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:

A tipping cascade will be hard to stop!

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….

Earth on fire
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.

Scotty from Marketing sets the tone of truthfulness for the COALition Government he leads.

William P. Hall on January 5, 2022

Can we believe anything this crew of special interest puppets says on climate change?

The Crikey article presented here documents our Prime Minister’s deeeep respect for truth and honesty in government and shows how the COALition misrepresents reality. Can we afford to allow him or any of his fellow puppets stay in Parliament?

Peter Fray and Eric Beecher in Crikey, May 25, 2021 – “A dossier of lies and falsehoods – How Scott Morrison manipulates the truth”

A Dossier of Lies and Falsehoods identifies a litany of statements, interviews, speeches and comments over the past two years from Morrison that are demonstrably untrue. Some were clearly intended to mislead, and these are marked as “lies”. Other statements were untrue, or turned out to be so, and these are marked as “falsehoods”.

“There are a great many of both,” writes Crikey politics editor Bernard Keane, “and most of them have been uttered while Morrison occupied the highest office in the land.”

The PM “lies openly and frequently, about matters large and small — Australia’s carbon emissions, or an inquiry in relation to a sexual assault within the ministerial wing in Parliament House, or simply whether he spoke to someone who refused to shake his hand”, Keane writes.

“Most of his lies are about himself, or his government, and what it has done, or failed to do; often he has lied about things he himself has said or done, as if he wasn’t present when a woman refused to shake his hand and he turned his back on her, or he didn’t carefully explain to Parliament that the secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet had given him no update about his report in relation to Brittany Higgins.”

Why have we made a distinction between “lies” and “falsehoods”? Because we appreciate that sometimes the PM might misspeak or be poorly briefed. We are not inside his head. We don’t always know his motive.

But when he repeats or fails to correct the same untruth, in the face of evidence to the contrary, we can only conclude that someone of his intelligence and high status objectively understands and knows what he is doing is lying.

As I have shown in many posts here and elsewhere there is a vast array of factual evidence that our we face an existential climate emergency from human caused global warming. Now that the warming is started it is further amplified by increased rates of ice melting, permafrost thawing, ocean warming, increasing aridity, increasing wildfires, weakening and wandering jet streams, etc.

If we cannot stop and reverse the warming process soon, the heating will continue to accelerate until our world literally becomes too hot for most living organisms to survive. Whole ecosystems will fail and collapse, including our agricultural ecosystems. If the heat doesn’t kill our species directly (e.g., death by heat stroke), crop failures, famine, social disorder, extreme weather, etc. will.

Given that we probably have not yet passed the point of no return — where nothing humans could do would be enough to stop the runaway warming process — there are many actions we can and should be making to mitigate and avoid the risk of extinction. Many of these would benefit from Government promotion and coordination: e.g., to immediately stop the production of greenhouse gases by stopping the burning of fossil fuels and methane gas producing agricultural practices. However, even the best science tends to understate the risks of inaction. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for our present COALition government to lie, misrepresent, obfuscate, distract, and humbug to hide any uncomfortable facts. And further, to actively work to prevent and delay any emergency actions that might in any way inconvenience their patrons and puppet masters in the from positive actions to control global warming.

To help you with your voting decisions we have reviewed all of the parties (even the microparties) and independent candidates to see who they are likely to pass their preferences to and where they stand on climate. Our conclusions inform our Stoplight Voting Guide. We don’t tell you who we think you should put at No.1 on your ballot, but using the Stop Light Guide, by putting our red-light candidates last you will ensure that your vote doesn’t helps to remove them from or keep them out of Parliament. Green-light candidates are those we think will put addressing the climate emergency at the top of their agenda in Parliament.

In terms of guaranteeing that our children and grand children have a viable future, stopping global warming is the only issue in the upcoming election that really matters. If we fail here, we might as well practice singing hymns as our house burns down around us, because nothing we might do will have any effect on the outcome.

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