I still have washup on the Victorian Election to write, but it’s time for news on why we have to hold our representative’s feet to the fire
The election is over, but votes are still being counted. Greens and climate-friendly minor parties have done well in both houses, with climate friendly independents in Hawthorn and Mornington still in the running on Monday evening. Labor will have a clear majority in the Legislative Assembly (Lower House) and it seems fairly certain that Greens and climate friendly minor parties will hold the balance of power in the Legislative Council (Upper House).
This is a vastly better outcome than we could have had with a Liberal/National Coalition in power.
Nevertheless, our climate is still warming at an accelerating rate, and humanity faces extinction if we fail to stop and reverse the warming before civilization begins to collapse and a consequence of climate catastrophes, increasing die-offs from extreme temperatures, and famines from collapsing agricultural systems. At least until we are fully involved in the NSW state election, I will be posting more of the flood of bad news crossing my desk every day to reinforce the need for all of us to keep hammering our Parliamentary representatives with the urgent need to organize effective responses to the climate emergency.
From today alone, I have 5 important news items, I’m going to try to get out tonight. All are important, but not all of them are grim reading.
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.
