News in a year of no winter from midwinter in the northern USA

William P. Hall on March 1, 2024

If you want a future, it is time to take global warming seriously and totally mobilize to fight the fires driving us towards Hothouse Hell.

Bill McKibben, one of America’s most respected environmentalists and a founder of the international 350.org, reports from the northern state of Vermont on the winter that wasn’t. As noted by my featured image, even high school students in Pennsylvania have commented how extremely unwinterly their weather has been. These are signs of the rapidly accelerating global climate emergency.

As Winter Melts Away

Notes toward a eulogy for something I love

Bill McKibben, 29 Feb 2024 – The Crucial Years

I don’t write that often about developments in the actual climate in these pages—it’s uniformly depressing, and it is the part we can do the least about. None of us has the power to change how much heat a molecule of carbon dioxide traps, nor can we alter how the jet stream reacts to changes in polar temperatures. All we can do is determine how much CO₂ and methane there is up there in the air—and so that’s what I concentrate on.

And yet the changes underway on our planet are now so extreme, and so remarkable, that sometimes we do need to stand back and simply gaze in awe and sadness. At my latitude (43.97 degrees north, or very nearly halfway between the North Pole and the equator) the changes in winter may be the most dramatic signs yet. And the most dramatic in my heart for sure, because winter is the time I love the most.

This year in North America has been about as close as we’ve ever come to a year without a winter…. [T]he gases we produce increase the temperature: it was 70 degrees in Chicago yesterday, in February—which was also the day that the Windy City decided to join other American cities in suing the fossil fuel industry for damages. But that was just one of a hundred heat records broken in the course of the day, from Milwaukee to Dallas (94 degrees). But it wasn’t a single day of heat—it’s been an almost unrelentingly warm winter, with by far the lowest snow coverage for this time of year ever recorded (13.8 percent of the lower 48 as of Monday, compared with an average of more than 40 percent) and with the Great Lakes essentially free of ice.

…

In the high Arctic, previously unheard-of thunderstorms are melting ice faster than ever. As Ed Struzik reported last week from Greenland, “surface crevassing, which allows water to enter into the interior of the icecap, is accelerating, thanks to rapid melting. And slush avalanches, which mobilize large volumes of water-saturated snow, are becoming common: In 2016, a rain-on-snow event triggered 800 slush avalanches in West Greenland.”

Further south, those record winter temperatures let forests and grasslands dry out fast. That’s why Canada’s boreal forest burned at a record rate last summer, and it’s why huge blazes are driving Texans for cover today—the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Panhandle, which only started Monday, is already the second largest blaze in the state’s history; it forced the evacuation of the country’s biggest plant for disassembling nuclear weapons.

….
Read the complete article….

What does this mean?

I’m still trying to finish my February 2024 climate report on climate extremes as the indicators are growing faster than I can keep up with (Please see the working draft: Feb. 2024 climate extremes: Welcome to 2024 as we race down the road to Hothouse Earth). However, every day the meaning becomes more stark. Earth is heating up enough that large swathes of country are too warm for snowfall even in midwinter (amongst a vast array of other problems from extreme weather!).

Earth’s energy imbalance is currently increasing at an accelerating rate. Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (mainly CO₂ and methane) trap an increasing amount of solar energy striking the planet. Earth can no longer radiate enough energy as long-wave infrared radiation to balance the books. Earth rises until the excess energy can be radiated away as shorter wavelength IR, and it won’t be able to cool down below the new balance until GHG concentrations fall enough so the necessary amount of energy can again be shed as longer wavelength IR.

Most of the excess energy is first absorbed in heating the oceans, and melting ice.

**Rabid acceleration of Earth’s Energy Imbalance over the last 23 years**. It is now ~4x as bad as it was at the beginning of the 21st Century. This will cause a comparable acceleration in rates of global warming (though perhaps with a few years of delay).

**Global sea surface temperatures – every day since 1981**. Temperatures have been above records for the day, every day of 2023 since since 15 March, and every day of 2024 so far (each of the thin black lines shows the variation in temperature for a year. Since my last version of this graph, on Feb 27, 2024 the temperature has risen to slightly above 21.1 °C. This is yet another new all-time record 2 weeks to 6 month’s before previous all-time records. (For details see my report for February 2024.)

Because of water‘s huge capacity for storing heat, more than 90% of solar energy goes first into heating the tropical and subtropical oceans. Currents circulate the heat around the planet, including its polar areas – even in midwinter. Warm water gradually melts polar ice from below and transfers heat energy into the atmosphere as ‘sensible heat‘ by increasing the air temperature and much more heat energy in the form of ‘latent heat‘ water vapor (= humidity). Particularly when water vapor condenses back into liquid (cloud droplets & precipitation), the atmospheric energy creates extreme weather and heats the land and melts a lot more ice from above. (Even if the ambient temperature is cold enough for the precipitated water to freeze as snow or hail, the region ends up being significantly warmer than if it hadn’t snowed!)

Decreasing snow and ice cover allows the Earth to absorb more solar energy in a positive feedback cycle to melt even more snow and ice. Warming soils, permafrost, and wetlands cause strong positive feedbacks by increasing greenhouse gas emissions to raise temperatures even faster…..

A couple of cartoons illustrate some of the difficulties in accepting the physical reality shown by this kind of evidence.

In other words, it is likely that Earth’s Climate System has already crossed several tipping points where exponentially growing positive feedbacks pushing us ever faster down the road of runaway global warming to Earth’s Hothouse Hell.

My guess is that pictures on the left are from last year’s movie, “Don’t Look Up” — where the mass extinction event was only a few days away.

Compared to a dinosaur killing meteorite strike in days, where runaway warming is concerned the final collapse will be decades to a couple of centuries away.

The problem is literally planetary in scale. Human greed, competition for power (both literally and figuratively), intelligence, and ingenuity led us to dig up and burn in little more than a century as much carbon as it Earth’s geological processes millions of years to sequester. We started this task with the aid of the original coal-burning steam-powered technology. And it is clear from the news I have been reporting on the Climate Sentinel that the emissions from the carbon we have already burned is probably enough to snuff out most complex life on Earth, including our own species.

However, if we take the threats of the climate catastrophe seriously and begin total emergency mobilization very soon, immediate action might actually minimize the collapse by reversing the global energy balance enough to allow some cooling to begin.

What to do about it?

With today’s vastly more sophisticated and powerful technology aided by our much greater understanding of science we should be able to work out how to recapture most of our carbon emissions and implement technology to put it back into the ground. However, this will require coordination at state, national, and global scales.

Unfortunately, most of our governments have been captured by special interests in the fossil fuel and ‘development’ industries who will have to immediately stop burning fossil fuels – and any effective action on their profits from emitting greenhouse gases is seen as a direct threat to their wealth. Thus they and their government stooges will do everything fair and foul to delay and deter actions to stop greenhouse emissions or broadly implement clean energy solutions. In the process they will invent very costly and thermodynamically impossible “carbon capture and storage” industries to sop up as much money as possible to keep it from being spent developing workable solutions. There isn’t much that we as individuals can do to solve these global scale problems.

Probably the most useful thing individuals can do is unite with others to change our governments by removing puppets and collaborators of the special interests from office, or convincing them that they will be replaced at the earliest opportunity if they don’t ditch their sugar daddy patrons and work for you and your community. You do this by electing people who are genuinely committed to working for their communities rather than special interest patrons (many of whom are not even citizens).

Vote Climate One was established to help you do this this, and our pages there offer a number of other suggestions as to how you may help change governments.

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

Victorian Election Reminder – Vote Climate One

William P. Hall on September 17, 2022

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….
Read the complete article….

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.

This has been demonstrated by the amazing exponential growth in the number of ‘community independent’ MPs working in our Federal Parliament since 2013: 1 house seat in 2013, 2 seats in 2016, 3 in 2019, and 10 + David Pocock in the Senate, following on from this year’s federal election that decimated the Liberal Party, giving a House majority to the Labor Party (a “Teal Tsunami).

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.

Let David tell you in his own words:

ABC Australian Story, 13 Sept 2022

In the Australian Senate – 2 Aug 2022

As demonstrated, Labor’s climate climate change bill passed last week (8 Sept) with David Pocock’s ‘teal’ vote.

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:

Transforming Australia’s Parliament to act on climate (12 Sept 2022)
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….
Read the complete article and see the embedded presentation…. or download the presentation directly: “The Teal Tsunami started in Indi“

Our changes to Earth’s atmosphere are driving us down the slippery road to mass extinction in ‘Hothouse Earth‘

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.

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

In other words, 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!

Featured Image: Temperature data – Berkeley Earth; CO₂ data – NOAA Global Monitoring Lab Trends in CO₂; Trends in CH₄; Trends in N₂O

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

July 2022 Climate – still on road to extinction

William P. Hall on July 31, 2022

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.

https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

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

Horrific heat descends upon Western Europe: 104°F in London

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.
…
Read the complete article

Record high temperatures and extreme weather events are being recorded around the world. Photograph: Ian Logan/Getty Images [from the article]

by Robin McKie, 31/07/2022 in the Guardian

‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert

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.
…
Read the complete article

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.

Corrupt leaders, casual media, gullible believers

William P. Hall on April 26, 2022

This is the recipe for extinction when facing existential catastrophe. A lesson on the difference between thinking and believing

We humans face a very real risk of runaway global warming that we have triggered by burning fossil carbon accumulated over millions of years in around 150 years. We have already passed the trigger points where the warming will continue without further human contributions; and are approaching the point of no return where nothing that humans could do would stop positive feedbacks from continuing the warming until Earth’s “Hothouse” state is reached.

Rather than promoting and facilitating effective responses to control and resolve the crisis, much of the world’s media and political ‘leadership’ seems to be working to primarily to promote and protect the continued growth of the fossil fuel industry from ‘harm’ by citizens more concerned to promote and protect their families from the existential consequences of runaway warming.

The crisis

Climate Sentinel News has presented a plethora of fact-based science that Earth’s Climate System is being driven by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions towards a point of no return.

Here, increasing global temperatures will generate enough natural positive feedbacks to ‘run away’ into a global ‘hothouse’ of lethally high temperatures and insanely extreme weather. Given the exponential nature of positive feedbacks, only a few more decades of heating will drive global temperatures to extremes that will be lethal to most life – resulting in global mass extinction for most large and complex organisms — including humans.

A fundamental problem is the ease by which many people are conned by marketeers, faith-healers, demagogues and other humbuggers that tell them what they want to believe and that there is nothing to fear (i.e., ‘this is coal – – don’t be ‘fraid, don’t be scared‘)….

Facts vs Beliefs

Some of our religions and many of our political ‘leaders’ try to teach us that our “beliefs” are all-important. They teach that we must accept and believe in whatever ‘truth’ they teach by ‘faith and faith alone’ — at least that was what I was being taught in Sunday school shortly before refusing to go any more. (Fortunately my parents were easy enough about religion that they accepted my decision – others haven’t been so lucky).

Science teaches us that we need to base our decisions and actions on what we think and know about reality based on facts and evidence provided by the world we live in. This gives us the best chances to anticipate and react rationally to whatever the real-world throws at us.

Although I tacitly understood most of this from my science education, it was a master machinist who had a vast knowledge of what you could do with a block of metal from many years of hands on experience, that taught me the deeply visceral difference between believing and thinking.

As I finished my BS degree in Zoology and started my postgraduate work I was working part time as a research assistant in a hospital-based neurophysiology research lab where Norm hand-made all-kinds of precision scientific and microsurgical equipment from blocks of metal, glass tubing, and other sorts of bulk materials as required. Other than technical stuff for the job, the only reading Norm ever admitted to was the Bible and Shakespeare’s complete works, because these taught him everything he wanted to know about people. Our lunch-break was the best time of the day, when Norm and I would have long rambling discussions of world affairs and the future (in a time when one could be optimistic about he future).

Many of my flights of fancy unconsciously included the words “I believe that…” as if this was a telling point in the argument. The day finally came when Norm had had enough of my fancy talk, and decided to teach me a lesson in humility.

He stopped responding to any and all of my attempts to start a conversation. After a week or so of the silent treatment, I broke down and begged for him to tell me what was so wrong. He thought a bit, and answered: “Bill, I’m fed up with your ‘beliefs’. I don’t give a damn what you believe…. It’s what you THINK that matters…. ‘He who assumes, zooms‘ [as in taking a pratfall]. Since I’m not interested in talking about baseless beliefs, whenever you used the world ‘believe’ I decided there was nothing worth discussing. However, when you start a statement with ‘I think, there is an assumption of a rational chain of reasoning based on some fact-based evidence.” This would have been around 1963-64. Since then I have worked to remove ‘I believe’ from my vocabulary, and to ensure that my statements are underpinned by rational connections with real-world evidence.

The following search strings show you the evidence that Climate Sentinel News has reported about the fact-based science: ● “Road to Hothouse Hell“, ● “Existential Risk“; and our LNP COALition Government’s responses to the evidence:

Unfortunately, Australia is presently governed by a PM from marketing who actively spruiks whatever humbug his special interest patrons appear to want.

Lesson begins

Here is a real-life televised interview between some media people and Miranda Whelehan on ITV’s Good Morning Britain (11 April 2022 | Just Stop Oil). The interview lasts 10 minutes – but displays the stark reality as to how the ‘seriously’ some commercial media take the climate emergency.

The ‘parody’ using parts of Whelehan’s interview demonstrates Hollywood’s imagination in the movie Don’t Look Up was limited in comparison to the reality of British morning TV. Too many people believe what they hear/see on TV in preference to thinking about the extent of what they hear/see is actually based on evidence of reality.

Miranda Whelehan | ITV | Good Morning Britain | 11 April 2022 | Just Stop Oil

The Parodies

"Don't look up 2022", hosted by Richard Madeley.#DontLookUp 👀 pic.twitter.com/GkbdaVm0SH
— Greenpeace UK (@GreenpeaceUK) April 15, 2022

‘Good Morning Britain’ Interview Gives ‘Don’t Look Up’ Vibes | The Mehdi Hasan Show

Australia today

Unfortunately, the next parody by Juice Media isn’t a parody at all. Juice is far more factual than you will hear from most COALition politicians (along with many others). The evidence underlying almost every statement has already been discussed on Climate Sentinel News; and there would be even more if I had the time and stamina to produce it.

Sorry about the profanity, though.

Unfortunately, polite English doesn’t have strong enough words words to express how many people who think rationally feel about a government that is supposed to keep Australians safe but spends billions of our dollars shoveling more coal on the fires causing global warming….

What to do about the situation

Vote Climate One is comprised of a group of volunteers who decided to pool our various resources to document the issues and the consequences of ignoring them. Our primary goal is to do what we can to replace the existing puppet government in league with the fossil fuel industry with people who have provided evidence that they will prioritize action on the climate emergency in government. Towards achieving this goal, (1) we are ranking every candidate in every Australian electorate as to the evidence we have as to their willingness to place action on the climate emergency as their first priority in parliament, and (2) establish Climate Sentinel News as a way to detail evidence that the crisis is real, and of the COALition’s malfeasance in protecting Australian citizens from the dangers of global warming.

Another Juice Media parody that isn’t a parody at all, explains how preferential voting can be used to change our government for the better.

Tells the truth about electing honest government

Juice Media describes Australian preferential voting quite effectively. It is up to Australian voters to use this process effectively to get the kind of government you want.

Vote Climate One works under the assumption that there are a lot of people who have been swayed in the past by the rhetoric and what the Juice Ladies call ‘shitfuckery’ to vote for fossil fuel puppet parties and and individuals protecting and promoting the fossil fuel industry. In the past this could be justified by their (supposed) support for economic growth and employment opportunities. However, in in the present, as our understanding of climate change grows, it is increasingly evident that the fossil fuel interests and their puppets are paving the road to mass extinction by still working to expand the burning coal, oil and gas.

We think that if they are given the facts and understanding of the differences between thinking and believing many past voters for the LNP and similar puppets will consider voting for people who have pledged to put action on the climate emergency at the tops of their agendas if elected to Parliament. Climate Sentinel News focuses on what we know about climate change and think about it. Our Traffic Light Voting System ranks every candidate in every electorate with our traffic lights and provides a form you can fill out at home before voting to ensure your preferences have the best chance of giving you the election results you want.

The bad news is that if Capt Humbug’s government remains in power, they have proved that they can be quite effective in distracting from and blocking effective action to resolve solve the climate emergency. If Humbug has its way, Australia will have done nothing effective to slow and stop our progress towards runaway global warming and what may prove to be the end of humanity in our world’s worst global mass extinction event.

The good news from the IPCC and other scientific bodies is that if we accept we are facing the crux of the crisis and unite with other nations who take the risk of extinction seriously, we still have a very few years where it is still possible to stop and reverse the warming process. However, to do this we will need the backing and support of a progressive government that puts action on climate change at the top of its Parliamentary agenda, as the candidates we have flagged with our ‘green light’ have done.

Featured Image: Scott Morrison: From the Australian, Paul Murray Live – 14/03/2022.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he is supportive of Australia’s fossil fuel industry – and particularly coal, which he says will be around for “decades to come”. “When it comes to the coal industry, it’s worth $35 billion to us every year in exports, and that’s money Australia needs to grow our economy,” Mr Morrison said. “What you need in today’s energy economy is you need to continue to run your coal-fired power stations for as long as you possibly can and that is our policy … we want them to run as long as they possibly can.” Coal-fired power stations will continue to run to back up renewable power sources, although Mr Morrison said gas would play a larger role in the energy mix in years to come. Mr Morrison added that building a new coal-fired power station would be difficult because of the state government planning powers, which would “probably never allow them to do it”.

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

Have we reached the point of no return on the road to runaway warming ending in near-term global mass extinction (including humans)?

William P. Hall on February 3, 2022

Part 7 – concluding David Spratt’s guidebook to events along the road to Hothouse Hell: Have we triggered so many tipping points already that we are already at or past the point of no return?

Clearly, we wont know if we have passed the point of no return until it is too late to do anything about it. Spratt’s concluding comments to his guidebook need no embellishment from me. He lists 7 points. Basically I agree with all of him, except that I would state several of them even more strongly than he does:

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (7) Summing up: Faster than forecast, cascades loom

01 February 2022

by David Spratt in Climate Code Red

Seventh in a series.
Read 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

Reflecting on the evidence presented in this tipping point series, a number of conclusions may be drawn:
1. At just 1.2°C of warming, tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. At just 1.2°C of global average warming, tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. These include Arctic sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet, The Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, the eastern Amazonian rainforest, and the world’s coral systems. The world will warm to 1.5°C by around 2030, with additional warming well beyond 1.5°C in the system after that. Yet even at the current level of warming, these systems will continue to move to qualitatively different states. In most cases, strong positive feedbacks are driving abrupt change. At higher levels of warming, the rate of change will quicken. The meme that “we have eight years to avoid 1.5°C and tipping points” should be deleted from the climate advocacy vocabulary. It is simply wrong.

2. System-level change is happening faster than forecast. In each case surveyed above, abrupt change is happening earlier and/or faster than projected only two decades ago. The 2007 Arctic sea-ice collapse was “100 years ahead of schedule”; in 2014 the tipping point for Amundsen Basin glaciers was one that “none of us thought would pass so quickly”. It was said that the guardrail for coral reefs was warming under 2°C, then 1.5°C; it is now clear that it is under 0.5°C. In 1995, the IPCC projected “little change in the extent of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets… over the next 50-100 years”. The 2001 IPCC report suggested that the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets would not lose significant mass by 2100. Both have now passed their tipping points. The effect of the permafrost carbon feedback has not been included in the IPCC scenarios, including the 2014 report. And on it goes.
Read the complete article….

It’s an Emergency!

In this now completed series of posts, Spratt has done an excellent job of summarizing the scientific observations that sound the klaxon fire alarm warning us that our planet is on fire. If we don’t wake up, smell the smoke, and mobilize global action to fight the fire, it will consume us humans along with most other complex life who share the still green(ish) planet with us.

The puppets show and tell — Captain Humbug (a.k.a. Scotty from Marketing) behind his then leader’s back, showing Barney Bulldust and the parliamentary puppet troop what he is promoting. ““Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.” With these words Australia’s Treasurer Scott Morrison taunted the Opposition, attempting to ridicule its commitment to renewable energy.” – The Conversation (15-02-2017). Note: The fourth man — the holy ghost – later stabbed in the back by Scotty, was also previously a marketeer of the merchant banking type, by and for the special interests.

Following on from Tony Abbott’s almost religious commitment to denying climate science, Scotty’s marketing backed up by his troop of puppets, buffoons, and knaves in Parliament have been for years almost totally successful in blocking any effective action against the climate emergency. This has been achieved through a rich mix of humbug, denial, lying, misrepresentation, blocking, delaying, and distracting smoke and mirrors.

If our children and grandchildren are to have any hope of surviving into the future, we have to remove the humbug troop from Parliament and replace them with sensible people who can be trusted to put action against the climate emergency at the top of their priority lists if elected. Vote Climate Ones, Traffic Light Voting System is designed to help you rank your preferences to do this, without telling you who you should vote for. With a new Parliament focused on what needs to be done to protect our burning house, we might be able to offer our families a viable future in a still functional biosphere.

Will they have a future in the world we leave them? That is up to us. If we get it wrong, it will be too late for them…..

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