Climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels, contributing to the Great Deluge, is consigning Australia to escalating climate disasters
Most of Australia’s East Coast from Cape York south to the Victorian border has had over a meter of rain by the end of October — with the rains still continuing. Some of these areas have had more than 2 meters, and a few more than 3 meters! Many rainfall records have been smashed in all of the eastern states: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania; leading to almost constant flooding through the whole area that is continuing today. The latest reports from the BOM tell us the rains will continue into summer.
This is clearly a function of global warming. Physical laws dictate that as air temperatures rise, the air can carry more water vapor before it begins to condense as rain. Higher temperatures increase the rate of evaporation of water from soils and standing water – encouraging drought. Seemingly contradictory warmer air can precipitate more water in areas where it is raining. As the water condenses out as rain it also releases its ‘heat of fusion’ — and more heat is available to drive more extreme winds able to carry rain to high elevations before the rain freezes to fall back to Earth in devastating hail storms. Over larger areas there is also more energy available to fuel increasingly powerful cyclones.
Increased water means increased plant growth, increased temperature increases the rate at which soils and vegetation dry out — ensuring ever more catastrophic wildfires.
Ever more floods, fires and tempests cause increasing damage to infrastructure and people’s livelihoods and property until the catastrophes follow one another so closely that there are simply not physical or human resources left to repair the damage from one catastrophe before the next catastrophe causes even more damage. If the warming is not stopped this progression leads inevitably leads to social collapse (as we are already seeing in parts of the world), agricultural collapse (and famines as we are already beginning to see in Africa and the Middle East), ecological collapse (as we are already seeing in marine habitats with coral reef communities, kelp beds, sea grass meadows), and finally, population collapses when the land has literally been swept bare (areas in Africa are already on the edge of the cliff).
With the collapse of society, humans will quickly lose the scientific and engineering capabilities to fight further climate change already dialed into the system, such that there will be little hope of avoiding near-term global mass extinction. Continuing ‘business as usual’ support of the fossil fuel industry more-or-less ensures this grim outcome.
The Climate Council’s report, presented below, presents the facts and explains what they mean here in Australia, and some of the things we can to moderate and mitigate the expected damages. This is a good start, but I would be a silly liar if I said this was all we need to do in order to keep from utterly destroying our future.
Vote Climate One will continue to do whatever we can do to encourage serious government leadership and action to fight climate change. Please do what you can to pressure your representatives to counteract the self-serving special interests who consume our resources and return little or nothing from the super-profits they take overseas.
If we can help get climate savvy governments on the problems that really matter, they may be able to mobilize enough action so we can survive our accidental disruption of Earth’s Climate System so our kids and grandkids inherit a world they can live in….
Let’s hope that we can stop global warming soon enough to leave them with a future where they can survive and flourish
Featured Image: Rainfall and Flooding 2022 – Queensland to Tasmania. Current year data from 1 January to 2 November, sourced from Bureau of Meteorology, 2022. Graphic from Chapter 2, The Great Deluge: Climate Extremes in Action, in the featured article.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
We live in dangerous times. Our state and federal parliaments will make life and death decisions about the climate crisis
Global warming is real. It was triggered by the ‘greenhouse effects’ in the atmosphere of exponentially increasing amounts of CO₂ emitted by humanity’s prodigious burning of fossil carbon beginning with the Industrial Revolution. The rate of warming is also slowly accelerating to a point of crisis, where positive feedbacks driving further acceleration may be unstoppable by anything humans can do. If the warming runs away, there is no evidence that natural processes will stop heating before the ensuing Hothouse Earth condition causes global mass extinction – including our own species.
These statements are real world facts substantiated by a vast array of scientific evidence. We deny the reality at our own peril.
Here is a tiny bit of the evidence:
Estimated changes in annual global mean surface temperatures (°C, color bars) and CO2 concentrations (thick black line) over the past 150 years relative to twentieth century average values. Carbon dioxide concentrations since 1957 are from direct measurements at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, while earlier estimates are derived from ice core records. The scale for CO2 concentrations is in parts per million by volume (ppm), relative to the twentieth century mean of 333.7 ppm, while the temperature anomalies are relative to a mean of 14 °C. Also given as dashed values are the preindustrial estimated values, where the value is 280 ppm, with the scale in orange at right for carbon dioxide. From Trenbarth & Cheng (2022), A perspective on climate change from Earth’s energy imbalance. Environ. Res.: Climate1 013001 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license)
Berkeley Earth corroborates Trenbarth & Cheng’s temperature observations above in great detail.
The rising concentrations of CO2 and other important greenhouse gases (GHGs) in our atmosphere are meticulously plotted by US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Global Monitoring Laboratory’s Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases project’s Trends pages:
The Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases – Trends pages show the most up to date measurements and rates of changes of the three most important greenhouse gases. Links to the individual graphs are: (1) Atmospheric CO2; (2) Annual Increase of CO2; (3) Global Monthly Mean CH₄ / Annual Global Increase of CH₄; and (4) Global Monthly Mean N₂O / Annual Global Increase of N₂O. These links also explain how the data were collected and analyzed to produce the graphs.
The ‘pump handle’ graph below begins by showing monthly readings from the various sampling sites around the world on the left (with the distance from the equator – S to N plotted on the horizontal axis), and the global averages on the graph to the right.
The northern (right) end of the plot of monthly readings jumps up and down showing the marked annual variation in the atmospheric CO2 as the gas is consumed by plants’ photosynthesis in the spring and released by dead and decaying vegetation in the fall. More CO2 is released into the atmosphere in each year than plants can use, causing the average to ratchet upward each year. The excess CO2 is mostly from the burning of fossil fuels that has exceeded the biosphere’s capacity to use it to support plant growth.
The inset map shows the the location of each site from which the CO2 in each month.
When the present time is reached the graph begins looking backwards in time. The different colors represent the different sources of information for the older readings back into the Ice Age.
History of atmospheric carbon dioxide from 800,000 years ago until the end of the most recent GLOBALVIEW+ CO2 collection. From NOAA’s Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases / Trends in CO2.
As shown by the first series of graphs, CO2 is currently the dominant GHG because of its high concentration, but on a molecule-by-molecule basis methane (CH₄) and oxides of nitrogen (mainly N20) are much more powerful. At the rate methane is being released compared to the other gases, it will soon replace CO2 as the dominant GHG. Because permafrost and frozen soil above and below sea level presently holds vast amounts of methane inertly as ice-like hydrates, a warming Arctic has the capacity to release many times the present volume of atmospheric methane.
All three gases are released from natural sources at a greater rates as the ambient temperature rises. This causes positive feedbacks on global average temperatures that are effectively beyond human control. To slow the natural emissions we must reduce those GHG emissions we can control FASTER than positive feedbacks are driving them higher or reduce the strength of the greenhouse either by actively removing and safely sequestering GHGs or by actively cooling the WHOLE PLANET by some kind of geoengineering process(es) that reflects solar energy before it is trapped in the Earth System. The point beyond which we cannot stop the warming process is literally a point of no return on the road to runaway global warming.
The observations show that there is actually a very real and very high risk of near term human extinction (i.e., an EXISTENTIAL RISK) if we do not act to stop global warming
Ample evidence shows there is enough carbon readily available for release in a runaway warming scenario in the Earth System to to raise global average temperatures by 5-10 °C within a century or so of passing the point of no return.
The truth is so dire and scary that even most scientists fear (consciously or subconsciously) to use the EXTINCTION word
As I argued in my 2022 presentation, linked above, this is especially the case of academic modelers with training in physics (rather than, say, systems engineering). Three issues likely have significant influences:
Scientific reticence – you don’t win grants or tenure or get promoted if you work too far outside the boundaries of your academic furrows (i.e., what your academic peers expect of you) – and this is especially true of you come to scary or unpopular conclusions,
Failure to understand how to deal with risks associated with non-linear feedbacks and mathematical chaos in complex dynamical systems: e.g., discarding models that sporadically ‘blow up’ and break, rather than accepting that these are more likely valuable indicators of how such system can behave in the real world. Systems engineers know systems break, and observe/test them until they do break (preferably many times in many different ways), and even have a discipline dedicated to that approach: ‘Failure Modes and Effects (Criticality) Analysis‘. Mathematical modelers work very hard to remove real-world chaos from their models because the underlying belief of most physicists is that physical processes should be exactly repeatable.
Failure to accept that an ‘existential’ risk is actually actually a factual statement that personal, species, and global mass extinction is a very real and even likely result if a runaway situation occurs. Physics happens irrespective of what any human might wish.
Mathematical models are useful for understanding possible behaviors of complex climate systems, but should not be accepted and acted on as accurate representations of how probable or costly a particular event or excursion might be. If an existential event occurs, its cost to humans will literally be infinite, because the denominator will be zero. The cost to society will huge in that no society will be left to pay it…..
However, even the prestigious science journal Proceedings of the (US) National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) does not take the consequences of civilization’s collapse in the face of runaway warming to the logical conclusion. Nevertheless, it follows from the substantial array of evidence on Climate Sentinel News and covered in the presentations linked above that we are already trending towards collapse. It follows from these considerations that:
Only mobilization of a massive and coordinated effort to stop ongoing human carbon emissions will suffice to stop the feedbacks from running away.
As temperatures continue rising increasing ecological changes will begin debilitating an increasing percentage of the human population, making areas of our planet effectively uninhabitable; and lead to the effective extinction of keystone species in natural and agricultural ecosystems – leading to their effective collapses.
Human organizations, economies, nation states, civilizations will be increasingly stressed until they too begin to collapse as a consequence of mass disablements and deaths from heat stress, famine, social disruption, disorder and lethal conflicts probably including nuclear warfare over dwindling resources.
As 3 progresses, at some (probably relatively early point in the process), humanity would no longer have the resources, coordination or physical capacity to mount the massive and coordinated effort to stop and reverse the accelerating warming process.
Given that surviving humans are no longer capable of stopping the warming process, the planet will continue to strengthen greenhouse warming until
the feedback is slowed as most of the readily available inert carbon in the Earth System has been burned and converted into greenhouse gases; or
some currently unknown process will kick in at some point on the temperature scale that allows Earth to shift its radiation balance from absorbing more solar energy than it can emit to emitting as much or more heat energy than the solar energy it is absorbing.
Earth’s geological record shows several heat spikes occurred over an ‘instant’ of geological time (e.g., the End Permian is the most obvious case) where global temperatures peaked so fast that most life on the planet could not adapt genetically fast enough to survive when their physiological limits were exceeded — resulting in global mass extinction events. Given the exponential nature of feedback-driven processes, runaway warming could easily raise global temperatures by 10 or more degrees within a century or two, that large, slowly reproducing organisms like humans simply could not adapt to genetically in 5 or 10 generations. This is because the knowledge for genetic engineering and the capacity to make the very sophisticated high technology required would be lost in the very early stages of societal collapse.
Thus, if humans fail to stop and reverse global warming very soon, human extinction within a century or two is highly probable. At the very best a few subsistence hunters and gathers might survive along with a few other remnant species in far polar regions. However, their chance of surviving with an intact knowledge base, infrastructure, and resources for any kind of industrial or high technology would seem to be nil. Fossil fuels will have been burned up into greenhouse gases even assuming other mineral resources could be found within the still livable areas of the planet.
The truth is….
As grim and frightening as this prospect should be to anyone facing the future reality with a family of loved ones, humans as we know ourselves would be fully extinct with no progeny, or at best our heritage would be no more than a few implausible myths and fairy tales told around camp fires in a few tribes of hunters and gatherers……
The truth also is we have a choice…. If humans can start working together with enough determination and effort, we probably still can stop and reverse the warming…
Personally, I do not think we have passed the point of no return, but that we are already close enough to it that by implementing world-war scale global mobilization of people and industry, and the expenditure of massive resources we, still have the capacity to turn the warming process around. Human efforts might seem to be too piddling to have any effect on planetary scale processes. However, consider this…. Accidentally, without thinking, human activities have managed to increase atmospheric CO₂ concentration from around 316 ppm to 416 ppm since (around 30%) since controlled measurements began to be made in 1958; or from an inferred 280 ppm (around 49%) since the beginning of the industrial revolution as shown in the Featured Image – a snapshot showing growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that began around 1750.
Given that humans were able to have this degree of impact on Earth’s atmosphere more or less by accident, to me it is reasonable to believe that with total mobilization of human and modern technological resource we have enough knowledge to stop and reverse the warming. If the alternative to doing nothing is extinction, there is a strong business case for doing whatever it takes to stop extinction, however much it costs.
Unavoidably an intensely political process will be required to achieve the necessary mobilization and expenditure of resources.
It seems to have taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.
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 grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is truly the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for an existential climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.
In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future.
In our present situation where most of our governments are still supporting and even funding fossil fuel production and use, the most effective actions we can take as individuals is to change our governments to prioritize action on climate change above all other things. Nothing else matters if we have no future….
States are probably even more important than the Federal Government where climate action is concerned
States permit, enable and regulate mining and production of fossil fuels, and many of the important sources of emissions. Planning, industrial, rural, public safety and others are all primarily state concerns where political and administrative decisions may have considerable impact on regulating carbon emissions. Thus, if you are concerned to influence how your state acts in relation to the climate emergency, you need to elect representatives who will do this rather than bow down to wealthy patrons and vested interests who want to protect their short-term profits rather than humanity’s longer-term future.
The Victorian state election on 26 November is our next opportunity to begin focusing our state parliaments on the need to prioritize climate action. For Victorian voters, this may be the most important vote you ever make: Do you support major parties in their business as usual financial and regulatory support of the fossil fuel industry, or will you vote for a minor party or independent who is clearly focused on promoting and facilitating climate action?
Applying your decision to preferential voting on the ballot
If you believe that our present Labor government or the Liberals will govern in your interests rather than protecting and supporting their patrons in the fossil fuel and related industries, then go with the flow and don’t concern yourself with the likely consequences of going down their fossil fueled road towards runaway global warming. On the other hand, if you think it is better to work for a sustainable future where your children and their children can hope for a happy life, Vote Climate One can help you elect a government that will actively lead and support this effort.
Our Climate Lens Traffic Light Assessment process will help you to do this most effectively in both houses of Parliament. Also, our Climate Sentinel News provides access to factual evidence about the growing climate crisis to support your thinking, In the May Federal Election, our Traffic Light Voting System made it easy to use factual evidence about where each candidate in your electorate ranks in relation to their commitment to prioritize action on the climate emergency. We have modified this for the Victorian State Election in November. Part of our assessment process asks independent candidates the following questions:
Peter Trusler’s Self Portrait: Reduction
If we can get climate savvy governments in power soon enough, we may be able to mobilize enough action to survive our accidental disruption of Earth’s Climate System so our kids and grandkids inherit a world they can live in…
Let’s hope that we can stop global warming soon enough to leave them with a future where they can survive and flourish
Featured Image. Annotated snapshot from the from the Trends in CO2 video above. The pre 1958 measurements in orange were made from trapped air bubbles in precisely dated ice cores cut from the Law Dome in Antarctica as explained on the Trends in CO2 website.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization warns us that we have done nothing to slow the global warming caused by our carbon emissions.
Message from the UN’s Secretary-General in the article
Geneva, 13 September 2022 (WMO) – Climate science is clear: we are heading in the wrong direction, according to a new multi-agency report coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which highlights the huge gap between aspirations and reality. Without much more ambitious action, the physical and socioeconomic impacts of climate change will be increasingly devastating, it warns.
The report, United in Science, shows that greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise to record highs. Fossil fuel emission rates are now above pre-pandemic levels after a temporary drop due to lockdowns. The ambition of emissions reduction pledges for 2030 needs to be seven times higher to be in line with the 1.5 °C goal of the Paris Agreement….
If you are concerned about this visibly escalating climate emergency, but think there is nothing you can do about it, think again!
Major political parties primarily represent the vested interests who fund their candidates and election campaigns and work hard to protect their patrons. Many of these include rich fossil fuel and related industries (many based overseas) who would be harmed by climate action. As single individuals, we have been powerless to change the world against the political might of the ‘patrons’ and their government puppets…. But where your local communities and governments can coordinate together with a common goal to elect governments responsive to their citizens, we CAN change the world.
However, even with Greens support, Labor is still one short of a majority in the Senate. This gives Pocock, a community independent, the deciding vote. As an immigrant rugby player from New Zealand, arguably he has become the most important senator in the Australian Parliament where climate action and integrity are concerned — selected, supported and endorsed by the Climate Change the local ACT community independently from the discipline of any political party.
If you and your local community are unhappy with the way your sitting state or federal parliamentarians are representing your interests, the teal community independents can show you how to empower your communities to change that.
Work with your friends and neighbors to decide what you want from your representative(s) in government, select someone from your community to stand for election, support their campaign, and then vote them into office. My research as Editor of Climate Sentinel News, documents in detail how this works, and introduces the fabulous support network that the the successful teal community independents have developed to help empower other communities to become independent of the special interests supporting major party candidates:
A rising tsunami of teal independents is transforming our democracy representing special interests to a participatory democracy of community representatives.
As noted in my many posts to Climate Sentinel News, it is becoming increasingly evident that humanity on our only planet faces near term extinction if we don’t manage to stop and reverse the global warming process we have started through our profligate burning of fossil fuels. Their emissions are preventing the Earth from radiating away excess solar energy. This imbalance between incoming and outgoing heat energy causes the world to grow warmer. Unfortunately the problem is global and can only be solved on a global scale through the cooperation of governments – which makes it unavoidably political.
The difficulty of solution is only compounded by the fact that the unimaginably rich global fossil fuel industry has been fighting for decades to disrupt and stop effective actions against global warming/climate change to protect their sources of income from the burning of fossil fuels causing the emissions. Even the supposedly most ‘democratic’ governments have been corrupted so they represent the patrons and special interests (mostly fossil fuel industry related) who support and fund major political parties. This influence is so strong that I have been deeply pessimistic that our governments would ever be able to work effectively to combat climate change and stop our progress along the runaway warming road to extinction.
However, the results of Australia’s May 21 Federal Election provide evidence that Australia has begun to transform its government into one truly representing the substantial majority of voters who want action on climate change to be prioritized above any other issue. Finally there is scope for some genuine optimism that our government(s) will actually work seriously to resolve the climate issues….
The featured image heading this post and the video below show the most recent and best documented evidence that nothing humans have done to date has significantly slowed the accelerating rise in global temperatures driving by rising greenhouse gas concentrations from or directly triggered by human activities. If nothing is actively done on a global scale to stop and reverse these increases, it is inevitable that within a few more decades that our planet will have become uninhabitable to humans and the other living resources we need for our survival.
The graphs above and the video here are pretty clear. Objective measures of our planetary atmosphere show that we have done nothing yet in the world that is changing this prediction.
The video from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Global Monitoring Laboratory shows the historical fluctuations in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere we breathe over the last 800,000 years. It begins in 1979 when detailed daily tracking of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations began in a serious way across the globe using both physical sampling and measurements combined with satellite remote sensing. The inset map shows sampling locations, the fluctuating line plots CO2 concentrations by distance of the location south or north of the Equator and the graph shows annual fluctuations and the year-by-year rise in the average concentration for the year up through 2021.
When the present is reached, the x-axis of the graph is extended backwards in time from 1979 using a variety of measurement tools, mostly the CO2 concentration in bubbles of atmospheric gas trapped in bubbles of gas frozen into glacial ice from Antarctica. (The modern and ice-core measurements overlapped for long enough to demonstrate that the different sampling technologies were giving the same results.)
Until now I have been quite pessimistic that adequate action would ever be taken to reverse the trends shown on these graphs as our governments will continue greasing the downhill slide into the death and chaos of global mass extinction.
Community independents and Greens know how to change that, and have shown that they actually have the knowledge and ability to cancel remove the power of major political parties to block effective action.
Action is required! Simply voting for a Party may not ensure our survival (or may even speed our demise). Learn how to Vote Climate One!
I am now decidedly optimistic that humans have the knowledge and power to stop the ultimately lethal processes we have accidentally triggered in our profligate burning of Earth’s carbon resources. All it takes is a willingness for communities to be come fully involved in their own interests in avoiding the extinction of their families and heritage.
If you don’t think a major party you have voted for in the past truly represents your interests (rather than those of their immensely wealthy patrons — who may not even be Australian), Vote Climate One will show you how to maximize the chances that your vote will help to elect someone who will actually represent your community interests. See our Vote Climate One page on Voting Guides. At the moment this reflects the past Federal Election, but it will give the idea of the kind of analysis and information we will provide for the Victorian state election in November. The Victorian State Election guide will not be finalized before Sunday Nov.13th when the Victorian Electoral Commission releases the final list of candidates for each electorate. Prepolling starts on Monday Nov. 14th. We should have draft versions of the Victorian guides on-line around the beginning of November.
If you want to maximize the chances that your vote will actually count towards electing a government that will prioritize acting on climate first, we’ll do the work to make it easy for you to vote effectively.
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, before you cast your ballot: Wake up! Smell the smoke! See the grimly frightful 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. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for an existential climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process. To do this our governments must accept the reality, and work effectively to plan and coordinate the necessary mobilization and action. YOUR VOTE IN THE VICTORIAN ELECTION CAN HELP ENSURE THAT THIS HAPPENS: Vote Climate One in November!
No evidence here that humans have done anything yet to stop and reverse GHG emissions to get us off the road to Hothouse Earth and global mass extinction.
As the ocean ice around Antarctic approaches its maximum spread for the year, on 19 August 2022 Antarctic sea-ice extent is the second lowest ever as recorded in the satellite era as recorded by the US National Snow & Ice Data Center. As sunlight again begins to shine on the antarctic polar region more of the ocean surface is exposed to solar heating that will warm the waters surrounding the ice cap to speed glacial melting and slow the formation of more sea-ice next winter.
July’s trends in global warming continue in August. Heatwaves, fires, and droughts in the Northern Hemisphere continue, e.g:
In the run-up to Australia’s May 22 Federal Election many articles on our Climate Sentinel News documented the reality, mechanisms and dangers humans face if global warming is allowed to continue. If global warming runs away due to already documented feedback mechanisms heating will continue at an accelerating rate that will soon rise beyond the capacity anything humans can do to stop it.
Critical time is wasting. It is time for all of our politicians, new and old to lead our country in massive mobilization to stop carbon emissions and start implementing carbon capture and sequestration processes able to extract excess amounts from the atmosphere. Biological processes are likely to scale up a lot more successfully than engineering solutions. Geoengineering to increase Earth’s reflectivity (i.e., albedo reduction) may also help. We know how to stop emissions, but sequestration and albedo reduction will require significant research that needs to start now.
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE, AND THE URGENCY GROWS WITH EVERY DAY OF DELAY!
Featured image: See July’s report for details.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Australia has a new government. Every month we fail to stop global warming is a month closer to global mass extinction. Still no visible progress towards solution.
The graphic above downloaded today shows the current state of sea-ice surrounding the Antarctic continent. Despite what seems to be a cold winter in Victoria, its coverage indicated by the teal blue line in the chart is 530 km2 smaller than it has ever been before for this time of the year. There are many more indicators that the climate is still deteriorating towards making Earth uninhabitable for its present life forms (including humans!) at an accelerating rate.
The following news items underline the dangers this represents for humans.
Model-analyzed temperatures at 12Z Tuesday, July 19, 2022 (noon GMT) were transcending average values for the time of day and season by 12 to 24 degrees Celsius—or 22 to 33 degrees Fahrenheit—over large parts of northwestern Europe. (Image credit: tropicaltidbits.com) [from the article]
by Bob Hensen, 17/07/2022 in Eye on the Storm, Yale Climate Connections
Dozens of all-time record highs melted on Monday and Tuesday under a searing, deadly European heat wave that has caused at least 1,169 heat-related deaths in Spain and Portugal. The heat wave has also brought the hottest day on record for many locations in France and the hottest temperatures — by far — ever observed in the United Kingdom.
The record-smashing heat in Europe’s normally mild, maritime northwest corner was eerily comparable to the astounding heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and far southwest Canada in June 2021. The latter was found to have been “virtually impossible” without human-produced climate change.
By 9 a.m. GMT on Tuesday, July 19, London’s Heathrow Airport had already surged past 90°F, and at 12:50 p.m., the airport’s official observing site for London recorded what, if confirmed, would be the hottest temperature in London history: 40.2 degrees Celsius, or 104.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK scientistRobin McKie.
The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.
And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.
In the run-up to the May 21st Federal Election, I posted many more articles documenting the increasing risk of mass extinction that humans face if we do not stop and reverse the runaway acceleration that is flipping our global climate to the Hothouse Earth state.
In the Election Australians replaced the Liberal/National COALition with a more climate friendly Labor government supported by an extensive cross-bench of climate-friendly independents (‘teals‘) and Greens.
The Government has very little time (if any – see the article above) to act to stop carbon emissions and to do what we can to remove some of the past excesses from the atmosphere.
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!
Featured image:
Time series graphs showing the variation in the three most important greenhouse gases as observed and recorded by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Global Monitoring Laboratory at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii.
The carbon dioxide data on Mauna Loa shown in the top row constitute the longest record of direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere. They were started by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in March of 1958 at a facility of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [Keeling, 1976]. The first graph shows atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last five complete years of the Mauna Loa CO2 record plus the current year. The second graph shows annual mean CO2 growth rates for Mauna Loa. In the graph, decadal averages of the growth rate are also plotted, as horizontal lines for 1960 through 1969, 1970 through 1979, and so on.
The middle row charts the growth of atmospheric methane: the first graph shows the full NOAA time-series starting in 1983, The red circles are globally averaged monthly mean values centered on the middle of each month. The black line and squares show the long-term trend (in principle, similar to a 12-month running mean) where the average seasonal cycle has been removed.The second graph summarizes annual increases in atmospheric CH4 based on globally averaged marine surface data.
The bottom row charts the growth of atmospheric N2O (Nitrous oxide) beginning in 2001, when NOAA began to have confidence in the data. Values for the last year are preliminary pending recalibrations of standard gases and other quality control steps. The second graph plots the annual increase in atmospheric N2O in a given year, i.e., the increase in its abundance (mole fraction) from January 1 in that year to January 1 of the next year, after the seasonal cycle has been removed (as shown by the black lines in the first figure). It represents the sum of all N2O added to, and removed from, the atmosphere during the year by human activities and natural processes.
As yet, there is NO evidence that any of these values are beginning to stop increasing, let alone decrease, as the result of any human actions.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
A major challenge in communicating complex messages about climate change is that the more simplified media reports of these events often have more influence than the science itself.
This worries observers who argue that giving countries the impression that emissions can continue to grow until 2025 would be a disaster for the world.
“We definitely don’t have the luxury of letting emissions grow for yet another three years,” said Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace.
“We have eight years to nearly halve global emissions. That’s an enormous task, but still doable, as the IPCC has just reminded us – but if people now start chasing emissions peak by 2025 as some kind of benchmark, we don’t have a chance.”
Editor’s note: Based on my rigorous evaluation of the IPCC’s scientific methodology and writing processes, even the corrected understanding of the IPCC report STILL UNDERSTATES the likelihood of the risk from, and the magnitude of consequences of failures or even delays in stopping the progress of global warming. In reality, the report says it is already too late to avoid global average temperatures rising more than 1.5 °C. By reaching net zero in 2030 AND extracting and sequestering most of the excess CO₂ already in the atmosphere we might be able to bring temperatures back down to 1.5 °C or less. Continuing with business as usual keeps us on the road to runaway warming to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and social collapse leading towards global mass extinction of humans and most other large and complex organisms on the planet.
Featured Image: A dried out reservoir in Chile where drought has forced the government to take emergency measures. / Getty Images / from the article.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
A 2016 article lays out where we were then compared to past extinctions. We are now closer to point of no return. Warming must be stopped!
Coral bleaching in March 2016. Rapid rises of greenhouse gases in the past have been linked to major extinctions in the oceans. XL Catlin Seaview Survey / via the article.
[G]reenhouse gases are rising faster than at any time since the demise of dinosaurs, and possibly even earlier. According to research published in Nature Geoscience this week, carbon dioxide (CO₂) is being added to the atmosphere at least ten times faster than during a major warming event about 50 million years ago.
With increasing CO₂ levels, temperatures and ocean acidification also rise, and it is an open question how ecosystems are going to cope under such rapid change.
Featured image: Moschorhinus kitchingi with Lystrosaurus. Basal Triassic of South Africa. Lystrosurus was one of the few large animals that survived the Permian-Triassic global mass extinction event anywhere on the planet. Source: Creator:Dmitry Bogdanov / Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.
The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification. We clarify the gravity of the human predicament and provide a timely snapshot of the crises that must be addressed now.
The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades. The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own.
Featured image: Said to be the longest traffic jam in the world — in China (https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/worlds-worst-traffic-jam-drone-6594560): Source: unknown, but appearing in many places.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Even the very conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says billions of people will suffer direct harm from ongoing global warming. Are they getting the message?
Although their science is impeccable, I have explained in detail that the IPCC is constrained by governmental foundations and scientific reticence to understate and downplay the dramatically stark nature of the impacts accelerating global warming is having and will have on human populations and Earth’s biosphere.
Nevertheless, even the IPCC warns that half of all humanity can expect serious impacts from the crisis, including a billion people face coastal inundation from rising sea levels (to say nothing of those already caught up in riverine and flash flooding from extreme weather. And then there are the mass dieoffs of trees, corals, and other land and marine organisms that are already beginning, to say nothing of large areas of land becoming unsuitable for agriculture due to droughts, excessive temperatures, fires and too frequent flooding.
“Children aged ten or younger in the year 2020 are projected to experience a nearly four-fold increase in extreme events under 1.5°C of global warming by 2100, and a five-fold increase under 3°C warming. Such increases in exposure would not be experienced by a person aged 55 in the year 2020 in their remaining lifetime under any warming scenario”.
“With ongoing global warming, today’s children in South and Southeast Asia will witness increased losses in coastal settlements and infrastructure due to flooding caused by unavoidable sea level rise, with very high losses in East Asian cities. By mid-century, more than a billion people living in low-lying coastal cities and settlements globally are projected to be at risk from coastal-specific climate hazards. Many of those will be forced to move to higher ground, which will increase competition for land and the probability of conflict and forced relocation.”
“Climate change will impact water quality and availability for hygiene, food production and ecosystems due to floods and droughts. Globally, 800 million to 3 billion people are projected to experience chronic water scarcity due to droughts at 2°C warming, and up to approximately 4 billion at 4°C warming, considering the effects of climate change alone, with present-day population.”
“Depending on future policies and climate and adaptation actions taken, the number of people suffering from hunger in 2050 will range from 8 million to up to 80 million people, with most severely affected populations concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America. Under a high vulnerability-high warming scenario, up to 183 million additional people are projected to become undernourished in low-income countries due to climate change by 2050.”
And this is a highly conservative reading of the likely consequences of continued warming….
What do people and their governments need to do in response to the warnings? As emphasized in the Guardian article and IPCC Report, far too little effort has been made up to now either to mitigate or adapt to the climate changes being driven by global warming. To avoid the most extreme consequences (e.g., global mass extinction – not discussed anywhere in the Report due to government suppression and scientific reticence) much greater effort must be devoted to stopping human carbon emissions and implementation of major mitigation projects.
The third part of the IPCC AR6 report, on mitigation is due for release next month, will explore the kinds of strategies that need to be implemented to mitigate the most immediate effects. Part 4, to be released in October will provide information for discussion by policymakers at COP 27.
A wildfire in January in Bastrop State Park in Texas in the south-western US. Photograph: Jay Janner/AP / via the Guardian
The point I am trying to make with this post is that if the IPCC says our future is filled with dire consequences if we fail to act now to stop and begin reversing global warming, our future is very likely to be even a lot worse than forecasted in the full 3675 page document. My assessment of the vast array of evidence around climate change based on a long professional career as an evolutionary biologist and complex systems analyst is that global warming is approaching a point of no return beyond which nothing humans can do will stop Earth’s climate system from runaway heating to its ‘Hothouse Hell’ state, as explained by Steffen et al, 2018 in their Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This risk is both real, and very large if warming is not stopped.
Unfortunately most governments have done very little to slow global warming by actually stopping greenhouse gas emissions or to mitigate the kinds of dangers described in the IPCC AR6 pt. II report. Some are just incompetent, but most seem to be well trained puppets of already super-wealthy special interests of fossil fuel industry who put protecting the special interests continued profits above any serious actions that might curtail them, as is all too evident where both the American and Australian governments are concerned.
“This is coal” 09/02/2017 via David Marler on Youtube
“We’ll keep on mining coal” 09/09/2021 via The Guardian
I have said what follows before, and I’ll probably say it many more times – because it is important!
We need to turn away from the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with business as usual!
It seems to have taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.
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 grimly frightful 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. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment WG2 Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.
Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact all they 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 hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, 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 off the road to Hell!
Featured image: Climate emergency – The oceans are risking. Melbourne was part of the global climate strike on March 15, 2019, drawing an enormous crowd estimated at 40,000 people, the vast majority school students. After welcome to country and some speeches at the Old Treasury Building the march wound it’s way through CBD streets, down Collins Street and up Bourke street, then down to Treasury Gardens. It was a highly energetic march with the roar of chanting calling for coal, don’t dig it, and for climate action now. . Attribution: Takver from Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/The_oceans_are_rising_and_so_are_we.Climate_emergency–Melbourne_climate_strike–IMG_4246%2833509327348%29.jpg/1200px-The_oceans_are_rising_and_so_are_we.Climate_emergency–Melbourne_climate_strike–IMG_4246%2833509327348%29.jpg?20190416115510
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
IPCC’s Sixth Assessment WG2 Report looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities
On February 28 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) officially launched the second of three parts of their Sixth Assessment Report, produced by Working Group II: responsible to assess the impacts of climate change, from a world-wide to a regional view of ecosystems and biodiversity, and of humans and their diverse societies, cultures and settlements. It considers the vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of these natural and human systems to adapt to climate change to reduce climate-associated risks and provide options for creating a sustainable future for all through an equitable and integrated approach to mitigation and adaptation efforts at all scales. In other words, it provides a route map to global warming on the road to hell
To test my assumption that the Report softens the actual reality, I have thoroughly scanned all 3,675 pages of the full report for all uses of “human” and “extinction” using Acrobat X’s powerful search function. The word “extinction” is used 322 times in the full document, and “human” and “extinction” are found within 10 words of one another 33 times. However, “human extinction” is used only once — and this in the title of a reference not discussed from this point of view in the text. Most of the other hits relate to human or climate change induced extinctions of other species, while authors have carefully avoided extending the logic to humans.
Nevertheless, the bleeding obvious conclusion from the vast amount of data presented in the report is that if governments and people do not succeed in stopping the ongoing global warming there is a very high risk of near-term human extinction.
Also, the news items on the unprecedented/NB4 flooding over the last week of a substantial portion of Australia’s east coast underlines the already horrific impacts on Australian citizens from the increasing rate of global warming. The Guardian article below ties the flooding to the situation described in the IPCC Report. Bloomberg Green’s news item on the Report is typical of hundreds more news items around the world. As long as our planet continues to warm, more and more energy is available to drive extreme weather events. What in the past may have been one in 500 year events are beginning to happen again only 5 years into the future. This is when each climate catastrophe causes even more disruption before recovery from the previous ones are still far from complete. This is when the total collapse of human civilization begins, and the risk of global mass extinction becomes very real.
Flooding in the town of Lismore, New South Wales. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found catastrophic flooding is becoming more likely due to global warming. Photograph: Reuters
Catastrophic flooding on the scale of the disaster hitting Queensland and New South Wales is becoming more likely as the planet heats due to greenhouse gas emissions, climate scientists have warned.
In Australia, it said extreme events exacerbated by emissions – heatwaves, droughts, floods, storms and fires – were causing death, injury and financial and emotional stress. Their impacts were “cascading and compounding” across nature, society and the economy.
The breakneck speed of global warming exceeds the pace of efforts to protect billions of vulnerable people, according to a new report released Monday by the world’s top climate scientists. The report warns of a growing mismatch between rising temperatures and slow, fragmented efforts to adapt, leaving little time for catching up before “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity” is sealed shut.
“With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, calling the 3,500-page document “an atlas of human suffering” and an indictment of a “criminal” “abdication of leadership.”…
The UN Secretary General António Guterres says that the IPCC Report is “an atlas of growing human suffering and an indictment of a criminal abdication of leadership”. I provide evidence here that our political leaders are the abdicators
The handwriting has been on the wall for some 40-50 years the unrelenting of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels to drive our continued industrial development would increasingly warm our whole planet. As explored in a series of reports by Inside Climate News, Big Oil’s own research identified the problem, and the industry by ramping up a relentless campaign using tools originally developed by the tobacco industry to deny and misrepresent the reality, direct attention away from it, to recruit “scientists” to discredit the actual science, and to “encourage” politicians to introduce legislation to block research and actions that might lead to the elimination of carbon emissions.
What follows here is some very solid evidence in our “leaders” of just how effective the fossil fuel industry and its allies in the media; and its puppets and useful idiots in governments and the institutions have been in distracting and blocking Australians from taking any effective action towards solving the ever worsening climate emergency by stopping global warming.
This book by Maria Taylor — Published in 2004 by ANU Press, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia (freely available on-line) documents in detail based on contemporary press reports just how comprehensively successful the special interests have been in protecting and promoting the continued growth their of their industries at the expense of the continued survival of our species. This 230 page (free!) book should be required reading for anyone concerned about the survival of their families into the future in face of the oncoming crescendo of catastrophes the ongoing climate emergency is bringing us. On its own, this book is filled with compelling reasons why we must remove the present members of the LNP COALition government and their fellow travelers from Parliament that are driving us down the road to hell and replace them with rational people who are committed to putting action to solve the climate crisis at the top of their to-do lists if elected to Parliament.
Even if you have always voted for the LNP or one of their fellow traveling minor parties and have any questions about removing these puppets from office, listen to and think about what they told us in their own humbug and bulldust about how they are working keeping Australia’s fossil fuel interests (not the Australian citizens who voted for them) safe from the climate emergency.
Paving the road to hell in their own words….. Only a sampling
Tony Abbott sets tone for successive COALition governments
Tony Abbott 11/10/2017
Barnaby Joyce, ‘Blarney Bulldust, the man in the hat’ at work leading the fight against the climate emergency
Barnaby Joyce becomes deputy leader 22/06/2021
.@Barnaby_Joyce: Tell me what it costs! David Speers: I'm not in Government, you are. Joyce: Tell me how we do it.
Australia has been ranked last among 60 countries on climate change policy in the annual Climate Change Performance Index report. In the wake of the Black Summer bushfires, climatologist @MichaelEMann faced off with Barnaby Joyce on #60Mins over the government’s climate inaction. pic.twitter.com/ieSDJkUkt3
Scotty fighting the climate emergency during the worst of Black Summer
"I don't hold a hose, mate, and I don't sit in the control room." Scott Morrison on 2GB confirms he is returning from holiday due to the bushfire crisis in Australia. #auspol#MorrisonFirespic.twitter.com/IZZOO3rjYz
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has declared that coal will be used for decades to come, dismissing Boris Johnson's claim that the COP26 climate summit sounded a "death knell" on coal | @vanOnselenPpic.twitter.com/Pgobr35IEr
Why don’t they have a replacement for burning coal?
Gas-led recovery funds fossil fuel & distracts from labor intensive renewable energy
15/09/2022 – blather and humbuggery about advantages of expanding the gas industry with its associated fracking — completely neglecting any mention of the huge labor requirement from investments in sustainable energy infrastructure.
Morrison humbuggery at COP26 in Glasgow
Scott Morrison spurns criticism of Australia’s record on climate change during UN speech – video 26/09/2021 — Again, Morrison is notable for his lack attention on the principal issue at hand, the danger from global warming and the need to stop it. Rejection of criticism does not mean there is nothing to criticise!
What is the truth behind the COALition’s humbug, bulldust and blather – and how can you find it
In my many years of professional life in evolutionary biology and engineering knowledge management systems analysis and design I spent several years studying how to identify authentic reality amongst the clouds of human faith, true-belief, opinion and deliberate attempts to misrepresent and deny important facts of the world we are living in. Both as a scientist and from my employment in the defence engineering world I am fully aware that our lives may depend on recognizing and acting on real dangers in the world we live in. Ignoring them does not make them go away!
From 2013 to 2017 I gave several presentations around Melbourne explaining what I learned in this area. I provide links to them here in hopes that others can learn from them, and to show that my comments on how the COALition and its fellow travelers have worked to pave the road to hell by misrepresenting, distracting attention from, and actually blocking any concerted action to stop carbon emissions are based on a great deal more than just political disagreement.
Note: the first 6 documents describe my learning experiences and some of the lessons I drew from them. The last three speak most directly to sorting our way through today’s political humbug to find hints of reality.
The common factor in all the political interviews I linked above is that they humbug, avoid, minimize, distract from or even lie about the emerging dangers of global warming driven by fossil fuel emissions, while also emphasizing the need to continue or even expand support for fossil fuel industries such as coal and gas in order to maintain/protect employment and the Australian economy. Even more important is the total absence in all the humbug and blather of any comments that the lower cost for renewable energy and the investments to build and deploy the vast array of new generators, storage and distribution systems for renewable energy. These will do far more to increase employment and economic activity than anything that can possibly be done to support the dying fossil fuel industry. There is also no hint of the further economic activity that will be needed to mobilize global solutions to reduce warming by capturing and sequestering atmospheric carbon.
Where some of the puppets are concerned, the strings tying them to the fossil fuel industry rather than the Australian voters are starkly obvious. Craig Kelly is tied to Clive Palmers billion dollar coal interests by Clive’s totally funded United Australia Party (how much has already been spent on the endless TV commercials and full-page newspaper ads?) Malcolm Roberts is practically wed to Pauleen Hanson who founded Pauleen Hanson’s One Nation party. Malcolm worked most of his life in the coal industry. Both Pauleen and Malcolm are currently Senators for Queensland in the Australian Parliament and totally committed to advancing the coal industry. It is less clear what so strongly motivates Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce to promote growth of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of renewables, but there is no evidence that the continually growing evidence that fossil fuel emissions are having profoundly bad impacts on Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere as emphasized in the AR6 pt. 2 Report causes any concerns for these two.
We need to turn away from the road to hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with business as usual!
It seems to taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.
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 grimly frightful 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. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment WG2 Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.
Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact all they 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 hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, 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 off the road to Hell!
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
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