Teal Independents: birth and spread of the movement

Climate News Links on May 17, 2022

ABC Australian Story’s account of Cathy McGowan’s remarkable rise in the Liberal’s safe rural seat of Indi and several of the current teal independents applying her model

Independent candidates’ secret weapon to win election seats | Cathy McGowan | Australian Story

Australian Story, 16/05/2022 in ABC News in Depth

Independent candidates’ secret weapon to win election seats

When Cathy McGowan won the seat of Indi in 2013, she had no idea that she would become a lightning rod for an independent movement that is now dominating Australian politics. More than 23 so-called teal or community independent candidates are standing in this election and it’s McGowan who has been their “secret weapon”. Join Australian Story as we go on the hustings with the 68-year-old farmer from Victoria to two seats where she’s helping guide candidates and rallying their armies of more than 20,000 volunteers.

Read more: https://ab.co/38vURgr

Featured Image: Cathy McGowan’s run for Indi started and grew through dinner table conversations in the local community wanting to distant ‘representatives’ to deal with locally important issues. / Still image from the ABC video (https://youtu.be/TIxf8Sr6x8I?t=414)

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

History: First real evidence for abrupt climate change

Climate News Links on April 3, 2022

1969 Greenland ice cores provide convincingly accurately timed evidence for abrupt major changes in Earth temperatures and global warming.

Wally Broecker, shown here in 1997, proposed that the shutdown of a major ocean circulation pattern could lead to abrupt climate change. Jean-Louis Atlan/Paris Match via Getty Images / from the Article

by Alexandra Witze, 29/03/2022 in Science News

Wally Broecker divined how the climate could suddenly shift: The shutdown of an ocean conveyor belt could cause abrupt climate change

It was the mid-1980s, at a meeting in Switzerland, when Wally Broecker’s ears perked up. Scientist Hans Oeschger was describing an ice core drilled at a military radar station in southern Greenland. Layer by layer, the 2-kilometer-long core revealed what the climate there was like thousands of years ago. Climate shifts, inferred from the amounts of carbon dioxide and of a form of oxygen in the core, played out surprisingly quickly — within just a few decades. It seemed almost too fast to be true.

Read the complete article….

Editor’s note: See Broecker’s 1975 paper, Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? in Science, that gave us early warning 47 years ago on what might be happening. How different our future might have been if humanity took that warning seriously.

Leland_McInnes at en.wikipedia – (red) GRIP data: http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/data/grip-ss09sea-cl-50yr.stp (blue) NGRIP data:http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/data/NGRIP_d18O_50yrs.txt / License: CC BY-SA 3.0

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

Floods and then more floods! Can we expect more yet?

Climate News Links on April 1, 2022

Multiple floods in La Niña years are not unknown in Australia, but global warming can supply more water that makes extreme flooding even worse.

Jason O’Brien/AAP Image from the article

by Margaret Cook, 31/03/2022 in the Conversation

Why can floods like those in the Northern Rivers come in clusters?

Right now, Lismore residents are going through their second major flood in a month.

On February 28th, the devastating first flood peaked at 14.4 metres, fully two metres higher than the previous record of 12.27 metres in 1954, and well above the town’s 10-metre-high levee wall, constructed in 2005. Four people died, with 2000 homes destroyed or unlivable of the city’s 19,000.

Even as Lismore and Northern Rivers residents struggle to recover from the first flood, the floods are coming again. On March 29th, more heavy rain began falling onto the soaked catchment feeding into Wilsons River.

Read the complete article….

Featured Image: Lismore locals are still cleaning up after February’s floods – now they are being hit again. Darren England/AAP Image / from the article.

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