NSW: If you haven’t voted, please THINK first

Unwelcome reality is that we face an extremely dangerous climate emergency. Politicians must shift from business as usual to emergency mode.

Anyone who pays attention to weather and climate will know that lethally dangerous extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, wildfires have been growing increasingly more extreme, widespread, and frequent. These will keep getting more and more lethal as long as our planet keeps getting warmer. This is an emergency!

The scientific evidence as summarized in the 8000 page report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a United Nations organization comprised of the representatives of the 180 nations involved in the World Meteorological Organization) is so overwhelmingly comprehensive and complete that is no longer contestable. The Australian Climate Council explains it. Our own Climate Sentinel News blog surveys the vast array of evidence and considers its implications and government’s reactions in more depth. Three major articles focus on NSW (click the image to open the article):

David Spratt, of the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration is one of many sources documenting the causes and naturse of the dangers we face. Spratt posted 7 articles detailing major tipping points towards catastrophes likely to be crossed as the world continues to warm. His latest article, “Reclaiming ‘Climate Emergency’” considers the kinds of political shifts required to move from business as usual’s ignoring crisis situations to actively managing them. Spratt summarizes the shifts in the table replicated from the article replicated here:

Before you fill in your ballot papers, please think about which candidates/parties on the ballots have the willingness, ability, or capacity to deal with the genuine emergencies we face. Will wishful thinking, party dogma or denial or reality be enough? I.e., usiness as usual – the normal mode for the major political parties, and some of the minor parties or independents. If you can vote in your electorate for someone who seems ready, willing and able to deal with climate emergency issues, please do so.

Vote Climate One can make it quick and easy for you to choose.

Use our VOTING GUIDES: NSW State Election 2023 to learn more about what the the parties and independent candidates in your electorate offer. How we thoroughly assessed parties and independents is described in Climate Lens Traffic Light Assessment.

Those we found to be generally tied to vested interests and/or unrealistic party or personal dogmas; or deniers of the climate crisis are flagged with red lights without any detailed justification. We use the orange light for those individuals and parties we thought might help or at least not impede required climate action, but could not fine enough evidence they would actually drive climate action.

Green lights were granted only where we found enough good evidence that a candidate or party could be trusted to put action on the climate emergency high on their priorities in Parliament. In these cases we also provide voters with links to some of the information justifying our ranking.

All this is distilled in our easy and quick to use voting guide for each electorate showing our ranking of all the candidates you can vote for. Grandad Rob, with a little help from a couple of youngsters in his tribe, demonstrates:

With a lot of work, our species and families may just might be able to survive the 21st Century.

• Category: Agriculture & Environment, CLIMATE SENTINEL NEWS, Observations, Opinion, Politics, State Election 2023 - NSW
• Tag: Climate action, Climate crisis, Climate Emergency, Global Warming, NSW, NSWpol, NSWvotes, Politics, Voting guides

Posted by William P. Hall

Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'. Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry. After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology. In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne. In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract. Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'. Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe. As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.

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