CNN’s featured image shows a pumper truck spraying fire retardant on trees around the evacuated neighborhood of Beacon Hill in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, on Wednesday.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press/AP, 16 May, 2024
Some of the fires are resurging from overwintering remnants of last year’s unprecedented holocaust in the boreal forests. This is assisted by continuing droughts, increasing temperatures, and minimal snowfallls. Ft McMurray, that was partially cremated in 2018 with $ billions in damage costs and the commercial and residential center of the tar sands (dirty!) oil producing district, is again being evacuated under threat from a repeat by another monster blaze. Other population centers are also under threat.
Clouds of smoke, toxic aerosols, and greenhouse gases are already spreading into the higher Arctic and over the northern United States.
It’s likely that the Russian taiga (boreal) forests and tundra are also beginning to burn as they did in 2019 – 2021 (see Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost). This alone will keep temperatures rising unless we can reduce the constant input of solar energy enough so Earth can again radiate (mostly long wavelengths of IR) more energy than it receives. If we don’t do this soon, Earths ecosystems will be collapsing at a steeply accelerating rate over a few more decades until no accessible carbon is left in the geosphere – i.e., after most life save a few preadapted extremophiles – are left.
To stop the warming we will have to join in total global mobilization to geoengineer zero new emissions, draw down a substantial fraction of the presently existing GHGs to open the atmospheric windows for more IR emissions to escape Earth, and to increase Earth’s reflectivity enough to significantly reduce the absorption of solar energy. Led by America, the West was able to achieve this kind of mobilization to win WWII in little more than 4 years from the start of America’s joining the fray at the end of 1941. Such mobilizations need to be managed and led by governments, however, most current governments of the world (including Australia) are controlled by puppet-masters in the fossil fuel and related industries who are actively blocking any attempts to initiate effective action.
For our species to have any chance in any kind of sustaining biosphere, our mobilization must begin with replacing fossil fuel puppets in our ‘majority’ controlled governments with climate aware and progressive Greens and community independents who understand the issues and work for their constituents rather than their (often non-citizen) puppet masters.
@VoteClimateOne and Climate Rescue Accord can show you how to do this legally and ethically in the next available elections. See https://voteclimateone.org.au.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
If we don’t reverse the climate system’s growing energy imbalance it will soon drive us over the lethal fall into global mass extinction
ALL the global climate indicators are at or near all-time records so extreme that by September last year staid climate professionals have called the readings “gobsmackingly bananas.” — a phrase that is now in common usage in the climate science community. To some, the readings spell doom is nigh. But, here, i’m with the Guardian’s Fiona Katsaukas and her friend in the green shirt.
These gobsmacking records bear witness that Earth’s climate system has shifted into a new kind of rapidly evolving climate regime that is not encompassed or anticipated by existing climate forecasting models (at least not before 2050…). Every month since September has set new, still more extreme records.ALL the global climate indicators are at or near all-time records so extreme that by September last year staid climate professionals have called the readings “gobsmackingly bananas.” — a phrase that is now in common usage in the climate science community. These records bear witness that Earth’s climate system has shifted into a new kind of rapidly evolving climate regime that is not encompassed or anticipated by existing climate forecasting models (at least not before 2050…). Every month since September has set new, still more extreme records.
In 1985, the renowned planetary systems scientist and cosmologist (also one of the best communicators of hard science to the public the world has known), Karl Sagan addressed the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Hazardous Wastes and Toxic Substances hearing on the greenhouse effect to explain the then scientific understanding of global warming. The 17 minute video on YouTube of his speech is extracted here by C-SPAN. C-SPAN also has the full 2 hour, 24 min video of the hearing. I mention this to triply underline the fact that the science of global warming and its consequences was already clearly understood four decades ago. The only fault in Sagan’s exposition is that the predicted dire consequences are happening sooner than he anticipated. This is still a common problem in climate science today where most climatologists trained in maths or physics still fail to appreciate the importance of fundamental non-linearity and chaos of complex dynamical systems like climate. The existential emergency Sagan predicted for the latter half of the 21st Century has already started now.
Because the [greenhouse] effects occupy more than a human generation there is a tendency to say that they are not our problem. Of course, then nobody’s problem, not on my tour of duty, not on my term of office… It’s something for the next century. Let the next century worry about it. But the problem is that the greenhouse effect is one of them which have long time constants. If you don’t worry about it now, it’s too late later on; and so in this issue, as in so many other issues, we are passing on extremely grave problems for our children when the time to solve the problems if they can be solved at all is now.
Carl Sagan, 1985, transcribed from C-SPAN video [2:30-3:15]
Today’s screams heard now from continually breaking climate records are the realities anticipated 39 years ago in this address;
In my “Feb. 2024 climate extremes” report (published March 12) I review the records as they were being broken in the February peak of the global climate cycle. I am currently trying to finish an update on the first anniversary of setting continuous daily record high global sea surface temperatures. detailing the piling up energy flows through the climate system (as described by Sagan) from the time solar energy is absorbed in the climate system and is eventually emitted back to space in the form of infrared emissions leaving the Earth. I have posted the current state of the first part, “Considering the first anniversary of a new climate regime — Accelerating down the road to extinction in Earth’s Hothouse Hell?” in the Google Docs format (that everyone should be able to read). Completing this is difficult because many indicators are literally breaking records faster than I can write about them. The most important of these regularly breaking records is the daily average sea surface temperature (SST), which is the first place excess solar energy piles up in the climate system. On 9 May SST is still more than 0.1 °C above 2023’s 9 May record – the 423 day of continuous daily records. The graph below focuses mainly on the part of the years where this year’s record is on top of last year’s. Note that Sagan also predicted rapidly rising sea levels. Today’s Washington Post describes how the southeastern US is currently being affected by this rise (probably because hot water is being backed up in the slowing Gulf Stream).
However, so people can see the evidence that is driving us here in @VoteClimateOne to do what we can to fight the emergency, I have also been posting to X-Twitter, and I include a couple of samples here:
If not this year, the next 1 or 2 years will see Kim Stanley Robinson's million-death heat wave: The Ministry for the Future (https://t.co/6ifnrqiIzP). If we ignore this emergency and fail to totally mobilize to reverse Earth's energy imbalance before society collapses, we'll… https://t.co/4eKQiB9Egypic.twitter.com/TBAblGHNtf
Copernicus offers no good news. Their news is amplified by a small sample from other sources. Global mass extinction (including us) is virtually certain unless we reverse the energy imbalance. However, given that humans created the climate crisis with 19th-century tech, we should… https://t.co/GxBU3LXd67pic.twitter.com/u9xdLI8iHI
As ever increasing numbers of climate scientists and aware commentators are crying out that it is time to sound the emergency alarms and urgently mobilize to fight the global emergency while there is still some chance that with our far greater knowledge and more powerful science than Sagan knew about (he suggested that by now it would be too late to stop the inevitable catastrophic end), it might still be possible for us reverse the solar energy imbalance that is rapidly driving our planet’s temperatures towards runaway feedbacks that will ensure global mass extinction is truly under way before the end of the 21st Century.
Another new fact in today’s in box hit me in the face. The record high rate of increase in CO₂ causing a majority the backup of the solar energy that is cooking us is still ACCELERATING UPWARDS at a record high RATE OF ACCELERATION. To me this suggests that runaway warming driven by positive feedbacks with temperature has well and truly started. ‘Natural’ emissions are already coming out of the ground, permafrost, wetlands, forests, and oceans faster than we are reducing fossil fuel emissions.
I’m like the girl in the green shirt in Katsaukas’s cartoon. I think it is well and truly time to sound all the emergency alarms and start total global mobilization to fight the crisis. My knowledge and experience tell me that if enough of us are willing to accept the reality of the danger and work together as a disciplined emergency force, we have sufficient knowledge and technological prowess to turn off the road to extinction and find some way to sustain at least some of the living world we know today.
Born in 1939, I’m old enough to remember living in a blacked out house in Los Angeles, and then the successful ending of WWII in 1945 little more than 4 years after America mobilized and joined the war at the end of 1941. At least in 1941-42 Americans managed the kind of mobilization we need today. I think we might still be able to defeat the runaway warming enemy if we start soon enough and fight hard enough to find a place in a still sustainable biosphere. On the other hand, I’m as close to certain that if continue to avoid looking at the grim and (for some) terrifying reality in hopes of continuing with business as usual, we will be burning up in the midst of the worst global mass extinction (i.e., even worse than the End Permian extinction ~ 250 million years ago).
As well as learning about global mass extinction when I learned to read from my father’s university textbooks in geology and paleontology, I grew up in navy towns started university as a pre-engineering student before changing my major to zoology and earning my PhD in evolutionary biology as well as teaching a variety of genetic, organismic, systems and population biology courses. I also worked professionally as a radiation ecologist and for the last 17 years before ‘retiring’ I designed a variety of documentation and knowledge management systems for Australia’s then largest defense engineering company. There, my systems helped ensure the on-time, on-budget completion of the ~7 billion $AU ANZAC Ship Project. (This is one of the very few large defense projects in world history that did not end up years overdue and billions of dollars of cost overruns, thanks in good part to systems I designed specifically to solve the kinds of management and engineering change issues that defeat most large defense projects). Finally in retirement I have spent some 15 years researching and writing on the coevolution of humans and our technologies prior to deciding that doing what I could to address the climate crisis was far more important than finishing a book for a society doing nothing to save itself from extinction.
In @VoteClimateOne.org we have thought a lot about what we can do to help the mobilization. It is clear that most governments in the world today are being run by fools, useful idiots, or puppets owned and led by already insanely rich fossil fuel and other special interests will do or say almost anything to gather more wealth. Political party discipline means that a majority government can be controlled by a handful of ‘strong’ party members and functionaries in leadership roles. For example, in Australia, the supposedly ‘climate friendly’ Labor majority government has just demonstrated its fealty to its puppet masters over effective climate action.
@VoteClimateOne.org has a two-pronged approach to try to change governments into supporters and even leaders of the climate emergency mobilization effort.
Given how urgent the need for action is, we hope to convince the puppets and other blockers that climate action is far more important and urgent than whatever benefits they gain from catering to the desires of their patrons and masters. However, this will take a massive effort – much more than just supplying truthful information that is easily ignored or actively denied. Minds might be changed if enough people piled on each and every recalcitrant parliamentarian – but this would take the concerted action of a large number of climate and environment action groups that has to this point not been forthcoming.
The other prong in the spear, is to actually replace enough of the recalcitrant parliamentarians with progressive community representatives or small party members who truly understand and accept the crisis and the need for action; and who are willing to put in the effort to get elected — to prevent either major party from forming a majority government. Not only will there be more sensible and effective parliamentarians, but any party forming government will have to listen to and compromise with genuine community representatives to do anything, even if this requires them to mobilize an effective climate action.
Our home page, ACT NOW, and TRAFFIC LIGHT VOTING explain how this all works, and provides examples of how we have addressed past elections. Hopefully all voters will have the chance to see and think about what these pages have to offer, and inform their voting decisions with the climate crisis in mind. As elections approach, CLIMATE SENTINEL NEWS will be providing frequent updates on the state of the climate and relevant political news.
Our grandchildren tell us all to “vote climate one” so they can have a happy future rather than the descent into Earth’s hothouse hell (like Sagan and most climate scientists until the last few months, the authors of the referenced paper have overestimated just how much time we have left for effective action).
WE MUST BEGIN ACTION NOW!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Dr Andrew (“Twiggy”) Forrest tells international business and political forum the factual reality that “Business will kill your children!”
When I started this essay, Renew Economy, whose article is linked below, was one of the few mentions I found in the press or social media of the unique event where any self-made billionaire, let alone an Australian, stated simply and with honesty that his business kills our children and puts human survival at risk. He asks for help in making him, his industry, and business in general to stop carbon emissions. Simultaneously, and blissfully unaware of what Andrew Forrest was saying, a collaboration of climate and environmental action groups was organizing an emergency meeting, #SteppingUpTogether, for Melbourne Town Hall to crystallize a coalition of (hopefully ALL) such groups to provide precisely the kind of help Forrest was asking for.
Both Forrest and the people at Melbourne Town Hall accept that it may already be too late to avoid the existential climate catastrophe.
However, by working together, he and we may actually be able to defeat global warming, and work our way off the highway to Earth’s Hothouse Hell to find a probably rough and narrow road to stewardship of a habitable world with a sustainable future.
“Business will kill your children:” Was Andrew Forrest’s climate speech really that “loopy”?
It was the sort of speech you [would be lucky to] hear from climate scientists and climate protesters; a presentation stunning in its simplicity and series of one liners.
“It is business that will kill your children,” Forrest declared. “It is the beginning of the end.
At $US 21.7 Bn, Forbes Australia’s Richest in March placed Andrew Forrest second (after Gina Rinehart at $US 30.6 Bn) amongst the motley crew of billionaire miners, tech sector high flyers, and property developers, most of whom seem to be more concerned to build even more personal wealth than they already have. To many in the climate and environmental action movement, these billionaire business people are the class enemy. It is their industrial businesses that are largely responsible for driving Earth’s climate system into what now looks like runaway warming. Warming that will lead to climate catastrophe and probable extinction at the end of the downhill highway to Earth’s Hothouse Hell.
Yet, Forrest’s 24 minute speech, delivered Aug 30 in Perth at the Boao Forum Asia (29-31 Aug — sponsored by China) and linked above, is the complete antithesis of what you would expect to hear from one of the self-confessed perpetrators of the currently accelerating climate catastrophe threatening us.
Amongst other things, the speech: ● confesses and condemns what business has done to put human survival at real risk; ● gives a meticulously and gorily detailed description of one of many ways that the business triggered climate catastrophe will reap human lives along he road to extinction; ● expresses Forrest’s promise and “steely determination” that he and ALL of his industries are committed to reach absolute zero carbon emissions by 2030 [I’ll have more to say about this promise below] — both to stop emissions from his business, and to show the world that it can and must be done; ● asks that China, India, and the USA step up together to legislate and subsidize doing whatever it takes to achieve what he is showing can be done; and, finally, but by no means least, ● Forrest begs citizens and consumers around the world to make governments and businesses do these things:
This is what I’d like to put out to you as members of the Boao Forum.
This is not my idea, or any single person’s idea. If this is our idea in the Boao Forum, this is what I ask you to consider during the course of this day and decide:
Do we want a member’s resolution of our forum to ask that discussions proceed at the G20?
That intention to proceed with law happens at APEC and that the business people of the world gather BOAO Forum for Asia next year and work out how to do it.
Business people, if we are not fighting with our own governments, [we] can leave this [meeting] and make it happen….
and that’s what I’m asking [for], a simple agreement led by business.
Fast! …..Because it’s business.
I need you tonight….
It’s business which is causing global warming….
It’s business which will kill your children.
It’s business which is responsible for lethal humidity.
But it’s policies which guide business!
YOU MUST HOLD US TO ACCOUNT!
Don’t let us with our clever advertising blame
You — the consumer; or
You — the public or individual…..
That’s rubbish.
Business guided by government will either destroy or save this planet.
To understand greatness and gravitas of Forrest’s address and its implications for all humanity takes your patient and careful attention to his actual words and your awareness of several contexts surrounding the lead up to the conference. Of course, in the case of Australian media, his content and intent were so incongruous that it took two or three days into September before there were many reports at all.
Murdoch and the financial press (often the same) responded to Forrest’s attack on fossil fuel and gory details about how heat kills people by claiming that he must have lost the plot to ever increase his personal wealth due to a brain seizure or having gone troppo — bad news for his shareholders. Even usually progressive and climate action friendly press such as the Saturday Paper, Crikey, and the Guardian seem to have missed the point. However, in the last few days more articles, accepting that the speech was actually important, have given more thoughtful attention to its actual content (e.g., see ‘Twiggy’ Forrest: Climate messiah or billionaire opportunist?, from Sept. 13). But, even here, commentators seem to have real difficulties seeing past what they assume must be Forrest’s overwhelming drive to become even richer.
Personally, I think these commentaries trivialize and miss the major thrust. This man from the bush is staking his fortune, career, family — and everything else…. To crystallize a critical transition:
From: corporate business as usual — working for immediate profits that are far more important than even human survival in the face of the growing climate catastrophe.
To: business working to build a healthy society that can sustain itself into the foreseeable future.
What has Andrew Forest actually said?
In my diverse careers in science, teaching and corporate knowledge management, I learned that speech has a low bandwidth for communicating detailed facts and knowledge. You have to listen to strings of words before their meaning and import are clear. As Walter J Ong observed in his classic work, Orality and Literacy: The technologizing of the word, speech disappears in the instant of its impact on the ear-drum of the listeners. All that is left are fading impressions in the hearers’ brains that were influenced by all kinds of extraneous perceptual and cognitive issues, to say nothing of preexisting memories and biases. In other words, we often only hear what we expected to hear, not what was actually said, and certainly not everything that was said.
Because, on first listening to the speech, I thought that Forrest had said some very important things. His speech was important enough that I needed to read, and re-read it in a printed transcript. Not only is reading far faster than comprehending the spoken word, but it is much harder to misread than to mishear. And, if you missed something or are unsure what was said, you can re-read the work as many times as it takes. And if there is a video of the speech, you can go back as often as you want hear and see HOW it was said.
The only transcript I could find was YouTube’s totally unparsed and unpunctuated speech-to-text (click the three dots at the end of YouTube’s video menu bar, and select “Show transcript”). In any case, I had to do the parsing, punctuating and formatting of the text myself to be sure I understood it. I had to look at each word, and pick out each thought and sentence in the sequence and then parse out the thoughts on the screen/paper. Where there was any chance of misunderstanding (YouTube’s transcript has some fascinating garbles, e.g., 23 secs, in “Minderoo Tatterang” becomes “military”), I had to go back to the original speech and its various contexts to be sure that the transcript actually recorded the spoken word(s).
The deeper I got, the more impressed I was with the total precision and clarity of Forrest’s expression. Almost without exception, every single word was precisely chosen and placed to unambiguously convey a particular thought. He said exactly what he meant, and totally meant what he spoke.
Forrest must have put a great deal of thought and rehearsal into crafting the talk; and based on the hoarseness of his speaking, he had also been doing a lot of talking (arguing?) in the lead up. By no means was there anything sham or trivial about the talk.
As many of those commenting on the address dimly recognized, this is a pivotal turning point in Forrest’s personal and professional career. This giant of a man who arrived at the 20th Anniversary celebration of his mining company on one of his many 3 story tall dump trucks was once a jackaroo from the WA bush.
Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest arrives at the 20th Anniversary celebration of his foundation of Fortescue on one of his fleet of mining trucks. Picture: SoCo Studios via NewsCom.au
Forrest is betting his entire fortune, body, soul, and family on his understanding of Earth’s climate crisis and what he thinks he can do personally and via his business empire to help humanity find a sustainable pathway to an extended future.
I don’t think there is anything particularly messianic about this. Forrest is self-made, he knows his limitations and his very real capabilities. He has assessed that he has the capabilities to be an agent of changes that must happen if humanity is to survive the present climate crisis. “Again, someone has to do it. “And I just think, ‘If not me, then who?’ ” [quote from SMH 2/072022]. And if he hasn’t at least tried…. then emissions from his mining activities have been at least partly responsible for the end of humanity.
Definitely not a messiah, but perhaps a redeemer?….
Forest has placed his bet, turned the roulette wheel, and rolled the ball (the image is from his presentation).
He is helping us, …..so all those of us in the climate and environment action community need to hold him, business and government to account, so the ball falls in the correct slot for all of us to win the “one in fifty chance of 1.5 °C holding”.
Critical Contexts
Andrew Forrest more-or-less grew up in WA, on the Forrest family owned Minderoo Station (when he wasn’t away attending school), a 2,400 km² sheep and cattle station traversed by the Pilbara’s Ashburton River and 95 km E of Exmouth across the Exmouth Gulf.
He may spend more time on corporate jets than on horseback these days, but the fact that he hails from the wide open spaces is an important part of Andrew Forrest’s mystique. He likes to remind us that the red dust of the outback is deep in his pores – that even when he’s sporting a dapper navy suit, his mindset is that of a man in moleskins.
After meeting US President Joe Biden at COP26, the UN climate conference in Glasgow last November, Forrest accepted an invitation to visit the White House to continue the conversation about green energy. Describing how he felt as he entered the West Wing in April, he says: “Ex-jackaroo. Kid from the bush. So fortunate to be able to do this.”
…
Mounting debts had forced Forrest’s father, Don, to sell Minderoo Station in 1998. When the property came back onto the market 11 years later, Forrest sent two bidders to the auction – “just in case one had to go to the toilet or had a heart attack”. He bought it for $12 million and has spent millions more turning the station into a showpiece. He says he does his best thinking there. The place is full of memories, not all of them good.
When Forrest was a boy, just eight years old, he noticed smoke on a distant part of the property. Lighting a fire was the accepted method of sending a distress signal, so he and Don went to investigate. A man had been working on the engine of a bulldozer when it jumped forward and pinned him against a gum tree. He had managed to light a fire but it burned back towards the tree and engulfed him.
“When we got there, we found this charred but breathing body,” says Forrest, who travelled with the man in the back of the Land Rover on the long drive to hospital. “He could just speak and he said, ‘Sing me some nursery rhymes.’ ” Forrest held the man’s hand and sang to him until he died. He tells me during our lunch at Cottesloe that it was this experience, more than any other, that shaped him. From then on, he understood at a visceral level that life was short and not a day should be wasted: “I do tend to treat time as being incredibly precious.”
Time is valuable to Yindjibarndi leader Michael Woodley, too, and he has spent a lot of it slogging his way towards legal recognition of his people’s ownership of land on which Fortescue mines. “Everything is about Andrew Forrest. His image. His brand,” says Woodley, who contends that if Forrest has been able to live a large life, “it’s because of the wealth that he has generated from our country. That’s what money does, right? It turns you into a superstar.”
Immense wealth also gives some people immense power to do things mere mortals can only dream about…., like saving human existence. In 2001 Andrew Forrest and his wife, Nicola, established Minderoo Foundation (named after his boyhood home) with part of their Fortescue wealth to work towards making our shared planet a better and safer place for people to live. As at 20 June, 2023, the Forrests have donated a fifth of their Fortescue shares to the Foundation (about $5 Bn), bringing its total endowment of the Foundation up to about A$7.6 billion).
“As our world faces enormous challenges, we have elected to continue to use our material wealth to help humanity and the environment meet these existential risks,” Dr Andrew Forrest AO said.
“Accumulating wealth should only be a small part of a person. Their contribution to their family and society is way more important. Other skills such as carpentry, farming, the arts, working in construction or for government are equally as important. If you happen to be good at accumulating wealth, then I believe in using that skill for the greater good.
“This is why we will continue to donate our wealth to causes where we can make a sustainable difference.”
Of course, Forrest presumably still controls how those deeded shares are voted. He may have ceded the capital and income they represent, but most likely still controls the power they represent.
Another large tranche of his family wealth is devoted to a private investment group with a very strong social and environmental policy called Tattarang (see also Wikipedia).
The name Tattarang pays tribute to a fiery but caring stallion that was owned by Andrew Forrest’s mother and cherished by all at the Forrest family’s Minderoo Station during the 1950s.
In a joint statement, Andrew and Nicola Forrest said: “The name Tattarang has held a special meaning in our family over many years and was the inspiration to rename our commercial group. For us, Tattarang signifies the unique bond of trust that is formed between a rider and their horse, and the seriousness each party invests in caring for and protecting the other.”
The Forrests said they wanted business to play a greater role in changing the world for the better.
“The way you earn your money will have a greater impact than the way you choose to give it away. Business is critical to improving the world,” added Grace Forrest, Director of Minderoo Foundation and Co-founder of Walk Free.
The Tattarang group entities remain separate from Minderoo Foundation, the philanthropic entity founded by Andrew and Nicola Forrest. As part of the name change, Tattarang has launched a new corporate website: www.tattarang.com.
Dr Andrew Forrest AO is Chairman of Fortescue Metals Group, the publicly listed company he founded in 2003, in which Tattarang Pty Ltd holds a 36 per cent shareholding.
The scale and severity of bushfires in Australia over the summer of 2019-2020 was a clear example of how increased weather volatility due to climate change is already contributing to the intensity and scale of natural disasters.
The time to act is now. Collectively, we must act with all speed and determination to reduce emissions and create pathways to achieve a net-zero emissions global economy. Climate change is already exacerbating environmental degradation and as a society, we must also adapt to protect human health and threatened ecosystems through environmental conservation measures, including effective plastic waste management.
We must act immediately if we are to effectively adapt to the impacts of climate change and to achieve net-zero emissions well before 2050. If we do not act, we risk leaving enormous challenges, and terrestrial and marine ecosystem-wide destruction to our next generation. Tattarang accepts this call to action.
Tattarang has commenced an assessment to estimate the emissions from its investments, activities and operations. This will provide critical data upon which Tattarang can implement a range of actions including the development of science-based emissions reduction targets and emissions avoidance and mitigation projects.
And then, who is this titan of industry and business, who thinks that he can tell us that we are all doomed to oblivion if we don’t stop global warming NOW, while we still might? Forrest has made himself into a genuinely qualified marine scientist, with an earned PhD to prove it. It’s a real thesis, based on real research — done in the midst of building his fortune….
Personally, I grew up on and in the ocean — face to face with a diversity of life far beyond anything that can be experienced on the land. I am an academic scientist. Marine biology was one of my teaching specialties…. It’s a real thesis….
[Eight] years ago, Forrest was hiking in the Kimberley when a ridge gave way and he fell into a large pool. One of his legs shattered from the kneecap down as it wedged in a loop of submerged tree root, trapping him underwater. The pain was excruciating and in wrenching himself free, he mangled the leg further: by the time he struggled to the surface, his foot was facing the wrong way. The accident may not have killed him, as for a few heart-thumping seconds he thought it would, but it changed him.
During his convalescence, as he moved from a wheelchair to crutches and finally back onto his feet, he had time for reflection. He decided to embark on a PhD in marine science, a field that had always fascinated him. For four years, he immersed himself in the study of pelagic ecology and, more broadly, the state of the world’s oceans. “It was there that I really came across the reality of global warming,” he says. By 2019, he was Dr Forrest, eco-warrior.
So far, the continuity of this interest is represented in real estate by the Exmouth Research Lab, a new marine biology lab he had built about 80 km across Exmouth Gulf from Minderoo heartland.
I have parsed and reported what Andrew Forrest spoke to the world at the Boao Forum late in August, and analyzed the contexts from which the words came. What remains to be seen is whether the world will step up and unite to solve the existential crisis so forcefully laid out before us by this remarkable address.
If anyone has any residual doubts about Forrest’s sincerity, he has wagered control of his family and foundations’ fortune on being right (remember the imagery of the roulette wheel), and burned a lot of bridges along the way.
In his interview with 9News, following separation from his wife, Nicola, Andrew Forrest admits he’s hard to live with, and explains the high turnover of Fortescue executives: ‘My way or the highway [to Hothouse Hell]’. Several chosen the highway, and there may well be more. With his transfer of shares into Minderoo Foundation and voluntary settlement with Nicola, 9News reports that this moves Andrew from 2nd to 13th place in AFR’s Rich List (‘Nic and I are lockstep’: Andrew Forrest gives first interview since split from wife Nicola). This suggests he is left with a fortune of between $7.5 and $6.5 bn. Even if you assume that growing his wealth is Andrew’s main concern, he has risked ‘everything’ on his turn of the roulette wheel to decarbonize all of his businesses…..
If anyone can bulldoze his way through to convince our world leaders that they have to prioritize climate action above all else, Andrew Forrest has a better chance of doing it than any other person I can think of: Pope, UN Secretary General, David Attenborough, et al. But to make it stick, he needs coordinated support and cooperation from the bulk of society that I think the world’s climate and environmental action groups represents.
Some afterthoughts
VoteClimateOne.Org recently (9 September) participated in a recent emergency meeting of diverse climate and environmental action groups at Melbourne Town Hall called #SteppingUp Together focusing on how we might work together to advance action on the climate emergency. This was organized in part to begin establishing a structure able to help the (literally) millions of Australians belonging or subscribing to such groups coordinate their individual voices to make businesses and governments change their focus from promoting and subsidizing industries killing our children with carbon emissions to legislating and organizing the fight to stop and turn around global warming.
Although few of us at the #SteppingUpTogether meeting knew of Andrew Forrest’s Boao Address at the time, it stands as a clarion call to to mobilize the global war effort to defeat the existential enemy — global warming. It is no coincidence that the common goal to our diverse approaches is to give consumers and individuals tools to construct a common voice able to hold governments and business to account. We all see and understand the need to actually achieve what Forrest is calling for us to do!
Although the SteppingUp meeting was originally conceived to coordinate demonstrations and actions to convince the Government to stop fossil fuel export developments (especially in the Beetaloo Basin and Darwin areas), the crazy extreme deviations in global climate indicators (documented by Climate Sentinel News posts and in direct mailings to all Australian MPs) made the meeting a lot more urgent, with several important speakers being incorporated only shortly before we met. These last-minute additions included:
Assoc. Prof Mark Diesendorf, UNSW Sydney, was double booked so could not attend in person, but provided us with a couple of videos, focused on his research on how fossil fuel and other special interests have captured “captured” and control governments so they do their bidding rather than working for constituents’ interests. This gives the SteppingUp group a deep understanding of where and how we have to force change before our government will actually begin working in our interests. Diesendorfs’ ideas are fully laid out in his 2023 book (with coauthor Rod Taylor), “The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation: Technological, Socioeconomic and Political Change“. This helps us know our enemies….
Just back from the Northern Territory, Jane Morton, who helped bring Extinction Rebellion to Australia and co-convenor of Darebin Climate Action Now, who in 2016 instigated the first local council in the world to declare the climate emergency gave us a talk on some of her methodology.
Charlotte Gallace, an amazingly poised year 9 student and school council member at Prahran High School, and also a school striker, presented the younger generations’ hopes that we would get our act together and leave her generation with a sustainable future.
SteppingUpTogether organizers had hoped that we could have at least one of the recently elected ‘teal’ community independents join us, but this proved impossible given their workloads while Parliament was sitting (both major parties have been happy to deliberately hobble independents by limiting each to only a single paid staff member).
Given the plethora and importance of these last-minute speakers, and the enthusiasm of our planned speakers to share their tools and ideas for changing the minds of currently ‘captured’ MPs, we had no time left for our planned workshop. However, you can be sure that we are already working towards assembling a user-friendly communications apparatus to share our practical knowledge and for coordinating public and MP-focused campaigns.
Given the urgency aroused by the crazy extreme and still growing indications that we already tipping into a hotter and more rapidly changing climate regime, you can be sure that within a few more weeks SteppingUpTogether attendees (and many other organizations) will be putting together a network facilitating the coordinated and collective involvement in public and MP-targeted campaigns of the millions of members belonging to one or more climate and environmental action groups.
End state capture!
Hold our governments to account: Make them work for Us — The Public…. The Consumers…. The Individuals.
Make the governments change…. Make the governments hold business to account….
Hold governments to account…..
Victoria first, then Australia, and then the world.
Some groups represented in SteppingUpTogether and their toolkits
Note: Following are banners for some of the groups who presented at or were involved in organizing the SteppingUpTogether emergency meeting. Click the banner to access their web site.
See also Invitation to Climate Rescue Accord livestream: Wednesday 20 September 2023 7PM
Promotes and assists climate emergency declarations at the local council level – applies political pressures upwards, downwards, sideways, and inwards
“We need to treat the climate emergency as a global war we are on track to lose unless we can focus our efforts on the only task that matters — reversing global warming. If we fail here no other tasks matter — our species will soon end up extinct no matter how we arrange the deck chairs on the burning ship.”
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
G20 nations broke records in 2022 subsidizing fossil fuel: $1.4 TN in 2022 — more than twice what they have invested in sustainable energy.
Clearly, fossil fuel subsidies help the greedy special interests whose carbon emissions are smothering our planet drag us towards mass extinction from the ‘runaway greenhouse‘. Equally clearly, members of governments approving and providing these subsidies must be getting something in return.
Public money still flowing into industry despite agreement to phase out ‘inefficient’ subsidies, thinktank says
The G20 poured record levels of public money into fossil fuels last year despite having promised to reduce some of it, a report has found.
The amount of public money flowing into coal, oil and gas in 20 of the world’s biggest economies reached a record $1.4tn(£1.1tn) in 2022, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) thinktank, even though world leaders agreed to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow two years ago.
The report comes ahead of a meeting of G20 countries in Delhi next month that could set the tone for the next big climate conference, which takes place in the United Arab Emirates in November.
It is crucial that leaders put fossil fuel subsidies on the agenda, said Tara Laan, a senior associate with the IISD and lead author of the study. “These figures are a stark reminder of the massive amounts of public money G20 governments continue to pour into fossil fuels – despite the increasingly devastating impacts of climate change.”
Scaling back subsidies would reduce air pollution, generate revenue, and make a major contribution to slowing climate change.
Fossil-fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion last year as governments supported consumers and businesses during the global spike in energy prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the economic recovery from the pandemic.
As the world struggles to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and parts of Asia, Europe and the United States swelter in extreme heat, subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas are costing the equivalent of 7.1 percent of global gross domestic product. That’s more than governments spend annually on education (4.3 percent of global income) and about two thirds of what they spend on healthcare (10.9 percent).
…
As the Chart of the Week shows, fossil-fuel subsidies rose by $2 trillion over the past two years as explicit subsidies (undercharging for supply costs) more than doubled to $1.3 trillion. That’s according to our new paper, which provides updated estimates across 170 countries of explicit and implicit subsidies (undercharging for environmental costs and forgone consumption taxes). Download detailed data for different countries and fuels here.
The longer this evil cycle continues the less likely our escape from the dead-end road ending in Earth’s hothouse hell becomes. Seemingly, the only way we can find a side-road to a sustainable future is by replacing our present puppet governments with people committed to representing the interests of those who voted for them.
The only for them to know they will be replaced if they don’t do this is if for everyone who thinks this to tell their government representatives by post, email, phone, or old-fashioned knocking on the electoral office door. Only if enough people do this to convince special interest supporters that they really will be out of a job, will they begin to take the climate emergency seriously.
It is in your hands to start this action. VoteClimateOne.Org has the addresses and information you need to do this, and many other climate or energy action groups can also help you to power your tangible demands for action.
If you want to understand the climate crisis, see what VoteClimateOne.Org is telling our federal and state governments, and Climate Sentinel News for the real evidence of what is going on with the climate:
If you reference any of our evidence in your petitions to government member, they will know that a lot more people than you will be working to remove them from office if they don’t respond with serious climate action. See ACT NOW! and Traffic Light Voting.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Labor Gov’t slashes vital Antarctic research by $25 M while promoting fossil fuel production/export and gifting $200 million to Aussie sport despite the desperate need to understand how unprecedented Antarctic ice and oceanic conditions relate to the climate crisis.
Anthony Albanese and the federal Labor government are supposedly concerned to keep Australians safe. Yet, if you listen to what they say,
It is necessary to save money by cutting $25 m from Antarctic research into why such a record shattering low amount of sea ice has formed this winter — a phenomenon that seems to place the whole of the human species at risk of near term extinction if we fail to understand and mitigate the risk. See what the science journal Nature says about this: (16 Aug 2923) Australia’s Antarctic budget cuts a ‘terrible blow for science’
It is more important to spend $200 m in voters’ tax dollars on cake and fairy floss (for girls sports) because the Matildas came 4th in the contest for the World Cup (see more below).
It is more important to grovel to America and the UK by spending $268bn to $368bn over the next ~30 years ($10 bn per year!) for delivery of 8 nuclear subs able to project our ‘power’ around the world in the by and by (the majority of these costs would also go overseas) when we could build 20 air-independent subs, a huge kit of other defensive weapons & related infrastructure, with $hundreds of billions left over (see more below).
I would call this government malfeasance of the highest order!
NO SINGLE POLITICAL PARTY SHOULD EVER AGAIN BE GIVEN THE MAJORITY POWER TO GOVERN FOR ITS OWN BENEFIT !
A couple of news items and some basic data on our only planet may make the claim of malfeasance more real.
Incredibly low sea-ice extent around Antarctica. Since early May (i.e., for more than 3½ months!) there has been an all-time record low for the month of the year since records began in 1979. Sigma (σ) is a measure of the probability of observing a deviation of that amount from the average of all measures for that day, assuming the deviations are randomly distributed. -5σ is about one chance in 3.5 million, -6σ is about one chance in 500 million! – and we have seen these extremes day after day after day!!
As many as 56 Antarctic research projects could be cancelled, delayed or restricted, said an email sent from the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) to its staff.
The email stated that the division was facing budget constraints and would need to locate $25 million in savings in order to deliver the planned projects, which include studies into the diminishing sea ice, declining penguin populations, and the “cleaner Antarctica program”, an initiative designed to remedy damage caused by human activity such as oil spills.
Further information from anonymous insiders confirmed that two of Australia’s Antarctic research stations would not be fully staffed during the upcoming summer season, when scientific research at the south pole is usually at its peak.
The announcement comes at a crucial time for scientists, many of whom say this research is more important than ever.
Just last week, it was reported that Antarctic sea ice levels are at a record low, with ice that is normally recovered over the winter being absent – an event that would naturally occur only once every 7.5 million years. [this assumes that the variation is random, but clearly, this record is not random as the deviation has lasted for months, and many other climate indicators are also going crazy at the same time for similarly long periods]
…
“It couldn’t be any more catastrophic to hear at the moment, considering we’re seeing these incredible changes, particularly the sea ice right now. We’re seeing so little sea ice relative to what we normally see this time of year.”
“If there’s a gap in data collection, it’s catastrophic for our understanding. If we have data up to a certain date, and then we have a gap for three years, five years, and then we start the data set again, it doesn’t make it useless. But it makes it really hard for us to get that understanding that we need.” [Especially when we need that information right now!]
Global Sea Surface Temperature at an all time high since records began in 1981 — and still rising compared to previous high records for day of the year.ClimateReanalyzer. Grey lines – Global average SST variation for each year from 1981 to 2021. Dotted line – global average SST, dashed line – 2σ above the average, Red line – global average SST variation for 2022. Note: for legibility, the image only shows temperatures from March 1 to Sept 17.
Sea Ice Thickness: Given that only a thin veneer of sea-ice is left over the Arctic Ocean with 3-4 weeks of melting time left, it seems possible that there may be “blue ocean” at the North Pole this year.
These three CICE charts are a product of the US Naval Research Lab’s GOFS 3.1 Global Ocean Forecasting System. See also Wikipedia: Measurement of sea ice. Other products for both poles provide similar ocean graphics for Sea Surface Salinity (SSS); Sea Surface Height (SSH) – as the ocean warms, it expands so the surfaces of warmer volumes will rise above mean sea-level; and CICE Speed and Drift. They also provide GIF animations of the last 30 days variation for all plots, and daily plots back to 2014. Except for the ice-related products, all of these measures are provided for global oceans and subregions.
Like most Australians, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been inspired by the Matildas’ World Cup performance Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/FIFA/Getty Images / From the article.
In the wake of the Matildas’ World Cup performance, the government will unveil new funding and changes to TV bidding rights for sporting fixtures.
The Albanese government will promise $200m to improve women’s sporting facilities and equipment after the Matildas’ historic Women’s World Cup run sparked an unprecedented outpouring of support for women’s football.
As the Matildas prepare for their third-place playoff against Sweden in Brisbane on Saturday, the government will declare the national team had “changed sport forever”, while unveiling a new funding package and flagging moves to make more major events available on free-to-air television.
…
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, will announce a new grants program, called Play Our Way, with money available for all sports. The government expects soccer will need a significant amount, given clubs have seen a “mind-boggling increase in interest” in the wake of the World Cup.
The grant guidelines have not been completed, but the government said the money would go to “promote equal access, build more suitable facilities, and support grassroots initiatives to get women and girls to engage, stay, and participate in sport throughout their lives”.
[The total budget for the Antarctic Division is around $800 million…; The ANKUS Submarine Project will cost between $268bn to $368bn between now and the mid 2050s – assuming society doesn’t collapse from ‘global boiling’ and precipitate global mass extinction before then.]
Cumulative area burned in Canada by year estimated from satellite detected hotspots since measurements began in 2003.Natural Resources Canada. Black line is 2023. As at 23 Aug 2023 14,664,278 ha had burned (off the scale of the automatically generated chart) — 3 x larger area compared to the previous largest burn, 4,524,137, recorded for the whole of 2014. Note also that in previous years very little burning occurred after mid August. In other words 1.47 % of the total land area of Canada has burned so far this year, with no indication that the burning will be stopping any time soon.
Sea Ice Concentration: Where thin ice still exists, most of that is fairly broken up with 30% or more of the surface within the pixel apparently open water.
Sea Surface Temperature: Warmish sea water, 2-4+ °C comes up to the edge of the thin ice, and even seems to be detected within the edge of the mapped extent (>15% concentration)
Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere jet streams from ClimateReanalyzer’s Today’s Weather Maps. Normally each hemisphere has two circumferential jet streams: Polar and Sub Tropical. In the Northern Hemisphere the winds are mostly too slow to be considered as jet streams at all (> 60 kts) and essentially completely chaotic. This accounts for the frequent, long-lived, mostly motionless, and extreme heat domes promoting unprecedented flash droughts, wildfires, and floods. In the Southern Hemisphere, the winds are of jetstream strength, but again they seem somewhat confused and chaotic which may be associated with the extreme anomalies in sea ice.
What do these measures signify?
On its own, any one of the unprecedented deviations from ‘normal’ climate behavior over the last 40 years or more shown the the graphics above would be scary/remarkable. The fact that several different global measures are more or less simultaneously show similar degrees of (or even growing!) deviation over several months should be sounding emergency warning sirens around the world.
As explained, the nature, extent and duration of the deviations scream out that the complexly dynamical global climate system has been ‘forced’ by increasingly high global average temperatures out the semi-stable glacial-interglacial cycle where it is now beginning to fall (i.e., run away) towards climate apocalypse, collapse and global mass extinction in a much hotter ‘hothouse Earth’ state. The current rate of change in climate indicators is far faster than anything that can be reconstructed for even the worst of them all – the End Permian that also seemed to be driven by runaway warming as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions. As explained in the documents cited in the previous paragraph, if we cannot mobilize effective action quickly enough to halt and reverse the global warming, our climate system seems to be crossing several tipping points that will drive us ever faster down the road to our extinction in Hothouse Hell. If we continue our present ‘business as usual’ attitudes of supporting the fossil fuel industry and gaslighting emergency actions to manage the climate crisis, and the climate trends seen in the last few months continue at the present pace, society may well collapse before 2050 with probable extinction of our species by 2100.
Note: In the cited documents above I suggested one of the tipping points being crossed was stoppage of Earth’s ‘thermohaline circulation‘ in the North Atlantic. At least I have found solid evidence showing that it is still working — even though hot water is covering the ocean surface — the depressed sea level and actual whirlpools E of Newfoundland and S of Greenland show deeper cool salty water is still being sucked down the usual plug-hole to the bottom of the ocean: last 30 days GIF of Sea Surface Height.
Is doom now inevitable or are there good reasons to think we can still climb out of the hole to a sustainable future? YES! Stainability is possible, but only if we act fast enough and hard enough!
Even if we have the threshold to runaway greenhouse, I remain optimistic enough to think if we act fast and hard enough we can still manage to find a survivable future. My reason is based on historical experience. I’m old enough to remember the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Consider the history that led up to this: It took something on the order of 150 years of work using steampunk technology starting with mining coal with picks and shovels to reach our current crisis point. However in the same 150 years our scientific understanding, technological prowess, and overall knowledge has grown exponentially over that same time with a doubling time of 2-5 years (see Homo habilis to Homo destructor ― How the rise of tool-making apes can destroy the world).
America’s mobilization for WWII shows what humans can do in an emergency situation if they work together. Until Dec 7 1941 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Americans were isolationist deniers of the reality of Axis aggression (not unlike Trumpist ‘MAGA’). By 8 May 1945 Germany had been expunged and on 6 Aug. 1945 the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and then Nagasaki a few days later) overwhelmed Japan. In 1941 nuclear fission was a wacky idea proposed by some academics. In 4 years nuclear science was developed, the Manhattan Project was conceived, several different kinds of production infrastructure (Hanford, Oak Ridge Facility, Savanna River (a bit after the War), Los Alamos, etc…) were designed and built, atom bombs were designed, built, tested, and used. In the area of engineering and logistics, an average of 5 highly capable destroyers were built each month for 32 months and an average of 3 Liberty Ships every 2 days between 1941 and 1945. were able to be assembled and launched each week. The United Nations was formed, etc.. Equally prodigious challenges were met in many other areas that completely changed world history. Yes, conscription, coercion, rationing, etc. was required – but the global challenge was met and the common danger vanquished….
Today, we have massively more knowledge and prowess than we did in the early 1940’s. Humans can do remarkable things if people and governments unite and work together to fight the common danger. There is no greater danger than the near term extinction of our entire species and most of the rest of Earth’s biosphere!
In other words, there is no time left for the slow process of electing climate activists to replace sitting puppets in our parliaments.
We need a government fit and able enough to declare the emergency and lead an emergency mobilization to research and manage the climate crisis.If we are to gain effective government coordination and support we have no choice but to change the minds of the parliamentarians we have now.
Measuring Labor’s prioritization of the climate emergency relative to supporting the fossil fuel industry and crazy defence projects
A good measure of our government’s national priorities is the amount of our tax money being allocated to supporting various kinds of activities, and how these amounts change over time.
Australians are paying increasingly high costs due to more frequent, extensive, and severe weather and fire events associated with the accelerating rate of global warming driving climate change. One would think our government would give high priority to understanding what causes the extremes in hopes that we can better prepare for and/or mitigate the ever worsening catastrophes caused by the climate extremes. There are good reasons for thinking that positive feedbacks from ‘polar amplification‘ play a major role in driving the crescendo of climate catastrophes. This winter’s shockingly low rate of sea ice formation around Antarctica that might happen once in 500,000,000 (FIVE HUNDRED MILLION) years through random variation given the observed variations over the last 40 years. (Earth’s land animals emerged from the water less than 500 million years ago.) Clearly the missing winter sea ice is associated with the other similarly improbable climate extremes noted above for this year. Clearly we need to understand scientifically what has caused this year’s anomaly and how it relates to the other extreme variations…….. Yet, because the Government is cutting their funding, the Australian Antarctic “division [is] facing budget constraints and [needs] to locate $25 million in savings in order to deliver the planned projects, which include studies into the diminishing sea ice, …”, etc. Clearly, our government has little interest in supporting Antarctic research critical for understanding climate change.
Some indication of who our Australian state and federal governments are supporting big-time (along with many other countries) is their apparent patrons in the fossil fuel industry (mostly comprised of overseas multinational companies).
By comparison, it is interesting to see how concerned Federal Labor is to support action to protect citizens from the increasing catastrophic and existential threats from climate climate change driven by global warming.
According to the numbers the Climate Council has provided, their steps towards climate action amount to $3,621,600,000 for some very fuzzily defined categories — $3.62 bn compared to $29 – $57 bn (depending on who you follow) in pretty definite subsidies and supports for the mostly overseas fossil fuel industry.
And then there is government management of the potentially existential cost of the climate emergency versus abject kowtowing to ‘his master’s voice’ via AUKUS
Rex Patrick, ex submariner in Oberon and Collins Class subs, sonar and electronic technologies expert, defence contractor, author for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and Federal Senator from South Australia, is what I would consider to be a qualified expert on naval technology. In one X-tweet Mr Patrick demonstrates just how mindlessly stupid allocating $368 bn to AUKUS would be — even for the purpose of acquiring military kit to defend ourselves from other nations:
Instead of 8 nuclear subs that may (or may not) be delivered for the currently estimated cost sometime by the Americans and UK able to project Australian power (for whose benefit?) to the other side of the planet, the same budget would supply 20 air-independent (= very quiet!) subs to protect Australian interests around our shores and in adjacent waters (e.g., Indonesian Archipelago) and a huge kit of additional defence hardware that could mostly be manufactured within the Australian economy — leaving $200 BILLION FOR MEASURES TO KEEP AUSTRALIANS SAFE FROM CLIMATE CATASTROPHE.
What is it about Australian governments in majority power that makes them so eager to work for the interests of (mostly overseas) special interest patrons rather than for the safety and well-being of Australian citizens who have voted to put them in power? To reiterate:
We need a government fit and able enough to declare the emergency and lead an emergency mobilization to research and manage the climate crisis.If we are to gain effective government coordination and support we have no choice but to change the minds of the parliamentarians we have now.
The only way this will happen is if they can be convinced that voters will remove them from Parliament at the earliest possible opportunity if the don’t. They only way they will be convinced they will be voted out is if enough voters flood their mail boxes, in trays, and phone lines with demands for climate action — or else! And, I’m pretty sure there are enough members of climate and environment action groups that if we all sent our emails, posts, phone calls, and even personal visits to electoral offices to deliver this message, that action will be taken.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Smoke billows upward from a planned ignition by firefighters tackling the Donnie Creek Complex wildfire south of British Columbia on Saturday. (B.C. Wildfire Service/Reuters) / from the article
The oceans are record warm while heat waves have invaded multiple continents and ice levels are at historic lows.
Spring has only just begun to transition to summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but some of the season’s most odious and dangerous extreme weather is already running rampant.
Prolonged and punishing heat waves in Asia have sent temperatures soaring to 100 degrees as far north as Siberia and above 110 degrees in Thailand and Vietnam, breaking records.
Wildfires are raging in Canada, which has never seen so much land burn so early in the year. They come after a record-warm May.
Extreme conditions extend to the Southern Hemisphere too, where record warmth and historically low sea ice levels linger even as that part of the globe enters winter.
The extremes are all connected to ocean waters that have hovered at record-warm levels for months, boosted by human-caused climate change. The weather chaos could escalate in the coming months as summer temperatures peak and a developing El Niño elevates air and water temperatures worldwide further.
And then the 2020 wildfires on the Siberian permafrost and taiga as summarised by Hall 2020:
Apparently the situation this year in early June, which is still very early in the normal temperate and subpolar climate zones of the Northern Hemishere, is already significantly worse than either the whole years of 2016 and 2020.
Where climate change is concerned, in 2023 before the year is halfway finished, indicators of the progress of global warming are already of the map into previously uncharted territories.
This post here only adds to alarms being set off by Climate Sentinel News‘s posts of the last few days (click thumbnails to read the posts):
What can we do to turn off the road to extinction in Hothouse Earth before it is too late?
In a few days VoteClimateOne.org and affiliated organizations will be launching our “Tools for Changing Government Minds”. The need for change is too urgent to depend on replacing people in office. Instead we have to change the minds of the existing people in office. Our launch document(s) will provide access to the tools, explain how to use them, and provide an armory full of nuggets of knowledge to be used as ammunition.
The first nugget to be fired at your local representative from as many different sources as possible is: (again click the thumbnail to open the file):
We need climate emergency action now! to get it started email the link to or post a copy of the document above to your federal and state MPs and senators with your own comments: If they don’t immediately start acting on the climate emergency that they will be history come the next election. Actions must include declaring (or passing legislation) that they recognize that we have to fight an existential emergency and all parliamentarians must get off their arses to shut down all sources of carbon emissions and begin mobilization to develop genuinely globally scalable technologies for capturing carbon from past emissions and safely sequestering the captured carbon in soils or in the deep oceans.
You can start doing this today if you want. You are welcome to link to or download and print any of the Climate Sentinel News posts that will help drive home the points you want to make in your cover note.
The basic idea of the campaign is very simple.
What politician is going to continue working as a puppet for special interests against first a few letters on the climate action theme, then tens, then hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and possibly even hundreds of thousands specifically addressed to him/her with the message act or else…… The mailing lists exist, we are crafting proforma covering documents, etc..
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
There is actually a lot more on the front burner than El Niño. There are signs we may have just crossed a catastrophic ocean tipping point over the last three and a half months. The following thread of tweets and news items summarizes a very scary thread of observational data.
We may have broken Earth’s Thermohaline Circulation.
In 2020 Argo collected 12,000 data profiles each month (400 a day) or around 436,500 profiles a year. Each profile provides for each increment of depth a a record of the variation in ocean temperatures, salinity, and pressure from 2,000 m deep to the surface, together with the precise global positioning coordinates where the probe surfaced.
In the past water flowing into the polar regions was quite salty because a lot of moisture evaporated from the surface in tropical and sub-tropical regions, leaving the salt behind to make the water more dense. However, because the water was hot the density was somewhat lowered due to thermal expansion it stayed on the surface because it floated over the surface of cooler but fresher water. As the salty water flowed into polar regions it cooled enough that even though it was being diluted by precipitation and runoff from melting snow and ice on the land, the cooling and increasingly diluted water become dense enough sink under the warm salty waters drawn towards the poles by the sinking polar waters. This circulation also carried oxygen into the depths and nutrients from the depths towards the surface in areas where deep water wells up to replace the surface water flowing towards the poles in tropical and temperate areas.
Wikipedia:Thermohaline circulation (THC) is a part of the large-scale ocean circulation that is driven by global density gradients created by surface heat and freshwater fluxes.
However, as global average temperatures rise and more heat is trapped in the ocean evaporation everywhere puts more moisture into the air that falls as rain in tropical and subtropical areas, diluting the warmer ocean surface waters. In polar and sub-polar areas the increased moisture greatly increasing the runoff from the land from rain and melting snow and ice, that further dilutes the increasingly diluted ocean surface water flowing into polar regions from tropical and subtropical areas.
The result is that the thermohaline conveyors driving the major ocean currents are probably being choked and possibly being completely stopped by masses of water that are too hot and dilute to sink. Even worse, the warm dilute water washing against the ice sheets and glaciers reaching the ocean melts ice at an increasing rate making the surface waters even fresher.
On 26 May, 2023 we are seeing an all-time low extent of sea ice since the satellite record began in 1979. http://kjpluck.github.io/seaice/
Denmark’s Polar Portal (below) shows the melting of the multi-year Arctic sea ice from its winter peak in June 2004 until now. [Click the picture to load the live site, scroll up to to see the “Sea Ice Thickness and Volume” title. Note the grey slider bar below the map. Click the “Animate Monthly” to load the animation — which will take some time to download the data. You may use the slider to scroll through the series of monthly maps, or you can control buttons below the slider to start and stop the animation or step back or forward one month at a time. The red color represents multi-year ice around 4 meters thick, lavender to blue ice is single year ice less than about 1.5 m thick.]
Note, there is an interesting but deadly physical twist here: As water temperature drops below 4 °C cold/freezing fresh water floats on top of warmer relatively salty water, and freezes-over in the winter at higher temperatures than saltier water. Paradoxically, floating ice and snow accumulating on the surface actually insulates the lower layer of warm salty water from further cooling, where the winter surface temperature may be 20-50 °C below freezing. However, the fronts of large glaciers flowing into the ocean may be grounded hundreds of meters below sea level or floating on even deeper warm water(!). This means they will still be melting rapidly from the bottom up even in the dead of winter when fresh water is freezing. The ice melt dilutes the polar oceans even more – so say nothing of raising sea levels that will, in turn, lead to the floating of glacier fronts, exposing even more areas to melting.
What is happening as I write this warning?
If you follow the threads and commentary attached to these tweets here, the links show what was happening a week ago.
Daily global sea ice record low is small, but it doesn't show how significant it actually is. The volume and regional changes are even more telling.
The following Guardian articles highlight the existential risk we are facing.
Melting ice around Antarctica could cause a 40% slowdown of a global deep ocean current by 2050 if current greenhouse gas emissions continue, according to researchers. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images / from the article
New research by Australian scientists suggests 40% slowdown in just three decades could alter world’s climate for centuries.
[Actually, the data presented here suggests that as of the last three months or so this stoppage has already begun!]
Melting ice around Antarctica will cause a rapid slowdown of a major global deep ocean current by 2050 that could alter the world’s climate for centuries and accelerate sea level rise, according to scientists behind new research.
The research suggests if greenhouse gas emissions continue at today’s levels, the current in the deepest parts of the ocean could slow down by 40% in only three decades.
This, the scientists said, could generate a cascade of impacts that could push up sea levels, alter weather patterns and starve marine life of a vital source of nutrients.
Read the complete article….
Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf. There has never been less ice around the continent than there was last week. Photograph: staphy/Getty Images/iStockphoto / from the article
With the continent holding enough ice to raise sea levels by many metres if it was to melt, polar scientists are scrambling for answers.
For 44 years, satellites have helped scientists track how much ice is floating on the ocean around Antarctica’s 18,000km coastline.
The continent’s fringing waters witness a massive shift each year, with sea ice peaking at about 18m sq km each September before dropping to just above 2m sq km by February.
But across those four decades of satellite observations, there has never been less ice around the continent than there was last week.
…
“We are seeing less ice everywhere. It’s a circumpolar event.”
In the southern hemisphere summer of 2022, the amount of sea ice dropped to 1.92m sq km on 25 February – an all-time low based on satellite observations that started in 1979.
The Southern Ocean overturning circulation has ebbed 30% since the 90s, CSIRO scientist claims, leading to higher sea levels and changing weather.
A major global deep ocean current has slowed down by approximately 30% since the 1990s as a result of melting Antarctic ice, which could have critical consequences for Earth’s climate patterns and sea levels, new research suggests.
Known as the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, the global circulation system plays a key role in influencing the Earth’s climate, including rainfall and warming patterns. It also determines how much heat and carbon dioxide the oceans store.
Scientists warn that its slowdown could have drastic impacts, including increasing sea levels, altering weather patterns and depriving marine ecosystems of vital nutrients.
Global temperatures are rising. This paper demonstrates for the first time that the global temperature increase has not been linear but is exponential with a doubling time of about 25 years. Both the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the combustion of fossil fuels and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have also risen exponentially, with a similar doubling time. The exponential trajectories of rising global temperature, carbon dioxide emission, and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration support the idea that all three are entirely man-made. This analysis shows that during the past 70 years, the increasing use of fossil fuels results more from human activities than population growth, and that reducing the use of fossil fuels by 7.6% each year, the “7.6%-scenario”, can prevent annual global temperatures from surpassing pre-industrial temperatures by 1.6°C, a critical threshold to sustaining life on Earth.
Driven by exponentially increasing global temperatures, this process is also very likely to be accelerating at an exponential rate (doubling time of about 25 years).
Or worse!
What I think we are seeing in this data is that we have crossed a chaotically discontinuous ‘tipping point’. Prior to March 12, the thermohaline circulation was slowing as surface waters were gradually becoming warmer and more dilute, and thus less dense, decreasing the sinking rate of the cooling warm salty water that was driving the circulation. Around March 12, the surface waters actually became less dense than the deeper waters and thus stopped sinking at all to begin piling up in the polar regions where they would increase the rate of ice melting to be diluted still further.
With no sinking water to keep the the thermohaline circulation working, it has effectively been jammed and we are now in a totally new climate regime that is likely to get a lot hotter, a lot faster.
If this isn’t a climate emergency, I don’t know what is.
As at May 30, the heat anomaly is still growing. The average surface temperature of the World Ocean is a good 0.2 °C hotter than it has been on this day since the satellite records began in 1979; and it is only 0.1 °C cooler than the hottest temperature ever recorded in this era for any time of the year.
Featured Image
Figure from https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1663936433801887744/photo/1. “Will a Super El Niño materialize like in 1997 and 2015? What will that mean for global Sea Surface Temperatures? And for global and regional weather extremes?” This seems to be answered by https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1663195220207362048/photo/1
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Around 90% of the extra heat trapped by the greenhouse layer warms our Ocean to slow rising temperatures. We’ll pay the price.
The climate scientist, Bill McKibben reminded me of this fact in his regular newsletter, The Crucial Years, in his 18 May post, Maybe we should have called this planet ‘Ocean’. His post on ocean warming begins with an earlier version of the graphic here from ClimateReanalizer. These are updated daily, so the record here is only a day or two behind the current reality:
The page provides time series and map visualizations of daily mean Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from the NOAA Optimum Interpolation SST (OISST) dataset version 2.1. OISST is a 0.25°x0.25° gridded dataset that estimates temperatures based on a blend of satellite, ship, and buoy observations. The OISST data product includes SST anomalies based on 1971–2000 climatology from NOAA. The datset spans 1 January 1982 to present with a 1 to 2-day lag from the current day. OISST files are preliminary for about two weeks until a finalized product file is posted by NOAA. This status is identified on the maps with “[preliminary]” showing in the title, and applies to the time series as well. The time series chart displays area-weighted means of the selected domain. For example, if World 60S-60N is selected, then the SST values shown are area-wieghted means for all ocean gridcells between 60°S and 60°N across all longitudes.
Something very troubling is happening on and under the 70 percent of the planet’s surface covered by salt water. We pay far more attention to the air temperature, because we can feel it (and there’s lots to pay attention to, with record temps across Asia, Canada and the Pacific Northwest) but the truly scary numbers from this spring are showing up in the ocean.
If you look at the top chart above , you can see “anomaly” defined. [His chart was for 11 May. Mine, here, is the temperature on 19 May.]That’s the averaged surface temperature of the earth’s oceans, and beginning in mid-March it was suddenly very much hotter than we’ve measured before. In big datasets for big phenomena, change should be small—that’s how statistics work, and that’s why the rest of the graph looks like a plate of spaghetti. That big wide open gap up there between 2023 and the next hottest year (2016) is the kind of thing that freaks scientists out because they’re not quite sure what it means. Except trouble. [My emphasis]
… A little-noticed [but quite important] recent study headed by Katrina von Schuckmann found that “over the past 15 years, the Earth has accumulated almost as much heat as it did in the previous 45 years,” and that 89 percent of that heat has ended up in the seas. That would be terrifying on its own, but coming right now it’s even scarier. That’s because, after six years dipping in and out of La Nina cooling cycles, the earth seems about to enter a strong El Nino phase, with hot water in the Pacific. El Nino heat on top of already record warm oceans will equal—well, havoc, but of exactly what variety can’t be predicted.
McKibben’s second graphic (the up to date version is my “Featured Image”) shows a global plot of temperature anomalies (also compared to the same 1971-1980 baseline) for every ¼° – ¼° square of ocean surface. “Area weighting” is applied because ¼° of latitude (the width of the ‘square) becomes much narrower as either pole is approached, reducing the physical surface area encompassed by the lines on the globe.
In any event, this data doesn’t just freak me out. It suggests that the door to Earth’s Hothouse Hell is beginning to open to suck us in.
Is this data reliable enough to support action?
Where the climate record is concerned, From the beginning of the satellite era, our oceanic temperature record is very good indeed, and not just because satellite remote sensing measures virtually every square degree of most of the globe every day, but the satellites’ measurements are calibrated every day against the ‘ground truth’ measurements from many hundreds of Argo floats surfacing each day from their 9-10 days probing the ocean depths. The graphic below shows the physical locations sampled by Argo floats over the previous month. Added to these are more detailed measurements collected by fleets of oceanographic ships and a few special moored buoys that continuously record measurements from the ocean surface to the abyssal ocean bottom.
Supercomputers amalgamate the raw input data and assemble the kinds of human readable outputs that you and I can understand at a glance. Thanks to the exponential growth of measuring technologies and data processing power the accuracy and detail of our scientific understanding of climate and weather extends far beyond anything we could know in past decades.
How is all the additional heat in the warming ocean likely to affect the planet we live on?
Melting ice
As the atmosphere and oceans absorb more solar energy, some of this excess energy will inevitably be absorbed melting ice in the cooler regions of the planet where ice has existed more-or-less in an equilibrium state, e.g., in the form of glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice. The energy drives the equilibrium states towards more water and less ice.
One very obvious measure of ice melting is the rapidly shrinking area of the Earth’s surface covered by sea ice around the N and S Poles. Since the beginning of the satellite era this has been able to be measured accurately. The Australian Antarctic Program Partnership and the ARC Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science’s 2023 Science Briefing: On Thin Ice explains what is happening around our local polar ocean
Record minimums or maximums are updated annually. Therefore, a newly-set record may not be reflected in the chart until after the annual update. View additional years by clicking the dates in the legend. Roll your cursor over the line to see daily sea ice extent values. Zoom in to any area on the chart by clicking and dragging your mouse. To see a corresponding daily sea ice concentration image, click on a line in the chart. Sea ice extent is derived from sea ice concentration. Images are not available for the average or standard deviation. When reusing Charctic images or data, please credit “National Snow and Ice Data Center.” Currently, some functions do not work in Internet Explorer. We recommend using a different browser. For more information about the data, see About Charctic data. If you have questions or problems, please contact NSIDC User Services at [email protected].
What is currently happening in the Antarctic Ocean is also freakish and worrisome!
Uh, the #Antarctic sea ice anomaly continues to grow and is really a pronounced outlier for this time of year in our satellite record… 🥴
— Australian Antarctic Program Partnership (@Ant_Partnership) May 18, 2023
Rising sea levels
Of course, all the melt water released by melting ice has to go somewhere — i.e., adding to the volume of the World Ocean. As this wasn’t enough, as water warms it also expands to raise the sea levels even more. The graph below from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, plots the rising tide of the swelling ocean since 1993 through June 2022. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate.Gov site’s Climate Change: Global Sea Level also plots the rise, and considers its implications in more detail.
Daily change in global mean sea level, as measured by satellite altimetry, from January 1993 to June 2022 (solid line), the associated uncertainty at 90% confidence level (shading) and the trend (dashed line). The data have been adjusted for glacial isostatic adjustment and have been corrected for the TOPEX-A instrumental drift during 1993–1998. Data source: CMEMS Ocean Monitoring Indicator based on the C3S sea level product. Credit: C3S/ECMWF/CMEMS. https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-indicators/sea-level
Help! We’re sliding down the slope to Earth’s Hothouse Hell! Sound the sirens and mobilize for WW III against global warming and the existential climate crisis!
As is usual for the UN’s climate pronouncements driven by the UN’s IPCC findings that absolutely establish the dangers we face from global warming/heating, even this klaxon warning understates and downplays the magnitude of the crisis we face.
If we fail to mobilize genuinely effective action over the next decade to stop and reverse the warming crisis, our families will have their lives shortened due to increasing climate catastrophes and we will have condemned our entire species to death in Earth’s 6th global mass extinction within a century or two. We don’t have time to take more election cycles to elect new governments. Our existing governments must wake up, smell the smoke, and immediately begin acting to put out the fire before it destroys us all. If you are in government, read Guterres’ message in mind. YOU must act now!
Planet Hurtling towards Hell of Global Heating, Secretary-General Warns Austrian World Summit, Urging Immediate Emissions Cuts, Fair Climate Funding
Following is the text of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ video message to the seventh Austrian World Summit, in Vienna today:
I thank the Austrian Government and Arnold Schwarzenegger for this opportunity. The climate crisis can feel overwhelming. Disasters and dangers are already mounting, with the poor and marginalized suffering the most, as we hurtle towards the hell of 2.8°C of global heating by the end of the century.
But, amidst all this, I urge you to remember one vital fact: limiting the rise in global temperature to 1.5°C remains possible. That is the clear message from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, it requires a quantum leap in climate action around the world.
To achieve this, I have proposed an Acceleration Agenda. This urges all Governments to hit fast-forward on their net-zero deadlines, in line with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in the light of national circumstances. It asks leaders of developed countries to commit to reaching net zero as close as possible to 2040 — as Austria has done. And leaders in emerging economies to do so as close as possible to 2050.
The Acceleration Agenda also urges all countries to step up their climate action, now. The road map is clear: phasing out of coal by 2030 in OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries and 2040 in all others; net-zero electricity generation by 2035 in developed countries, and 2040 elsewhere; no more licensing or funding of new fossil-fuel projects; no more subsidizing fossil fuels; and no more fake offsets, which do nothing to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, but which are still being used to justify fossil-fuel expansion today.
We can only reach net zero if we make real and immediate emissions cuts. If we embrace transparency and accountability. Relying on carbon credits, shadow markets, or murky accounting means one thing: failure. That is why I have asked CEOs to present clear net-zero transition plans, in line with the credibility standard presented by my high-level expert group on net-zero pledges.
And the Acceleration Agenda urges business and Governments to work together to decarbonize vital sectors — from shipping, aviation and steel, to cement, aluminium and agriculture. This should include interim targets for each sector to pave the way to net zero by 2050.
The Acceleration Agenda also calls for climate justice, including overhauling the priorities and business models of multilateral development banks, so that trillions of dollars in private finance flow to the green economy.
Developed countries must also make good on their financial commitments to developing countries. And they must operationalize the loss and damage fund, and replenish the Green Climate Fund. I commend Austria for increasing its pledge to the Green Climate Fund by 23 per cent and urge others to deliver their fair share.
On climate, we have all the tools we need to get the job done. But, if we waste time, we will be out of time. Let’s accelerate action, now. Thank you.
Featured Image
Note that about half the surface of Earth’s Ocean is a good 2 °C hotter than the baseline average temperature for this day of the year
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Labor puppets will work to benefit fossil fuel industries’ continued hyper-profitable exploitation come hothouse hell or high water flooding! How do we know this?
Jim Chalmers’ long-awaited tweaks to the PRRT are the itsy-bitsyest “reforms” about, the equivalent of recycling old Christmas presents with a fancy new bow. Michael West reports on how the Treasurer is merely returning a couple of billion in gas sector subsidies, and only for a while.
“Chalmers slaps $2.4bn tax hit on oil and gas,” cried Murdoch’s The Australian. “$2.4bn gas tax hit on energy giants,” declared the AFR. Santos chief Kevin Gallagher was nowhere to be heard with his “Soviet-style” scaremongering. Is Australia still going the way of Venezuela and Nigeria, Kevin?
Not on your Nelly. The foreign gas giants are profiteering from Australia’s resources like there is no tomorrow, and paying pocket fluff in tax to boot. Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ long-awaited tweaks to the PRRT are itsy-bitsy, the equivalent of recycling old Christmas presents with a bright new bow, really just “up-fronting” a piddling amount of gas revenue for the next few years, a clawing back of subsidies for a while.
You know it’s a fake “hit” when the fossil media talks it up as a “hit” but the gas lobbyists from APPEA say it gets “the balance right”. Reality is there is no balance, just ongoing pillage.
Clearly our Government is receiving or expecting to receive some kind of quid pro quo that they think will help them stay in power. Staying in power is clearly more important to the party that has the majority in government than doing whatever is necessary to stop and reverse the carbon emissions currently forcing us all down the road to hothouse hell and global mass extinction.
How else could the robber barons of the FF industries count on our Government helping them to rip off such extraordinary profits from their pillaging of so many Australian non-renewable resources?
Following this theme a little further, see the news from Alberta, Canada, that is currently burning to a crisp. This gives some of the evidence demonstrating how FF puppetry works through its ‘influence’ on the media:
The stark reality is that the successful puppetry of the fossil fuel industry to protect and possibly even enhance next year’s earnings is driving us ever faster down the global warming road that leads to human oblivion in the 6th global mass extinction. Even if the heating doesn’t kill us directly, the die-offs of increasing numbers of keystone species, will cause whole ecosystems (including human agricultural systems) to collapse, taking our species along as well.
The weather causing the fires in Alberta today is a sign of the times:
Now: There are 89 active fires in Alberta, Canada. Active area burned is ~1 million acres!! In the past 5 years the average burned area to date only +-1000 acres. Southern Canada has been super dry the past few months. A 4 sigma heat ridge this weekend will compound the issues! pic.twitter.com/rdNJ90kEgG
Indigenous communities, including three First Nations and a Métis settlement, have been among the hardest hit in the Alberta wildfires. Indigenous peoples are bearing the brunt of climate change.https://t.co/Yp6PLKDjss
— Dr. Kisha Supernant, social agitator (she/her). (@ArchaeoMapper) May 9, 2023
Confidence is increasing in a potentially record-smashing heatwave across the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada this weekend into early next week, which could rapidly escalate the already serious wildfire situation across Alberta. pic.twitter.com/UItmnbSiwZ
Note: The normal progression of waves in the Jet Stream is from west to east. In this time series, the Jet Stream is so disordered that the eddy is actually moving the heat dome from east to west!
What we are seeing here is the operation of a positive feedback look driven by increasing global temperatures. As the Arctic grows warmer, temperature differences driving the jet streams diminish. This change allows the streams separating frigid polar air from much temperate zone air to slow and meander both far north and south of their normal paths. As demonstrated above, this is how the monster heat dome causing the Alberta fires formed. Amongst other things, slow overall warming accompanied by periodic heatwaves like this over most of the world’s boreal forests has allowed bark beetles, normally killed off every year by winter freezing, to proliferate to the point that they are killing vast numbers of trees. This increases the forests’ vulnerabilities to fires and the ferocity of the fires themselves. Not only does this turn the carbon content of the trees into greenhouse gases, but the fires are often hot enough to ignite the peaty soil to release that carbon as greenhouse gases as well.
In sum, fossil fuel interests have convinced (1) our government to protect and even extend fossil fuel’s profits from producing and burning Earth’s carbon stores into energy and greenhouse gases, and (2) our press from advertising the facts of this pillage to the people whose futures will be destroyed by the consequent global warming.
Governments controlled by political parties in majority are easy targets for special interests, especially when the parties operate on the basis that the only issue that matters is to retain control of the government. They will represent the special interests of any person/group/industry they think can help them keep that control before the interests of the people in their electorates or people in general.
To mobilize and coordinate the necessary forces to turn off the downhill road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell, our governments need to work for us humans, not vested interests:
we need to convince our elected and candidate representatives that we will absolutely not vote for them if they put a vested interest before our interests;
that we need to elect enough independents from our own communities who will represent us to ensure that no major political party can form a majority government in its own right.
Item 2 ensures that community interests can veto legislation favoring special interests put up by the party in power.
Featured Image:
A protest against the US government’s decision to exit the Paris climate deal in 2017. ‘Ignorance-building strategies’ by fossil fuel companies have bred climate change scepticism among conservatives in the US and Australia. Photograph: Anthony Anex/EPA | from the Guardian article by Graham Readfearn (08/05/2018), “‘It’s all about vested interests’: untangling conspiracy, conservatism and climate scepticism“)
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Meteorologists are being threatened and abused for forecasting and reporting record high temperatures and weather extremes.
Last week Spain recorded the highest April temperature on record (38.8 °C) following on from last year, 2022, its hottest year since records began.
Nearly 75 percent of Spain is susceptible to desertification due to climate change. Water reservoirs are at half their capacity and farmers unions say 60 percent of agricultural land is “suffocating” from lack of rain. Spain has asked Brussels to help by activating the EU’s agriculture crisis reserve funds (when many other areas of Europe are also suffering from drought).
Long drowned villages emerging from bottoms of desiccating reservoirs: The ruins of the Sant Romà church, exposed due to historically low water levels in the Sau reservoir, Spain in April. Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg
Spain’s government on Friday came to the defence of the AEMET weather agency, which has suffered threats and abuse from climate conspiracy theorists over its forecasts during a record drought.
“Murderers”, “Criminals”, “You’ll pay for this” and “We’re watching you” are just some of the anonymous messages sent to AEMET in recent weeks on social media, by email and even by phone.
The threats were responding to forecasts and reports published by AEMET, notably over last week’s early heatwave, when Spain registered its hottest-ever temperature for April, reaching 38.8 degrees Celsius (101.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in Cordoba.
Where the European/Mediterranean region is concerned, Spain is not the only country facing water crises. Even before the end of winter, the Guardian’s article of 4 March, ‘Very precarious’: Europe faces growing water crisis as winter drought worsens, Austria, Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland were all suffering problems from shortages of rain and runoff from the small amount of accumulated winter snow.
Australia has already lost a lot of agricultural productivity because of three years of La Niña flooding. For several months we couldn’t even buy frozen french fries (shades of the Irish Potato Famine). This may well be followed by even more damaging droughts when the next major El Niño surpasses the last two to reach 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial baseline, as seems likely given past trends.
As a target for those with an often visceral distrust of the established science of human-caused global heating, the Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature record might be seen as ground zero. Photograph: Bill Bachman/Alamy / from the article.
Former Bureau of Meteorology staff say claims they deliberately manipulated data to make warming seem worse are being fed by a ‘fever swamp’ of climate denial.
For more than a decade, climate science deniers, rightwing politicians and sections of the Murdoch media have waged a campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature records.
Those records say Australia has warmed by 1.4C since 1910, the year when the bureau’s main quality-controlled climate dataset starts.
Extremely hot days come along more often than they used to, and the warming trends are happening everywhere, at all times of the year.
As a target for those with an often visceral distrust of the established science of human-caused global heating, the bureau’s temperature record might be seen as ground zero.
“This has frankly been a concerted campaign,” says climate scientist Dr Ailie Gallant, of Monash University. “But this is not about genuine scepticism. It is harassment and blatant misinformation that has been perpetuated.”
Attacking messengers because you dislike or fear the messages only impedes circulating knowledge that might help to solve real-world problems and save your life or the lives of your family members. That global warming causes record temperatures and droughts is a fact that causes problems…. Denying the fact does not make the problems go away! It only keeps the problem from being solved until it is too late to do anything effective.
When there are too many crop failures over too wide an area for too long, famine is the consequence, and can lead to. Continuing famine leads to starvation and, eventually, mass deaths.
