, a retail insurance company can insure themselves against a huge payoff by buying re-insurance from a specialist company betting that the total number of catastrophic risk events will be small relative to the policies they sell. Both the retail insurer and the reinsurer can still make a profit to stay in business.
However, if catastrophic loss events become too common, to stay profitable insurers have to charge premium fees that become such a large fraction of the cost of the possible loss that customers simply can no longer afford to pay the premium cost, as many people and businesses located in areas such as flood planes, bush lots in fire prone regions, and low-lying coastal area susceptible to cyclones and rising sea-levels deemed to be at high risk of catastrophic losses.
Thanks to rising rates and ferocities of wildfires and intense flooding many people are discovering that their catastrophic risks of total loss in such events are no longer insurable at an affordable cost — even assuming they can find someone willing to sell them such a policy.
As explored in the attached news items, the just released IPCC report tells the insurance industry that the frequency of catastrophic risk events is likely to continue rising, at an accelerating rate as the world continues to warm. This will undoubtedly mean that many more people and businesses will no longer be able to find insurance against total loss in the event of a climate catastrophe.
The likelihood of East Coast flooding and its costs
Underinsurance is more common than many realise. And if you live in an area where most people don’t have enough home and/or contents insurance, the financial and social catastrophe that follows a disaster can be community-wide. Even if you’re well covered, your neighbourhood may struggle long after the dust has settled, as houses lie derelict, people struggle to bounce back and social cohesion frays….
AAP /Jason O’Brien in The Conversation
by A. King, et al., 02/03/2022 in The Conversation
…Even though his house has never before had water through it, he couldn’t get flood insurance, explaining “no one will do it, no one would give it to me”.
“Hardened by a history of floods, residents are ‘getting on’ with the clean-up while waiting for politicians to address climate change” Guardian
In Australia, the political context and implications are also crystal clear. For years our LNP COALition Government has been owned and controlled by mindlessly greedy fossil fuel special interests. Both work to deny the science that shows us the world is warming at an accelerating rate from the continued burning of fossil carbon and to fill the thought space with endlessly distracting humbug and blather. The COALition’s priorities are clear in their lack of interest in using any of their Emergency Response Funds for mitigation or recovery. Burning coal clearly comes first!
As I have noted many times previously in my Climate Sentinel posts, even a child can still draw reasonable conclusions from the kinds of facts that the IPCC has exhaustively documented. Too bad for us all that the COALition are blinded to the reality of what they are doing.
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic idea that there is a ‘safe’ emissions budget, everything else Greta says is spot on: 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 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.
We’ll be having a Federal Election in a couple of months. Now is our chance to rid ourselves of the dead hands of this puppet government and replace the puppets with sensible people who have committed themselves to prioritizing action on the climate emergency on the top of their agendas if elected to Parliament. Our Traffic Light Voting System can help you use our preferential voting system to its best advantage towards meeting this goal.
Help us work towards insuring our kids have a future life.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Plus long-hot summer in WA. Continued global warming will make weather ever more extreme and lethal. LNP still shoveling coal on the fire.
As I write this, there are already 7 weather-related deaths in Queensland with flood levels still rising and at least one in northern NSW where the deluge is expected to continue at least until tonight. Flooding in Gympie and Lismore has reached NB4 levels, exceeded all-time records with flood defences in Lismore over-topped. As shown in the image above, the Bureau of Meteorology weather stations upstream from Lismore show 24 hour rainfall readings to 9:00 am this morning from 1/3 of a meter to more than 3/4 — with most around 1/2 of a meter! — i.e., an unimaginable layer water 50 cm deep on every point of the landscape that is now running down hill into the stream catchments.
Heavy flooding has already inundated the Lismore CBD, which is now off limits to all pedestrian and vehicular traffic, police said. (9News)
by Ciccharelli et al, 7:35am Feb 28, 2022 in 9 News
Emergency services are continuing to search for a missing man in Lismore floodwaters amid what is potentially the city’s worst ever flood disaster.Efforts have been underway to evacuate the entire town as flood waters rise, but hundreds of people are trapped in their homes.The city’s main road, Bruxner Highway, is underwater, with cars completely submerged.LIVE COVERAGE:Flood emergency gripping Queensland and northern NSW
The Queensland city of Gympie has been hit by the largest flood in more than 100 years, with more than 1000 properties submerged in floodwaters.The Mary River peaked at 22.8 metres on Sunday morning, the highest level since 1893.
Hundreds have been forced to abandon their homes and seek refuge in an evacuation centre after the region was deemed a disaster declaration area from the life-threatening floods.
Climate scientists have warned us for years that this was coming. If we had begun reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases and developing other mitigation strategies then, by now we might have already stopped and begun to reverse the warming process.
The fact is our governments, and especially the present LNP COALition Government in Canberra, instead of working to mitigate the climate emergency, have continuously promoted and protected the fossil fuel industry to help them to continue digging up and burning carbon at an ever increasing rate. This claim is not some wild claim off the top of my head, but demonstrated almost daily by COALition members in their own words standing before Parliament and the press. It is worth noting that this effort is often led by rural MPs from Queensland and NSW – the states that have at least suffered most from the increasingly extreme ‘weather’ events: bushfires, floods, droughts, and winds.
Captain Humbug showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017)
So far, the constant denial, misrepresentation, blocking, distraction and continuous humbuggery and bulldust has successfully prevented any effective government action to shut down carbon emissions and has disrupted most state and private efforts to do this. We cannot yet jail these fools, knaves and puppets for the crime of ecocide, but we can at least remove the blockers from Parliament and replace them with trustworthy candidates who have committed themselves to put action against the climate emergency as their first order of business.
To do this we have to accept the facts that are enough to make any sane person panic. However, in the incredibly wise words of a 16 year old autistic child, Greta Thunberg, we need to recognize that the panic can be answered with prompt action.
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 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. All Capt. Humbug and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are 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 hope. She wants you to panic enough to wake up 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.
Help give them the bright future they hope for!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The sensational title describes reality. World’s largest carbon store, peat covering permafrost, is now burning year-round through midwinter
The featured graphic above shows a false-color picture of an active fire burning on a forested area of permafrost in the drainage of the Lena River not far from Yakutsk, capital of the Sakha Republic in Siberia. The video below, from the Siberian Times, documents that the Arctic is burning, even through the entire winter under snow cover in the peat layer covering permafrost. This is only one of many reports (e.g., see Burning the High Arctic: 2020 Spring and Summer Fire Season in Sakha Republic. A Precursor of Fire Seasons to Come?) in this source of the escalating frequency, area, and ferocity of the wildfires burning forests, tundra, and peaty organic soils covering permafrost in the Arctic (Alaska, Canada, and Eurasia (mostly Russia/Siberia). This is also a phenomenon I personally studied extensively last year using freely available access to NASA and European Space Agency satellite monitoring: “Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost“.
At least where the burning Arctic in Siberia is concerned, peaty soils covering permafrost are susceptible to prolonged burning from the the margins of the Arctic Ocean to the southern boundaries of the permanently frozen soils as just reported in the journal article here that matches ground truth reporting with the satellite monitoring results.
Figure 1. The study areas.
by Kuklina et al, 23/02/2022 in Land
Fires on Ice: Emerging Permafrost Peatlands Fire Regimes in Russia’s Subarctic Taiga
Abstract
Wildfires in permafrost areas, including smoldering fires (e.g., “zombie fires”), have increasingly become a concern in the Arctic and subarctic. Their detection is difficult and requires ground truthing. Local and Indigenous knowledge are becoming useful sources of information that could guide future research and wildfire management. This paper focuses on permafrost peatland fires in the Siberian subarctic taiga linked to local communities and their infrastructure. It presents the results of field studies in Evenki and old-settler communities of Tokma and Khanda in the Irkutsk region of Russia in conjunction with concurrent remote sensing data analysis. The study areas located in the discontinuous permafrost zone allow examination of the dynamics of wildfires in permafrost peatlands and adjacent forested areas. Interviews revealed an unusual prevalence and witness-observed characteristics of smoldering peatland fires over permafrost, such as longer than expected fire risk periods, impacts on community infrastructure, changes in migration of wild animals, and an increasing number of smoldering wildfires including overwintering “zombie fires” in the last five years. The analysis of concurrent satellite remote sensing data confirmed observations from communities, but demonstrated a limited capacity of satellite imagery to accurately capture changing wildfire activity in permafrost peatlands, which may have significant implications for global climate.
What do I mean by “Too late already”? for a burning Arctic
It is still early days for an exact quantification of the amount of organic carbon sequestered in the Arctic and subarctic region (e.g., as organic matter in the form of living things, peaty soils, and frozen CO₂ and methane hydrates on, in and under the permafrost). However, our best estimate is that the permafrost region currently holds probably at least two times the total mass of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere. This is not the fossil carbon being released by human industries. According to the US NOAA Arctic Report Card article for 2019 on Permafrost and the Global Carbon Cycle by T. Schuur:
Northern permafrost region soils contain 1,460-1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon, about twice as much as currently contained in the atmosphere.
This pool of organic carbon is climate-sensitive. Warming conditions promote microbial conversion of permafrost carbon into the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane that are released to the atmosphere in an accelerating feedback to climate warming.
New regional and winter season measurements of ecosystem carbon dioxide flux independently indicate that permafrost region ecosystems are releasing net carbon (potentially 0.3 to 0.6 Pg C per year) to the atmosphere. These observations signify that the feedback to accelerating climate change may already be underway. [my emphasis].
Note that (1) positive feedbacks can grow exponentially (i.e., into ‘explosions’), and (2) a significant proportion of the permafrost carbon is sequestered in the form of frozen methane hydrates. Methane in the hydrate form is inert, but under heating it ‘melts’ and decomposes into water and methane gas – where for the first 20 years of its life in the atmosphere is around 85 TIMES more potent per molecule than CO₂. Even after 100 years is more than 20x potent (IPCC AR5 via Wikipedia). Thus, if global warming triggers an abrupt thawing of Arctic permafrost the rapidly increasing greenhouse could drive global temperatures substantially higher than if CO₂ was the only concern.
To me, the bulk of the evidence in my 2021 Portents for the Future graphical essay as placed in context in my subsequent January 2022 essay “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong” suggest that our planet has already passed tipping points where the “natural” positive feedbacks will continue warming the Earth even if we instantly stopped human generated carbon emissions. Note stopping our emissions should at least slow the rate of warming to give us some more time to actually stop the warming – so this remains a vital task! In other words not only do we have to stop carbon emissions from human activities, but we have to implement global scale projects to stop and reduce global heating, e.g., by capturing and sequestering atmospheric carbon by fertilizing and farming ocean deserts. In any event, if we don’t stop the warming feedbacks while we still have the possibility, we will soon pass the point of no return where near term global mass extinction becomes virtually certain.
I am not a near-term climate ‘doomer‘, although I see doom as inevitable if we don’t stop warming. Based on more than a decade studies of the co-evolution of the human species and our technological capabilities, I think if it took us 150 years to burn enough fossil carbon to trigger runaway global warming, we should be smart and capable enough to put that carbon back into safe storage before it kills us. The conclusion of that study in 2016 led me to where I am now rather than trying to finish the book for an audience that probably would not be there to ever read it.
The deep cultural change needed to reach a sustainable future can only be achieved by political action to replace our puppet governments protecting their greedy puppet masters
Captain Humbug showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017)
In Australia the puppets, fools and knaves forming our LNP COALition government continue working assiduously to protect the fossil fuel and related industries’ abilities to burn fossil carbon and emit methane for unimaginable profits by doing everything they can to deny, delay, block, confuse, distract any effective action to stop these greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, to begin effective solutions for the climate emergency we must clearly recognize and act on the need to replace this government with capable and trustworthy representatives who if elected will put action on the climate emergency at the top of their Parliamentary agendas.
To do this we have to accept the facts that are enough to make any sane person panic. However, in the incredibly wise words of a 16 year old autistic child, Greta Thunberg, we need to recognize that the panic can be answered with prompt action.
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 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. All Capt. Humbug and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are 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 hope. She wants you to panic enough to wake up 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’ futures.
Help give them the bright future they hope for!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
‘Strategic Intelligence’ app relating to all kinds of transformational issues, esp. Climate Change has been created by World Economic Forum
WE Forum’s Strategic Intelligence maps provide logical maps to the complex tangle of relationships among facts, risks, threats, issues, tools and actions involved in working out how to transform an existing problem area into some kind of a solution. The maps don’t claim to show you how to solve the problem, but at least they give a fair idea of where you need to look for solutions and what they might involve.
Transformation Maps can help you explore and make sense of the connections between different economies, industries and global issues. It is a dynamic way of exploring the transformational forces that relate to a topic, such as Climate Change or Artificial Intelligence, co-curated with leading universities and international organizations.
The featured image shows the major domain of interest in the middle, e.g., Future of the Environment surrounded by a wheel of grouped topics (e.g., relating to Risks) that in turn link to individual issues (e.g., Arctic) that takes you to the Arctic Domain. Note – for each domain the right side of the page explains what the current group topic or Domain is about. Registration for public access gives you a lot for free. There are also paid monthly subscriptions that allow you to use the system as your own tool for tracking complex interactions.
There is one bias in the World Economic Forum’s approach here that may concern some Climate Sentinel News followers. As stated in their video, their aim is to further sustainable development. Arguably, given the state of ecological overshoot we are in, we should be far more concerned to down-size our impacts on our limited planetary resources rather than engage in further development. Nevertheless, other than reminding all to ‘consider the source’ and recognize that it is not the last word, I would not hesitate to recommend it as a useful tool for navigating the complexity of transformation.
The video explains the concept:
WE Forum also provide access to a vast array of current documentation relating to specific areas of interest through their Discover function:
What does this mean for Australian Voters and candidates?
What this WE Forum application shows is how complex and complicated the tasks are that we face in trying to transform the current global climate emergency into a foreseeable future extending beyond near-term mass extinction. In our Climate Sentinel blog posts I think I the evidence presented overwhelmingly documents that our current LNP Government of fossil fuel puppets, fools and knaves will not and could not cope with the complexity of interacting issues that have to be dealt with if the climate emergency is to be solved.
Captain Humbug showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017)
In the upcoming Federal Election we must take advantage of the possibility to replace this tragic comedy routines of the LNP with sensible intelligent people able and willing to put dealing with the complexities of the climate emergency at the top of their agendas if elected to Parliament. Our government needs to wake up, smell the smoke, and to have any hope of putting out the fire urgently mobilize whatever it takes to fight the emergency both locally and globally rather than working to protect the special interests feeding the fire. Even a child can see that doing anything else is rearranging the furniture as the house (our planet) is burning up.
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 type of candidates Vote Climate One hopes to see elected may actually want to use the WE Forum’s Strategic Intelligence app described here for help in working through the tangle mitigations and partial solutions that will be required to mitigate and put out the fires that are warming the globe. We have designed our Traffic Light Voting System to help you establish your preferences from first to last for the House and Senate candidates in your electorate based on how likely they are to help defeat the climate emergency. With good choices we may soon have at least an Australian government doing what it can to provide a path towards a bright future for our offspring rather than the end.
Our young ones walking an unknown future. Hopefully there will be something there for them to reach.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
by Bob Berwyn, 23/02/2022 in Inside Climate News Global Wildfire Activity to Surge in Coming Years: A new U.N. report says communities need to prepare for the growing threat by refocusing on prevention, rather than just reacting to fires as they happen.
This 50th Anniversary interview with a “Limits to Growth” author puts the work in context and shows more to do than just stopping warming
by Richard Heinberg & Dennis Meadows, 22/02/2022 in Resilience.org Dennis Meadows on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Limits to Growth: Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth. Not only did this best-selling 1972 publication help spur the environmental movement, but it showed that the underlying dynamics of the modern industrial world are unsustainable on the timescale of a couple of human lifetimes.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The world’s oceans offer important and effective natural means to capture carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the ocean depths
There is significant evidence that the rate of global warming is already showing signs that it is at least partially being driven upward by positive feedbacks from temperature sensitive natural sources of carbon emissions. If so, it is unlikely that achieving zero emissions from human sources will be enough to do more than slow the rate of warming for a few years. To actually stop and reverse global warming we will have to actively remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere (i.e., sequester them) at global scales. Ocean sinks for carbon might turn this task from a hopeful dream into reality.
My own unpublished studies of the literature relating to possible mitigation strategies to stop global warming prior to taking on my present VC1 role, suggested that fertilizing and farming the ocean deserts over abyssal depths should have the capacity to capture and sequester a significant fraction of the CO₂ in the atmosphere today. The recent research linked here suggests that significant carbon sequestration might be achieved by facilitating the growth of plankton with carbonate shells:
Carbonaceous shells of phytoplankton
by Rupert Sutherland and Laia Alegret, 14/02/2022 in The Conversation
We think of trees and soil as carbon sinks, but the world’s oceans hold far larger carbon stocks and are more effective at storing carbon permanently.
In new research published today, we investigate the long-term rate of permanent carbon removal by seashells of plankton in the ocean near New Zealand.
We show that seashells have drawn down about the same amount of carbon as regional emissions of carbon dioxide, and this process was even higher during ancient periods of climate warming.
Humans are taking carbon out of the ground by burning fossil fuels deposited millions of years ago and putting it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The current rate of new fossil fuel formation is very low. Instead, the main geological (long-term) mechanism of carbon storage today is the formation of seashells that become preserved as sediment on the ocean floor. [VC1 Editor’s emphasis]
Read the complete article….
The full scientific report on which the above article is based is also linked here for your easy access. There are also a number of scientific reports and observations indicating that runaway warming might be avoided if we can increase sequestration of excess atmospheric carbon soon enough.
Generalized map of active global ocean currents (blue arrows; after data from www.noaa.gov) and seabed covered in sediment that contains high calcium carbonate content (blue shade; calcareous ooze, mixed calcareous/siliceous ooze, shells and coral fragments, and fine-grained calcareous sediment; Dutkiewicz, Müller, et al., 2015)
by Sutherland, et al., 26/01/2020 in Paleooceanography and Paleoclimatology
Global climate is likely to get warmer, and we want to know what will happen to marine life. We can study ancient warm periods to better predict the future. The ocean is a global carbon sink, because some organisms form shells by combining calcium with carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater. Once dead, their calcium carbonate shells sink to the seabed. Over millions of years, the southwest Pacific accumulated huge deposits. We used geophysical surveying and drilling to measure this history of deposition, which is a proxy for ancient biological productivity (how much marine life existed). A warm period 18–14 million years ago had high atmospheric carbon dioxide (2–4 times preindustrial levels) and slightly lower ocean productivity. In contrast, 8–4 million years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide was similar to predicted 21st century levels and productivity was much higher: more than double recent values. Rates of calcium carbonate deposition in the past do not correlate with ocean acidity or atmospheric carbon dioxide; but they were mostly higher than today. Hence, long-term biological productivity and carbon sequestration in the southwest Pacific might increase in future, but computer models that fit our observations are needed to test this idea.
Sequestration of excess atmospheric carbon under the ocean is one of the very few technologies I have seen that plausibly scales up enough to cleanse Earth’s entire atmosphere. Some further evidence supporting this conclusion is discussed and linked here.
Only biological rather than engineered carbon capture and sequestration technologies have the potential to scale up to planetary level solutions
Direct air capture
Stopping anthropogenic carbon emissions probably will not be enough to stop the continually increase in the rate of global warming because of the natural positive feedbacks already triggered. This has led to substantial work to find ways to capture/’draw-down’ atmospheric CO₂ for safe sequestration underground. Over the last year or so there has been a considerable buzz in the clean-tech industry to engineer and construct technological solutions under the name of ‘direct air capture’ for doing this. These are physical/chemical devices looking a lot like air-conditioning units, but a lot more complicated in the way they work.
Wearing the hat from the near life-long physics and engineering thread in my diverse background, I have to say that despite all the hype, the idea that this type of technology could be scaled up to have any significant impact on the planetary amount of atmospheric CO₂ has to be pure bulldust and fairy-floss from the fossil fuel industry. The ABC article where I found this illustration makes it clear, “The greatest challenge … is processing enough air to capture a significant amount of CO2, given the gas makes up just 0.04 per cent of the air we breathe.” Physically, it takes a lot of energy expensive ‘work’ to gather widely separated gas molecules and compress them into a small space where they can be packaged and stored. No matter how the compression is achieved, according to the universal and fundamental physical Second Law of Thermodynamics, this energy cost cannot be avoided. This is before considering the additional costs of mining, refining, or otherwise gathering and processing the materials required to build the technology, assembling the devices, and all the related transport and logistics of distributing them, processing the resulting compressed carbon into a sequesterable form and the placing it in some form of safe long-term storage. As implied in the ABC article, a lot of people will make loads of money that will be far more needed elsewhere, to implement this absurdly costly technology to make a microscopic contribution (assuming there is actually any net benefit at all) to solving the global problem.
Other examples of the hype I have discussed in my Facebook account include:
Biological systems capture and sequester carbon as a fundamental process of life
The biological and evolutionary thread in my life that began even before I learned to read. Wearing this hat, I can explain the absolute difference between the necessarily piece-rate and energy intensive processes required to produce engineered products, versus the intrinsic processes living systems use to reproduce and multiply themselves. They do this without any need for external instruction by self-harvesting the resources and energy they need from their surroundings. As such, living things also have the intrinsic capacity to adapt and evolve at least to some degree to meet changing aspects in their environments.
Plants (i.e., all types of photosynthesizing organisms) use energy from photons of light to capture CO₂ from their environments and combine this with water (H₂O) to produce the sugars that provide the starting point for synthesizing all of the other carbon-based organic molecules constructing the organism. Ultimately, all of this carbon is drawn down from the atmosphere (perhaps by way of first being dissolved in water). Thus, to live, grow, reproduce and multiply, plants MUST capture and hold onto carbon atoms for as long as they live. How and where they die determines how long this organic carbon remains sequestered away from the atmosphere.
Earth’s abyssal ocean depths are by far its largest repositories for carbon sequestration
The featured image heading up this post shows an equal area map of the extent of the oceans compared to land masses. Oceans cover around 70% of the total surface area of the globe. Land occupies the other 30%, but not all of this is remotely arable (e.g., the whole of Antarctica and many desert areas). The map is based on a “chlorophyll-based” model that estimates net primary production from chlorophyll using a temperature-dependent description of chlorophyll-specific photosynthetic efficiency. Net primary production is a function of chlorophyll, available light, and photosynthetic efficiency. The dark blue areas of the oceans away from the land are ‘ocean deserts’ where there is essentially no photosynthesis because there is an almost total absence of particular micronutrients phytoplankton need for building their photosynthetic apparatus.
I am certainly not the only person to have seen the potential importance of using the oceans as the major carbon sink for excess atmospheric CO₂. Committees of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have published several reviews of potential carbon capture and sequestration technologies meriting funding for further research and development. The latest of these focuses specially on various kinds of ocean sequestraton (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2021. A Research Strategy for Ocean-based Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
).
The race track has already been laid out, so we could hit the ground running if anyone gets really serious about solving the climate emergency
To me, it is the areas of marine deserts (~ half the surface of the world’s oceans) that are the most interesting, because this is where the potential should be greatest to use fertilization and farming to establish and control ecosystems optimized to capture and sequester carbon while causing minimal disturbance to already established ecosystems in more fertile areas of the world’s oceans. Chapter 3, Nutrient Fertilization in the National Academy’s review covers many general issues relating to this approach. There are also a number of recent scientific reports and observations that are relevant:
Collectively, together with many others I have seen, these references provide more than enough evidence to indicate that we should be able to seed and fertilize phytoplankton blooms over large areas of ocean desert to begin fixing globally significant amounts of atmospheric carbon into biomass. What remains to be worked out is how to optimize the growth and ‘packaging’ of this biomass carbon into relatively inert forms that will drop down into the abyssal depths to be incorporated in the bottom sediment.
This is the ‘farming’ aspect of the process involving the selection and seeding of appropriate phytoplankton species, and the selection, seeding, and husbanding of appropriate ‘consumer’ species to harvest and package a large proportion of the carbon in the phytoplankton as feces (i.e., ‘droppings’) or in the consumers own dead bodies that are dense enough to fall to the bottom out of the photic zone where the phytoplankton photosynthesize. Consumers may be shelled zooplankton, other invertebrates with dense carbonaceous components, or various kinds of fish, mammals or birds that can be counted on to take a significant mass of carbon to the bottom of the ocean when they die.
In principle, it should be possible to scale up such processes rapidly enough to begin drawing down carbon from the atmosphere before runaway warming has passed the point beyond which the positive feedbacks have become unstoppable. Once we have good recipes, given the propensity of biological systems to MULTIPLY autonomously, the processes should be rapidly expandable to the planetary scale. However, there are all kinds of presently unqualified risks and benefits to be faced from putting such activities into practice that need to be studied and qualified before implementation begins. Given the hints and evidence in the scientific literature, there should be hundreds and thousands of research studies working out the uncertainties to the point where large-scale pilot projects can be put to work as required to begin implementing global solutions.
Unfortunately, I am unaware that anything remotely close to the required volume of research has even been contemplated, let alone set to work…..
Why?????????
Australia’s COALition Government has relatively stifled climate science and the institutes and universities where such research would normally be carried out.
Captain Humbug showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017)
In my opinion the LNP COALition and the collection of egocentric clowns and knaves also owned by the same puppet masters in the fossil fuel and other despoiling industries have made their denial of climate science and support of their puppet masters unambiguously loud and clear. There seems to be no mistaking their intent to go on doing this until the final collapse of society under the rising impacts of the climate emergency.
If humanity is to survive on Earth much beyond the 21st Century we Australians and citizens of other governments around the world must remove the special interest puppets from their governments and replace these greedy clowns and knaves with clear-headed people who are committed to put fighting the climate emergency at the top of their to-do lists when elected.
In Australia, Vote Climate One was formed by a team of volunteers to provide citizens in every Federal electorate with the information and knowledge they need to make wise decisions when filling out their ballot papers in the next election. Climate Sentinel News provides the scientific evidence and daily reports that have so motivated our group to try to do something to help cleanse our Parliament of the puppets. Our Traffic Light Voting System shows you what we know about each candidate in your electorate and will provide a blank ballot you can use at home to list candidates in the order of your preferences. We also give each candidate a traffic light showing where we think they stand on the spectrum from putting climate first (green traffic light) to putting fossil fuel first (red stop light). Amber lights are used for those candidates we trust to vote with green light MPs in hung Parliament or ‘greenish’ minority government. If you trust us, you can use the traffic lights to make it easier to give your preferences on the ballot.
Hopefully we can elect a new Government that will give our offspring a bright future rather than a dying planet.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
In a new Nature News article scientists consider a dangerously fast rise in atmospheric methane (= methane spike) from natural rather than human sources
The physical observations in this article present us with a very important choice, accept the evidence that continued global warming may trigger a methane spike that represents a truly existentially catastrophic risk to continued human existence, and do whatever is needed to stop and reverse the warming process, or to accept the risk by hiding from reality and continuing with business as usual. My colleagues and I on the Vote Climate One are optimists who think that if we fight the risk we can mitigate its dangers.
By way of providing some background to the Nature News article, methane spikes are potentially dangerous global warming phenomena where some scientists think abrupt processes in polar permafrost and continental shelves may release enough methane to boost global temperatures by several degrees over only a few decades — probably enough to cause global mass extinction in the near term — a real, high, and truly existential risk. Because of methane’s strength as a greenhouse gas, its strikingly non-linear physical responses to small changes ambient temperature and pressure around 0 °C, and its heavy involvement in a number of bio/geochemical processes, attempts to model its behavior mathematically tend to be chaotic. Mathematical simulation is made even more difficult due uncertainties in the total amount of methane potentially in play for a spike event. Thus, the observational record as discussed in the news item, combined with methane’s basic physics and chemistry is our best guide to the potential risks it represents in the evolution of our changing climate. The underlying science of methane’s behavior is solid, and thanks to its importance to the petrochemical industry, we know a lot about how methane behaves. “Natural gas” is the marketing name given to most methane found in Nature. And even in this industry its weird behavior can have catastrophic results.
However, it should also be noted that many scientists who accept that the IPCC’s reports represent the ‘best available’ science are still not convinced that that the ‘methane spike’ scenario is likely. Last month, I explored in a detailed presentation “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong“, how the IPCC’s structure and policies cause it to downplay and minimize ‘sensational’ findings. If you are disinclined to accept the view that a global warming triggered methane spike is a genuine danger to humanity’s continued survival, please at least read and think about the sources of the controversy.
Tropical wetlands, such as the Pantanal in Brazil, are a major source of methane emissions.Credit: Carl De Souza/AFP via Getty, via Nature
As global methane concentrations soar over 1,900 parts per billion, some researchers fear that global warming itself is behind the rapid rise.
Methane concentrations in the atmosphere raced past 1,900 parts per billion last year, nearly triple preindustrial levels, according to data released in January by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Scientists says the grim milestone underscores the importance of a pledge made at last year’s COP26 climate summit to curb emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas at least 28 times as potent as CO2.
The growth of methane emissions slowed around the turn of the millennium, but began a rapid and mysterious uptick around 2007. The spike has caused many researchers to worry that global warming is creating a feedback mechanism that will cause ever more methane to be released, making it even harder to rein in rising temperatures. [my emphasis].
Why the evidence from the NOAA (US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) tables presented in the above article is so worrisome is discussed in detail in the 15 minute video by Prof. Eliot Jacobsin (a retired prof. computer science from UC Santa Barbara, Methane growth is accelerating, that includes the following graph shown on Biff Vernon’s Climate Geek Facebook post.
As explained in the video Jacobson uses the NOAA data to calculate the annual mean growth in atmospheric methane which is the difference between the net increase in methane emitted over a year (total emitted over the year minus amount consumed by environmental sinks) minus the amount remaining in the atmosphere that will have decayed over the course of the year. The NOAA link details how the basic measurements are made.
The following graphic from the Nature News item postulates where the increasing amount of methane is being emitted. The evidence suggests that the substantial majority of the emissions are from organic sources rather than fossil-fuel related resources (the article’s bibliography provides links to the sources for the numbers presented here).
The Nature article is sensational enough, but the actual reality is probably even worse because they have said virtually nothing about the huge reserves of potentially easily released organically produced methane stored in Arctic soils. I explored this risk in June last year in a detailed presentation: “Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost“. Here I showed how rapidly escalating wildfires may lead to rapid permafrost thawing that causes an abrupt methane spike by releasing massive reserves of methane currently locked away in ice-like frozen hydrates.
To me, this is a loud and clear fire alarm that says that if we have any hopes for an optimistic future, it is time to unite and begin working all-out to fight the fire that is burning down our only house – the global ecosystem that feeds us and provides the oxygen we breathe. Even a 16 year-old child could see the danger and what we need to do.
Stark alternatives face the Australian Electorate in our upcoming federal election: accept the fearsome reality and fight the fire for our future … or … believe the con and continue with business as usual
Unfortunately, in Australia and many other areas of the developed world, irrespective of the science, deciding to fight the fire is intensely political. In Australia we are currently governed by a LNP COALition administration whose first priority is protecting and even subsidizing already immensely wealthy special interests in the fossil fuel and other environmentally exploitative industries. In his own words and actions on the front bench of Parliament our current PM made his priorities abundantly clear. Most of his COALition partners are more than willing to support and promote these same special interests.
Captain Humbug (A.K.A. Scotty from Marketing) showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about behind his then PM, ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – Picture from The Conversation (15-02-2017). See also Katherine Murphy in The Guardian on 09/02/2017 for the live video — “Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this? What a bunch of clowns, hamming it up – while out in the real world an ominous and oppressive heat just won’t let up.”
On 20/12/2019 while on his secret Hawaiian holiday in the midst of Australia’s Black Summer wildfires, he also made it loud and clear that he doesn’t fight fires! As printed in black and white in an official transcript from the PM’s own office commenting on the deaths of two fire fighters, Scotty made it abundantly clear to John Stanley on 2GB Radio that HE doesn’t fight fires… “But I know Australians understand… that, you know, I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room. That’s the brave people who do that are doing that job. But I know that Australians would want me back at this time out of these fatalities. So I’ll happily come back and do that.”
As a marketeer Scotty’s principle occupation along with his fellow LNP puppets has been CONvincing people to believe in whatever his clients want him to sell, which the evidence suggests is currently to protect and support the fossil fuel industry above any other consideration. Following on from Tony Abbott’s earlier denials and diatribes about global warming, Scotty and his puppet mates in the Parliament have with considerable success maintained a fog of humbuggery (i.e., denials, lies, misrepresentations, legislative action, blocking, misdirection) preventing any effective actions towards reaching net zero emissions that are considered detrimental to interests of the fossil fuel industry. Beyond this, they actively promote and subsidize the industry to help its continued growth. Not only does Scotty not hold a hose himself, but he and his puppets have done a bloody good job keeping other people from using hoses.
Clearly, If we are to successfully do anything in Australia to stop the carbon emissions contributing to increasing the risk our own species’ extinction we must first rid ourselves of the LNP Government that has blocked and stifled any real progress against the climate emergency.
Vote Climate One was formed to help Australians elect those candidate in their individual electorates who if elected can be trusted to focus on reality and put action on the climate emergency at the top of their Parliamentary priority lists. Our election information team is focused on contacting every formal candidate in each electorate for a statement on how they intend to address the climate issues and combining this with additional evidence from voting records (for existing and previous MPs), additional evidence from social media statements, press reports, and so on. Following our Traffic Light Voting System voters will have access to a complete list of candidates for their House and Senate electorates with stoplights indicating where we think they stand on the climate issue. Those marked with the green traffic light are those we trust to give priority to the climate issues. Those marked with the red traffic light LNP members and micro parties who clearly prioritize supporting special interests ahead of stopping carbon emissions, and other micro parties and independents who are likely to give their preferences to special interest supporters. The amber lights are used for the Labor Party and others who have not clearly stated that the climate is their first priority, but can at least be trusted to work on climate issues where Labor is in a minority government or in coalition with Greens and green light independents.
If enough people follow this guide, we should be able to elect a new government that will give our children and grand children a foreseeable and hopeful future.
Will you help us give our kids a bright future?
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
