If I could give other journalists covering this report just one piece of advice, it would be this. The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) goes through a tedious approval process during which representatives from 195 governments (some of them very dependent on our continued dependence on fossil fuels, cough cough the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, I’m looking at you). The Technical Summary, on the other hand, comes straight from the authors and is generally released at the same time as the SPM. As Max Boykoff, a contributing author to Ch 13 (on policy) put it: “The technical summary is the one that’s prepared by authors of the report. So it does go through a review process by governments and experts, but ultimately the authors have a say there.” Whereas with the SPM, while authors can reject input that would make the summary inaccurate, that seems to be the most they can do to maintain the integrity of that document; preventing it from becoming a mealy-mouthed political document on the other hand, not so much.
Good factual, evidence-based reporting meticulously details the costs of 8 years LNP COALition Government denial and sabotage of science, blocking, disinformation, and downright malfeasance to prevent effective action on the growing climate emergency
Not counting front and end matter the Report provides 72 pages of well documented reportage on just what the government has done (1) to impede action on the global climate emergency that I have reported on extensively in Climate Sentinel News and (2) what the government has failed to do to help protect Australians from the worst impacts of climate change.
The analysis begins with an Introduction and Scorecard on Federal Government Climate Action that can be used to track progress into the future.
The real meat begins with Chapter 3 – Attacks on Science. What is documented here is a concerted attack to downsize and terrorize some of Australia’s world ranked scientific and technical institutions (e.g., CSIRO Climate Science Division) because the Government didn’t like the reality they reported. The cost of this denialism and threats is tracked through the remainder of the chapter (as well as through the rest of the Report).
Chapter 4 traces Australia’s dismal record, showing amongst other gems of mismanagement that:
In the thirty years since Australia first committed to tackling climate change, our emissions have increased by more than a quarter. [my emphasis]
p. 23
Chapter 5 – Setting the Record Straight, looks the physical cause of global warming, greenhouse gas emissions, and what can be done to reduce and stop them.
Chapter 6 – Reckless Conduct, looks at the LNP Government’s actions to promote fossil fuel industry growth at the expense of mitigating impacts of global warming induced climate change.
Chapter 7 explores the impacts of the LNP Government’s bad management of the climate emergency on Australia’s foreign policy and relationships.
The final chapter, saving the Conclusion of the Report surveys the Government’s program and policy decisions favoring its mates in the fossil fuel industry versus closing down or cutting programs addressing climate change.
…Australia can and should cut its emissions at an even faster rate than the required global average. The Climate Council recommends that to make a fair contribution to the required global effort, Australia should achieve net zero emissions by 2035, and reduce emissions by 75 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. As a first step, Australia should match its key allies and commit to at least halving emissions by 2030. We should aim high, and we should move fast in order to maximise the benefits and minimise the risks.
Embracing our natural advantages in clean energy, zero-carbon manufacturing and other climate solutions will ensure jobs and prosperity for Australians now and for generations to come. It will improve our health, and help protect our natural heritage. Bold and transformative action this decade is not only fundamental to protecting all of us, but can also secure Australia’s economic prosperity.
It’s crunch time. Another lost decade will put us on the precipice of climate catastrophe. The 2020s are our ‘Last-Chance Decade’ – a decade the next Federal Government cannot afford to squander.
pp. 65- 66
In Scotty’s own words in one of his pet mediums – something to think about:
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”. For the video see: The Australian, 14/03/2022, Commentary/coal-will-be-around-for-decades-to-come-scott-morrison/video. See also ‘We will keep mining’, says Australian prime minister Scott Morrison about the future of coal.
If that wasn’t enough, here’s a choice of some of Scotty’s thinking about stopping our slide down the slope to runaway global warming and possible near-term extinction
What can/must we do about this dreadful government and even worse situation?
We need to turn away from the the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with the kind of business as usual Scotty from Maketing and his fossil fuel puppets are spruiking!
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.
Our young ones are walking into an unknown future. Give them hope and not the Ukraine.
Victoria Fielding suggests that if Murdoch is supporting action on the climate emergency with people like Chris Kenny and Andrew Bolt, who needs enemies
The Australia Institute shows our puppet Emperor’s new clothes: carbon fraud and misdirection make his puppet masters even richer
In the previous article I posted today, I showed how our current LNP COALition government’s cash splash on cosmetic repairs to the Great Barrier Reef was probably intended to distract people from the fact that they are supporting the continued growth of Australia’s fossil fuel interests by doing nothing concrete to slow and stop the global warming process that is killing the coral.
In the article here, the Australia Institute points out the devious and deliberate humbuggery around the Government’s “target” for net-zero emissions by 2050 is nothing less than a fraud to misrepresent and distract from its commitment to subsidize a massive increase in coal and gas production (see quote below). The technologies being promoted (and subsidized!), such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen made from gas and coal – “are overwhelmingly trojan horses” to promote the production and burning of yet more gas and coal. Again, following the Australia Institute, “The only thing CCS has successfully captured at scale in Australia is public money. Collectively, the Australian governments has committed more than four billion dollars in public money to CCS with nothing to show for it.” [my emphasis].
The article goes on, noting several more initiatives represented to be action on climate change that actually channel more $billions to the fossil fuel industry to help them continue increasing their profits from burning fossil carbon.
From the Australia Institute, unattributed
by Ben Oquist, 19/03/2022 in Australia Institute/Opinion
The era of the great carbon fraud is upon us: We are entering the great era of carbon fraud. Instead of rushing to end fossil fuels, there is going to be a gold rush for carbon offsets, dirty hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS), all designed not to stop climate change, but to actually drive up the consumption of coal, oil and gas.
Consider the evidence. Before the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow last year, Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor announced Australia’s official target of net zero emissions by 2050. The Australia Institute pointed out this commitment is a fraud while the government remains committed to its plans to massively increase coal and gas production. There are more than 100 gas and coal projects in the pipeline, that will result in around 1.7 billion tonnes of additional CO2-e each year.
Many posts on this site show how we are already suffering climate catastrophes as the climate emergency grows progressively more dangerous in its acceleration towards runaway global warming. Even the politically constrained and conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that If the warming process is not slowed, stopped and reversed while this is still possible, many species will go extinct and humanity will suffer greatly. Actually, exponentially rising temperatures from runaway warming will most likely lead to an abrupt, near-term global mass extinction of most life on Earth, along with our descendants. Many will argue the last bit is impossible, because it is too horrible to contemplate. So horrible that the IPCC is totally afraid to touch the topic – not mentioning human extinction in any context anywhere in the 3675 page Report (as confirmed by several electronic searches on the words and synonyms).
Hear how our government is working to solve the climate emergency
Captain Humbug (A.K.A. Scotty from Marketing) showing the parliamentary puppet troop what it is all about behind his then PM, ““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.” – Picture from The Conversation (15-02-2017). See also Katherine Murphy in The Guardian on 09/02/2017 for the live video — “Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this? What a bunch of clowns, hamming it up – while out in the real world an ominous and oppressive heat just won’t let up.”
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 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.
Featured Image: Don’t be fooled by the jargon used by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor. Picture: Getty Images. Source: Canberra Times publication of the the Australia Institute article by Ben Oquist linked here in the Australia Institute version. 19/03/2022.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Another summer of coral killing ocean heat waves. Capt. Humbug will spend $1 BN on reef cosmetics but not to stop the climate emergency.
Reef building tropical corals are adapted to live close to the maximum water temperature they can survive in order to grow fast. Raise this temperature another 2-3 °C and their metabolism begins to break down.
The first sign of trouble is when coral polyps expel their photosynthetic algal symbionts that capture carbon and turn it into carbonates for coral skeletons and carbohydrates that are the primary source of energy to drive coral metabolism. They turn white (hence the term bleaching), and this expulsion is lethal for the corals unless they soon cool down and can host new symbionts.
It takes several years for a coral to fully recover from bleaching. If another bleaching event overtakes the coral before it has fully recovered from the last, death is more likely.
Also, the dead corals offer good sites for the attachment growth of bacterial slimes and noxious algae that the reef’s normal inhabitants won’t/can’t eat. As the reef ecosystem collapses, what was once a vibrant community of hundreds of fish species and tens of thousands of invertebrate species becomes a largely uninhabitable wasteland, substantially reducing the overall productivity of the reef ecosystem.
Also, as the dead biomass from the once robustly living reef breaks down, it begins to release copious volumes of greenhouse gases and reduces the oxygen availability in the surrounding waters, resulting in die-offs of many other species in the reef ecosystem besides just the corals.
Bleached coral on John Brewer Reef, offshore from Townsville, photographed in February 2022. Credit:Grumpy Turtle Designs.via The Age
Severe coral bleaching along 500 kilometres of Great Barrier Reef: The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has reported severe bleaching to 60 per cent of the corals along a 500-kilometre stretch of the Great Barrier Reef between Innisfail and Mackay. Surveys are ongoing on the southern section of the reef, but with reports of local bleaching, scientists cannot rule out widespread bleaching of similar severity.
Don’t look up! Here is Capt. Humbug riding to the rescue in a tour boat to announce a $ Billion in cosmetics to help keep his patrons in the fossil fuel industry safe from serious action on climate change
by Georgie Moore | AAP, 28/01/2022 in The Kalgoorlie MinerGreat Barrier Reef: Questions over timing of PM’s $1 billion funding promise: Climate scientists have questioned the timing of a $1 billion Great Barrier Reef spending splash days out from Australia’s deadline to update UNESCO on how it is protecting the World Heritage site. … UNESCO had asked Australia to provide more information by next Tuesday about what’s being done to protect the reef.
The Coalition’s ‘dreadful’ legacy on the Great Barrier Reef: Ahead of the upcoming Federal Election, the Coalition Government has made another significant pledge to protect the Great Barrier Reef from further environmental harm and degradation.
On 28 January 2022, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, … announced a $1 billion package for the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s seven natural wonders.
The Prime Minister claimed that the funding would bring the Government’s financial contribution to the Reef to an amount of over $3 billion since coming to power in 2013.
This announcement was made against a backdrop of years of catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef, including mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, which impacted 90 per cent of the Reef and killed almost a quarter of its coral reefs.
In the face of a rising frequency and intensity of ocean heatwaves that are bound to kill most of the corals forming our Great Barrier Reef, the LNP COALition government has rushed to the rescue with what is estimated to be around $3 billion in grant funding. As nearly as I can determine, not one doller of these grants addresses global warming that is heating the ocean.
In fact, from its start under Tony Abbott and then Malcolm Turnbull, the LNP COALition government has worked assiduously to protect the interests of its patrons in the fossil fuel industry well ahead of doing anything significant to stop the carbon emissions driving global warming:
And then Scotty from Marketing took over the show to further support his immensely wealthy fossil fuel patrons with humbug, disinformation and distraction to ensure nothing was done in Australia to impair their rights to continue emitting greenhouse gases from their mines and industries.
Today’s post here demonstrates just how he can earmark $3 BN of our money on cosmetics to repair and cover up damage caused by global warming to making his puppet government look like it is doing something about the emergency. Certainly, some of the money will support projects that would help the reef if it can survive being boiled in ocean heatwaves. But, I think more importantly for Capt. Humbugs patrons happy, he can cry poor when it comes to doing anything serious to stop carbon emissions causing the problem in the first place (because the money was allocated to cosmetics). This demonstrates the actions of a marketing guru at work using the “Don’t look up” ploy.
If we are to have any chance getting on top of the climate emergency, these kinds of governments have to be removed from office and be replaced by parliamentarians who have publicly committed themselves to putting action on climate change at the tops of their agendas in office.
Even a 16 year old school girl can see the imperative logic in this.
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 that will 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: Thetford Reef near Cairns in 2017 after bleaching. In Climate Change, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (undated). “Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs worldwide. Climate change is caused by global emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), agriculture and land clearing.”
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Climate can wait: French election campaign ignores ‘humanity’s greatest challenge’: It’s a key preoccupation of the French and the greatest challenge to our planet – and yet the subject of climate change has all but vanished from France’s presidential campaign, sidelined by the war in Ukraine, a lack of media exposure, and candidates’ own reluctance to broach the subject.
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.
We’ve argued previously that Scotty from Marketing has become a past master at distracting us from effective action against climate change to protect his patrons in the fossil fuel industry
‘Australia is getting hard to live in because of these disasters’ says Scott Morrison; protestors in Lismore believe they have identified a root cause. Photograph: Yaya Stempler/The Guardian
by Jeff Sparrow, 16/03/2022 in The Guardian/Opinion
Is battling back-to-back disasters distracting us from fighting the climate crisis? As floods follow fires, we need to hold our leaders’ feet to the flames – or, for that matter, to the water. Environmentalists once saw abstraction as the biggest obstacle to climate action. How, they wondered, could one focus the public on the distant future? Today, we confront the opposite problem, with the very immediacy of the crisis generating a strange paralysis.
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.
‘Natural hydrogen’ is a term for naturally occurring hydrogen sourced from the ground at low cost with zero (or at least minimal) greenhouse gas emissions
There is a ‘goldrush’ by petrochemical companies currently going on in South Australia where they are looking to stake claims on and prove the existence of underground reserves of nearly pure hydrogen gas. The article touts a “Potential to drastically cut costs” of hydrogen production.
Despite the lack of research, Australians – and indeed a number of companies internationally – remain undeterred, likely because of the potential for natural hydrogen to be three to four times cheaper than that produced via electrolysis or gas reforming with carbon capture. Gold Hydrogen estimates it should be able to produce natural hydrogen for less than $2.30 per kg, compared to manufactured hydrogen projects being produced at greater than $6 per kg.
Queensland company Gold Hydrogen has been granted the right to explore approximately 9,500km2 in the southern part of the Yorke Peninsula through to Kangaroo Island in search of natural hydrogen deposits.Gold Hydrogen
South Australia has found itself at the heart of a 21st-century gold rush, though this time for naturally occurring hydrogen. Since February 2021, 18 exploration licenses have been granted or applied for in the state by six different companies searching for natural hydrogen
In a rapid escalation from zero activity in February last year, exploration companies are now scrambling to look for what they believe could be the cheapest, easiest way to get their hands on the much hyped “future fuel”: hydrogen.
In the last 12 months, six different companies have either been granted or applied for 18 Petroleum Exploration Licences across the state of South Australia, according to Australian energy consultancy EnergyQuest. Combined, the area under permit equates to around 570,000 square kilometres (km2) or 32% of the entire state, the consultancy has found, referring to the sudden influx as a “boom”.
Natural hydrogen
Until now, natural or native hydrogen has been largely overlooked – despite it being described as “widespread in nature” by natural hydrogen researcher Viacheslav Zgonnik in a 2020 paper. Natural hydrogen deposits form through chemical reactions underground, with Zgonnik saying the molecule has been detected at high concentrations, often as the major gas, in all types of geologic environments.
Caveat emptor. This could be good news in that a potential source of low or zero emissions hydrogen for power generation has been found that could replace natural gas. However, I suspect that most or all of the hydrogen will found to be associated with methane rich natural gas. My guess is that this will be used as an excuse by the fossil fuel industry members funding the exploration to produce and burn more natural gas with consequent greenhouse gas emissions going into the atmosphere.
I would watch this very carefully, and would hope that by the time any concrete decisions need to be made regarding real hydrogen production projects that we will have replaced Capt. Humbug’s LNP Coalition Government with trustworthy people able to make sensible decisions where project approvals and he like are concerned.
Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to help you use our preferential voting system to elect these trustworthy people.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
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