Big Oil feasting on what was the world’s most powerful nation and hope for the future

William P. Hall on January 19, 2022

Beware Australians, under our LNP COALition puppet government we’re also on the menu to be barbecued by feasting special interests — but we still have a chance to change it

With this the article linked here, an American FB friend, Hieronymus Bosch, reminds/warns us Australians just how perilous our freedoms may be if we leave the fossil fuel industry’s LNP COALition puppets in charge of our government for any longer. Aside from controlling or at least disabling Congress, Trump and his puppet followers have also managed to replace/control a majority of the Supreme and Federal Court judges such that now, even with a sort of progressive President, the mighty USA is now little better than China or Russia where the practice of real democracy is concerned.

As demonstrated here, the fossil fuel special interests main aim seems to be to preserve their gluttonous but eventually nihilistic quest to prevent any action anywhere against global warming so they can continue unhindered their quest to turn fossil carbon into an ever increasing volume of greenhouse gases. We can already see that these sill growing emissions are forcing global temperatures higher into the zone that will virtually guarantee Earth’s next global mass extinction, even though such an extinction will almost certainly include their human bodies along with the rest of humanity.

At least til now Australia’s federal and state Electoral Commissions and Courts seem to be intact enough that we can still claim to be a functional democracy where the people retain the power to change the government if they feel the need to do so. However, if we don’t remove the COALition puppets from government in our upcoming Federal Election we may soon end up like Americans – essentially powerless to elect people who will work to protect our futures rather than feeding the burning appetites of the gluttonous special interests of the fossil fuel industries and other exploiters of our resources.
See how Vote Climate One and our Traffic Light Voting Guide can help you to remove or prevent special interest puppets in your electorates who want to destroy our futures. With a new government of people who can be counted on to put acting on climate change as their first order of business in office, we may have a chance that our species will have a possible future in a reasonably intact biosphere on our only planet.

Regarding the article that follows, Hieronymus said, “Living in an undemocratic and crashing empire [i.e., my original home country] where corporations have all the money and power. I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked, but DAMN. … Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has written to the all-Republican court – half of whose members he appointed – in support of Exxon. He accused the California litigants of attempting “to suppress the speech of eighteen Texas-based energy companies on the subject of climate and energy policies”“.

How Exxon is using an unusual law to intimidate critics over its climate denial

America’s largest oil firm claims its history of publicly denying the climate crisis is protected by the first amendment
Exxon, headquartered in Houston, argues that lawsuits filed by out-of-state politicians infringe on the sovereignty of Texas. Photograph: Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

Chris McGreal in The Guardian, Tue 18 Jan 2022

ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.

The oil giant also makes the curious claim that legal action in the California courts is an infringement of the sovereignty of Texas, where the company is headquartered.

Eight California cities and counties have accused Exxon and other oil firms of breaking state laws by misrepresenting and burying evidence, including from its own scientists, of the threat posed by rising temperatures. The municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for damage caused by wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather events, and to meet the cost of building new infrastructure to prepare for the consequences of rising global temperatures.

Read more…

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

Our puppet governments organize banquets where their piggy patrons with special interests can feed on our roasting environment

William P. Hall on January 18, 2022

If Howard and I are right, we have already passed several tipping points triggering positive feedbacks that will cause global warming to increase exponentially towards a point-of-no return where global mass extinction (including humans) is almost inevitable (he links the same science articles I use in this context). To avoid this end we need to turn the barbecue around to roast the pigs and their wooden-headed puppets first.

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

IPCC’s guidance downplays risks in climate emergency

William P. Hall on January 14, 2022

IPCC’s guidance is dangerous in rapidly evolving climate emergency due to time lost for peer review between observing and reporting reality

Introduction: Year by year we are seeing increases in both the basic readings for global warming and in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events attributed to the warming that show we are in the midst of a climate emergency. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is considered by many scientists (and politicians claiming to be guided by the science) to be the ultimate authority on the likely evolution of global warming and the future risks we face from it. However, the IPCC’s guidance in forecasts and predictions has consistently ignored or underestimated the rising levels of catastrophic and existential risk associated with the accelerating increases.

I don’t dispute the IPCC’s science, as the work leading to it is usually meticulous. But, at the same time, their processes add years of bureaucratic and political delay between the observations of reality and the eventually publications of conclusions from those observations. This means that any guidance offered in IPCC reports and assessments is likely to considerably understate the risks, impacts and rates of global warming. The peer review process and sociological factors in the academic/institutional environments most IPCC authors work in lead authors to minimize dramatic and scary risks irrespective of minimal they might be. These thoughts and their implications are detailed in a January 2022 presentation of mine, “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong” on the Researchgate repository .

Slide 3 from my January 2022 presentation exploring issues with the reliability of the IPCC's too conservative forecasts for the future evolution of global warming and why it shouldn't be trusted.
Slide 3 from my January 2022 presentation.

The article discussed here is an example of recent observations that should greatly change many presumptions in even the most recent IPCC AR6 report.

Carbonate rocks (e.g., limestone, dolomite) in permafrost zones may be global warming time-bombs for methane release.

The article linked here describes an unexpected observation from satellite scans of methane gas concentrations in the atmosphere over Siberia. As the frozen land warms in spring and summer remarkably high concentrations of methane are associated with geological outcroppings of common calcium carbonate rocks such as limestone and dolomite. Carbon is a significant component of these kinds of rock. Ordinarily this carbon is considered to be quite inert in relationship to short-term climate change. The authors were surprised to discover that largest releases of methane (~ 85 times the greenhouse potential of CO₂ over 20 years) in Siberia — not associated with fossil fuel production — were from these rocky areas. The observed behavior of the methane releases suggests these areas represented a risk of becoming global warming time bombs.

Methane release from carbonate rock formations in the Siberian permafrost area during and after the 2020 heat wave

by Froitzheim et al., PNAS August 10, 2021

ABSTRACT: Anthropogenic global warming may be accelerated by a positive feedback from the mobilization of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost. There are large uncertainties about the size of carbon stocks and the magnitude of possible methane emissions. … Two elongated areas of increased atmospheric methane concentration that appeared during summer coincide with two stripes of Paleozoic carbonates exposed at the southern and northern borders of the Yenisey-Khatanga Basin, a hydrocarbon-bearing sedimentary basin between the Siberian Craton to the south and the Taymyr Fold Belt to the north. [see featured image above] Over the carbonates, soils are thin to nonexistent and wetlands are scarce. The maxima are thus unlikely to be caused by microbial methane from soils or wetlands. We suggest that gas hydrates in fractures and pockets of the carbonate rocks in the permafrost zone became unstable due to warming from the surface. This process may add unknown quantities of methane to the atmosphere in the near future [my emphasis].

Read the complete article….

When the IPCC’s AR6 was being drafted its authors never encountered or even contemplated many of the discoveries made like the above, or the kinds of NB4 extreme weather events observed over the last 4-6 years (they were “unknown unknowns”)

The IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 6th Assessment Report that informed COP26 totally missed this risk — the abrupt release of prodigious amounts of greenhouse methane gas from permafrost. They also missed or downplayed many other risks that have only begun to appear as the climate emergency accelerates. My graphical essay, “Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong“, documents the fact that the IPCC’s claim to provide the best and most stringently peer reviewed scientific understanding of basic physics of Earth’s Climate System is true. However, their scientific methodology is deeply flawed when applied to predicting the rapidly evolving and changing behavior of the large and complexly dynamical Climate System:

How the IPCC prepares its own reports.

  • By the time the IPCC’s deeply bureaucratic and political review processes result in publication, the work is based on the reality of a world that existed several years ago, not the reality of today’s increasingly rapidly changing world
  • Research and publishing in academic and institutional environments are deeply (but most subliminally) constrained from publishing novel ideas and scary stuff. This is called “scientific reticence” — a situation that can only be amplified by the requirements that publications are approved by their political sponsors.
  • Finally, the Climate System involves non-linear and often chaotic feedback interactions of many variables – some of them not at all well understood. Many climatologists come from backgrounds in physics and mathematical modeling is very helpful for understanding the behaviors of mostly linear systems. Climate behavior in the antithesis to this kind of system. Where climate is concerned, modeling is useful for understand what can happen under specific circumstances where most of the variables are controlled. It is inappropriate for long term forecasting.

However, even taking the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report at face value: “The best peer-reviewed science we have” shows unambiguously that if we don’t stop and reverse global warming very soon, human life on the planet will be faced with a growing crescendo of extreme weather events and climate hell within a few decades at the most.

Today, we are already seeing the beginnings of this crescendo! But there is only one mention of a few sentences in the entire 3949 pages of the full IPCC report of the realistic possibility that if we fail to stop the warming, that runaway global warming will lead to the global mass extinction of most complex life.

The point raised here is that the scientific methodology underlying IPCC reports cannot help but underestimate and down play the full range and magnitudes of risks humans face from the rapidly accelerating climate emergency. This also provides great cover for the fossil fuel industry special interests, the humbugging puppets in our governments that keep spruiking the message that we shouldn’t look up, because there is noting there to see, and the much too compliant press.

To conclude, if we are to find and execute any way to stop and reverse the still accelerating warming of our only planet, we have to begin by replacing all the humbugging puppets in our Federal Government with people able to rationally understand the risks we face who also have the gumption to put acting on the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected to Parliament.

Our Vote Climate One Traffic Light Voting Guide will help you elect candidates in your electorate who are most likely to meet these critria, and equally identify LNP Coalition Members and fellow travelers and those whose preferences might flow in a way that would elect/reelect one of the humbuggers.

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

2021 wasn’t hottest year, but oceans are hottest ever

William P. Hall on January 13, 2022

As the world warms, oceans store an ever more solar energy to increase global ocean heating and polar ice melting.

As the following article explains, thanks to the continuing rise in the greenhouse effect caused by the continuing rise in concentrations of CO₂ and methane, our planet continues to capture more solar heat that it can radiate away to space. Some of this excess increases air temperatures. However, most of the excess solar energy goes into ocean heating. Hot oceans heat Earth. The warmer water can melt polar ice covers and heat can be stored for slow release into the terrestrial environment and atmosphere over many years.

The increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activities traps heat within the climate system and increases ocean heat content (OHC).

Another Record: Ocean Warming Continues through 2021 despite La Niña Conditions

by Lijing, et al., 11/01/2022 in
Advances in Atmospheric Sciences

Abstract: The increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activities traps heat within the climate system and increases ocean heat content (OHC). Here, we provide the first analysis of recent OHC changes through 2021 from two international groups. The world ocean, in 2021, was the hottest ever recorded by humans, and the 2021 annual OHC value is even higher than last year’s record value…. The long-term ocean warming is larger in the Atlantic and Southern Oceans than in other regions and is mainly attributed, via climate model simulations, to an increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. The year-to-year variation of OHC is primarily tied to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In the seven maritime domains of the Indian, Tropical Atlantic, North Atlantic, Northwest Pacific, North Pacific, Southern oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea, robust warming is observed but with distinct inter-annual to decadal variability. Four out of seven domains showed record-high heat content in 2021. The anomalous global and regional ocean warming established in this study should be incorporated into climate risk assessments, adaptation, and mitigation.

Read the complete article….

Excess heat in the oceans will continue to drive further global warming even if we stop all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

The accumulating heat in the ocean serves as a source of positive feedback to drive global temperatures even higher.

  • By melting sea ice – the warm water melts ice cover that used to reflect solar heat away from the ocean, allowing it to be absorbed tin warm the water further
  • By further warming the atmosphere to spread excess heat to the land to warm soils, increase wildfires, thaw permafrost, and warm wetlands – all increasing ‘natural’ greenhouse gas emissions to trap more solar heat
  • By reducing the solubility of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases in seawater – driving them into the atmosphere where they contribute to further warming and ocean heating
  • By reducing oxygenation to produce ‘dead zones’ where animals and green plants are suffocated to die and decompose anaerobically producing methane and poisonous sulfide gases.

In other words, even without an annual record high air temperature, the process of global warming is accelerating and becoming progressively more difficult to stop and reverse. Unless we mobilize and act soon and vigorously to resolve the climate crisis, enough solar energy will be captured to ensure that the warming process continues. Even if we stop all human carbon emissions the warming will be driven by positive feedbacks from the warm oceans. Beyond stopping human emissions we need to deploy global geoengineering projects. First to capture and sequester greenhouse gases (e.g., by fertilizing the ocean deserts and farming phytoplankton together with ecosystems of plankton eaters able to send much of the carbon fixed by the algae to the bottom sediments of the oceans in the form of feces and dead bodies). And, secondly, to help the Earth reflect more solar heat back to space (e.g., by making the atmosphere more reflective with aerosols such as calcium carbonate).

Australia’s current COALition Government in Canberra is controlled by Captain Humbug (i.e., Scotty from Marketing) and his fellow puppets and clowns of the fossil fuel special interests. They have been working for years to subsidize and protect their puppet masters’ industry from being shut down or even being inconvenienced by actions against global warming. If we are to act effectively and swiftly enough to have any hope of stopping and reversing global warming we need to replace all of the special interests’ clowns and puppets by voting for people in their electorates who understand the currently escalating climate emergency and will put action to resolve the crisis as their highest priority in Parliament. Otherwise, we will have little chance to avoid the global mass extinction that will ensue if we don’t act.

Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting Guide won’t tell you who to vote for, but it will help you avoid voting for anyone whose preferences are likely to flow to the COALition and their allies. Also, if you think our approach here is a useful one, please consider joining with us to become a Climate Hero.

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

Global warming means urban wildfires are after you

William P. Hall on January 10, 2022

Amongst many other growing perils resulting from global warming, as long as we allow our only Earth to go on warming urban firestorms will become more frequent, fiercer, and deadlier. Many of Australia’s close packed and leafy suburbs would also be susceptible to this kind of urban firestorm.

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

How wildfires affect our likely future

William P. Hall on December 29, 2021

Wildfires and special interest politics in Colorado paint a similar picture to what we see in Australia

This Denver Post article summarizes the longer term impacts and costs of wildfires to society. This applies to Australia as well as the USA and elsewhere. Despite all the political humbug to the contrary, global warming continues to accelerate.

The picture above shows the smoke plume on 30 December, 2022, when hurricane-force winds in Boulder County whipped fires across drought-parched grasslands and suburban neighborhoods, incinerating 991 structures, including part of a shopping center, a hotel, and a town hall. Two people are still missing, presumed dead. (Aqua-MODIS Satellite view. NASA).

Costs and damages due to wildfires will increasingly overlap and concatenate as fire conditions become hotter, drier, and windier. If global warming cannot be reversed, we will sooner or later have no more forests to catch water, and society will eventually be overwhelmed by fire damage and costs.

The only long term solution will be to attack the cause of the accelerating climate emergency by stopping and reversing the warming. Besides stopping all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, this will almost certainly require global geoengineering. I think this is still possible, but it will take global mobilization of the scale of a war effort to save our biosphere from the heat death in the Hothouse Earth.

Stability landscape showing the pathway of the Earth System out of the Holocene and thus, out of the glacial–interglacial limit cycle to its present position in the hotter Anthropocene (Will Steffen et al. PNAS 2018;115:33:8252-8259

Transformation of our capitalist society is needed. We also have to start soon. To achieve these things we must elect an Australian government that puts fixing the climate as the first order of business. No matter what your politics, if we can’t fix this problem, nothing else matters because the wildfires will continue to spread until there is nothing left to burn and there will be no long term survival for the human species.

What Colorado forests need to recover from historic wildfires — and to prevent the next one

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