Climate vs Covid: Humbuggery distracts from the climate emergency

Covid humbug distracts politics, media and virtually everyone from what really matters — solving the existential climate emergency

It is reasonable to fear Covid. It is a nasty pandemic disease, it will make a significant fraction of the world’s population too sick to work for a few days. However, even if we did nothing to manage it, a very small number (no more that 5% and probably less than 1%) of people might die from it. Where the scope of human history is concerned, this is insignificant. Who remembers the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Flu? that was at least as lethal, and people still die from flu today. Also, humans have faced much worse pandemics before (e.g., the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages), and we will probably have worse ones in the future. That is the nature of life on Earth. We keep on trucking.

Covid-19 total deaths per 100,000 population in each country from WikiMedia Commons.
Updated shades and values for 15 Jan using Our World in Data. The maximum value, 555 per 100,000 is a death rate of 0.555%.

What is wrong is that we are allowing Captain Humbug, his troop of COALition puppets and like-minded fellow travelers in the social and news media to blind and distract us (i.e., don’t look up!) from seeing and paying attention to the vastly more fearsome reality of the rapidly escalating climate emergency. Although the climate emergency is developing on a timescale of years rather than months, good science and risk management show that it is likely to be vastly more deadly than Covid. Those paying attention to the environment can see and fear that global warming is already passing some important tipping points where natural positive feedbacks from the environment will cause Earth’s Climate System to ‘flip’ over to its Hothouse Hell state.

However, looking over the history of the last three COALition Governments, it has been increasingly clear that the common thread has been to deny, distract and disrupt any real action to resolve the climate emergency by government or citizens. By contrast, it is equally evident that the COALition puppets have always been working to subsidize, protect, put the interests of the special interests of their patrons and masters in the fossil fuel and related industries first, above any actions in the favor of citizens that might in any way harm their patrons. In this, Scotty from Marketing has always been up front with his line of humbug, lies, disinformation, and distraction to keep citizens from looking over the curtain of blather to see what is really happening. This is exquisitely demonstrated by the man himself, in the famous episode of marketing coal to his colleagues.

The puppets show and tell
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 [then] Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – From That Lump of Coal by Professor Clive Hamilton in The Conversation (15-02-2017)

Michelle Grattan’s article in The Conversation reviews some of the signs of growing chaos amongst the Humbug troop of puppets, clowns, backstabbers, liars, fools, and suspected grafters. Captain Humbug is hoping to con the Australian people that Covid is the only thing that matters and that his team will manage it best.

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Lukas Coch/AAP

Grattan on Friday: Scott Morrison’s ministerial team looks far from match-fit

Michelle Grattan, 20/01/2022
The Conversation

It sounded a touch desperate – Prime Minister Scott Morrison imploring backpackers to “come on down” to Australia, as the Omicron crisis escalated.

“Enjoy a holiday here”, said the one-time managing director of Tourism Australia, and “at the same time join our workforce and help us”. The backpacker flow is slow, so there’ll be a $3 million advertising campaign (minus Lara Bingle) to lure them, and they’ll get a rebate on their visas if they come soon.

People were quick to see the irony – while Morrison was spruiking working holidays, travel advice in the US was updated to say “avoid travel to Australia”.

Read the full article….

Here I have shown several ways the morally corrupt LNP COALition Government helped by tame media has created a blinding cloud of humbug and bulldust. Helped by distractions Government hyperinflation of real concerns about Covid and playing the Djoker, few people have noticed that virtually nothing has been done or even planned to stop or even reduce carbon emissions. Nor have many people taken any real notice of the fearsome possibility that our inaction on the climate emergency may be committing the global biosphere and our own families and history to near term mass extinction. These circumstances have given fossil fuel gluttons a free pass to continue pumping their greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere to continue forcing GHG concentrations and global temperatures ever higher when we should all be working flat out to stop emissions and start working to reverse the global warming process.

We need to replace the LNP and other fossil fuel puppets NOW with sensible people who have committed to putting action on the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to give you information from a variety of sources to help you to rank the candidates in YOUR electorate on their likely performance relating to the climate emergency if elected to a ‘green’ tinged Parliament. Red lights for COALition and those whose preferences are likely to go to the COALition; green lights for those who have publicly committed themselves to placing the climate first if elected and Greens because of their official policy; and amber lights for those who we think can be trusted to work with or join a green tinged coalition if Labor fails to gain a majority. Currently we include the Labor Party as a whole in the amber category because their policy is still very ambivalent about shutting down the fossil fuel industry.

Help us leave our only planet in a fit state to give our offspring a bright future!

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

Climate vs Covid: Humbuggery distracts from the climate emergency

Covid humbug distracts politics, media and virtually everyone from what really matters — solving the existential climate emergency

It is reasonable to fear Covid. It is a nasty pandemic disease, it will make a significant fraction of the world’s population too sick to work for a few days. However, even if we did nothing to manage it, a very small number (no more that 5% and probably less than 1%) of people might die from it. Where the scope of human history is concerned, this is insignificant. Who remembers the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Flu? that was at least as lethal, and people still die from flu today. Also, humans have faced much worse pandemics before (e.g., the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages), and we will probably have worse ones in the future. That is the nature of life on Earth. We keep on trucking.

Covid-19 total deaths per 100,000 population in each country from WikiMedia Commons.
Updated shades and values for 15 Jan using Our World in Data. The maximum value, 555 per 100,000 is a death rate of 0.555%.

What is wrong is that we are allowing Captain Humbug, his troop of COALition puppets and like-minded fellow travelers in the social and news media to blind and distract us (i.e., don’t look up!) from seeing and paying attention to the vastly more fearsome reality of the rapidly escalating climate emergency. Although the climate emergency is developing on a timescale of years rather than months, good science and risk management show that it is likely to be vastly more deadly than Covid. Those paying attention to the environment can see and fear that global warming is already passing some important tipping points where natural positive feedbacks from the environment will cause Earth’s Climate System to ‘flip’ over to its Hothouse Hell state.

However, looking over the history of the last three COALition Governments, it has been increasingly clear that the common thread has been to deny, distract and disrupt any real action to resolve the climate emergency by government or citizens. By contrast, it is equally evident that the COALition puppets have always been working to subsidize, protect, put the interests of the special interests of their patrons and masters in the fossil fuel and related industries first, above any actions in the favor of citizens that might in any way harm their patrons. In this, Scotty from Marketing has always been up front with his line of humbug, lies, disinformation, and distraction to keep citizens from looking over the curtain of blather to see what is really happening. This is exquisitely demonstrated by the man himself, in the famous episode of marketing coal to his colleagues.

The puppets show and tell
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 [then] Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – From That Lump of Coal by Professor Clive Hamilton in The Conversation (15-02-2017)

Michelle Grattan’s article in The Conversation reviews some of the signs of growing chaos amongst the Humbug troop of puppets, clowns, backstabbers, liars, fools, and suspected grafters. Captain Humbug is hoping to con the Australian people that Covid is the only thing that matters and that his team will manage it best.

.

Lukas Coch/AAP

Grattan on Friday: Scott Morrison’s ministerial team looks far from match-fit

Michelle Grattan, 20/01/2022
The Conversation

It sounded a touch desperate – Prime Minister Scott Morrison imploring backpackers to “come on down” to Australia, as the Omicron crisis escalated.

“Enjoy a holiday here”, said the one-time managing director of Tourism Australia, and “at the same time join our workforce and help us”. The backpacker flow is slow, so there’ll be a $3 million advertising campaign (minus Lara Bingle) to lure them, and they’ll get a rebate on their visas if they come soon.

People were quick to see the irony – while Morrison was spruiking working holidays, travel advice in the US was updated to say “avoid travel to Australia”.

Read the full article….

Here I have shown several ways the morally corrupt LNP COALition Government helped by tame media has created a blinding cloud of humbug and bulldust. Helped by distractions Government hyperinflation of real concerns about Covid and playing the Djoker, few people have noticed that virtually nothing has been done or even planned to stop or even reduce carbon emissions. Nor have many people taken any real notice of the fearsome possibility that our inaction on the climate emergency may be committing the global biosphere and our own families and history to near term mass extinction. These circumstances have given fossil fuel gluttons a free pass to continue pumping their greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere to continue forcing GHG concentrations and global temperatures ever higher when we should all be working flat out to stop emissions and start working to reverse the global warming process.

We need to replace the LNP and other fossil fuel puppets NOW with sensible people who have committed to putting action on the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to give you information from a variety of sources to help you to rank the candidates in YOUR electorate on their likely performance relating to the climate emergency if elected to a ‘green’ tinged Parliament. Red lights for COALition and those whose preferences are likely to go to the COALition; green lights for those who have publicly committed themselves to placing the climate first if elected and Greens because of their official policy; and amber lights for those who we think can be trusted to work with or join a green tinged coalition if Labor fails to gain a majority. Currently we include the Labor Party as a whole in the amber category because their policy is still very ambivalent about shutting down the fossil fuel industry.

Help us leave our only planet in a fit state to give our offspring a bright future!

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

Tripping down the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and Global Mass Extinction

In this article David Spratt explains how we have embarked on this road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell.

These are well established tipping points on the road to runaway global warming. This and my featured image are from Steffen et al.’s 2018 article in PNAS, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.

18 January 2022

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (1) The basics

by David Spratt in Climate Code Red

First in a series.

As global heating reduces the extent of floating Arctic sea-ice each summer, the heat-reflecting ice is replaced by heat-absorbing dark ocean water, adding energy to the Arctic system, driving more melting. This is a “positive feedback”, a self-reinforcing change. Examples abound in the climate system. On Greenland, for example, warming is reducing the height of the ice, and this lower elevation means it will melt more, because the temperature is higher at lower altitudes. 

Sixteen years ago, James Hansen warned that “We live on a planet whose climate is dominated by positive feedbacks, which are capable of taking us to dramatically different conditions. The problem that we face now is that many feedbacks that came into play slowly in the past, driven by slowly changing forcings, will come into play rapidly now, at the pace of our human-made forcings, tempered a few decades by the oceans thermal response time.”   

Those feedbacks can drive non-linear (or abrupt) change that is difficult to forecast. That happened to Arctic sea-ice in the summer of 2007, when a collapse in the ice extent led one experienced glaciologist to exclaim that it was melting “100 years ahead of schedule”; actually, the scientific understanding was 100 years behind reality!  The same thing is happening in Antarctica now, according to the new observations of the Thwaites Glacier. 

For the full article ….

Spratt’s story will continue

Spratt warns us that more posts will follow in this series. One might relate to the unexpectedly rapid thawing of the Siberian permafrost (H on the map above) that holds at least two times more carbon Earth’s entire atmosphere.

This is something I have researched in detail with my own eyeballs using the original satellite scans. My findings are described in my graphical essay/presentation, “Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost.” The authors of the tipping point papers Spratt cites and linked generally anticipated thawing of the permafrost would be one of the later tipping points. These authors certainly did not anticipate that all-time record temperatures would be recorded in 2020 above the Arctic Circle (due to Arctic amplification), or how this heat affected the rapid acceleration in frequency, extent, and ferocity of wildfires on the Siberian permafrost.

Spratt and I and a few other generalists (some of us with complex systems engineering backgrounds) can see that what is happening is well outside the boundaries of the IPCC’s super-conservative and bureaucratic approach to climate science that assumes that future climates can be predicted – at least in a statistical sense – by treating climate change as if it followed the universal laws of physics in a statistically repeatable way. However, even the IPCC’s tightly controlled conservative approach that only mentions the possibility of global mass extinction on one out of the 3949 pages of their recently released AR6 Report still shows we are well on the road to climate Hell.

As Spratt notes in the article here and I explain in detail in another graphical essay/presentation circulated earlier this month, “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong“, climate change does not behave repeatably as one would expect in physics experiments. Climate is generated by a complex dynamical system of many variables interacting in non-linear and some times actually mathematically chaotic feedback loops such that climate change is actually unpredictable as one looks more than a few weeks into the future.

What this means for our future is that we are moving down the road to Hell farther, faster and sooner than anyone putting total faith in the IPCC’s complacent discussions of emissions budgets and 2050 net-zero targets would believe, and that the government and media puppets of the fossil fuel special interests are happy to refer to in their blizzard of optimistic humbug about a rosy future and keeping a vibrant coal burning industry going so there will be full employment.

The stark reality is that if we cannot very quickly mobilize a global effort to

  1. immediately stop human generated greenhouse gas emissions,
  2. engineer processes to capture and safely sequester a significant proportion of all the carbon in our planetary atmosphere, and
  3. enable to Earth to reflect away with out absorbing a significant fraction of the solar energy received,

we will soon have passed the point of no return where the natural climate feedbacks are warming the world sped up so fast that nothing humans could do would prevent temperatures from running away to Earth’s Hothouse Hell state. That climatic flip would, of course, lead to completion of the global mass extinction event we have already started. Humans would be among the 90% or more of Earth’s biosphere to go extinct (as happened in the End Permian mass extinction).

Our current LNP COALition Government is clearly comprised of puppets of the greedily gluttonous special interests of the fossil fuel and related industries that are exploiting Australia’s natural resources for minimal return to Australia or its citizens. To have any hope of generating effective action on climate change against the blizzard of humbug, lies, misrepresentation, misdirection, alternative facts, fake news, bulldust and blather that members of this government emit to provide subsidy, cover, and protection for their patrons, they must all be removed from office and replaced wherever possible by electingtrustworthy people who have made public commitments to make action against climate change their first order of business.

Vote Climate One is dedicated to helping you achieve this replacement (where needed) in every Federal Electorate by making it easy to use our Australian preferential voting system to full effect. This help is provided via our Traffic Light Voting System. If we can sterilize the pigpen our Parliament has become and replace it with houses of genuine leadership and legislation, we might actually be able to engineer a solution to the climate emergency that provides us with a path into a foreseeable future.

If you agree with the program outlined here, we are seeking like-minded volunteers to help us in this effort to change our Parliament as Climate Heroes or in any other way.

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

What a good idea!

Berlin may show the world how most of its citizens can live without private cars.

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

What a good idea!

Berlin may show the world how most of its citizens can live without private cars.

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

Big Oil feasting on what was the world’s most powerful nation and hope for the future

Beware Australians, under our LNP COALition puppet government we’re also on the menu to be barbecued by feasting special interests — but we still have a chance to change it

With this the article linked here, an American FB friend, Hieronymus Bosch, reminds/warns us Australians just how perilous our freedoms may be if we leave the fossil fuel industry’s LNP COALition puppets in charge of our government for any longer. Aside from controlling or at least disabling Congress, Trump and his puppet followers have also managed to replace/control a majority of the Supreme and Federal Court judges such that now, even with a sort of progressive President, the mighty USA is now little better than China or Russia where the practice of real democracy is concerned.

As demonstrated here, the fossil fuel special interests main aim seems to be to preserve their gluttonous but eventually nihilistic quest to prevent any action anywhere against global warming so they can continue unhindered their quest to turn fossil carbon into an ever increasing volume of greenhouse gases. We can already see that these sill growing emissions are forcing global temperatures higher into the zone that will virtually guarantee Earth’s next global mass extinction, even though such an extinction will almost certainly include their human bodies along with the rest of humanity.

At least til now Australia’s federal and state Electoral Commissions and Courts seem to be intact enough that we can still claim to be a functional democracy where the people retain the power to change the government if they feel the need to do so. However, if we don’t remove the COALition puppets from government in our upcoming Federal Election we may soon end up like Americans – essentially powerless to elect people who will work to protect our futures rather than feeding the burning appetites of the gluttonous special interests of the fossil fuel industries and other exploiters of our resources.
See how Vote Climate One and our Traffic Light Voting Guide can help you to remove or prevent special interest puppets in your electorates who want to destroy our futures. With a new government of people who can be counted on to put acting on climate change as their first order of business in office, we may have a chance that our species will have a possible future in a reasonably intact biosphere on our only planet.

Regarding the article that follows, Hieronymus said, “Living in an undemocratic and crashing empire [i.e., my original home country] where corporations have all the money and power. I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked, but DAMN. … Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has written to the all-Republican court – half of whose members he appointed – in support of Exxon. He accused the California litigants of attempting “to suppress the speech of eighteen Texas-based energy companies on the subject of climate and energy policies”“.

How Exxon is using an unusual law to intimidate critics over its climate denial

America’s largest oil firm claims its history of publicly denying the climate crisis is protected by the first amendment
Exxon, headquartered in Houston, argues that lawsuits filed by out-of-state politicians infringe on the sovereignty of Texas. Photograph: Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

Chris McGreal in The Guardian, Tue 18 Jan 2022

ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.

The oil giant also makes the curious claim that legal action in the California courts is an infringement of the sovereignty of Texas, where the company is headquartered.

Eight California cities and counties have accused Exxon and other oil firms of breaking state laws by misrepresenting and burying evidence, including from its own scientists, of the threat posed by rising temperatures. The municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for damage caused by wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather events, and to meet the cost of building new infrastructure to prepare for the consequences of rising global temperatures.

Read more…

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

If we are to survive global warming, we have to shut down the coal industry ASAP

The right government local action using local knowledge can provide local opportunities that are more attractive than continuing the lethal coal industry pushing us toward extinction

3 local solutions to replace coal jobs and ensure a just transition for mining communities

Liam Phelan and Kimberley Crofts (17/01/2022) in The Conversation

As the world shifts to renewable energy, helping the communities that have depended on fossil fuels for jobs is becoming ever more pressing.

The 2015 Paris Agreement notes the imperative of a “just transition” for affected workforces, with “the creation of decent work and quality jobs” to replace those lost.

Trade unionists have been arguing this point for at least several decades. The first use of the phrase “just transition” attributed to the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, which called for a “Just Transition Program” for workers in the logging industry in 1996.

Yet for all the talk since, action remains scarce.

Three clear priorities for policy makers, however, have emerged from Australia’s Hunter Valley region, where coal mines employ about 14,000 workers directly and thousands more indirectly. These are:

  • the need for a local coordinating authority
  • funding for a “flagship” job-creation project, and
  • more resources for technical and vocational education.

(… more)

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

Our puppet governments organize banquets where their piggy patrons with special interests can feed on our roasting environment

If Howard and I are right, we have already passed several tipping points triggering positive feedbacks that will cause global warming to increase exponentially towards a point-of-no return where global mass extinction (including humans) is almost inevitable (he links the same science articles I use in this context). To avoid this end we need to turn the barbecue around to roast the pigs and their wooden-headed puppets first.

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