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Original commentary & reports by the Editor, other VC1 principals and guests
Budget papers show Morrison government plans to cut climate spending if it wins election: Reduction in spending across clean energy agencies represents a 35% annual cut over four years.
By Adam Morton, 29/03/2022 in The Guardian
Liberal senator calls Australian PM Scott Morrison a ‘bully’, with ‘no moral compass’ – video, Source, ParlView 29/03/2022 in the Guardian
Editor’s comment: Clearly Fierravanti-Wells is a scorned and angry woman with a meat cleaver. Nevertheless, I think she is speaking truth here. This was a close packed formal statement to National Parliament taking 9:45 minutes! She seems to have the evidence to back up her comments.
Is she describing people and a government we can count on to keep Australians safe in the face of the escalating climate emergency?
Vote Climate One‘s Traffic Light Voting System ranks ALL candidates in all electorates on their commitment to prioritize action on climate change if elected. Green light candidates have publicly committed to do this in an easy to use way. Climate Sentinel News works to provide evidence based reporting of facts and opinions about what is at stake in the upcoming election.
Featured image: Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, ©Parliament 2018 via CFV Facebook Page
Considers the grim Apocalyptic Horsemen of too many people and too much consumption in a world approaching runaway global warming
by Corey J. A. Bradshaw, et al., 13/01/2021 in The Conversation
Worried about Earth’s future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp
Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.
The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification. We clarify the gravity of the human predicament and provide a timely snapshot of the crises that must be addressed now.
The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades. The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own.
Read the complete article….
The article here is based on the reserch paper, Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future by Bradsaw et al., 13/01/2021 in Frontiers in Conservation Science.
Featured image: Said to be the longest traffic jam in the world — in China (https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/worlds-worst-traffic-jam-drone-6594560): Source: unknown, but appearing in many places.
Thanks to 100 years of extracting burning fossil fuels, the human population has expanded to exploit and control the resources of essentially the entire surface of our planet.
We live on the surface of a sphere of finite size with a fixed surface area, but population growth is almost always exponential (i.e., growth is by multiplication from one generation to the next, rather than addition) — until all the resources are used up. This situation is called ecological overshoot when resources are consumed faster than our world can replace them.
As long as people try to carry on with business as usual the situation gets worse and worse until populations begin to collapse from system breakdown, starvation and disorder in what can become an Apocalypse when the four horsemen come out to play. These situations have occurred locally throughout human history (e.g., in the 14th Century when the Black Death overcame Europe), but now we face a situation that is even more dire.
Not only have we over stretched our limited resources, but the greenhouse gas emissions from our 100-year long frenzy to burn millions of years accumulation of fossil organic carbon has so changed the composition of our planet’s atmosphere that so more solar energy is captured to significantly raise the average temperature of the whole world. In turn, this extra heat has caused changes in the polar regions to capture still more heat — we are now crossing tipping points that lead towards runaway global warming and mass extinction. See my series of posts about David Spratt’s articles on this topic in Climate Code Red for an array of evidence that these tipping points are real.
David Shearman’s article in the political news blog, “The Hill”, featured here, shows a remarkably clear understanding of the ecological aspects of the current apocalyptic crisis I have outlined above. We need to stop the Apocalypse NOW by stopping runaway global warming.
by David Shearman, 21/03/2022 in The Hill
Climate change and loss of biodiversity are the terrible twins working together to threaten human existence. Unfortunately, their wicked problems are accompanied by two equally important drivers of calamity —population and economic growth. These four horsemen gallop in unison and must be considered together.
Read the complete article….
If it took a much smaller (there were only 3 billion when I was born), and more ignorant population of humans more than 100 years of the industrial revolution using relatively primitive technology to stuff up our atmosphere. If it isn’t already too late….. Given our present population of 8 billion; vastly greater understanding of physics, geology, biology and many other kinds of science; combined with our vastly advanced and powerful technologies we should be able to work out how to recapture our excess emissions and safely put them back into the ground so the Earth can begin to cool.
However, as Shearman’s article shows, society will have to assemble, organize and mobilize a monumentally large and coordinated “global war effort” to have any hope of doing what is needed to avoid total mass extinction and ensure our species’ survival into the future.
In Australia our present LNP COALition Government has made it clear that they will do everything they can to keep shoveling Australian coal on the fire to support and further extend economic growth and business as usual until the very end. Our first step in organizing the war effort to escape the horsemen of the apocalypse must be to replace these puppets of the fossil fuel special interests headed up by Scotty from Marketing.
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.
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.
Featured image: Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov. Painted in 1887. / Public domain: The author died in 1926, so this work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 95 years or fewer.
Representatives of most nations of the world are now sign-off on the overview of IPCC’s Mitigation of Climate Change report due out April 4.
by Amélie Bottollier-Depois, 18/03/2022 in PhysOrg
UN report to lay out options to halt climate crisis: Nearly 200 nations gather on Monday to confront a question that will outlive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: how do we stop carbon pollution overheating the planet and threatening life as we know it?
Featured image: AR6 Climate Change 2022 Mitigation of Climate Change — IPCC / via https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-3/
Victoria Fielding suggests that if Murdoch is supporting action on the climate emergency with people like Chris Kenny and Andrew Bolt, who needs enemies
by Victoria Fielding, 25/03/2022 in The Conversation
Is News Corp following through on its climate change backflip? My analysis of its flood coverage suggests not: Several months ago, Australia’s Murdoch media news outlets launched a new climate change campaign advocating a path toward net-zero emissions by 2050. The launch included a 16-page wraparound supplement in all of its tabloids supporting the need for climate action.
Featured Image: Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, News Corporation, USA and Co-Chair, Annual Meeting 2009./ Source: originally posted to Flickr as Rupert Murdoch via Wikimedia / Author: World Economic Forum / License: licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
by SETH BORENSTEIN, March 19, 2022 in AP News
Hot poles: Antarctica, Arctic 70 and 50 degrees above normal: Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.
What makes the Antarctic warming really weird is that the southern continent … has not been warming much, especially when compared to the rest of the globe,…
Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice — records go back to 1979….
What likely happened was “a big atmospheric river” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Meier said. And in the Arctic, which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.
Read the complete article….
These sorts of temperatures in what are supposedly the coldest places on our planet is a strong indication that our house is on fire, and that we need to get very serious about working to put it out before we are all consumed by it!
by Amélie Bottollier-Depois, 18/03/2022 in Phys Org/Earth/Environment
UN report to lay out options to halt climate crisis: Nearly 200 nations gather on Monday to confront a question that will outlive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: how do we stop carbon pollution overheating the planet and threatening life as we know it?
The answer is set to arrive on April 4 after closed-door, virtual negotiations approve the summary of a phonebook-sized report detailing options for drawing down greenhouse gases and extracting them out of thin air.
“The science is crystal clear, the impacts are costly and mounting, but we still have some time to close the window and get ahead of the worst of them if we act now,” said Alden Meyer, a senior analyst at climate and energy think tank E3G.
“This report will supply the answers as to what we need if we’re serious about getting there.”
Read the complete article….
Are we too late to put out the fire? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t think so…. at least not quite yet. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report: Climate Change 2021/2022 consists of three parts: Part I, published last year – The Physical Science Basis , details the scientific background; Part II, published this month – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, details the troubles we face if warming is not stopped; and Part III to be published early April details how we can respond. Bad news, but not yet a death sentence.
Aside from warnings issued by the IPCC and individual climate scientists, we only need to pay attention to the world around us and the NB4 weather catastrophes assaulting our communities to see that the climate is deteriorating before our eyes at an accelerating rate. Some observations will illustrate what I mean here.
This graph shows with remarkable clarity how much less ice cover there was on the Antarctic Ocean at the time of maximum melting, and how long that amount of ocean was ice-free and thus able to absorb solar heat that otherwise would have been reflected away from our planet. This heat will stay around slowing the rate of the winter freeze up and reduce the thickness of the ice cover so it melts away even faster in the following year than would otherwise be the case. Some of the heat will also speed melting of Antarctic glaciers from underneath. In other words, reducing the exent of the freezing provides positive feedback helping to drive global temperatures higher.
This graph shows air-temperature variation over essentially the whole of the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole from January through 20 March 2022. The scale is given in degrees Kelvin above Absolute Zero. Zero degrees Celsius is indicated by the blue line near the top of the graph. The green line shows the average mean temperature for each day of the year for the baseline reference years from 1958 to 2002. The red line shows this year’s mean temperatures for each day up to 20/03/2022. Every day this year the temperature has been at least 2 °C warmer than the reference temperature for the day. Recently, the whole area over the Arctic Ocean was 15 °C hotter than the reference temperature. At this temperature the Ice won’t be melting from the top, but it may be warm enough that warmish ocean waters under the ice may be doing some melting from he bottom. It also means that when spring comes the ice won’t be so cold, and will warm up to melting temperature earlier in the year.
And then there is yet more evidence from the last few days:
And then there are the climate catastrophes in Australia that some of you will have experienced personally and lived through… and the rest of us will have seen on the TV news.
Our home world’s climate system is telling us via the rising frequency of NB4 extreme climate events that she’s burning up and will become increasingly uninhabitable as her global temperature keeps rising at an accelerating rate. If the fires aren’t hosed down enough for the world to cool, our population will begin collapsing as rising temperatures and increasingly extreme and overlapping disasters lead to heat deaths, famines and disorder as ecosystems begin collapsing around us. The result will leave its record in geology as a global mass extinction event.
Even a 16 year-old school girl could see what we need to do:
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. Given that we are facing an existential crisis – this is the only issue that matters until the crisis is solved. Even the IPCC’s hyper-conservative 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 as noted above in his master’s voice, he doesn’t hold a hose, and is determined ‘to keep Australians burning coal as long as we possibly can’ and when they can’t burn that any more, burn more natural gas. And, as I have noted in previous posts, it seems that they actively work to prevent others from acting against the climate emergency because this might harm the profits of their patrons in the fossil fuel industry.
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.
Clearly, we need to replace the hoseless firebugs of the COALition with sensible people who are publicly committed to acting on the climate emergency or who can be counted on to vote this way because of party discipline.
Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ future.
In the previous article I posted today, I showed how our current LNP COALition government’s cash splash on cosmetic repairs to the Great Barrier Reef was probably intended to distract people from the fact that they are supporting the continued growth of Australia’s fossil fuel interests by doing nothing concrete to slow and stop the global warming process that is killing the coral.
In the article here, the Australia Institute points out the devious and deliberate humbuggery around the Government’s “target” for net-zero emissions by 2050 is nothing less than a fraud to misrepresent and distract from its commitment to subsidize a massive increase in coal and gas production (see quote below). The technologies being promoted (and subsidized!), such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen made from gas and coal – “are overwhelmingly trojan horses” to promote the production and burning of yet more gas and coal. Again, following the Australia Institute, “The only thing CCS has successfully captured at scale in Australia is public money. Collectively, the Australian governments has committed more than four billion dollars in public money to CCS with nothing to show for it.” [my emphasis].
The article goes on, noting several more initiatives represented to be action on climate change that actually channel more $billions to the fossil fuel industry to help them continue increasing their profits from burning fossil carbon.
by Ben Oquist, 19/03/2022 in Australia Institute/Opinion
The era of the great carbon fraud is upon us: We are entering the great era of carbon fraud. Instead of rushing to end fossil fuels, there is going to be a gold rush for carbon offsets, dirty hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS), all designed not to stop climate change, but to actually drive up the consumption of coal, oil and gas.
Consider the evidence. Before the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow last year, Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor announced Australia’s official target of net zero emissions by 2050. The Australia Institute pointed out this commitment is a fraud while the government remains committed to its plans to massively increase coal and gas production. There are more than 100 gas and coal projects in the pipeline, that will result in around 1.7 billion tonnes of additional CO2-e each year.
Read the complete article….
Many posts on this site show how we are already suffering climate catastrophes as the climate emergency grows progressively more dangerous in its acceleration towards runaway global warming. Even the politically constrained and conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that If the warming process is not slowed, stopped and reversed while this is still possible, many species will go extinct and humanity will suffer greatly. Actually, exponentially rising temperatures from runaway warming will most likely lead to an abrupt, near-term global mass extinction of most life on Earth, along with our descendants. Many will argue the last bit is impossible, because it is too horrible to contemplate. So horrible that the IPCC is totally afraid to touch the topic – not mentioning human extinction in any context anywhere in the 3675 page Report (as confirmed by several electronic searches on the words and synonyms).
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.
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.
Featured Image: Don’t be fooled by the jargon used by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor. Picture: Getty Images. Source: Canberra Times publication of the the Australia Institute article by Ben Oquist linked here in the Australia Institute version. 19/03/2022.
Reef building tropical corals are adapted to live close to the maximum water temperature they can survive in order to grow fast. Raise this temperature another 2-3 °C and their metabolism begins to break down.
The first sign of trouble is when coral polyps expel their photosynthetic algal symbionts that capture carbon and turn it into carbonates for coral skeletons and carbohydrates that are the primary source of energy to drive coral metabolism. They turn white (hence the term bleaching), and this expulsion is lethal for the corals unless they soon cool down and can host new symbionts.
It takes several years for a coral to fully recover from bleaching. If another bleaching event overtakes the coral before it has fully recovered from the last, death is more likely.
Also, the dead corals offer good sites for the attachment growth of bacterial slimes and noxious algae that the reef’s normal inhabitants won’t/can’t eat. As the reef ecosystem collapses, what was once a vibrant community of hundreds of fish species and tens of thousands of invertebrate species becomes a largely uninhabitable wasteland, substantially reducing the overall productivity of the reef ecosystem.
Also, as the dead biomass from the once robustly living reef breaks down, it begins to release copious volumes of greenhouse gases and reduces the oxygen availability in the surrounding waters, resulting in die-offs of many other species in the reef ecosystem besides just the corals.
by Mike Foley, 18/03/2022 in The Age
Severe coral bleaching along 500 kilometres of Great Barrier Reef: The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has reported severe bleaching to 60 per cent of the corals along a 500-kilometre stretch of the Great Barrier Reef between Innisfail and Mackay. Surveys are ongoing on the southern section of the reef, but with reports of local bleaching, scientists cannot rule out widespread bleaching of similar severity.
by Georgie Moore | AAP, 28/01/2022 in The Kalgoorlie MinerGreat Barrier Reef: Questions over timing of PM’s $1 billion funding promise: Climate scientists have questioned the timing of a $1 billion Great Barrier Reef spending splash days out from Australia’s deadline to update UNESCO on how it is protecting the World Heritage site. … UNESCO had asked Australia to provide more information by next Tuesday about what’s being done to protect the reef.
by Nicholas Bugeja, 5 March 2022, in Independent Australia
The Coalition’s ‘dreadful’ legacy on the Great Barrier Reef: Ahead of the upcoming Federal Election, the Coalition Government has made another significant pledge to protect the Great Barrier Reef from further environmental harm and degradation.
On 28 January 2022, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, … announced a $1 billion package for the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s seven natural wonders.
The Prime Minister claimed that the funding would bring the Government’s financial contribution to the Reef to an amount of over $3 billion since coming to power in 2013.
This announcement was made against a backdrop of years of catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef, including mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, which impacted 90 per cent of the Reef and killed almost a quarter of its coral reefs.
Read the complete article…
In the face of a rising frequency and intensity of ocean heatwaves that are bound to kill most of the corals forming our Great Barrier Reef, the LNP COALition government has rushed to the rescue with what is estimated to be around $3 billion in grant funding. As nearly as I can determine, not one doller of these grants addresses global warming that is heating the ocean.
In fact, from its start under Tony Abbott and then Malcolm Turnbull, the LNP COALition government has worked assiduously to protect the interests of its patrons in the fossil fuel industry well ahead of doing anything significant to stop the carbon emissions driving global warming:
Quoting from Independent Australia’s article, #ReefGate: The latest dubious Turnbull ‘foundation’, 17/08/2018 by Michelle Pini, there are the following environmental “achievements” during his Prime Ministership:
And then Scotty from Marketing took over the show to further support his immensely wealthy fossil fuel patrons with humbug, disinformation and distraction to ensure nothing was done in Australia to impair their rights to continue emitting greenhouse gases from their mines and industries.
Today’s post here demonstrates just how he can earmark $3 BN of our money on cosmetics to repair and cover up damage caused by global warming to making his puppet government look like it is doing something about the emergency. Certainly, some of the money will support projects that would help the reef if it can survive being boiled in ocean heatwaves. But, I think more importantly for Capt. Humbugs patrons happy, he can cry poor when it comes to doing anything serious to stop carbon emissions causing the problem in the first place (because the money was allocated to cosmetics). This demonstrates the actions of a marketing guru at work using the “Don’t look up” ploy.
If we are to have any chance getting on top of the climate emergency, these kinds of governments have to be removed from office and be replaced by parliamentarians who have publicly committed themselves to putting action on climate change at the tops of their agendas in office.
Even a 16 year old school girl can see the imperative logic in this.
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 that will 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.
Featured Image: Thetford Reef near Cairns in 2017 after bleaching. In Climate Change, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (undated). “Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs worldwide. Climate change is caused by global emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), agriculture and land clearing.”
Scott Morrison shows his hypocrisy and inconsistency in everything except his rusted on support of the fossil fuel industry. It is time for him and his wooden-headed puppets to go
by Van Badham, 17/03/2022 in The Guardian/Opinion
As his ‘fauxgan’ act wears thin, desperation is driving Scott Morrison deeper into the dress-up box: Serious times require serious leaders. You may not like Anthony Albanese but he’s telling you who he is
Featured Image: Cover picture from The Shot’s The long, long, long list of all the times that Scott Morrison has said ‘it’s not my job’, by Nadine von Cohen on 21/04/2021. The full article is a must read along with van Badham’s article here. It is so clear that Morrison should not have the job of leading an effective response to the climate emergency we must ensure that he doesn’t have the chance to say that isn’t his job either. Use Vote Climate One’s resources to elect people who have publicly affirmed that this is in fact the job they will undertake if elected to Parliament.
