Is Scotty using climate disasters to distract us from fighting the root cause?

We’ve argued previously that Scotty from Marketing has become a past master at distracting us from effective action against climate change to protect his patrons in the fossil fuel industry

‘Australia is getting hard to live in because of these disasters’ says Scott Morrison; protestors in Lismore believe they have identified a root cause. Photograph: Yaya Stempler/The Guardian

by Jeff Sparrow, 16/03/2022 in The Guardian/Opinion

Is battling back-to-back disasters distracting us from fighting the climate crisis? As floods follow fires, we need to hold our leaders’ feet to the flames – or, for that matter, to the water. Environmentalists once saw abstraction as the biggest obstacle to climate action. How, they wondered, could one focus the public on the distant future? Today, we confront the opposite problem, with the very immediacy of the crisis generating a strange paralysis.

Featured Image: “It’s ok. I saved the valuables”.The Cathy Wilcox@cathywilcox1 on Twitter, via Know Your Meme

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

If insurers won’t insure, should govt subsidize risks?

As the costs to insurance companies to cover climate risks skyrocket, insurance becomes unafordable. Should governments subsidize high risk policies?

Lismore was inundated during the floods.

by Jess Davis, 11/03/2022 in ABC News

Should the federal government step in to keep insurance affordable after the floods?: As communities look to rebuild from the devastating floods many are concerned they will no longer be able to afford insurance, with calls for the federal government to step in and help.

Featured image: Floods in Brisbane also caused widespread damage.(Supplied: Jared Cassidy)

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

Extreme weather costs will hurt insurance co’s and you!

Payouts for increasing damages from floods, wildfires, and winds hurt the insurance companies. They must choose to not insure the risk or recover costs from customers

Lismore locals clean up after their town was again inundated, this time by record flood levels.(AAP: Jason O’Brien)

by Michael Janda, 12/03/2022 in ABC News

Insurers brace for rising flood damage amid climate change, and they warn you should too: As New South Wales and Queensland clean up after what are likely to be the costliest floods in Australian history, insurers have a stark warning — prepare for things to get worse, especially along the east coast.

Featured image: Lismore floods regularly. This picture of the town is from the 2017 inundation.(ABC North Coast: Ruby Cornish) from the article.

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

It is up to us to decide who governs us — climate warriors or humbuggers

“This is coal” 09/02/2017 via David Marler on Youtube
“We’ll keep on mining coal” 09/09/2021 via The Guardian

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 risks extinction no matter how we arrange the deck chairs on the burning ship — and the risk continues to rise the longer we delay action.

William P. Hall

The climate emergency has two possible outcomes

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Risk runaway warming to a hothouse earth and extinction

RECOGNISE THE EMERGENCY

Mobilise to the max & work to become good stewards of our precious blue planet

There is no planet B

VOTE CLIMATE ONE to heal our planet

It is time for Australian citizens to reclaim our government from the puppets of the fossil fuel industry.

These humbugging puppets have been working for several years to keep their immensely rich patrons safe from any economic harm from actions to stop and reverse the global warming that has been changing our climate to allow ever more, and more deadly extreme weather events.

It is time for Australian citizens to replace the puppets in our Parliament with independent people or parties who are publicly committed to put action to fight the growing climate emergency at the top of their agendas if elected. As our name states, Vote Climate One has been established to help you elect these kinds of people in your individual electorates.

Welcome to our updated and “election ready” site!
Please check it out!

Home explains what we are about and who we are.

Traffic Light Voting, explains how our system will help ensure that your vote will count maximally towards electing ‘climate friendly’ representatives in your house and senate electorates.

Climate Heroes explains how you can help in a very big way to put our voting guide in everyone’s hands in your electorate and help us to make the guide as accurate as it possibly can be.

Political parties discusses the roles political parties have played in Australia to bring us to the present state of general inaction relative to the worsening climate emergency, and what we know about their stances relative to solving the emergency.

Electorates tells you what what we know about each candidate in each individual federal house and senate electorate, and shows you how we have ranked them in relation to their party or public stances on prioritizing action on the climate emergency.

Once the election is declared and the ballot papers laid out by the Electoral Commission, we will provide printable copies of the form so you can mark your preferences before you go to the polling booth to save you time when you are actually voting.

Climate Sentinel News is where we most differ from all other election-related web-sites. Here is where we present a curated collection of daily news items and scientific reports providing the concrete evidence relating to global warming and climate change that underlies our concerns for the futures of our families.

If you are unsure about the real importance of climate change and actions to control it, this information will keep you up to date with the latest scientific knowledge and continuing evidence from the daily news. This keeps telling us (1) we face real problems from climate change, and (2) that with the proper government, we may actually be able to make the world safer from it.

If you agree with us that we need a very different kind of government that can go beyond ‘business as usual’ there are some very positive things you can do to help spread the message

Basically our problem is that we are a purely volunteer outfit. Any funding we can raise goes to our Climate Heroes program to support posting and letter-boxing our paper Voting Guide in marginal electorates. However, the Web campaign is also critically important to reach possible swing voters in all electorates in hope that we may swing a few surprises here as well to remove some of the worst special interest puppets from their normally very safe seats.

The internet (Web) is truly remarkable in that social media has the power to circulate ‘interesting’ news to an exponentially growing market as fake news publishers all too frequently demonstrate. This doesn’t even have to be paid for if readers want to share the item.

We think VoteClimateOne’s Climate Sentinel News and/or our Traffic Light Voting System might be circulated in this same way. For example, if you find this post to be interesting enough to share with some of your friends, Google and other search engines will pick up on this interest and prioritize showing the post in other people’s search results over other, apparently less interesting stuff. There are some very simple things you can do in Facebook and Twitter to multiply this effect many times over.

For Facebook – when you receive a post from VoteClimateOne (like this one), (1) click the Like icon. (2) click the Share icon and then the Share now (Friends), write something in the comment saying why they should read the post and add some appropriate hash tags, e.g., #VoteClimateOne #AusPol #TellTheTruth #ScottyFromMarketing #WhereTheBloodyHellAreYou #AustraliaBurns #AustraliaFloods #ClimateEmergency #GlobalWarming. The presence of any one of these in YOUR comment to the item you are sharing will insure that this vote climate one post will be added to the posts indexed under that hash tag. And the more times this one post is shared by someone else also using the same hash tag, the closer this post will be to the top of the list someone sees when they do a search on the hash tag.

If everyone receiving a post from Vote Climate One shares only one post a day with all of their friends, within only a few days we will saturate the Web – especially if the hash tags are specifically Australian in context. Twitter works in very much the same way, but Paul Hosking, our Search Engine Optimization guru explains how this works in a video.

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

NB4 East Coast lows kill 21+ citizens — worse to come

As long as global warming continues ever more extreme weather can be expected. Is our govt. doing enough to help mitigation & adaptation?

Jason O’Brien/AAP via The Conversation

by Barbara Norman, 09/03/2022 in The Conversation

The floods have killed at least 21 Australians. Adapting to a harsher climate is now a life-or-death matter:

The devastating floods in Queensland and New South Wales highlight, yet again, Australia’s failure to plan for natural disasters. As we’re seeing now in heartbreaking detail, everyday Australians bear the enormous cost of this inaction. It’s too soon to say whether the current floods are directly linked to climate change. But we know such disasters are becoming more frequent and severe as the climate heats up. In 2019, Australia ranked last out of 54 nations on its strategy to cope with climate change.

Read the complete article

Featured Image: The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2021) projects that ten year extreme weather events will become more common compared to the pre-industrial era. Based on data from Fig. SPM.6 of: Climate Change 2021 / The Physical Science Basis / Working Group I contribution to the WGI Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change / Summary for Policymakers. IPCC.ch SPM-23. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (9 August 2021). Source states: ● Hot temperature extremes over land – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of extreme temperature event that occurred once in 10 years on average in a climate without human influence; ● Heavy precipitation over land – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of heavy 1-day precipitation event that occurred once in 10 years on average in a climate without human influence; ● Agricultural & ecological droughts in drying regions – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of an agricultural and ecological drought event that occurred once in 10 years on average across drying regions in a climate without human influence. / Date: 29/20/2019 / Author: Femkemilene / Licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

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

We’ve seen nothing yet: NB4 flooding in Qld & NSW

Plus long-hot summer in WA. Continued global warming will make weather ever more extreme and lethal. LNP still shoveling coal on the fire.

As I write this, there are already 7 weather-related deaths in Queensland with flood levels still rising and at least one in northern NSW where the deluge is expected to continue at least until tonight. Flooding in Gympie and Lismore has reached NB4 levels, exceeded all-time records with flood defences in Lismore over-topped. As shown in the image above, the Bureau of Meteorology weather stations upstream from Lismore show 24 hour rainfall readings to 9:00 am this morning from 1/3 of a meter to more than 3/4 — with most around 1/2 of a meter! — i.e., an unimaginable layer water 50 cm deep on every point of the landscape that is now running down hill into the stream catchments.

Heavy flooding has already inundated the Lismore CBD, which is now off limits to all pedestrian and vehicular traffic, police said. (9News)

by Ciccharelli et al, 7:35am Feb 28, 2022 in 9 News

Lismore flooding exceeds 48-year record as search for missing man resumes

Emergency services are continuing to search for a missing man in Lismore floodwaters amid what is potentially the city’s worst ever flood disaster.Efforts have been underway to evacuate the entire town as flood waters rise, but hundreds of people are trapped in their homes.The city’s main road, Bruxner Highway, is underwater, with cars completely submerged.LIVE COVERAGE:Flood emergency gripping Queensland and northern NSW

Read the complete article….
Severe floodwaters are continuing to hit the Queensland town of Gympie, with evacuation centres already reaching capacity. (9News)

Chanel Zagon, 8:15pm Feb 27, 2022, in 9 News

Gympie smashed by largest flood in more than a century

The Queensland city of Gympie has been hit by the largest flood in more than 100 years, with more than 1000 properties submerged in floodwaters.The Mary River peaked at 22.8 metres on Sunday morning, the highest level since 1893.

Hundreds have been forced to abandon their homes and seek refuge in an evacuation centre after the region was deemed a disaster declaration area from the life-threatening floods.

Read the complete article….

Climate scientists have warned us for years that this was coming. If we had begun reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases and developing other mitigation strategies then, by now we might have already stopped and begun to reverse the warming process.

The fact is our governments, and especially the present LNP COALition Government in Canberra, instead of working to mitigate the climate emergency, have continuously promoted and protected the fossil fuel industry to help them to continue digging up and burning carbon at an ever increasing rate. This claim is not some wild claim off the top of my head, but demonstrated almost daily by COALition members in their own words standing before Parliament and the press. It is worth noting that this effort is often led by rural MPs from Queensland and NSW – the states that have at least suffered most from the increasingly extreme ‘weather’ events: bushfires, floods, droughts, and winds.

The puppets show and tell
Captain Humbug showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017)
Fossil fuel donations keep puppets in government.
See also Katherine Murphy in The Guardian on 09/02/2017 for the live video — “Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this? What a bunch of clowns, hamming it up – while out in the real world an ominous and oppressive heat just won’t let up.”

So far, the constant denial, misrepresentation, blocking, distraction and continuous humbuggery and bulldust has successfully prevented any effective government action to shut down carbon emissions and has disrupted most state and private efforts to do this. We cannot yet jail these fools, knaves and puppets for the crime of ecocide, but we can at least remove the blockers from Parliament and replace them with trustworthy candidates who have committed themselves to put action against the climate emergency as their first order of business.

To do this we have to accept the facts that are enough to make any sane person panic. However, in the incredibly wise words of a 16 year old autistic child, Greta Thunberg, we need to recognize that the panic can be answered with prompt action.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.

In other words, wake up, smell the smoke, see the reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. All Capt. Humbug and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about. In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hope. She wants you to panic enough to wake up and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ future.

Help give them the bright future they hope for!

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

Gov’t gives fossil fuel free pass for excess emissions

A fifth of Australia’s fossil fuel facilities emit more more GHGs than approved – with no penalties/costs applied for excess emissions

by Adam Morton, 24/02/2022 in The Guardian
A fifth of Australia’s fossil fuel facilities emit more greenhouse gas than originally estimated, report says: Australian Conservation Foundation says blowouts show government’s safeguard mechanism is ‘failing’ to control industrial emissions.

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

Biospheric carbon emissions are not easily recovered

Living things and soils store vast amounts of organic carbon. If this is lost to the atmosphere by wildfire, land clearing, or other disturbances it is not easily recovered

Irrecoverable Carbon: The Importance of Preventing Deforestation

by Govind Bhutata 13/02/2022 Carbon Streaming Corporation in Visual Capitalist

The Earth is home to some natural ecosystems that function as carbon vaults, storing massive amounts of carbon. Researchers developed the concept of “irrecoverable carbon” to identify areas on the basis of three criteria relevant for conservation:

Manageability: How they can be influenced by direct and local human actions

Vulnerability: The magnitude of carbon lost upon disturbance

Recoverability: The recoverability of carbon stocks following loss

Applying the three criteria across all ecosystems reveals that some places contain carbon that humans can manage, and if lost, could not be recovered by 2050, when the world needs to reach net-zero to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change.

The above graphic sponsored by Carbon Streaming Corporation charts global irrecoverable carbon by land area, highlighting important ecosystems of stored carbon.

Read the complete article….

For the science behind this brief presentation see, Noon et al., 2022. Mapping the irrecoverable carbon in Earth’s ecosystems in Nature Sustainability.

Greta Thunberg tells us us how important it is to fight the fires.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019.. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand.

In other words, smell the smoke, see the reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. All the troop of wooden-headed puppets is doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything else we may care about. In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hope. She wants you to panic enough to wake up and fight the fire…. so she can have some hope for her future. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your vote wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ futures.

If we successfully purge our Parliament of the puppets, we may be able leave our offspring with a hopeful future.

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

Estimating the social cost of greenhouse gas pollution

US Federal courts consider this vexing question: how much do greenhouse gas emissions cost society and who should pay this cost?

Jim Krane & Mark Finley, 13/02/2022 in The Conversation
What is the ‘social cost of carbon’? 2 energy experts explain after court ruling blocks Biden’s changes: When an electric company runs a coal- or natural gas-fired power plant, the greenhouse gases it releases cause harm – but the company isn’t paying for the damage. Instead, the costs show up in the billions of tax dollars spent each year to deal with the effects of climate change, such as fighting wildfires and protecting communities from floods, and in rising insurance costs. This damage is what economists call a “negative externality.” It is a cost to society, including to future generations, that is not covered by the price people pay for fossil fuels and other activities that emit greenhouse gases, like agriculture.

VC1 News Editor’s comment: Australians need to think about this in the run-up to our election. The costs to human society from human triggered global warming are already reaching catastrophic levels. If we cannot stop and reverse the warming process, near-term human extinction is likely. The social cost of this would be literally infinite (any costs divided by zero humans left is infinite). In other words, if we wish for our families to survive into the future, we need to spend whatever it takes to stop the warming. This won’t be helped by a present puppet government that continually denies and downplays the reality and often works to block any effective action against the carbon emissions of its puppet masters. Use Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System to replace them with people who will put climate action at the top of their to-do list if elected.

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

New litigation aims to bring Govt & interests to account

Several major legal actions to be taken to court this year hope to bring Australian governments & special interests to account for climate failures

by Kieran Pender 12/02/2022 in The Guardian
The environmental activists bringing the climate crisis to the courtroom: There’s a growing trend of climate litigation around the world. Here’s a look at the Australian cases likely to make headlines this year

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