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by Michelle Grattan, 30/01/2022 in The Conversation
Labor leads Coalition 56-44% and Morrison slumps dramatically in first 2022 Newspoll
by Becky Ham, 17/12/2021 in Phys Org (from Nature)
Selective separation could help alleviate critical metals shortage
Simon Benson, 30/01/2022 in the Weekend Australian
Alarm bells for Coalition as Scott Morrison’s Newspoll ratings drop
Sometimes I wonder if ABC News is a willing stooge of the fossil fuel industry special interests or if they just don’t care about the biggest but effectively invisible emergency the human species has faced in our recorded history.
Science and the fossil fuel industry (at least Big Oil) have had no doubts about the contribution of greenhouse gas emissions to global warming for at least 40 years. Science has come to understand that uncontrolled global warming represents an existential crisis to the planetary biosphere (including humans). By contrast, the fossil fuel industry (again led by Big Oil) have considered only that public understanding of the crisis represents a real threat to their profits. This must be combated by doing everything they can to deny and discredit the science, and block any actions that might be taken to force a reduction in the burning of their products. Two of many reviews of this history of denial, lies, and sabotage are provided by Inside Climate News and Wikipedia. The WIkipedia article provides a comprehensive list of further references documenting these assertions.
Especially over the last five years, the accelerating growth in the scale of NB4 extreme weather and wildfire events are undeniable signs that the climate emergency is growing ever worse because nothing is being done to mitigate its causes. Much of this failure is a direct consequence of the effectiveness of the fossil fuel special interests’ activities to deny, distract, denigrate, misdirect attention from the stark reality of our still rapidly growing risk of near-term extinction. They have made the emergency effectively invisible.
Today’s Insiders shows how effectively people and even the major news media have been distracted away from giving any attention to the need for managing the real emergency. The first 20 minutes of the program were devoted almost entirely to Covid, Covid, Covid. Without any doubt Covid is a worrisome issue. It is a nasty disease (but by no means the worst). Even if absolutely nothing had been done to stop, mitigate or treat it, it might have killed 5% of humans – which in a few years may seem to be a minor blip compared to diseases like bubonic plague, that killed up to 50% of Europeans in the Middle Ages. However, because we know how to deal with viruses, Australia’s cumulative death rate beginning with the first Covid death is currently just 1.22 deaths per 10,000 people.
The interview with Albanese lasted 18½ minutes with virtually every question/answer tied to Covid in one way or another, with the last 2-3 more focused on how Albanese would work with National Cabinet. Following the interview, the Insider’s Panel waffled around several non-critical issues. The real emergency remained invisible.
Only around 50min 50 seconds into the program was anything remotely related to climate mentioned (and this is despite the fact that summer rains have created a flood emergency so extreme in South Australia that all rail links with NT and across the Nulabor have been cut – probably for a week or more – and trucks are having to drive 3,000 km out of their normal routes to supply the NT. The RAAF has had to be called in to supply central towns like Coober Pedy with basic foods to say nothing of other economic disruptions). In any event, the last two minutes of the panel discussion were devoted to Morrison’s promise (for what that is worth) to spend a billion dollars over the next 9 years on ‘protecting’ the Great Barrier Reef. A couple of panelists did mention that some comments had been made that these promises offered nothing to combat the primary source of danger to the Reef — climate change. However, even these brief notices focused only on Morrison’s promises, and not the danger from the invisible emergency.
My main point here is not to attack Insiders or the ABC specifically, but to point out how incredibly effective fossil fuel’s denial, disinformation and distraction campaign has been to remove consideration and discussion of the only issue that matters where humankind’s future survival on our only planet is considered. The LNP COALition has been supremely effective in transmitting and multiplying fossil fuel’s speaking points to stifle any effective discussion or action on the climate emergency. The reality that the LNP COALition Government puts the desires of their patrons in the fossil fuel industry above and before any genuine concerns for the Australian people is clearly evident in any action or speaking that contacts the favored industries. The end result is that Australia has taken no significant actions to even begin mobilization to combat global warming. They are giving their already super-wealthy FF friends a few more years of profit, at the expense of rapidly reducing the already few years we have to stop and reverse the warming before we pass the point of no return on the road to extinction.
Insiders shows us that it is high time for us Australians to wake up from our humbug induced stupor, smell the smoke, and start putting out the fires that are burning up our house. Because they are effectively smothering us in a thick fog of lies, bulldust and blather that effectively hides all kinds of malfeasances, our first order of business in the election will have to be replacing wooden headed puppets of the fossil fuel and other special interests with respectable people who have committed to prioritize action on the climate emergency. We can help you do this with our Traffic Light Voting System.
Dan Gearino, 27/01/2022 in Inside Clean Energy
As Efficiency Rises, Solar Power Needs Fewer Acres to Pack the Same Punch: Research shows a big improvement in generating capacity per acre of solar panels, with implications for how much land is needed for an energy transition
29/01/2022 in BBC News
Storm Ana: Deadly Africa storm shows climate crisis reality – UN
Jena Booker, 28/01/2022 in Grist
Extreme weather is destroying more crops. Taxpayers are footing the bill
In this part of his narrative, David Spratt leaves the polar regions he discussed in Part 3, to see what is happening to tropical forests (and other habitats). Tropical forests, notably including the Amazon Rainforest, are switching from sinks removing greenhouse carbon from the atmosphere to emitting greenhouse gases as they struggle to adapt to increasing temperatures.
Photosynthesis, the biochemical process that uses energy from light to shift electrons around to combine 6 CO₂ and 6 H₂O (water) molecules to make sugar (C₆H₁₂O₆, the basic carbohydrate that both fuels and forms the basis of most living matter) involves a complex cycle of enzymatic and electron transfer steps that are temperature sensitive. For most plants living in moderate climates, the rate of photosynthetic carbon capture increases as they get warmer, until, inescapably, there is a point (called the thermal maximum) when steps in the process begin to fail, causing the the rate of carbon capture to decline rapidly as temperature rises further. Also as the plant is increasingly stressed by rising temperature it burns more carbohydrate to fuel repair and maintenance so its CO₂ emissions also begin to rise rapidly. Spratt explains:
26 January 2022
by David Spratt in Climate Code Red
Fourth in a series.
Read 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
The plant-based terrestrial biosphere may be understood as including the world’s land-based plants, soils, derived dead organic matter, such as litter, and soil organic matter.
Plants photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide and water to produce sugar (glucose) and oxygen. Around 30% of the additional carbon dioxide (CO₂) produced by human actions has been drawn down from the atmosphere (mitigated) by increased plant photosynthesis. This adds to the land-based sink of stored carbon. But plants also respire, for example at night and in winter, by converting oxygen and stored glucose back into water and carbon dioxide.
As the planet continues to warm, a point of warming is reached — the “thermal maximum for photosynthesis” — after which combination of the rate of photosynthesis decreasing and the rate of respiration increasing results in the net flux of CO₂ from the atmosphere decreasing.
Together with more severe droughts and wildfires that also add to plant-based CO₂ emissions, the total amount of carbon stored in the terrestrial biosphere (the land sink) then starts to fall. This may be understood as a tipping point, a threshold beyond which large change is initiated in the terrestrial biosphere.
…
Brazil’s Amazon basin forest emitted more CO₂ than it has absorbed between 2010 and 2019: it gave off 16.6 billion tonnes of CO₂, while drawing down only 13.9 billion tonnes. “We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter,” said study co-author Jean-Pierre Wigneron. Another study concluded that southeastern Amazonia, in particular, is acting as a net carbon source (total carbon flux minus fire emissions) to the atmosphere.
Read the complete article…..
Spratt’s article here refers mainly to tropical forests flipping from net GHG carbon sinks to net GHG emitters. The added GHGs then serve as positive feedback to increase the planetary greenhouse effect and thus force global average temperatures higher. What he does not discuss here (but may cover in subsequent parts of this series) is that boreal forests from the temperate to arctic zones are also flipping from being major carbon sinks to being even more potent emitters. This is due to the increasing number, extent, and ferocity of wildfires turning living and dead biomass into GHGs, combined with setting on fire especially carbon rich peat soils, releasing still more GHGs; and in the Arctic, contributing to the thawing of permafrost releasing still more GHGs including methane from the decomposition of methane hydrates stored in and under permafrost. These flips from sink to emitter begin slowly, but because of feedback amplification the flip may go to completion quite abruptly. (Last year I researched and wrote in some detail about how these processes work in the Siberian permafrost region: Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost).
This is scary stuff. There is a large and rapidly accumulating body of evidence showing that humans started global warming started with the carbon emissions of our Industrial Revolution. We have probably reached a point where positive feedbacks will continue driving global temperatures higher even if we achieve zero emissions. At this point there is no evidence that anything we have done to reduce anthropogenic emissions is slowing the accelerating rise of any of the three major greenhouse gases, or that we are reversing the growth of global average temperatures. If we do not actually stop and reverse the warming, continuing positive feedbacks over the next few decades will drive us and the biosphere we need for our survival through the gates of Hell to a world that will be too hot for most species of life (including us) to survive.
I have said many times, and will undoubtedly say many times more that the fossil fuel industry special interests, its puppet representatives in many of the world’s governments, and friends in the print and social media have over the last 40 or so years until now managed quite successfully to deny, mislead, misrepresent, distract, delay, or block any effective action against their greenhouse gas emissions or their profits from thermal power generation. In Australia, beginning with the Abbott Government the LNP COALition and a few fellow-traveling independents & minor parties have been almost totally effective in preventing ANY very effective action to stop global warming (i.e., by doing everything they can think of to keep us on the downhill road to mass extinction and the end of the human species.
If we are to leave our only planet in a state where our children and grandchildren will have a future, Capt. Humbug and his wooden headed puppets must be removed from Parliament and replaced by trustworthy people who have committed if they are elected, to place action on the global climate emergency as their first priority in office.
Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System explains how you can use australia’s preferential voting system to do this.
Kim Heacox – 29/01/2022 in the Guardian
Birds are remarkable and beautiful animals – and they’re disappearing from our world
Reuters 28/01/2022
Non-fossil fuels forecast to be 50% of China’s power capacity in 2022
